<Archive Obituary> Mary Ann Ganser (March 13th 1970)

[Bill Schenley]

<Note: For whatever reason, the Times printed her sister's first
name.>

Four Teen-Agers Die From Heroin Here

Youths Are Among 8 Addicts Killed Over Weekend

Photo: Loading Image...

FROM: The New York Times (March 17th 1970) ~
By Staff

Four more teen-agers have died from acute reactions
to heroin, the Medical Examiner Office reported
yesterday. They were among eight narcotics victims
who died between Friday night and yesterday.

The total number of addicts dead so far this year from
acute reactions to heroin and from infections caused
by hypodermic needles is 179. Including 11 heroin
addicts who were slain and seven narcotics users killed
in accidents while under the influence of heroin,
according to the Medical Examiner's Office, the total
this year is 197 deaths. Of these, 55 were teen-agers.

A 16-year-old boy, Thomas Jesel, was found dead at
his home yesterday at 115-24 Myrtle Avenue in
Richmond Hills, Queens, and three other teen-agers
died over the weekend. They were: Jose Torres, 15,
who lived at 1013 Fox Street and who was pronounced
dead Saturday at Lincoln Hospital; Frederick Sanders,
19, who died at 691 Gerard Avenue Saturday, and
Diane Cantley, also 19, who died Sunday at Trinity
Hospital in Brooklyn of hepatitis. She was said to be
36 weeks pregnant.

15-year-old Girl Dies

A 15-year-old girl, Barbara Montabono, who died
Saturday night at Brooklyn Hospital after she took 80
Nembutal tablets - barbiturates used as "goof balls,"
was not listed among the heroin death totals for the
weekend.

Five addicts over 21 years old were also reported
dead from acute reactions to heroin. One, an
unidentified young man, was found Saturday in a
vacant apartment at 245 West 11th Street and Joseph
Jackson, 41, was found in front of 2114 Eighth
Avenue Friday.

Two died on Sunday; Margaret Ganser, was found
dead at 105-24 64th Road in Queens Sunday
afternoon and Arcello Roman, 46, was found dead at
176 West 88th Street on the same day. The Medical
Examiner's Office also reported that Samuel
Henderson, 38, has died over the weekend as the
result of an acute reaction to heroin. No address was
given for him.

To stop the illegal sale of heroin, Representative
Bertram L. Podell said he was presenting legislation
in two weeks that would allow hospitals to set up
clinics to dispense free heroin to addicts and provide
therapeutic psychiatric treatment.

Mr. Podell, a Brooklyn Democrat, spoke yesterday
at a news conference at the Overseas Press Club,
54 West 40th Street. "This program," he said, "is
designed to stop making criminals out of sick people
and to remove the profit motive from the distribution
of heroin."

Mr. Podell proposed that community health centers
and hospitals administer free heroin to addicts. The
narcotics users would register their names, addresses
and Social Security numbers to avoid drug abuses.
He said his plan differed from the British system because
addicts would not be able to obtain heroin from
individual doctors but only from treatment centers.
---
Photo: Loading Image...
(w/her twin sister Marguerite)

Loading Image...

The Shangri-Las on YouTube:

[Brad Ferguson]

Post by Bill Schenley
To stop the illegal sale of heroin, Representative
Bertram L. Podell said he was presenting legislation
in two weeks that would allow hospitals to set up
clinics to dispense free heroin to addicts and provide
therapeutic psychiatric treatment.
Mr. Podell, a Brooklyn Democrat, spoke yesterday
at a news conference at the Overseas Press Club,
54 West 40th Street. "This program," he said, "is
designed to stop making criminals out of sick people
and to remove the profit motive from the distribution
of heroin."

Bert Podell -- a name I grew up with -- went on topic on 17 August 2005.

Post by Bill Schenley
In October 1974, Rep. Podell pleaded guilty to conspiracy and conflict
of interest for accepting $41,350 in fees and campaign contributions
from a small Florida airline to obtain a Bahamas route.
Rep. Podell, who maintained a law practice while in the House, said he
went before federal agencies for his legal client, the now-defunct
Florida Atlantic Airlines.
The trial catapulted future New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani to
front-page status when, as assistant U.S. attorney, he relentlessly
cross-examined an initially calm Rep. Podell. The congressman
reportedly grew more flustered and eventually decided to plead guilty.

