Leiber and Stoller... and Piaf?

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Any rock and roll fan worth his or her salt has heard of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. American songwriters and producers supreme, repsonsible for the biggest and best hits of the Drifters and the Coasters, creators of the soundtrack for Elvis Presley's Jailhouse Rock and so much more...  The list of artists who have recorded their work is a very, very long one, but few fans would expect to find the name of Édith Piaf in the list. Yet there she is...and therein lies a story.

In the early fifties, la môme Piaf had established herself not only as the leading French music hall performer of the era but also as the international embodiment of French chanson, with a repertoire full of future standards such as "La vie en rose" (1948), "Hymne à l'amour" (1950), "Padam... padam" (1951) and "Bravo pour le clown" (1953). She was however spending increasing amounts of time abroad, principally in the United States, where she toured regularly through the decade. It was therefore inevitable that American sounds began to seep into her repertoire, principally via cover versions of such American hits as Frankie Laine's "Jezebel" ("Jézébel") and Les Paul and Mary's Ford's "Johnny Is The Boy For Me" ("Johnny, tu n'es pas un ange"), with French songsmiths such as Charles Aznavour and Francis Lemarque doing the honours on the lyrics for the French versions. 

Piaf was far from alone in pilfering international sources for hits. By 1956, it was fairly common practice across the great and the good of French music hall, although by and large, the song choices were fairly mainstream. Big American hits like "Papa Loves Mambo" or "Whatever Will Be, Will Be" were often brought to market in France by a dozen different singers or more, with the likes of Dario Moreno and Jacqueline François keeping their names in lights through judicious picking through foreign material.

Early in 1956, while on tour in the States, Édith Piaf picked up two recent American hits that she thought might be suitable for a French audience. Popping into an American studio with orchestra leader Robert Chauvigny, she laid down four tracks - two new French compositions "Avant nous" and "Les amants d'un jour" and the two American hits. The first, "Suddenly There's A Valley" had been a hit the previous year for Gogi Grant and was a commercial offering that was easily adapted into French as "Soudain une vallée". The other one though was something else...

The Cheers were a fairly whitebread vocal trio who had been recording for Capitol since 1954, when "Bazoom (I Need Your Lovin') (Capitol F 2921) had given them a modest hit. The hit (and their follow up releases)  had been written by a hot new Los Angeles songwriting combo - Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, whose Spark Records label was turning out a string of engaging R&B hits. The Cheers though could hardly claim to be an R&B outfit, with titles like "Can't We Be More Than Friends" and "I Must Be Dreaming" fitting snugly into the American pop marketplace dominated by Mitch Miller's stable of inane but likeable pop singers. For their fifth release (Capitol F 3219) though, Leiber and Stoller came up with something a little different. The tale of a motorcycle loving "bad boy" who loved his bike more than anythnig esle in the world, and who eventually met his fate out on the road, "Black Denim Trousers" was a prototype for the bad boy ballads that would bring fame to the Shangri-Las a decade later. 

How serious Leiber and Stoller were about it is lost to the mists of history but it was certainly an engaging enough song and giving its 1955 release date, considerably ahead of its time. It was however an unusual choice of material for Édith Piaf, although she may have been drawn to the tragedy in the song's melodramatic storyline. Whatever the case, she laid down a typically powerful performance of the song, now transformed into French by lyricist Jean Dréjac as "L'homme à la moto". Masters of the four songs were quickly shipped back to France where they were pressed into service in May 1956 as the singer's latest EP release (Columbia ESRF 1070).

 By July, the record had entered the French top ten, although the chart published in Music Hall magazine listed "Les amants d'un jour" as the main track. The sheet music charts however told a different story, with "L'homme à la moto" climbing into the top twenty some two months ahead of its more traditional running mate (the nominal lead track on the record, "Soudain une vallée" was conspicuous by its absence). There was something about the power that Piaf brought to Leiber and Stoller's song that cut through to French audiences in a way that nobody (except perhaps Piaf) had expected. The first Elvis Presley EP had only just been released in France, to very little interest, but Piaf's emotive, driving performance reached out to listeners in much the same way, and while Piaf was hardly a favourite among French teenagers, for at least this one release she was right on the money.

Both Piaf and Leiber and Stoller would go on to grace the French charts many more times ove the next two decades, although never again would their careers collide on the same record. Piaf would step back from American material in the later fifties in favour of mostly homegrown chansons from the likes of Georges Moustaki ("Milord") or Charles Dumont ("Non, je ne regrette rien") while Leiber and Stoller's material would provide rich pickings for the rock 'n' roll groups and yé-yé singers who would ultimately elbow Piaf off the airwaves and out of the charts. "L'homme à la moto" would however live on...

The first to revive Piaf's motorbiking anthem was Nicoletta, one of the few yé-yé girls who could hope to match the diminutive titan of chanson for firepower. With a soul-gospel voice to die for, the swinging hat-check girl in Parisian nightclubs was clearly a cut above the rest, and it was not long before Eddie Barclay signed her to the Riviera label. Issued early in 1967, Nicoletta's power-packed version led off her first EP (Riviera 231252) and although not a hit, it turned a lot of heads and set her up for her commercial breakthrough a few months later. 

A more logical fit for the song was leather-clad Vince Taylor, an English-born died-in-the-wool rocker who had set up home in France in 1961 and who had enjoyed a rapid rise and fall from grace before falling prey to drug-affected psychological problems in the mid-sixties. By 1974, Taylor was effectively washed up but he bravely attempted a comeback during the glam rock era, taking Piaf's hit back to its roots on a one-off single (Labrador LA 4052) that failed to reignite his career. Interestingly, although he used Piaf's French title, Taylor sang the original English lyric...

The saong got another airing in the early eighties when Michèle Torr revived the French lyric for inclusion on her 1983 album Midnight blue en Irelande - Torr being one of the few remaining yé-yé girls and along with Nicoletta (and the sadly deceased Jocelyne) one of the few with the vocal chops to pull it off. Since then, the song has been picked up by an array of French singers, from superstars like Mireille Mathieu to quirky underground favoueites like Brigitte Fontaine, and has become something of a surprise standard in Piaf's repertoire. Not a bad ending for what was, when all is said and done, one of Leiber and Stoller's lesser works - and a fine memorial to the first French singer to bring their work to the French public.

You can read more about Édith Piaf - and much more besides - in my newly-released book. Feel free to grab a copy here: BOOK