The Shangri-Las: A Conversation with DRESSED IN BLACK author Lisa MacKinney

On this episode of the Long Island Music & Entertainment Hall of Fame Podcast, historian and author Lisa MacKinney joins host Tom Needham to talk about her new book, Dressed in Black. 

The first full-length history of the Shangri-Las, the book tells the story of how a group of Queens schoolgirls became 1960s pop legends with hits like “Leader of the Pack” and “Remember (Walking in the Sand).” 

MacKinney’s meticulous research uncovers the real story behind the group’s meteoric rise and the forces that ultimately cut their careers short. 

She challenges long-standing myths and restores the Shangri-Las to their rightful place in American music history. 

It’s a fascinating conversation about one of pop’s most influential yet misunderstood groups.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Hi, this is Tom Needham and welcome to the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame podcast. Today we are joined by historian and author Lisa McKinney, whose new book, Dressed in Black, offers the full-length history of the legendary Shangri-Las, best known for their iconic tracks like Leader of the Pack and Remember Walking in the Sand. The Shangri-Las rose from Queens schoolgirls in the 1960s to pop stardom. only to see their careers cut short by forces beyond their control. Lisa's meticulously researched work challenges the myths, uncovers the group's real legacy, and places the Shangri-Las firmly in the canon of great American music. Lisa, thank you so much today for joining us on the Long Island and Music Entertainment Hall of Fame podcast.

SPEAKER_02: 0:56

My absolute pleasure, Tom. I'm very happy to be here.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00

Yeah, man, we have a lot of fans of the Shangri-Las, so I'm super excited to talk to you. You seem like an expert, having written this book. What inspired you in the first place to write this book?

SPEAKER_02: 1:13

Well, firstly, realizing that there wasn't one. And I realized that there wasn't a book about the Shangri-Las 25 years ago, if you can believe it. I was working in a book and music, a book and record store. And I worked in the music section and I was also in charge of ordering books for the music section in the book department. And I was having an animated discussion with one of my colleagues one evening about the Shangri-Las. And at that stage, like a lot of people, I thought I knew a bit about the Shangri-Las. And I said to him, oh, wow, you know about them? You know about Shadow Morton? He's like, no, I don't. And I said, I uttered the fateful words, there must be a book, I'll order it in. Little did I know what I was setting off by saying that. So I I went and looked through all the catalogues. No, there wasn't a book. There had never been a book. And I thought at that moment, I'm a historian. I should write one. So that was 25 years ago. And then I started a PhD in an entirely different topic at a university in Australia. I started a PhD on religious devotional practice in the late medieval household. And I got a year and a half into it. And this idea about the Shangri-La's book was just bubbling away in the back of my mind. And a couple of people suggested to me that I, like, why don't you do it as a PhD? And I'm like, oh, yeah, as if they're going to let me change topic. And then I won't bore you with all the details, but they did. And so I was able to, that was in 2005, so I was able to devote myself with that, the support and security that a scholarship gives you, I was able to devote myself full time to that work for around five years. And that's when the bulk of the research was done and there's absolutely no way I would have been able to do that level of investigation without that support. So that's essentially how it started. But in terms of what inspired me to be so excited about the Shangri-Las in the first place, It's their extraordinary music, their songs, and it was particularly the emotional content of their songs that really got me. Like, as I say in the introduction, for years I couldn't listen to I Can Never Go Home Anymore without crying. It was just so powerful and so real to me. And there just really wasn't anything that, hit me emotionally in the way that that song did and in the way that other songs of theirs did. So really, it was that incredible emotional power that they had that really got to me.

SPEAKER_00: 4:43

That's amazing. Two things you said that I kind of want to backtrack just a little bit. Here at the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame, we love it when we hear about Mm-hmm. to research the Shangri-La as it was a worthy academic topic. Can you just speak to that just a little bit about what their influence has been in Australia and why they were a suitable topic for an academic research project initially that turned into this book?

UNKNOWN: 5:39

Sure.