[Mucker]

Ironically, Mary Weiss ,the lead singer of The Shangri Las is
appearing on the Conan O'Brien show tonight. It's her first TV
appearance in almost 40 years. She has a new CD
out.

<Note: �For whatever reason, the Times printed her sister's first
name.>
---
Photo: �http://www.redbirdent.com/SLas2.jpg
� � � � � �(w/her twin sister Marguerite)
http://www.gloriousnoise.com/images/shangri-las.jpg
The Shangri-Las on http://youtu.be/gOdP_VvPKHU

[Bill Schenley]

Post by Mucker
Ironically, Mary Weiss ,the lead singer of The Shangri Las
is appearing on the Conan O'Brien show tonight. It's her
first TV appearance in almost 40 years. She has a new
CD out.

The Leader of the Pack Is Back

Decades after her death-obsessed girl group, the Shangri-Las,
was buried under litigation and changing pop tastes,
Mary Weiss goes solo.

Photo (recent):
Loading Image...

FROM: New York Magazine (Arts & Events) ~
By Michael Martin

They were the ultimate New York band of the sixties: four
Catholic schoolgirls from Queens with leather vests and
abandonment issues who sang beautifully arranged pop
operas involving death by motorcycle ("Leader of the Pack"),
death by car accident ("Give Us Your Blessings"), and death
in general ("I Can Never Go Home Anymore"), along with
the occasional ecstatic valentine involving the clomping of
boots and the blowing of kisses.

The Shangri-Las turned teen angst into dark and spiky pop
art, and even as the campy vroom-vroom! of their biggest
hit became a starting point for junior-high talent shows
everywhere, the group's influence cut deep and wide. They
were patron saints of the CBGB crowd-Blondie, the New
York Dolls, and Johnny Thunders covered their songs; the
Ramones took notes-and their mix of hooks and heartbreak
has filtered down into the furthest reaches of alt-country and
emo.

The lead singer was a 15-year-old named Mary Weiss. She
wore her hair long, her pants off the men's rack, and her
heart on her billowy sleeve. In 1964, she screamed "Look
out!" over and over as her biker boyfriend ate the
pavement-all the way to No. 1. Four years later, the band
itself had eaten it, run down by the sort of vituperative litigation
that ridiculously successful bands staffed by minors always
seem to generate. Next week, at age 58, she's releasing
Dangerous Game, marking one of the rock era's longest
hibernations and most anticipated comebacks. "I think people
are expecting me to come out onstage in a walker," says Weiss
over lunch at the old-school Chinese restaurant she insisted on
meeting me in near the United Nations-and across the street
from her former apartment. "But they don't realize how young
I was back then."

When it all started, Weiss, her older sister (a Bardot
doppelg�nger named Betty), and two of their friends (twin
sisters Mary Ann and Margie Ganser) were singing at school
dances. Nothing had come of their first demo. Then they were
introduced to aspiring songwriter-producer George "Shadow"
Morton. It was the era when the Brill Building songwriters
reigned supreme over the American bandstand, and Morton
decided he would impress two of the Brill gurus, Jeff Barry
and Ellie Greenwich, by cutting a demo with the girls. The
song, "Remember (Walking in the Sand)," was loaded with
seagull sound effects and hit No. 5. (Years later, Aerosmith
covered it and Weiss sang backup.)

Weiss speaks in terse and low tones, Garbo with a Queens
honk. She grew up in "kind of downscale" Cambria Heights.
"My father died right after I was born, and my mother didn't
do much of anything," she says. "I had a fairly rotten childhood.
Lived in abject poverty. Always fended for myself. I didn't
really have a childhood; I was supporting myself from the time
I was 14."

