Quincy Jones sat in the Tenafly, New Jersey den of 16-year-old vocal student Lesley Gore,
playing demo after demo, looking for the right song to cut for her first record. Out of over 200 tapes, Jones and Gore had moved only one to the "maybe" pile, and so that song,
It's My Party, was recorded on March 30, 1963 in a Manhattan studio. After the session Mercury president Irving Green warned Gore not to get her hopes up, but Gore gratefully told him that it had been a great experience anyway, and it was okay if he didn't want to release it. However, later that evening Jones learned that
Phil Spector had just recorded "It's My Party" for
The Crystals, so Jones rushed back to the studio to press 100 test copies of the single and immediately mailed them to key radio stations across the country.
A week later, Gore heard her version of "It's My Party" for the first time
listening to a New York radio station while riding in a car on the way to school. In a month, the song was #1, fans were camping on her lawn, and Gore was a star. She was a junior in high school. It was Quincy Jones' first hit record as a producer.
A sequel,
Judy's Turn to Cry, soon followed, along with a string of teen-girl vignettes like
Maybe I Know,
She's a Fool, and
That's the Way That Boys Are. But tastes were quickly changing in 1963, and what was perhaps Gore's finest song --
You Don't Own Me -- could only reach #2, behind
I Want to Hold Your Hand. (Given the complementary themes of the two songs, perhaps they were meant to be together.)
In 1964 Gore was invited to perform on the
T.A.M.I. Show, an ambitious concert featuring the Beach Boys, Rolling Stones, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, and others.
Here is Gore's full performance in the movie, but if you click just one link in this post, study her rendition of
You Don't Own Me.
This turned out to be Gore's peak, however. Despite the many television and movie offers coming her way, she chose to concentrate on her education, attending Sarah Lawrence College and limiting her public life to weekends and vacations. By the time Gore graduated, the music scene had
changed drastically, and she was having a hard time finding an audience. Her last single to reach the Top 20 was
California Nights in 1967.
Still, Lesley Gore had 11
Top-40 singles before her 21st birthday, and managed to fit in numerous TV perfomances, including a
1966 perfomance as Pussycat on
Batman. Combined with the
breadth of her
lesser-known material, she is possibly one of the most underrated and misunderstood singers of the Sixties, and in 2005, although she'd never kept it a secret, Gore revealed she
was not exactly attracted to boys.
James Brown on the Tammy show,
Same tape I've had for years
I sit in my old car, same one I've had for years
Old battery's running down, it ran for years and years
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:28 AM on September 13, 2011 [1 favorite]