SPEAKER_02: 5:40

Well, I made a pretty strong case, which I had to. But really, it was, I mean, the first thing that you need to do if you're embarking on an academic project, you need to demonstrate that there is a significant gap in the literature that you are going to fill. So that wasn't difficult because there had never been a book about the Shangri-Las. So... So that part of it was reasonably easy, but then it was like, all right, well, why should there be a book about the Shangri-Las? And then that came down to, you know, the extraordinary complexity of their songs and also the impact that they'd had. And they have had... as you know, an extraordinary impact, like a really unusual array of different styles of artists have been influenced by the Shangri-Las, from like Bette Midler to Amy Winehouse to the New York Dolls, the Ramones, Blondie covered out in the streets on their first EP. And even in Australia, I'm not sure whether you've heard of Roland Howard, but he's a very famous guitar player. He's dead now, unfortunately. But he was in a band called The Birthday Party with Nick Cave and then a group called These Immortal Souls. And then he made two solo albums that were critically acclaimed. And on the first one, He did a cover of He Cried and he did it as she cried. But he was a huge Shangri-La's fan and, like, was super excited when I told him I was embarking on this project. And there's a whole group of bands... in the 80s in Australia that were very 60s music influenced, like the Hoodoo Gurus and Died Pretty and a little bit earlier Radio Birdman and the Celibate Rifles even. And they were all fans of the Shangri-Las as well. So they've had a really wide impact even in Australia.

SPEAKER_00: 8:28

I love how you go into the book, how they have impacted a lot of artists, and you mentioned quite a few of them just now. What was it about the Shangri-Las that so many artists took away from and inspired them?

SPEAKER_02: 8:44

Well, I guess, like, from my perspective, I guess it was something... Well, not only were they really great songs... in terms of the constructions of the songs, the performances, the arrangements. They're really like sort of standalone works of art, many of them, I would argue. But also I guess, you know, I guess the emotional impact as well. I think they really spoke to people because, you know, They had a real core of emotional truth, I think, their songs. They were very... They were authentic. They weren't... They weren't... They weren't tacky or, you know, it didn't sound like they were being, you know, that the emotion was manufactured. The emotion was real, like anyone can hear it. It's... It's a very powerful, the songs were very powerful. I think that's part of it. But also, you know, I think that's a really interesting question because I think I've thought about this a lot and I really, you know, with the New York Dolls, for instance, you know, you have this bunch of misfits, like, you know, who are kind of, you can't really imagine them being able to do anything else other than being a musician, you know, because they're kind of all over the place and kind of wild and crazy. And if you think about the– if you think about the– you know, in the Shangri-La's, like, body of work, small as it is, but in the Redbird recordings, there's a– There's a type of guy that there's a continuity with, the leader of the pack type guy, you know, who's kind of, you know, a bit rough around the edges, you know, from the wrong side of town, whatever, you know, and they didn't give him a great big kiss. You know, he's like, he's got, you know, dirty fingernails and like high boots and, oh boy, what a prize, you know. And I think those guys are, saw themselves in that character. And so the Shangri-Las was singing to them about who they were as well. And I think, you know, that's a very attractive concept, having these four beautiful young women sort of intoning these pains of love toward people like them. And I think, I really think that that is part of it, that they saw themselves in the guys that the Shangri-La sang about.

SPEAKER_00: 11:54

It's amazing, you being from Australia, how well you describe the setting here. in which the Shangri-Las came to be. They are from Queens, and I was wondering if you could share with our listeners what you learned in terms of how them living in Queens came to be an important aspect of who they are and what they became.

SPEAKER_02: 12:22

Well, I... Yeah, I'm super glad to hear that because, like, it might not necessarily have worked in that way. I may have appeared to be, you know, like an outsider writing about, you know, an area that I've never lived in, you know. So I'm really glad to hear that. But I loved researching that. I found it so interesting. And, you know, I was able to visit a few times, but obviously, you know, I never lived there. But I think obviously it was, you know, it was obviously like a nice, a good place to grow up. There's so many, so many stories of people people who moved from crowded parts of Brooklyn and sometimes Manhattan and moved to Queens, which was marketed as an area where there was lots of wide open space and you could have a yard and you could have a house rather than a crowded apartment. That was true of George Shadow Morton and his family. That was true of the Gansers who moved from Brooklyn to their house in Canberra Heights where they lived until at least the 70s. So that obviously... you know, gave them a kind of, like, space and happiness and, like, a good sort of solid American childhood, I suppose, you know, in a way. But one thing that Mary Weiss always emphasised, like, in her reviews, in her interviews, I mean, is that, the vibrant musical context and that there was so much doo-wop, you know, and so much, well, you know, vocal group singing. It wasn't called doo-wop until later, but that there was so much of that and that's what she grew up hearing. And I've thought that, I found that really interesting because I think a lot of, people who think about the Shangri-Las think about them in a rock context, which, you know, they certainly kind of moved, they certainly fit into a rock context. But I think it's really important to understand that the Shangri-Las came out of that vocal group tradition. They came out of a tradition where the focus was the singing. There was no expectation that they needed to play instruments. That kind of came later as well. And, you know, not necessarily to write their own material either because there's, you know, an army of professional songwriters who made their living writing songs for groups to sing. So, yeah, I loved finding out about Queens. It's great. And I do have a couple of friends who live in Queens and every time I've visited, it's always been awesome. There's always been great food. And yeah,

