In Memoriam: Mary Weiss of The Shangri-Las (1948-2024)

The heavenly horn-like voice of such tuneful teenage melodramas as “Remember (Walkin’ In The Sand)” taught the rock ‘n’ roll world the value of vulnerability and bitchin’ leather boots.

“I’ve heard we were tough, and I just find that so hilarious,” Shangri-Las vocalist Mary Weiss informed New Yorker journalist Michael Martin, as she was on the precipice of a return to active rock ‘n’ roll duty. “If you really look at the old tapes, I don’t think that word would even come up. I saw a clip recently and I sound like [whimpering noise]. How do you get ‘tough’ out of that? It makes me laugh. People liked to put people in boxes back then, especially the girls. 

“Maybe it was the boots,” she remarked, lifting the pair she was wearing (which Martin described as “intimidating”) to “table height.” 

“Do these make me look tough?”

Many thought so. Ellie Greenwich, the Brill Building songwriter who worked with The Shangri-Las alongside husband Jeff Barry and their producer/mastermind George “Shadow” Morton, described their visits to Red Bird Records in the recent oral history of the ‘60s girl group era, But Will You Love Me Tomorrow: “They would come in and they were like kind of tough and they would come in chewing gum and they would have stockings on with runs in them.” Musician Artie Butler noted The Shangri-Las’ youth (Weiss was 15 when they cut their first hit, “Remember (Walkin’ In The Sand)”), adding, “Mary was drop-dead gorgeous. Oh my God, she was a shiksa goddess – even at that age.”

She was this beautiful, blonde, side-parted angel. But Weiss’ voice alone could make you fall in love with her every time The Shangri-Las appeared on network television in their ‘60s heyday. She sang like a chorus of heavenly trumpets, or maybe alto saxes more accurately. It was like there was this direct connection from her larynx to her heart, and every ounce of emotion poured out in every note she sang. You wanted to marry that voice.

Mary Weiss, that vulnerable, gorgeous voice on all those sound effects-laden Shangri-Las melodramas like “Leader Of The Pack,” passed away Friday at age 75 in her home in Palm Springs, CA. Her husband Ed Ryan provided no details in confirming her death to NPR, though family friend David Stenn, the author and TV writer, later laid the blame on “chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.” As tributes poured in everywhere from The Washington Post to Rolling Stone to The Guardian, it’s curious to see that The New York Times didn’t eulogize her until the following Monday. After all, until the advent of The Velvet Underground and then the New York Dolls (who worshiped them, and eventually worked with Morton themselves), The Shangri-Las had to be the most quintessentially Noo Yawk act of their time.

“I think the beauty of those songs is that they’re so kind of vulnerable in a way that guys aren’t in that stage of their careers,” the Dolls’ David Johansen remarked in But Will You Love Me Tomorrow.  “So it gives you a lot of insight into that.

“Listen to the records. The Shangri-Las’ ‘Remember’ — that’s, like, such a masterpiece of recording and singing. And ‘Leader Of The Pack,’ ‘Out In The Streets.’ They’re, like, masterpieces.”

Jerry Lieber, co-writer with Mike Stoller of many of the best rock ‘n’ roll songs of the ‘50s and early ‘60s as well as Red Bird’s co-owner, said of those masterpieces, “It was teen melodrama, and the teens went nuts for it.”

Indeed. Morton bluffed his way into Barry’s good graces, then went home to write a song for the first time, then booked a studio and a band from Long Island, and was in turn referred to The Shangri-Las for the session. The song was “Remember,” and the session pianist was another teenager named Billy Joel, playing on his first recording. The song was unconventional, an exaggerated take on Phil Spector’s Wall Of Sound productions, with the echo boosted to hysterical proportions, peppered with overdubbed seagulls and crashing waves. Riding it all, even above the massed “WAAAAAHHHHH!”s of her sister Betty and twins Marguerite “Marge” and Mary Ann Ganser, is Mary Weiss with all the ache and lump-in-throat vulnerability in the world. You could not help but fall in love with anyone who sang like that.

“I made demands of Mary Weiss that were extraordinary,” Morton said years later. “When you listen to her records today and imagine that it’s coming from a 15-, 16-year-old girl? I was asking her to be an actress, not just a singer.” 

