This video has it all: Goofy teenage girls, almost babies really, doing a sappy song that was destined to have a date with infamy. Could this song with sobbing, roaring motorcycle engines and a horrible crash be anything but an early classic of rock music? It had to have a place in the history of rock, it just had to. Put Steve Allen and Robert Goulet in the mix, on national TV, and you have a real winner full of silly American nostalgia. The songwriters said that the minute they heard the final take, they knew they had written a monster. It was that good!
That group was the Shangri-las, the lead singer being only 16 years of age, and they were from Queens, New York. Leader of the Pack held the number #1 position on the charts for a single week. The song was, also, big in the UK -- it charted there a number of times including in the 1970's. The group had four members but they often appeared as a trio.
Let's go back to that era. Guys on motorcycles started really getting the young girl's attention eleven years previously, in 1953. It was no coincidence that these bikers, dressed in black, were the heart-throb of the nation. That was almost guaranteed when one famous and sexy actor posed on the big screen as the leader of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.
Who could ever forget the famous still shot from the movie The Wild One? This is an image that you do not even have to see to picture it in your mind. It is that famous of a shot! Brando and the bike -- enough said. Back then, everybody was a Brando wannabe and tried to look the stud that he had become in pop culture.
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Steven L. Smith
Bellingham WA Home Inspections
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