SPEAKER_00: 16:05

it's great. And it's just an astronomical number of people who have had success worldwide that are from this area. And we started to really investigate why that is. And obviously, you know, it's partly due to the fact that you can still be out here in the suburbs, but you're still close to New York City. But then there's something else that's a little bit more intangible, which is that Oh, wow. George Shadow Morton, he's also an inductee, and he's an important person in this story of the Shangri-Las. Tell me a little bit about how he came together with the women in the group and really created history.

SPEAKER_02: 17:37

Well, Shadow Morton is a really fascinating character because as... As I go into quite a lot of detail about in the book, he has always presented himself as someone who got into the music industry as a result of a joke and who was never particularly serious about it. And it was an accident and, you know, he just, like, landed with this group and it just happened, you know, which is... like really not quite accurate. So he moved with his family. Interestingly, his parents divorced. sometime before the 1950 census and in the 1950 census he was recorded as living with his mother and her new husband and he was recorded as their stepson and with a younger sister who was one year old and at some point in the early 50s I think it must have been, they moved to Long Island and he started going to Bethpage High School. And at Bethpage High School, he met Tony Michaels, who was an important figure there. in the Shangri-La's story early on, but also continued. He wrote or co-wrote songs like right until the end, which is interesting as well. So Morton started like a vocal group, a doo-wop group called the Marquees, with five similarly aged people. Tony Michaels was in the same year as him at Bethpage. And I'm not sure who formed the Marquise, whether the Marquise existed already and he joined later or what the story was, but they recorded two singles together. for RCA in 1958 when he would have been 15 or 16. And he wrote or co-wrote all of those. Actually, no, the B-side of the first single was Yakety Yak. He didn't write that. But the rest. So that was really interesting. That was the beginning, and that was the beginning– of his recording career, and then he made several other singles up until about the early 60s. When he made this single with a group of people, the identities are still not clear of these young women, but he wrote and produced, importantly, a single by a group called the Beatlettes, which was, like many other things at that point in early 1964, attempting to capitalise on the popularity of the Beatles, which was beginning to sweep America. So he has this solid body of... um, recording experience. It's kind of, you know, lo-fi, you know, indie, you know, recording experience, but, but recording experience, you know, all the same. And, uh, the way he tells it is that he, um, he found out that, uh, Ellie Greenwich, who he had also, uh, known when he was at school, she didn't go to the same school, but she went to, uh, Levitown Memorial High, which wasn't very far away. And they had done, uh, some music together at various points at high school dances and things. He found out that she was working in the Brill Building and had co-written important songs that were hits with Bill Spector. And he... rang her up and said oh hey remember me um and you know can I come and see you and so uh he did and um and uh as a result of um sparring with um with uh Jeff Barry I think it was um he uh he left with a um with a request to come back with a song. So then he had an audience ready, you know, waiting for a song. And so then he assembled some musicians, his friends from the Marquise, who had access to a studio that was in the basement of one of their houses where they used to record demos and stuff. So he had all this ready to go, you know, like he had a studio he could use, he had musicians he knew, and so he pulled this all together. He'd already met the Shangri-Las who had been taken by Tony Michaels, who became their manager early on. Their manager, Tony Michaels, had... arranged for them to have an audition at Bob Babaloo Lewis's place and they went there and sang for him and apparently Morton was there that night. So he had heard them and obviously thought they were pretty good and they'd recorded a couple of singles at that point on the Smash label and the Spokane label that... Nothing, you know, nothing very hugely popular, but they were doing engagements around and they had recorded a couple of singles. And so he asked them if they would sing on this track that he was going to record. And... According to legend, he was on his way to the session and realized that he didn't have a song. Let

SPEAKER_00: 24:55

me just interrupt for one second. Is this going to be the Billy Joel story?

SPEAKER_02: 25:03

Well, partly.

