Leader of the Pack

photo: Ralph M.  Newman

Margalit Fox’s recent Times obit describes Shadow Morton as being “almost singlehandedly responsible for the wild success of the Shangri-Las, the Queens girl group he introduced and propelled to international stardom”(“Shadow Morton, Songwriter and Producer , Dies at 71,” NYT, 2/15/13).  Morton was responsible for such iconic songs as “Leader of the Pack” and later produced Janis Ian’s “Society’s Child.” There was a haunting quality to Morton’s music. It was a mixture of doo-wop and The Sufferings of Young Werther. The dissonant riffs communicated an infatuation with a world pregnant with impossibility, one in which fantasy is prized over reality, with that which doesn’t exist trumping knowable things. Just like today you have East and West Coast rap. Back in the sixties, The Beach Boys presented the West Coast version of a similar sound in songs like “Don’t Worry Baby.”  The defiant James Dean character in Rebel Without a Cause prefigured Morton’s “Jimmy”in “Leader of the Pack." Fox’s obit pointed out that Morton possessed a “brazen, naive genius” epitomized by the fact that “he played no instrument, could not read music and wrote his songs in his head.”  According to Fox, “The nickname Shadow was bestowed on him by a Brill Building colleague to describe his habitually evanescent presence.” Morton’s bio makes him sound like a creature out of one his own songs, which is not implausible for an artist. Some writers and songwriters describe the life they’ve lived and others prophesy their own epitaphs. Morton didn’t turn out to die as young as the ill-fated James Dean, but he burned out quick, as far as music is concerned, crashing like the  “Leader of the Pack.” “Mr Morton,” Fox went on to say, “who underwent treatment for alcoholism in the mid-l980’s…remained sober to the end of his life” and “had a second career as a designer of golf clubs.”

Moebius Strip

There is a certain type of person who is trapped in a perpetual withering glare. Sufferers from Moebius Syndrome lack the ability to show any expression, and their seeming lack of responsiveness is frequently misinterpreted as a lack of empathy. Kathleen Bogart, a one-time social worker who is now studying the syndrome from which she suffers, has described how her condition made it difficult for her to help clients (“Seeking Emotional Clues Without Facial Clues,” NYT, April 5, 2010). Ms. Bogart represents an extreme example, but there are many people whose seeming indifference to life is actually a selling point. When you come across a person who is expressionless and doesn’t seem to react to your presence, you immediately assume something is wrong with you, not them. How much more powerful is this than the people-pleaser, the unctuous soul, the Uriah Heep who fawns over you with false praise, the person who has a goal in sight and is trying too hard? The gregarious nurse in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona is frantic to make some sort of contact with the psychotic actress who has withdrawn from the world, until the tables are turned and the actress desperately tries to pierce the nurse’s now stolid exterior. In the case of Moebius, a physical abnormality creates a chasm. In the case of Persona, it’s psychiatric. In everyday encounters that don’t approach these kinds of physical or mental extremes, there tends to be an amalgam in which a posture of indifference is an outgrowth of a so-called passive aggressive propensity. Conversely, social anxiety creates a chaotic exterior filled with involuntary muscular movements. Naturally the cool, silent type gets a certain degree of reinforcement for the malady, to the extent that he or she is likely to have the upper hand. James Dean was the epitome of the cool, silent type. The frantic character Jim Carrey has created in so many of his films is the diametric opposite. Carrey’s persona is the paradigm of the dejected figure who has little of what sociologists terms “social capital.” Stripping your character down to basics, into which category do you fall?