But Weiss never thought of herself as hardened. "I've heard
we were tough, and I just find that so hilarious," she says. "If
you really look at the old tapes, I don't think that word would
even come up. I saw a clip recently and I sound like-" She
makes a whimpering noise. "How do you get tough out of that?
It makes me laugh. People liked to put people in boxes back
then, especially the girls. Maybe it was the boots. Do these
make me look tough?" she asks, hoisting an intimidating black
heel to table height.

"Leader of the Pack," their second hit, featured revving
motorcycles, screeching tires, crashing glass, and an infamous
adenoidal spoken-word intro. Its success led to a string of
bubblegum Grand Guignol.

In "Give Us Your Blessings," Weiss begs her parents for
approval to marry her boyfriend; the two drive off to their
deaths-the song implies that their prodigious weeping might
have affected their driving-leaving the parents to sob over
their rain-soaked bodies. In "I Can Never Go Home Anymore,"
a girl contemplates running away, inspiring her mother to die.
But "Give Him a Great Big Kiss"-mwah!- and "Right Now
and Not Later" were among the most buoyant songs of the
time. There were war-bound boyfriends ("Long Live Our
Love") and bad-boy crushes to be analyzed ("He's good bad,"
went the interlude, "but he's not evil").

In an era that never lacked for overcooked melodrama, the
Shangri-Las stood out because of Weiss's vulnerable delivery.
Today, to listen to "Out in the Streets"-in which a girl cleans
up her hoodlum boyfriend, then realizes his soul has died and
she has to let him go-is to swoon in pop dolor: "He used to
act bad/Used to, but he quit it/It makes me so sad/
'Cause I know that he did it for me."

The group's last top-100 song, "Past, Present and Future,"
released in 1966, is an entirely spoken-word piece set to
swirling piano and strings. It has also been interpreted to be
about date rape, which Weiss says is nonsense. "It's about being
hurt and angsty and not wanting anyone near you."

The band toured nonstop for four years, with a road manager
barely out of his teens. After a man put his arm through the
plate-glass window of her hotel room, Weiss bought a gun for
protection, which resulted in her mother's being visited by the
FBI. "She must have loved that," says Weiss with a laugh.

The band emerged late on the girl-group scene; Phil Spector
prot�g�es like the Crystals-who were even more hysterical,
with songs like "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)"-had peaked
in the early sixties. The Shangri-Las essentially closed the genre
down, pushing the teenage yearning and countercultural fixations
of West Side Story and Rebel Without a Cause as far the radio
would allow ("Leader of the Pack" was banned by the BBC
but proved irrepressible, hitting the U.K. charts three times and
as late as 1976).

In 1968, after an attempted upgrade to Mercury Records
resulted in two dud singles, the Shangri-Las disbanded amid legal
issues that Weiss still cannot discuss. "My mother kind of signed
my life away when I was 14," she says. "I'm laughing. Thirty years
of litigation. There's a storeroom of litigation up to the ceiling ...
That's one of the reasons I walked away. The litigation was much
thicker than the music. I couldn't go near another record label for
ten years."

The girl-group era was over anyway, replaced by something
more band-driven and psychedelic. Perhaps obviously, she moved
to San Francisco, where she spent a year and a half roller-skating
through Golden Gate Park, pursuing "peace and love and all that
hippie stuff-and floundering," before returning to Manhattan
("Where else was I going to go?") and living in weekly-rate hotels
like the Warwick that were popular with musicians.

Eventually, she became a secretary at an architecture firm in
midtown; later, she moved to a commercial furniture dealership.
"I ran installation-all the techie stuff. When I left there, I was
working on $20 million projects. The major project I worked on
blew up during September 11. The landing gear came through the
roof. They had asbestos, dioxin, mold growing everywhere-
I walked through it with a mask on and cried."

As for her former bandmates, Mary Ann Ganser died in 1971;
conflicting accounts cite a drug overdose or a seizure. "And I'll
leave it that way. It doesn't much matter anymore," pronounces
Weiss, sounding a bit like an intro to one of her old songs.
Margie Ganser died of breast cancer in 1996. "It happens a lot,"
says Weiss, sighing. "They get it, and then within five years-"
Her sister is well but "doesn't want to be a part of this," says
Weiss (Betty was an inconsistent member of the group, in any
case).

