Mary Weiss, who was the lead singer of the Shangri-Las hit No. 1 in 1964 with “Leader of the Pack,” extracting every ounce of passion and pathos available in a three-minute adolescent soap opera, died on Friday at her home in Palm Springs, Calif. She was 75.
Her death was announced by the author and television writer David Stenn, who had been collaborating with Ms. Weiss on a stage musical about the Shangri-Las. He said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
“Leader of the Pack,” the Shangri-Las’ second and biggest hit, was narrated by a young woman who falls in love with a motorcycle-riding tough guy without her parents’ approval — “They told me he was bad/But I knew he was sad” — and is then left bereft when he dies in a road accident on a rainy night. Produced and co-written by Shadow Morton, the single featured call-and-response vocals, full-tilt teenage angst and motorcycle sound effects. It was excessive and melodramatic, requiring acting as much as singing, but Ms. Weiss sold it with her yearning performance. She was just 16 when it topped the charts.
“I’m kind of a shy person, but I felt that the recording studio was the place that you could really release what you’re feeling without everybody looking at you,” Ms. Weiss was quoted as saying in “Always Magic in the Air,” Ken Emerson’s 2006 book about notable songwriting teams of early rock ’n’ roll. “I had enough pain in me at the time to pull off anything and get into it and sound believable.”
The Shangri-Las had six Top 40 singles between 1964 and 1966, all produced with brio by Mr. Morton. Songs like “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” and “Past, Present and Future” made the end of a young romance sound like an epoch-defining tragedy, but they masked their emotional desperation with an air of fearlessness. Wearing leather pants — as opposed to the formal gowns favored by groups like the Supremes — they embodied 1960s bad-girl chic and inspired legions of other musicians.
Amy Winehouse, in the 2012 documentary “Amy Winehouse: The Day She Came to Dingle,” praised the Shangri-Las — “I love the drama, I love the atmosphere, I love the sound effects” — and described the group’s 1965 single “I Can Never Go Home Anymore” as “the saddest song in the world,” remembering how she listened to it over and over for days after a painful breakup.
Ms. Weiss called herself a “street singer.” According to Mr. Stenn, she said the greatest compliment she had ever been paid came when she ran into Joey Ramone at the punk club CBGB and he told her, “Without the Shangri-Las, there would have been no Ramones.”
Ellie Greenwich, who wrote “Leader of the Pack” with Jeff Barry and Mr. Morton as well as two other Shangri-Las singles with Mr. Barry, told Mr. Emerson: “The Shangri-Las were tough girls and I was somewhat afraid of them. They had an attitude before they made it.”
Mary Louise Weiss was born on Dec. 28, 1948, in Queens, the youngest of three children of Perry and Elizabeth (Treubig) Weiss. Her father, who worked for the phone company, died of undiagnosed heart disease on Valentine’s Day 1949, less than two months after she was born. “I’d have been a different person if my father hadn’t died,” she said in a 2006 interview with Miriam Linna and Billy Miller of Norton Records, the label that released a solo album by Ms. Weiss in 2007.
She loved music from a young age, favoring harmony groups like the Ink Spots, the Everly Brothers and the clusters of young men who sang a cappella on nearby street corners. She and her older sister, Elizabeth (known professionally as Betty), befriended Marge and Mary Ann Ganser, twin sisters who attended Andrew Jackson High School with them; they harmonized together at the Ganser house or at the local playground.
They named themselves the Shangri-Las after the Shangri-La restaurant on Long Island and, after performing at local dances and releasing a single, “Wishing Well,” on the tiny Spokane label in 1964, were recruited by Mr. Morton to record a demo of his composition “Remember (Walking in the Sand),” a session that included a young Billy Joel on piano.
That song got the Shangri-Las signed to Red Bird, the record label run by the songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller; released as a single, it reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Ms. Weiss remembered the next three years as an exhausting whirlwind of studio dates and barnstorming tours. Other Shangri-Las left the group at various points, making the group a trio until they returned; Ms. Weiss, who handled most of the lead vocals, was the constant.
“Fame doesn’t do anything for me, never did,” she told The New York Times in 2007. “Actually, I never really liked it.”
After Red Bird folded in 1966, the Shangri-Las signed with Mercury. They released two unsuccessful singles, one of them a pro-Vietnam War song, “Take the Time,” before breaking up in 1968.
“When we started, it was all about music,” Ms. Weiss told Rolling Stone in 2007. “By the time it ended, it was all about litigation.”
Long-running lawsuits prevented Ms. Weiss from recording until 1977, when the Shangri-Las made an album for Sire Records (run by Seymour Stein, who had previously worked as the group’s tour manager). That record was never released — Ms. Weiss was unhappy with its quality.
The group reunited again for a 1989 oldies concert in New Jersey. It was their final show together.
After retiring from music, Ms. Weiss was employed by an architecture firm, where she spent years as an administrator specializing in commercial interiors. That career ended after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when a building she had been working on one block away from the World Trade Center was gutted, destroying a $20 million deal.
In 2007, she released her first and only solo album, the well-received “Dangerous Game.” She told Rolling Stone that year that whenever a songwriter proposed “the perfect song for Mary,” it inevitably featured a gruesome death in the vein of “Leader of the Pack.”
Ms. Weiss is survived by her husband, Edward Ryan; her sister Elizabeth Nelson, who is now the last surviving Shangri-La; and her niece, Tracy Kendall.
The Shangri-Las were often described as a “girl group” (as were the Ronettes, the Shirelles and other acts of that era), but Ms. Weiss abhorred the term, which she regarded as a symptom of the music industry’s sexism. As she said in 2007 in an interview at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (the Shangri-Las have not been inducted, although the Hall honored “Leader of the Pack” in 2019): “A lot of men were considered artists, whether or not other people wrote for them, where women were considered products. And I always found that difficult to accept.”