John Barry (b. 1933) - Visualizations

John Barry (b. 1933)



Dr. No (1961)



To Russia with Love (1962)



[aforementioned and other Bonds -- 12 total -- through The Living Daylights (1987)]



Born Free (1966)

A Lion in Winter (1968)

Midnight Cowboy (1969)

King Kong (1976)



Out of Africa (1985)



Dances with Wolves (1990)



John Barry, OBE (b. John Barry Prendergast, November 3, 1933, York, England) is a renowned Golden Globe and five-time Academy Award-winning English film score composer.

Barry was educated at St Peter's School, York, and also received composition lessons from Francis Jackson, Organist of York Minster. Living in his native England until the mid 1970s, Barry spent some time in Spain (for tax reasons) but has since lived in the United States, mainly in Oyster Bay outside New York.

Barry suffered a rupture of the esophagus in 1988 which has left him vulnerable to pneumonia.

Barry has been married four times. His first three marriages ended in divorce: Barbara Pickard 1959-63; Jane Birkin 1965-68; and Jane Sidey 1969-71. He married his current wife, Laurie Barry on 3 January 1978. Barry has three children, one each from his first, second, and fourth marriages.

His family was in the cinema business, but it was during his National Service that he began performing as a musician. After taking a correspondence course (with jazz composer Bill Russo) and arranging for some of the bands of the day, he formed the John Barry Seven. Barry then met Adam Faith, and composed songs, along with Les Vandyke, and film scores on the singer's behalf. When Faith made his first film Beat Girl in 1960 Barry composed the score that was not only Barry's first film, but the first soundtrack album to be released on an LP in the U.K.. Barry also composed the music for another Faith film Never Let Go.

These achievements caught the attention of the producers of a new film called Dr. No who were dissatisfied with the score given to them by Monty Norman. Barry was hired and the result would be one of the most famous signature tunes in film history, the "James Bond Theme."

This would be the turning point for Barry, and he would go on to become one of the most celebrated film composers of modern times, winning five Academy Awards and four Grammy Awards, with memorable scores written for The Lion in Winter, Midnight Cowboy, Born Free, and Somewhere In Time.

Barry is often cited as having a distinct style which concentrates on lush strings and extensive use of brass. However he is also an innovator, being one of the first to employ synthesizers in a film score (On Her Majesty's Secret Service), and to make wide use of pop artists and songs in Midnight Cowboy.

After the success of Dr. No, Barry scored eleven of the next 14 James Bond films (but with Monty Norman continually credited as the composer of The James Bond Theme.

Sole compositional credit for the "James Bond Theme" is attributed to Monty Norman, who was contracted as composer for Dr. No. However, Barry, while not publicly denying that, has implied otherwise. Some 30 years later, authorial matters came to a head in court when Norman sued The Sunday Times when that claim was published in a 1997 article naming Barry as the true composer; Barry testified for the defence.

In court, Barry declared he had been handed a musical manuscript of a work by Norman (meant to become the theme) and that he was to arrange it musically, and that he composed additional music and arranged the "James Bond Theme." The Court also was told that Norman received sole credit, because of his prior contract with the producers; Norman won the lawsuit and was awarded damages. Nevertheless, on September 7, 2006, John Barry publicly defended his authorship of the theme on the Steve Wright show on BBC Radio 2.

Contemporary research indicate that it seem to have been John Barry who more or less composed the theme to the bigger part. This is, among other things, based on the theme's strong resemblance to his previous music, like the song Bee's Knees, and the fact that no other music in Dr. No sounds like the "James Bond Theme."

***



Lyricist Jerome "Jerry" Leiber (born April 25, 1933) and composer Mike Stoller (born March 13, 1933) are among the most influential American songwriters and record producers in post-World War II popular music.



Their first successes were as the writers of such crossover hit songs as Hound Dog and Kansas City. Later in the 1950s, particularly through their work with The Coasters, they created a string of ground-breaking hits that are some of the most entertaining in rock and roll, by using the humorous vernacular of the teenagers sung in a style that was openly theatrical rather than personal, songs that include Young Blood, Searchin', and Yakety Yak.

They were the first to surround black music with elaborate production values, enhancing its emotional power with The Drifters in "There Goes My Baby" and influencing Phil Spector who worked with them on recordings of The Drifters and Ben E. King. Leiber and Stoller went into the record business and, focusing on the "girl group" sound, released some of the greatest classics of the Brill Building period.

They wrote hits including "Love Me," "Loving You," "Don't," "Jailhouse Rock," and "King Creole," among others for Elvis Presley.

They were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1985 and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.

They currently live separately in Los Angeles, California.