The comeback was a long time coming. In 1977, Sire Records
honcho Seymour Stein signed the three surviving Shangri-Las
to record a new album, but a summer of recording sessions
-capped by an impromptu gig at CBGB-displeased everyone
involved and went into the vaults. Otherwise, she was too
gun-shy from her legal experiences (which expanded to include
a lawsuit against a promoter who had launched an impostor
Shangri-Las act in the late eighties) to want to record.

Then last year, she had a chance meeting with Billy Miller,
head of the Brooklyn indie label Norton, at a Rhino Records
party for the girl-group boxed set One Kiss Can Lead to
Another (it featured two Shangri-Las tracks). "I was a fan
since the first record, which I remember hearing on WABC
when I was 10 years old," says Miller. "I followed every
record they made. They were on TV a lot. It was the time of
the British invasion, and it was just so unique that they were
local. It was always stressed on TV that they were from New
York City. Everybody on TV was either from Liverpool or
California." He e-mailed her and asked her if she wanted to
go back into the studio. "The first thing I told her was I'm
not interested in nostalgia. That's what she wanted to hear,
I think."

"I always said I would do this once more," she says. "And I
didn't feel like I wanted to-it just wasn't right." Still, the fans
didn't forget her; sometimes they went through her trash and
showed up unannounced at her office. "When I walked away,
it took me twelve years to get lost in the street and not be
recognized." After stints in Forest Hills and an eleven-year
marriage that ended in 1985, Weiss now lives in Babylon, on
Long Island, and has ducks on her front lawn. Her husband is a
legal-case manager. ("I never thought I'd get married again,"
she says. "I called it the M-word.")

She decided to go for it. She listened to records in Miller's
Prospect Heights apartment. People wanted her to record
their songs. "A lot of it was sort of dramatic-somebody
drives off a cliff or something," says Miller. "She said that's
nice-just don't bring it up again."

Dangerous Game contains a remake of the Shangri-Las
"Heaven Only Knows." It didn't make it on the CD, but she's
dusting off a cover of the deliciously ambiguous "Train From
Kansas City" to perform live. She's not so sure she wants to
play "Leader of the Pack" again.

"I wanted to do a mix of new with old," Weiss says. "Why
walk into the studio to do old things? What's the point?"

She has been encouraged by social-networking Website
MySpace. "I did my page myself. I didn't want anyone else
to touch it. I talk to people every day, and I go in and look at
what young people are listening to. And their tastes are so all
over the place and so sophisticated. They're grounded.
They're listening to stuff from the forties, really good stuff! I
went 'Whoa,' and thought, There's room for me. But I didn't
know that before MySpace."

She will play a show at Austin indie-music fest South by
Southwest, and another in Cleveland; her New York City
homecoming has yet to be scheduled. "I'm taking it very
slowly," she says. "Small steps. No rush.

"I just want to have fun now. And I'm going to. People can
take advantage of you in your youth," says Weiss. "And they're
not going to do it again. There are benefits to being a grown-up."

[Health Solutions]

Hello,

I ran into your message quite accidentally while researching about
some details on 'Drug Overdose' and thought of sharing some of my
findings. I've read at 'http://www.medical-health-care-information.com/
articles/9-28drug-overdose.html' that
A drug overdose occurs when a chemical substance (i.e. drug of abuse)
is ingested in quantities and/or concentrations large enough to
overwhelm the homeostasis of a living organism, causing severe illness
or death. It is a type of poisoning.

Drug overdoses can be accidental or on purpose. The amount of a
certain drug needed to cause an overdose varies with the type of drug
and the person taking it. Overdoses from prescription or over-the-
counter (OTC) medicines, "street" drugs, and/or alcohol can be life-
threatening. Know, too, that mixing certain medications or "street"
drugs with alcohol can also kill.

I hope the above is of some help to you as well.

Regards,
Monica

Post by Bill Schenley

Post by Mucker
Ironically, Mary Weiss ,the lead singer of The Shangri Las
is appearing on the Conan O'Brien show tonight. It's her
first TV appearance in almost 40 years. She has a new
CD out.