“Remember” reached No. 5 at a Billboard where British acts were running amok. And Shangri-Las records got more hysterical, grandiose, and operatic in their high-drama, poor Mary continually denied her heart by unfeeling, uncomprehending parents. She fell in love with Jimmy, a doomed biker her parents didn’t understand in “Leader Of The Pack,” sent to his fate with Dad’s insistence she break it off with that hoodlum, as Morton laid on the motorcycle vrooms, screeching brakes and crashes, poor Mary yelping “LOOKOUTLOOKOUTLOOKOUT!” “Leader”’s compressed hysteria took The Shangri-Las to No. 1 for their first and only time.

Then it’s Mary’s mom who dies on “I Can Never Go Home Anymore” — or is it one of the Gansers’ moms? A Ganser is the narrator on that particular teenage opera, concerning a girl again being denied The Love Of Her Life by her mother, because she was too young to understand. But Marge or Mary Ann, whichever Ganser it is, runs away to be with This Boy until her dying day…and breaks up with him almost immediately. But Mom dies of a broken heart over her little girl’s disappearance, as the strings shriek louder, the piano triplets get banged that much harder, and Mary cries “MAMA!!!” Because Mom “grew so lonely in the end/Angels picked her for a friend.”

This is YA fiction writ large, in 2:30 chart-topping pop songs, full of those banging drums and pianos, endless echo, big emotions. And this 15-year-old girl with the heavenly trumpet voice in the center of this audio maelstrom — lonely, pain-wracked, vulnerable. Every one of Mary's vocals cried and sobbed beautifully. It was like there was this direct connection from her larynx to her heart, and every ounce of emotion poured out in every note she sang. 

But The Shangri-Las could express sweet ecstasy, as well. Think of “Give Him A Great Big Kiss,” quoted and covered by the Dolls. How overjoyed does Mary sound about her guy walking down the street with a dancing beat, wearing his thick wavy hair a little too long, and his tight, tapered pants and high button shoes? But he’s also got dirty fingernails, and she doesn’t know the color of his eyes: “I dunno — he’s always wearing SHADES!”  When she sees him in the street, her heart takes a leap and skips a beat. You best BELIEVE she’s gonna walk right up to him, give him a great big kiss, tell him that he loves him, tell him that he cares, that she’ll always be there, etc., etc. Every girl who hears that wants a boy like that. And every guy wants a girl kissin’ him like the way Mary Weiss’ voice sounds. That’s LOVE! (L-U-V!)

And all these high emotions were being delivered by these teenagers with beehives and thick eyeliner, and custom leather outfits. Whom Ellie Greenwich claimed “were kind of crude,” because they made her “very uptight — with their gestures and language and chewing the gum and the stockings ripped up their leg.”

“We would say, ‘Not nice, you must be ladies,’” Greenwich complained, “and they would say, ‘We don’t want to be ladies.’”

Behold the anti-Supremes. No Motown finishing school for the Gansers and Weisses – they wanted big leather boots, tight leather pants and vests, and all the eyeliner the Maybelline factory could produce! Get those evening gowns outta here! Talk about protopunk….

And yet….

Somehow, I think Mary was given a script….

Those deep emotions? The defiance? They likely stemmed from growing up in what Weiss called the “kinda downscale” Cambria Heights neighborhood in Queens. “My father died right after I was born, and my mother didn’t do much of anything,” she recalled. “I had a fairly rotten childhood. Lived in abject poverty. Always fended for myself. I didn’t really have a childhood – I was supporting myself by the time I was 14.”

All the adversity meant she “had enough pain in me at the time to pull off anything and get into it and sound believable….I think you can hear it in the performances. It was easy for me. The recording stuff was the place you could really release your feelings without everybody looking at you.” 

Weiss proclaimed a mix of everything from The Ink Spots to The Everly Brothers to Nina Simone and gospel inspired her move into music, as well as the street corner doo wop singing flooding her neighborhood growing up. She and her two-years-older sister Betty met the 16-years-old-at-the-time Ganser twins at Andrew Jackson High School, soon harmonizing with them at the Ganser’s house or on the local playground. The group name came courtesy of a Long Island restaurant called The Shangri-La. They came to Morton’s attention after performing at local dances and releasing a go-nowhere 45 called “Wishing Well” for the Lilliputian Spokane Records label. 