SPEAKER_00: 25:06

Because, as you probably know, Billy Joel is a major inductee of ours, and we have the world-famous Billy Joel exhibit. And it's so amazing that it's just unbelievable to a lot of people who have not heard this story. And I want to let you tell the story. But it's so unbelievable that there is a connection between Billy Joel and the Shangri-Las. Tell the story, because I just can't believe this. And it's in your book.

SPEAKER_02: 25:40

Oh! I mean, if you... I... I think it's not so surprising, really, if you think about how young they all were, you know. So anyway, so George Morton pulls over on the side of the road and writes, remember walking in the sand, which, you know, you can believe that or not believe it. I don't know. John Greco, who's also written about the Shangri-Las and put together that really fabulous story, Record Store Day LP reissue called The Best of the Redbird and Mercury Recordings, I think. He says in the liner notes to that that of all of the stories that he's heard of Morton's over the years, he's never, ever deviated from that one. So he thinks it's that Morton that Morton was being truthful. So anyway, so regardless of how the song came into being, he turns up at the session and he'd met, he'd seen Billy Joel, who was like the rest of them, like a kid, you know, 16, 17, something like that. playing piano in a band somewhere and kind of, and he needed piano for this. So he'd asked him to come and play on this session. And so Billy Joel played the, you know, thumping piano on Remember Walking in the Sand. Wow. And which is, yeah, which is a, you know, a fantastic story. um but um yeah so apparently the apparently the original version was was like seven minutes long with like a narration from morton at the beginning and um so he takes this back to the brill building and they listen to it and they're kind of like oh wow this is kind of weird but it's really interesting and um So to cut a long story short, that was how he got a foot in at the Brill Building and he was signed on as a staff songwriter. And they re-recorded some of Remember Walking in the Sand. I think they used some of the original recording but re-recorded the vocals probably at least. And it went to number five on the Billboard Hot 100. So the rest, as they say, is history.

SPEAKER_00: 28:30

And did Billy also play on Leader of the Pack?

SPEAKER_02: 28:35

I haven't found any evidence of that. He said that he thinks that he did, but I'm certain about Remember Walking in the Sand, but I'm not certain about Leader of the

SPEAKER_00: 28:50

Pack. But Billy has said that he has. played on it. He

SPEAKER_02: 28:55

also said that the sessions happened that both songs were recorded at the same time, which is not possible. I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_00: 29:07

Well, this is an incredible story. We're well into the interview. I need to hear more about the members of the group. Okay. Tell me about the individual members and what you think in terms of why they, in light of their career, why they are deserving of more praise than what some people have given them traditionally, which is just to say that, as you said earlier, they didn't play their instruments or write the songs, but you make the case in the book that these were very talented individuals who have a body of work that deserves appreciation. Why?

SPEAKER_02: 29:55

Well, the first thing that needs to be addressed about that is, and it comes back to what we were talking about before, about the Shangri-Las coming out of the doo-wop tradition and not the rock tradition. So that's one thing. There was no expectation of playing instruments in the vocal group tradition. And there was a long tradition, and in fact it was very much the norm, that people sang songs written by professional songwriters. This whole idea of an authentic artist being someone who wrote and performed their own music, preferably on instruments, is an idea that really gained currency in the mid to late 60s. as part of the sort of counterculture movement. And that became the yardstick of authenticity. And along with that is sort of the idea that it had always been like that, which is absolutely categorically not the case. So what happened with vocal groups like the Shangri-Las is that they became regarded as, as inferior in authenticity terms later because of ideas about authenticity that were projected back onto them but were not current at the time when they were making records. So in the early 70s, there was was like a number of like rock journalists who kind of decided that this whole girl group framework was like a genre and, you know, what being a girl group meant was that you didn't play instruments, you didn't write songs, you had a genius producer and like the singers were, you know, almost, almost, second rate to the whole exercise, that they could have been, you know, replaced by anyone, which is kind of the girl group narrative, which is just so, not only is it so patronising and reductive, but it's also actually in many cases with some of the other, you know, groups that are called girl groups, you know, some of them did write material about Arlene Smith from the Chantels, for instance, wrote quite a few of their songs. But this has all been brushed over in this sort of grand narrative that posits these young women as without any sort of agency in their music. So, you know, so there's that. But... In terms of the Shangri-Las themselves, I mean, they've always been shrouded in mystery. And so it's very difficult to get a handle on their individual personalities. And unfortunately, Marianne Ganser died in very, very tragic circumstances in 1970. Her sister, Marguerite, died of breast cancer in 1996. So they were long out of the picture when I started my investigations. Mary and Betty Weiss. Mary is the one who's done the most interviews and is on the public record the most. And even though she did not want to cooperate or be interviewed for my book, which I remain very disappointed about, but I also understand where she's coming from. She probably thought that I was just some other person who wanted something from her, and she'd had enough of that in her life. But In terms of, so if you dispense with all of these kind of anachronistic ideas about what is authentic and what isn't and actually look at their performances, the performances are really what elevate them to another level. They weren't just like, you know, stand-in session singers. They were... they were extraordinary performers who worked very hard at their craft. And, you know, I might just throw in here at the moment that nobody thinks that Elvis is any less of an authentic performer because he didn't write his own material, you know. So this is really an idea that gained currency later. But if... So the... There... Their performances are so emotionally powerful and so skilled, you know, as well. I mean, I don't want to sort of give the impression that, like, it's sort of just it's all about sort of emotional, like, emotion with no craft involved as well. That's categorically not the case either because they worked. You know, they started singing when they were really, you know, probably 12 or 13. They worked hard. They practised. They went from, you know, doing little shows around, you know, little local shows around, you know, Canberra Heights and Queens to like suddenly like being on television. And, like, going on tour. And they just had to sink or swim. And they swam, you know. I mean, if you think about the fact that Mary Weiss was 15 years old when Leader of the Pack went to number one.