Leiber came from Baltimore, Stoller from Long Island, but they met in Los Angeles in 1950, where Stoller was a freshman at Los Angeles City College while Leiber was a senior at Fairfax High. Stoller had graduated from Belmont High School. After school, Stoller played piano and Leiber worked in a record store and, when they met, they found they shared a love of blues and rhythm and blues. In 1950, Jimmy Witherspoon recorded and performed their first commercial song, "Real Ugly Woman." Their first hit composition was "Hard Times," recorded by Charles Brown, which was a rhythm and blues hit in 1952. "Kansas City," which was also recorded in 1952 (as "K. C. Loving") by Little Willie Littlefield, became a No. 1 hit in 1959 for Wilbert Harrison. In 1952, they wrote "Hound Dog" for Big Mama Thornton, which became a hit for her in 1953; it became a much bigger hit for Elvis Presley in 1956, which was a takeoff version of the song that Presley picked up from Freddie Bell's lounge act in Las Vegas.

His showstopping mock-burlesque version of "Hound Dog," playfully bumping and grinding on the Milton Berle Show, created such public excitement that on the Steve Allen Show they slowed down his act, with an amused Presley in a tuxedo and blue suede shoes singing his hit to a basset hound. Allen pronounced Presley "a good sport"; and the Leiber-Stoller song would be forever linked to Presley. Their later songs often had lyrics more appropriate for pop music, and their combination of rhythm and blues with pop lyrics revolutionized pop, rock and roll and punk rock.

They formed Spark Records in 1953 with their mentor, Lester Sill. Their songs from this period include "Smokey Joe's Cafe" and "Riot in Cell Block #9," both recorded by The Robins.

The label was later bought by Atlantic Records, which hired Leiber and Stoller in an innovative deal that allowed them to produce for other labels. This, in effect, made them the first independent record producers.

At Atlantic, they revitalized the careers of the Drifters and wrote a number of hits for The Coasters, a spin-off of The Robins. Their songs from this period include "Charlie Brown," "Searchin'," "Yakety Yak,""Stand By Me" (written with Ben E. King), and "On Broadway" (written with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil). For the Coasters alone, they wrote twenty-four songs that appeared in the US charts.

In 1955, Leiber and Stoller produced a recording of their song, "Black Denim Trousers And Motorcycle Boots," with the white vocal group, The Cheers.

Soon after, the song was recorded by Édith Piaf in a French translation titled, "L'Homme à la Moto." The European royalties from another Cheers record, "Bazoom (I Need Your Lovin')," funded a 1956 trip to Europe for Stoller and his first wife, Meryl, on which they met Piaf. Their return to New York was aboard the ill-fated SS Andrea Doria, which was rammed and sunk by the Swedish liner MS Stockholm. The Stollers had to finish the journey to New York without the ship. After their rescue, Leiber greeted Stoller at the dock with the news that "Hound Dog" had become a hit for Presley.

Stoller's reply was, "Elvis who?" They would go on to write more hits for Presley, including the title songs for three of his movies—Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, and King Creole—as well as the rock and roll Christmas song, "Santa Claus Is Back in Town," for Presley's first Christmas album.

In the early 1960s, Phil Spector served an apprenticeship of sorts with Leiber and Stoller in New York, developing his record producer's craft while assisting and playing guitar on their sessions, including "On Broadway."

After leaving the employ of Atlantic Records, where they produced, and often wrote, many classic recordings by The Drifters and Ben E. King, they produced a series of records for United Artists' record wing. They produced hits by Jay and the Americans ("She Cried"), The Exciters ("Tell Him"), and The Clovers ("Love Potion #9," also written by Leiber and Stoller).

In the 1960s, Leiber and Stoller founded and briefly owned Red Bird Records, which issued the Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack" and the Dixie Cups' "Chapel of Love." After selling Red Bird, they continued working as independent producers and writing songs. Their best known song from this period is "Is That All There Is?" recorded by Peggy Lee in 1969; earlier in the decade, they had had a minor hit with Lee with "I'm a Woman." Their last major hit production was "Stuck In the Middle With You," by Stealers Wheel in 1972. In 1975, they recorded an album of art songs with Peggy Lee, entitled Mirrors. A remixed and expanded version of this album was released in 2005 as Peggy Lee Sings Leiber & Stoller.

In the late seventies, A&M Records recruited Leiber & Stoller to write and produce an album for Elkie Brooks. The album Two Days Away (1977) proved a success in the UK and most of Europe. Their composition "Pearl's A Singer" (written with Ralph Dino & John Sembello) became a hit for Brooks, and remains her signature tune. They produced another album for her, Live and Learn, in 1979.

Mezzo-soprano Joan Morris and her pianist-composer husband William Bolcom have recorded an album, Other Songs by Leiber and Stoller, featuring a number of their more unusual (and satiric) works (including "Let's Bring Back World War I," written specifically for them, and "Humphrey Bogart," a tongue-in-cheek song about obsession with the actor).

In 1982, Donald Fagen recorded their song, "Ruby Baby," on his album, The Nightfly.

Coincidentally that same year, former Steely Dan member Michael McDonald released I Keep Forgettin' (Every Time You're Near), adapted from Leiber & Stoller's I Keep Forgettin'.