Once Red Bird folded in ‘66, The Shangri-Las moved on to Mercury, releasing a couple of non-charting singles, including an ill-advised pro-Vietnam War number called “Take The Time.”  Two years later, the hits/the tours/the acclaim dried up, The Shangri-Las were nothing more than an asset in a court battle, due to some shady contracts they’d signed at the beginning of their career.

“When we started, it was all about music,” Weiss said in 2007. “By the time it ended, it was all about litigation.” She also commented “my mother kind of signed my life away when I was 14.” As a result, she “couldn’t go near another record company for 10 years.”

“A lot of men were considered artists, whether or not other people wrote for them, where women were considered products,” she told the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in a 2007 interview. “And I always found that difficult to accept.”

Briefly following the hippie trail in San Francisco, she wound up back in NYC. She saw the impact those old Shangri-Las records had on the Dolls and Blondie, among many, and responded favorably when Seymour Stein signed Mary and Betty Weiss and Margie Ganser (Mary Ann having passed away in 1971) to Sire Records. The Shangri-Las played CBGB in 1977, with a backing band featuring their comeback album’s producer Andy Paley on guitar and a rhythm section comprising The Patti Smith Group’s Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty. She later said Joey Ramone paid her the greatest compliment she’d ever received offstage at that gig: “Without The Shangri-Las, there would have been no Ramones.”

That Sire Shangri-Las comeback album came to naught when no one was satisfied with the session tapes. They went straight into the vault, still sitting there to this day. When an unscrupulous promoter sent a bogus Shangri-Las out on the road, the Weisses and Ganser reunited to play a 1989 oldies concert in New Jersey. It would be the last time the real Shangri-Las would perform together. Margie Ganser succumbed to breast cancer in 1996.

Weiss moved on to working for an architecture firm, disgusted with the music biz. Norton Records finally enticed her to cut an excellent solo record in 2007, Dangerous Game. Backed by ex-Oblivian Greg Cartwright and his excellent garage outfit Reigning Sound, who provided some songs as well, Dangerous Game was a solid, stripped-down take on the classic Shangri-Las sound, with Weiss sounding very much a seasoned, mature version of that teenage girl on “Leader Of The Pack.” This was a woman singing. Norton’s Billy Miller told The New Yorker that much of the material submitted by songwriters for consideration for the album “was sort of dramatic—somebody drives off a cliff or something. She said that’s nice—just don’t bring it up again.” Live, she rarely performed any of her oldies – maybe a “Train From Kansas City” here, a “Remember (Walkin’ In The Sand)” there.

And that was it. She retreated to private life after giving us a taste of what we’d been missing, communicating to the world and her fans through her Facebook page. It was comforting to see her outrage at the rise of Trumpism via her frequent posts. 

And now, Mary Weiss is gone. (GOOOONE GONE GONE GONE GONE GONE GOOOONE!) I admit, I feel sad and numb and completely caught off-guard. I’ve fallen in love with a few voices in my life — Ronnie Spector and Chrissie Hynde, for certain. But Mary Weiss’ death is hitting me hard. I’m in tears as I type this. And I know – you were probably expecting me to talk about the impact the woman had on punk, which was substantial. This article talks all about that, even quoting Mary: “The Shangri-Las were punk before punk existed….The jukebox at CBGB had a lot of Shangri-La cuts on it. I was amazed. And I was deeply touched when Joey Ramone told me what a big influence we were on them.”  And this doesn’t even take into account superb Shangri-Las covers by Blondie, Redd Kross and Superchunk.

But I dunno. In my profound sadness, it feels cheap to pull a Tim and talk about Shangri-Las/punk connections. Isn't it enough to talk about how Mary Weiss’ singing was truly high art? Or maybe low-culture at its highest? Shouldn’t the point be that Mary Weiss had voice that knew intimately what it was to love so much that it hurt? That understood pain and loneliness? That cried every time you put the needle back in the groove of that scratchy Red Bird 45? A voice that hurts like my heart, now that she won’t hang around with the gang ever again. 

R.I.P., Mary. I wish there were a lot more records available, filled with That Voice. God, you could sing.

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