Meet Our Guest Artists
Lesley Gore and Judith Martin (Miss Manners)
A Conversation with Lesley Gore
If you’re a baby boomer and female, your life changed at least a little the day Lesley Gore’s first big hit made the top of the charts. It was in the spring of 1963 and in those days good girls from nice families didn’t cause scenes and they didn’t make demands. In the 1950s women singers like Doris Day crooned dewy-eyed songs about the raptures of being in love with Mr. Right. Then along came 16-year-old Gore from Tenafly, New Jersey, unapologetic about crying her eyes out in public when her best girl friend steals her boyfriend. To heck with lady-like decorum. Gore let her emotions rip.
“It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to, cry if I want to, cry if I want to. You would cry too if it happened to you.”
Somewhere no doubt there’s been a graduate thesis written on Gore’s 1960s hits – there were many more after "It’s My Party" -- and their assertive, self confident lyrics. Here was a young woman with a blond flip, pretty girl-next-door looks and undeniable attitude -- an unheard of combination. The women who followed her in the 1970s gave full-throated voice to the women’s movement. And by the 1980s and 1990s women divas ranging from Patti Smith to Madonna wouldn’t dream of playing second fiddle to men.
Coming a decade before the political and cultural upheavals of the women’s movement, it is possible now to suggest that Gore’s 1960s songs represented some of the first baby steps of feminism. Gore herself chuckles at the thought. “Well, when I first heard the song "It’s My Party" I thought of it more in terms of humanism than anything else,” Gore said recently during a telephone interview. “Of course there wasn’t even a word like feminism then, but the song to me was about having a human reaction to something. And I didn’t preclude the idea that a guy could also be hurt. I’ve always like the song because it’s out there and people can interpret it themselves. If it’s about feminism to some people that’s fine.” Gore agrees, however, that her lyrics sounded a streak of female independence that wasn’t part of the pop music culture in the early and mid-1960s. “I think that’s where my early personality raised its little head,” Gore said. “I felt better singing assertive songs. The first time I heard "You Don’t Own Me" I knew just how I wanted to do it. For a 16-year-old to get up and sing lyrics like “you don’t own me” and wag your finger – I loved it! Whether I was talking to my boyfriend or my parents, what 16-year-old wouldn’t want to do that?”
Gore’s voice is huskier on the telephone than you might imagine if the last time you heard it was on one of her 1960s recordings. And at age 58 she says her singing voice is “more mature now, rounder. Though I think my inflections and phrasing are the same.” Seattle Women's Chorus audiences can decide for themselves when Gore appears as a special guest with the Seattle Women's Chorus on April 16 and 17 in a concert called "It’s Our Party"! But Gore’s upbeat humor and down-to-earth point of view seem refreshingly familiar even if you haven’t followed her career lately. This is the woman after all who 40 years ago sang such self-assertive songs as "You Don’t Own Me" and "Judy’s Turn to""Cry", as well as exuberant teen-aged anthems such as "Sunshine Lollipops and Rainbows. "Since then she’s become a regular in some of the nation’s most famous cabaret venues and she performs frequently in shows from Las Vegas to New York. With her brother Michael Gore, a film composer, she’s collaborated on songs for Broadways musicals, including the hit "Out on My Own" from "Fame." She’s also performed on television and on Broadway. In 1999 she stared in a hit Broadway production of "Smokey Joe’s Cafe""." She makes her home in New York.
Still, the story of her break-through hit in 1963 is the stuff of legends. Her producer was Quincy Jones, already an accomplished and much in-demand producer, and the song hit the top pop charts within weeks of its release. “Quincy called me up to record in early February 1963 and we were in the studio on March 30,” said Gore. “We did "It’s My Party" and I knew there was something special there. I saw so much reaction from people in the band and the rest of the singers. It was unbelievable.”
Born in Brooklyn, Gore moved to New Jersey with her parents and brother as a youngster. She and her brother were always drawn to music. “I started listening to records when I was knee-high, and a rainy day meant I could spend the day inside lip synching. Then my folks brought a piano into the house and Michael was 5 or 6 and had to use phone books to sit on to reach the piano. The next thing I knew he was playing "Fly Me to the Moon "and I had a piano player.” Michael Gore is four years younger than Lesley, but he accompanied her on the piano even while she was in college.
By the time she was in her teens Gore had a vocal coach in New York who was so sure of her talent that he took her demonstration recordings to Quincy Jones. Jones was impressed. She continued turning out hits while in high school and college though she never really went on the road. Instead she attended Sarah Lawrence College and earned a degree in drama and literature, occasionally performing in a television show like "Shindig" or Hullabaloo". “My parents definitely expected me to finish college,” said Gore. “I was hard-wired to go to college and not attending was never really an option.”
Gore kept producing hits for Mercury Records until 1967, when, she says, “they just let me go. So I was eliminated from Mercury at an early age.” Even with decades of success separating her from those turbulent years, Gore remains a critic of the business practices of the major record companies. She says she’s pleased to see a new groundswell of young, independent producers and small record companies making hit recordings. “The big record companies got too greedy,” she says. “Now there are a lot of ways to get your material produced. That wasn’t true in the 1960s.”
These days Gore is busy with an upcoming CD being produced by a friend and performances in Las Vegas, where she says she will perform new material as well as many of her old hits. Unlike some performers who became famous at an early age for a particular song or group of songs, Gore says she doesn’t mind singing those 40-year-old hits for her audiences. “People come to hear some of those older songs and that’s fine. I do a medley of seven or eight of them and it’s not just a few bars of each one, it’s a full three minutes. I just don’t think it’s fair for performers not to do the songs that people come to hear. You can do both. I also intersperse my shows with talk about the songs, which I think people also enjoy.” •