SPEAKER_00: 36:37

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_02: 36:37

And they had already– it's extraordinary. And they had already been, you know, remember walking in the sand, had already hit. They got packed off on the road immediately. And suddenly, you know, they've gone from doing these little local shows to like doing shows in a different town every night and having to, you know, and having to perform on TV. It's like, it's extraordinary that they just like picked it up so quickly. And, you know, the stories of them, you know, turning up to play in different cities and there'd be a different pickup band wherever they turned up and sometimes they'd have to teach them the songs. I mean, you know, like that's consummate musicianship to be able to do that, you know. So it's this whole idea that, you know, they're somehow lesser is just like, yeah, I really– the real– you know, if I had to like boil the– purpose of the book down to one sentence, it would be to blow that out of the water. It's like, no. These young women were really extraordinary performers. And their small but incredibly influential body of work really bears that out.

SPEAKER_00: 38:05

Yeah, and it's amazing that anyone today who sees any of those clips of them on TV, they're still captivating. They still, you know, it is, it's like, and that's not true of everybody, but you see the clip and it just gets your attention. It's like, wow, who's that? If you haven't seen it before and it's still as good today as it was back then. So they really had something. Did you discover any like subtle ways in which the women in the group did change? input their preferences in terms of vocals or style or anything that fed into what people perceive as to be the Shangri-Las?

SPEAKER_02: 38:50

Well, I think the spoken word parts of the songs, I really think that was them because They– there's little spoken word components in, like, in their first singles, in, like, the– so their first– the first single they recorded was in late– it was released in late 1963 called Simon Says. And then early in 1964, this is before they signed with Redbird and before Morton was involved, was– a song called Wishing Well and Hate to Say I Told You So on the other side of that. And there's spoken word components of those which so like that wasn't anything to do with Morton or the songwriters because they were doing that before then. So I found that really interesting because that became something that they were really well known for and particularly with Past, Present and Future, which is the most extraordinary song and which I discuss at length in the book. It's entirely spoken. There's not a single word that's sung in that song, which is, you know, very unusual. But also that also really contributes to the emotional power of it because it's like a direct address. It's like... it's like Mary or the character in the song is speaking directly to you. She's almost whispering, you know, at times. And that makes it incredibly personal.

SPEAKER_00: 40:44

When they're speaking, you said their character, they really did have like a persona. Like how would you– you do it in the book, but how would you describe– their persona, like who, who were they as characters? If you think of the group as being a group of characters.

SPEAKER_02: 41:03

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, I guess, you know, they were sort of teenage girls with, um, you know, the same problems that other teenage girls had or not just girls, you know, teenagers like as well, you know, so they, um, you know, they had, they had problems, you know, problems with their parents, you know, really big problems with their parents. Um, So the parents were always trying to stand in the way of true love

SPEAKER_01: 41:31

and

SPEAKER_02: 41:34

stop their daughters from seeing these guys with dirty fingernails and riding motorbikes. And often that resulted in the death of someone, either the characters or the love interest. So... So, yeah, they really did have a very... And I think they had a really strong connection with their audience. Does this break? If I can just find it quickly. I don't know whether I can. But...

