Early-60s girl groups like the Shirelles and the Chiffons conjure a bygone, more innocent time when female adolescent concerns ostensibly could be summed up in songs like “Chapel of Love” and “I Wish I Knew What Dress to Wear.” Because of this perception, and because the girl groups merely sang–they almost never wrote their own material or played instruments–their records are often assumed to have little bearing on rock, which everybody knows is made by self-contained bands of bad boys who write their own songs. But as the recent release of three girl-group anthologies suggests, the form warrants our attention, especially for its recurring role in the evolution of rock.
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In a few days Morton, who afterward claimed he’d never written a song before, reappeared with a tape of a single tune. It didn’t conform to any then-fashionable style for a pop song. High-spirited delivery of lyrics, regardless of content, was de rigueur. In their hit “My Boyfriend’s Back” the Angels warned a male pest, “You’re gonna get a beatin’!” with cheerleaderlike exuberance. The Supremes expressed heartbreak in “Where Did Our Love Go” over joyful hand claps and a catchy “baby baby” backup vocal hook. But Morton’s song dared to be a real downer, exaggerating like an old radio melodrama–“Oh what will happen to / The life I gave to you? / What will I do with it now?”
It made the top 20, as did three follow-up singles authored or coauthored by Morton: “Leader of the Pack,” in which the girls glorified the death of a motorcycle-riding antihero; “Give Him a Great Big Kiss,” in which they pledged eternal devotion to a guy with long hair and dirty fingernails; and “I Can Never Go Home Anymore,” a runaway’s sad tale. With a decidedly unwholesome image–unprecedented for a successful pop group–the Shangri-Las openly defied the conventions of polite society.
The legacy of the girl groups has taken on new dimensions in the work of this decade’s most visible and controversial female rock stars. In the mid-80s Madonna re-created the style, albeit somewhat generically, for the title song of her True Blue album, which found her moving away from boy toy and material girl and toward a more mature, self-reliant persona. Courtney Love revived an obscure Crystals song for Hole’s MTV Unplugged appearance. Though it seemed perfectly at home in Love’s oeuvre, it’s remarkable something as openly perverse as “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)” was written (by Carole King and then-husband Gerry Goffin), recorded, and released (by Phil Spector) in the early 60s.
