Mods And Rockers Festival: That Legendary Songwriting Team: "Liebman & Stroller"?!

The Mods & Rockers Film Festival presented a special in-person tribute to pioneering rock 'n' roll songwriters and producers Leiber & Stoller. Brad Schreiber reports on the evening - and shares some of the many stories with which Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller regaled the audience at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood

"It was Leiber & STROLLER," complained composer-musician Mike Stoller good-naturedly, referring to the early days when people actually got wrong the names of this renowned songwriting duo.

"LIEBMAN & Stoller," insisted lyricist Jerry Leiber with a smile.

After their almost 60 years of writing hits, including those for Big Mama Thornton, The Coasters, The Drifters, Elvis Presley, Ben E. King et al - there had better not be any more typographical errors.

The Leiber & Stoller tribute - to go back - began with a private reception in the foyer of the Egyptian Theatre, where Mods and Rockers Film Festival founder and "ringmaster" Martin Lewis introduced me to Stoller, resplendent in peach shirt. As Sally Kellerman strolled up, Stoller graciously told me she would be performing, among others, at a Leiber & Stoller tribute at Carnegie Hall on November 26.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Write brilliant, witty, snappy hit songs influenced by the black idiom. And apparently, that's also how you get your songs in Elvis' film Jailhouse Rock, which was shown at the Egyptian, along with the film of Broadway musical tribute to the boys, Smokey Joe's Café. Stoller told the crowd -- in the extended between-screenings conversation with Martin Lewis -- that Leiber was chosen to play piano in a scene in Jailhouse Rock, based solely on his looks. Leiber convinced Stoller to go to the studio instead and no one noticed the difference -- although Stoller was told to shave his beard for the sequence as it would otherwise be "a scene-stealer".

There were so many great tales from L&S, including Stoller leaving the sinking SS Andrea Doria, only to arrive in New York and be told by his partner that "some kid named Elvis Presley" was now recording their music ... Or Leiber working nine months with choreographers to get their Broadway show Smokey Joe's Café just right ... Or Stoller bumping into the brother of Atlantic Records founder/chairman Ahmet Ertegun at one of the music publishers on a long-ago Pico Boulevard - and that chance encounter leading to the producing deal that enabled them to generate so many number one hits.

As the Q&A wound down, the inevitable question of their partnership and its longevity was handled by Leiber who quipped: "Neither of us can stand the other but we made a deal to never tell each other ..."

This alone would have been yet another utterly memorable night - but in the Egyptian Theatre's smaller auditorium - the Steven Spielberg Theatre - the Mods & Rockers Festival also had a three-hours-and-twenty-minutes documentary about British filmmaker Peter Whitehead, whose seminal films of early Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and others were screened earlier in the Festival.

I deliriously dashed between Leiber & Stoller and this remarkable doc, In the Beginning Was the Image. It is not hyperbole to say that Whitehead is a generally unheralded but major figure of the 60s counterculture. Interviews with the loquacious and philosophical Brit are intercut with sequences from his many films. The subject matters include not only the aforementioned rockers in their formative stages, but the June 11, 1965 poetry performance, Wholly Communion, featuring Allen Ginsburg among many counter-culture bards - that drew 7,000 people (with 2,500 more turned away) at London's Royal Albert Hall, a seismic shift in the UK's socio-politico-cultural consciousness. There were also clips from Whitehead's unique footage inside Columbia University in 1968, when it was taken over by Students for a Democratic Society.

One story after the next held this Mods & Rockers blogger spellbound. There was a pre-Pink Floyd Syd Barrett, blasting weirdo music at their art school in London while Whitehead fought back with Wagner and Janacek. They would both exhibit art together and then, a year later, Whitehead would meet Barrett again - now with the nascent Pink Floyd - and film their remarkable studio version of Interstellar Overdrive for his 1967 film Tonite Let's All Make Love in London.

There is corrupt financier (and future Heidi Fleiss sugar-daddy) Bernie Cornfeld getting Whitehead into a new financial scheme called mutual funds. There's Andy Warhol insisting Whitehead have sex with Factory star Viva in one of his films - to no avail. Even when talking about his later pursuits, including pottery, falconry, hypertext novels and Egyptology -- perfect for the Mods & Rockers setting -- the subject of Paul Cronin's doc is nothing less than mesmerizing.

It is a night such as this - with an inspirational Leiber & Stoller tribute and a fascinating documentary about Peter Whitehead playing simultaneously in the same building - that is the strongest argument for the legalization of cloning.

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