SPEAKER_00: 42:23

By the way, there's such great photos in the book. It's just a fun book to flip through.

SPEAKER_01: 42:32

Sorry, what was that?

SPEAKER_00: 42:33

There's just so many great photos in the book. It's just a fun book to flip through and just revisit all those images and album covers and things like that.

SPEAKER_02: 42:44

Yeah. Oh, that's good. That's good. Yeah. Yeah, so there's this great interview from 1966 in The Village Voice where, you know, Mary Ann Ganser was sort of really getting stuck into people who couldn't take their emotional intensity seriously. And so she said, they say our stuff is corny. Well, a lot of people eat corn. Besides, if that were true, then we wouldn't sell, which we do. Our lines are realistic and frank. Take our latest single. The girl who's talking in it has had one tragic affair and is obviously hung up on it. Well, we never say she's hung up because she let herself go. We don't put her down for it. So she's talking there about past, present and future. And she's basically saying, you know, like we, you know, we understand our audience. We are connected with our audience and we talk to our audience. And, you know, we don't put them down. We are at one with our audience, which is like really amazing. it's really powerful, you know, and that's partly, you know, that's partly why the songs are so powerful as well.

SPEAKER_00: 44:05

Yeah. Well, one of the things that's unfortunate is that Oh, yeah. Things just went wrong. What happened? A lot happened, but what happened exactly?

SPEAKER_02: 44:44

Well, I think the really key event was the collapse of the Redbird label. So that whole little ecosystem there at the Brill Building with Morton and Lieber and Stoller who, you know, clearly understood and supported and guided Morton with what he was doing. That basically fell apart because of the other person other than Lieber and Stoller, who was a partner in the Redbird label, George Goldner, who's like a fairly, you know, legendary person. music industry figure, he had a terrible gambling problem and he had a long history of getting into financial strife and borrowing money off loan sharks, aka, you know, mobbed up people. And he would... He sold off a series of really pioneering labels as collateral to get out of his, to pay off his gambling debts. And that's essentially what happened with Redbird. And Lieber and Stoller walked away and the whole thing collapsed. So that meant that the Shangri-Las ended up at Mercury. where they went from being... It's the equivalent now of, say, Nirvana being on sub-pop records and then ending up on Geffen records. I mean, it worked out for them for a little while, but it's the idea of going from a small... sort of almost like a family label where you're, you know, you're really part of a family to this big impersonal sort of corporation where no one cares about you. And that is essentially sort of what happened to the Shangri-Las. It's kind of evident in the two singles that they recorded for Mercury, of which, you know, there is one incredible song called I'll Never Learn written by a teenage uh Esra Mohawk um uh and if I mean that that song really is an indication of what direction their career could have taken if they had been given more material like that um I couldn't see that they wouldn't have, you know, gone on to make records for much longer. Instead, that was relegated to the B side of their first Mercury single, which was a, you know, the A side of which was a very, you know, unspectacular song called Sweet Sounds of Summer. And then... The second one was not very good either and was complicated politically. And that was it. It didn't sell. And then the label just lost interest in them. And it's terrible. But even worse than that, they had signed this contract with... with mercury that um prevented them from uh recording with any other uh label um for another 10 years

SPEAKER_01: 48:43

so

SPEAKER_02: 48:44

mercury wasn't interested in them but they couldn't like work with anyone else either so it it it's but you know that's that's typical of the music industry unfortunately um you know i laugh but it's not funny you know it's it's it's it's shocking and um Yeah, so it's no coincidence that they had another crack at it in 1977 and reformed briefly and did some recordings, which for Seymour Stein's Sire label, because they knew Seymour Stein from, he'd worked at Redbird as well. Yeah. But those recordings have never surfaced, but I wonder if they will one of these days.

SPEAKER_00: 49:34

What was their personal reaction during that period where they were kind of blocked out of the industry for 10 years? How did they personally handle it?

SPEAKER_02: 49:47

It's hard to know. The Ganses, I'm not, well, Mary Ann had died in 1970. I think Margie just, like, tried to, I think they tried to just, like, assimilate back into normal life. I'm fairly sure that Margie tried to finish school at some point because they had been ripped out of school to go on the road and they'd never finished school. I don't know whether Mary and Betty ever finished school. I don't think Mary did, but I'm not sure about Betty. But, yeah, I think they just tried to kind of, like, move on.