With collaborator Artie Butler, Stoller wrote the music to the musical Laughing Matters, with book and lyrics by Iris Rainer Dart.

***


The Coasters are an American Rhythm and Blues/ Rock and Roll vocal group that had a string of hits in the late 1950s. Beginning with Searchin' and Young Blood, their most memorable songs were written by the songwriting and producing team of Leiber and Stoller. Although the Coasters originated outside of mainstream doo wop, their records were so frequently imitated that they became an important part of the doo wop legacy through the 1960s.

The Coasters' forerunners were The Robins, a Los-Angelesbased rhythm-and-blues group, which included Carl Gardner and Bobby Nunn. The original members of the Coasters, who formed in October 1955, were African-Americans Carl Gardner, Billy Guy, Bobby Nunn, Leon Hughes (who was replaced by Young Jessie on a couple of their early Los Angeles recordings), and guitarist Adolph Jacobs. Jacobs left the group in 1959.

The songwriting team Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller had started Spark Records, and in 1955 produced "Smokey Joe's Cafe" for The Robins (their 5th single with Leiber-Stoller). The record was popular enough that Atlantic Records offered Leiber and Stoller an independent production contract to produce The Robins for the Atlantic label. Only two of The Robins -- Gardner and Nunn -- were willing to make the move to Atlantic, recording their first songs in the same studio as The Robins had done (Master Recorders). In late 1957 the group moved to New York and replaced Nunn and Hughes with Obie Jesse and Will "Dub" Jones. The new quartet was from then on stationed in New York (although all had Los Angeles roots).

The Coasters' association with Leiber and Stoller was an immediate success. Together they created a string of good-humored "storytelling" hits that are some of the most entertaining from the original era of rock and roll. Their first single, "Down in Mexico", was an R&B hit in 1956 and appears (in a re-recording from 1970 - still with Gardner singing the lead) on the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof. The following year, The Coasters crossed over to the national charts in a big way with the double-sided "Young Blood"/"Searchin'". Searchin was the group's first U.S. Top 10 hit, and topped the R&B charts for 13 weeks, becoming the biggest R&B single of 1957 (all these were recorded in Los Angeles).

"Yakety Yak" (recorded in New York), featuring King Curtis on tenor saxophone, included the famous lineup of Gardner, Guy, Jones and Gunter, became the act's only national #1 single, and also topped the R&B chart. The next single, "Charlie Brown", reached #2 on both charts. This was followed by "Along Came Jones", "Poison Ivy" (#1 for a month on the R&B chart), and "Little Egypt (Ying-Yang)".

Changing popular tastes, and a couple of line-up changes, contributed to a lack of hits in the 1960s. During this time, Billy Guy was also working on solo projects, so New York singer Vernon Harrell was brought in to replace Guy for stage performances. Later members included Earl "Speedo" Carroll (lead of The Cadillacs), Ronnie Bright (the bass voice on Johnny Cymbal's "Mr. Bass Man"), Jimmy Norman, and guitarist Thomas "Curly" Palmer. The Coasters signed with Columbia Records's Date label in 1966, but were never able to regain their former fame. In 1971 The Coasters had a minor chart entry with "Love Potion No. 9" (originally recorded by The Clovers in 1959). In Britain, a 1994 Volkswagen TV advertisement used the group's "Sorry But I'm Gonna Have To Pass" track, which led to a minor chart placement in that country.

The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, crediting the members of the 1958-era configuration. The Coasters also joined the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 1999.
Several groups used the name in the 1970s, touring throughout the country, though Carl Gardner, one of the original Coasters, held the legal rights to it. Gardner continued to tour with the Coasters and has made many attempts to stop bogus groups with no connection to the original group from using the name. In late 2005 Carl's son Carl Gardner, Jr. took over as lead with the group, when his father retired. The Coasters of 2008: Carl Gardner Jr, Ronnie Bright, Alvin Morse, J.W. Lance, and Thomas Palmer (gtr), with Gardner Sr as coach.

As of 2009, all of the other original group members, except Leon Hughes and Carl Gardner, have died. Some of the former members suffered tragic ends. Saxophonist and "fifth Coaster" King Curtis was stabbed to death by two junkies outside his apartment building in 1971. Cornelius Gunter was shot to death while sitting in a Las Vegas parking garage in 1990. Nate Wilson, a member of one of Gunter's offshoot Coasters groups, was shot and his body dismembered in 1980.

Former manager Patrick Cavanaugh was convicted of the murder after Wilson threatened to notify authorities of Cavanaugh's intent to buy furniture with stolen checks. While Cavanaugh was convicted of the murder and given the death sentence in 1984, his sentence was commuted to life in prison. He died in 2006, in Nevada's Ely State Prison. Cavanaugh was 60.

The Coasters continue to appear regularly on "oldies" shows and PBS specials as old favorites and are available for bookings.



[Leiber and Stoller - Down in Mexico (The Coasters) as used in Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof (1977)]

[8933 Gorecki / 8933 Barry / 8932 Little Richard]