Gore captured
By Tim Ryan
girl power
30 years early
Star-Bulletin"It's My Party" will always belong to Lesley Gore. But it almost went to the Crystals.
Before it was "my song," Gore explains in a telephone interview from New York City, song meister Phil Spector wanted it for his group, the Crystals.
Seems that in March, 1963, Spector went to a friend who owned a music publishing company which had been a reliable source of material for the girl groups on Spector's Philles label
"That's when (Phil) heard a demo of 'It's My Party,' " Gore said. "And he wanted it for the Crystals."
Spector took the demo not knowing others had heard it, including Quincy Jones, who had already selected the song for Gore's first record.
"A month before I recorded the song, Quincy came to my house (in Tenafly, N.J.) with a stack of demos," Gore said. " 'It's My Party' was among the songs we listened to. We both liked it and both decided we'd record it."
Meanwhile, Spector was building his fabled "Wall of Sound" production for "It's My Party." And, as usual, it was taking him forever to make a record. He cut the tracks and was in the middle of doing it when he learned about the Jones-Gore situation.
"When Mercury records learned about Spector's version, they rushed Quincy's version out even sooner than they'd originally planned," Gore said. "I recorded the song in a real formula style."
But Jones added his own touch, fattening the teen-ager's sound with double-tracked vocals and intricate backup vocals and horns.
"Quincy's capacity for music was enormous," Gore said. "By the time he finished all the arrangements for 'It's My Party' he could have sung it and reached No. 1."
Gore was unprepared for how fast everything happened from there. Six days after cutting "It's My Party," she heard it on the radio. The song -- a tale of adolescent trauma about the singer's birthday celebrations, marred on losing boyfriend Johnny to Judy -- reached No. 9 in England, and had gross sales of more than $1 million. "I thought making records would be just a temporary thing, and was planning to go on to school, but it took only four weeks for that song to hit No. 1. Suddenly I was a full-time singer."
Why was the song so popular?
"Well, first it had a good melody; once you hear it, you remember it," Gore said. "And the singer was a young woman with a little attitude, not a common thing."
Gore said she never took advantage of doing personal appearances during the peak of her popularity because she was concentrating on school.
"I never really reaped the financial benefits of having Top 10 songs," she said. "And I had no intention of stopping my education to milk a recording career."
Gore, projecting an archetype of female adolescent yearning, reeled off several more big hits in 1963 and 1964: "Judy's Turn to Cry," "She's a Fool," "You Don't Own Me," "That's the Way Boys Are" and "Maybe I Know."
" 'You Don't Own Me' became a sort of anthem of independence with a feminist theme that was pretty advanced for early 1964," Gore said.
The Last Blast
of 1998On stage: Little Anthony & The Imperials, Lesley Gore, Freddie "Boom Boom" Cannon, The Angels, Eddie Holman, and Mark Lindsay in concert