SPEAKER_00: 50:42

Wow, such a tragic story. Well, your book, though, does celebrate their greatness and makes the case that they are deserving of real... you know, that they really do deserve credit for being leaders in the industry with what they were doing. And you did such a fantastic job. Thank you so much, by the way, for joining us today on the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame podcast. Can you tell people, if they want to learn more about your book, is there a place online where they can find out about the book and your work and so forth?

SPEAKER_02: 51:28

Oh, well, I mean, it's available, you know, it's available through all, like it's available internationally, so there's If it's not in your local bookstore, you should be able to order it. There's plenty of places you can order it online. For people who are on Instagram, I have an Instagram account that's dedicated to the book. It's Lisa underscore McKinney underscore author. So there's all of– If you want to keep up to date with what's happening with the book and everything, you can go there. There's also like a set of links of different places where you can buy the book if you want to. There's also my publisher's website. My publisher is Verse Chorus Press. And so there's information there about it as well.

SPEAKER_00: 52:30

Well, Lisa, when you look back at the whole experience, you spent a lot of years working on this. What was the most satisfying aspect of finally putting out this book for you personally?

SPEAKER_02: 52:44

Well, I always said that... So it's actually 20 years since I started writing about them. I started writing the PhD in 2005, and it's now... So it's been a really, really long road. And I always said, you know, the happiest day of my life would be when, you know, I was holding the book in my hand because it meant that it had finally happened and nothing could go wrong, you know. So, yeah, I think that was actually the, like, That moment when, you know, I was holding it in my hand and it was like, oh, it has actually happened, you know. That was a really, a really great thing. But I have to say that it's been really wonderful getting messages from people who've enjoyed it, you know, or who are enjoying it and who were just like, who are really, Because, I mean, like, you know, I kind of know my audience. You know, I've been trying to, you know, I've been a fan for a long time and I know what people, like, want to know about the group, you know, and to some extent I've been able to, you know, clear a lot of that up. You know, they've always been shrouded in mystery, as I said before, and, you know, part of that is their doing and part of that, is not. But it's very satisfying to be able to really bring their achievements to, well, not bring them to light, but it's kind of like, you know, it's kind of like a painting that's been kind of you know, hidden in a closet for ages and it's all dusty and, you know, you take it to a restorer and they sort of clean it up and the colours, you know, start to, like, be more visible and then, you know, you see the picture much clearer, you know, and that's kind of how I see this. You know, I really feel that this extraordinary group deserves to be, to have some kind of, like, in a way that is sort of that solidifies their reputation. And a book is a really good way to do that because it's like, okay, you know, there's a book about them. Okay, well, they must be, you

SPEAKER_01: 55:40

know, serious. Right.

SPEAKER_02: 55:41

And, in fact, you know, it's kind of interesting. There's a friend of mine was like when it just came out, a friend of mine bought a copy and was sitting in a room sitting somewhere, like in a cafe, reading it. And the guy behind the bar said, oh, yeah, what are you reading? And he said, oh, my friend's just written this book about the Shangri-Las. And he said, oh, I didn't think there'd be much to say about them. And I'm just like, oh, you know, he told,

SPEAKER_01: 56:07

you

SPEAKER_02: 56:07

know, my friend, like, told me that. And he said, like, you know, this is the way people still think about them, you know? Yeah. Even if you like some of their songs, it's kind of like, oh, well, you know, they're not that important. Well, no, I'm afraid they are.

SPEAKER_00: 56:23

Well, thank you so much for writing the book. I think we're like-minded souls and that's what we're doing at the Hall of Fame. We're trying to preserve history and remind people of artists who have made contributions. And books are important, like you said, and your book is one of them. So thank you so much for joining us today, for writing the book. And if you are ever on Long Island, you'll have to come by and we'll talk to you again, maybe with an audience.

SPEAKER_02: 56:53

Oh, well, I actually was going to say that if the next time I'm in the U.S., I will definitely be coming and checking out the Long Island Hall of Fame. I'm very, very interested to come and have a look, so for sure.

SPEAKER_00: 57:08

That's great. Okay. Well, I hope to meet you in the future, and best of luck with the book, and I highly recommend it to everybody. Thanks again. Oh,

SPEAKER_02: 57:18

thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. And thank you everyone for listening.