Jerry Leiber of the songwriting team of Leiber & Stoller has died at the age of 78. I always knew the two men gave us a lot of hits but I don't think I realized just how many until they started flying at me when I saw the Broadway show, Smokey Joe's Cafe. I somehow didn't get a program book on the way in or maybe didn't look at one I did get. In any case, I didn't know all the tunes that were coming so as hit after hit was performed, I kept thinking, "Oh, yeah…they wrote that, too" or sometimes, "Gee, I didn't know they wrote that."
It was a stunning playlist and then when I went home and looked those gentlemen up in a book I have, I noted another dozen or so chart-toppers that the producers didn't even have room for in Smokey Joe's Cafe — including, ironically, "Smokey Joe's Cafe." There are composers out there who built their whole reputations and personal fortunes on one hit of the magnitude of "Jailhouse Rock" while Leiber and Stoller had dozens. Take a look at this list on their website.
Here's a link to a brief interview with them that ran in Rolling Stone. And below, we have a clip from an episode of What's My Line? that aired in March of 1958. Though they had had many hits by then, Leiber and Stoller were still so unknown that it was okay for them to sign in as themselves. Host John Daly and panelist Dorothy Kilgallen were somewhat condescending with their remarks on rock 'n' roll but Leiber and Stoller took it in stride, especially after it was noted how popular (at least in a monetary sense) their work was…