The Leader of the Pack Is Back
Decades after her death-obsessed girl group, the Shangri-Las,
was buried under litigation and changing pop tastes,
Mary Weiss goes solo.
Photo (recent):http://www.spectropop.com/recommends/Rhino/GirlGroupsRhino_FL072.jpg
FROM: New York Magazine (Arts & Events) ~
By Michael Martin
They were the ultimate New York band of the sixties: four
Catholic schoolgirls from Queens with leather vests and
abandonment issues who sang beautifully arranged pop
operas involving death by motorcycle ("Leader of the Pack"),
death by car accident ("Give Us Your Blessings"), and death
in general ("I Can Never Go Home Anymore"), along with
the occasional ecstatic valentine involving the clomping of
boots and the blowing of kisses.
The Shangri-Las turned teen angst into dark and spiky pop
art, and even as the campy vroom-vroom! of their biggest
hit became a starting point for junior-high talent shows
everywhere, the group's influence cut deep and wide. They
were patron saints of the CBGB crowd-Blondie, the New
York Dolls, and Johnny Thunders covered their songs; the
Ramones took notes-and their mix of hooks and heartbreak
has filtered down into the furthest reaches of alt-country and
emo.
The lead singer was a 15-year-old named Mary Weiss. She
wore her hair long, her pants off the men's rack, and her
heart on her billowy sleeve. In 1964, she screamed "Look
out!" over and over as her biker boyfriend ate the
pavement-all the way to No. 1. Four years later, the band
itself had eaten it, run down by the sort of vituperative litigation
that ridiculously successful bands staffed by minors always
seem to generate. Next week, at age 58, she's releasing
Dangerous Game, marking one of the rock era's longest
hibernations and most anticipated comebacks. "I think people
are expecting me to come out onstage in a walker," says Weiss
over lunch at the old-school Chinese restaurant she insisted on
meeting me in near the United Nations-and across the street
from her former apartment. "But they don't realize how young
I was back then."
When it all started, Weiss, her older sister (a Bardot
doppelgänger named Betty), and two of their friends (twin
sisters Mary Ann and Margie Ganser) were singing at school
dances. Nothing had come of their first demo. Then they were
introduced to aspiring songwriter-producer George "Shadow"
Morton. It was the era when the Brill Building songwriters
reigned supreme over the American bandstand, and Morton
decided he would impress two of the Brill gurus, Jeff Barry
and Ellie Greenwich, by cutting a demo with the girls. The
song, "Remember (Walking in the Sand)," was loaded with
seagull sound effects and hit No. 5. (Years later, Aerosmith
covered it and Weiss sang backup.)
Weiss speaks in terse and low tones, Garbo with a Queens
honk. She grew up in "kind of downscale" Cambria Heights.
"My father died right after I was born, and my mother didn't
do much of anything," she says. "I had a fairly rotten childhood.
Lived in abject poverty. Always fended for myself. I didn't
really have a childhood; I was supporting myself from the time
I was 14."
But Weiss never thought of herself as hardened. "I've heard
we were tough, and I just find that so hilarious," she says. "If
you really look at the old tapes, I don't think that word would
even come up. I saw a clip recently and I sound like-" She
makes a whimpering noise. "How do you get tough out of that?
It makes me laugh. People liked to put people in boxes back
then, especially the girls. Maybe it was the boots. Do these
make me look tough?" she asks, hoisting an intimidating black
heel to table height.
"Leader of the Pack," their second hit, featured revving
motorcycles, screeching tires, crashing glass, and an infamous
adenoidal spoken-word intro. Its success led to a string of
bubblegum Grand Guignol.
In "Give Us Your Blessings," Weiss begs her parents for
approval to marry her boyfriend; the two drive off to their
deaths-the song implies that their prodigious weeping might
have affected their driving-leaving the parents to sob over
their rain-soaked bodies. In "I Can Never Go Home Anymore,"
a girl contemplates running away, inspiring her mother to die.
But "Give Him a Great Big Kiss"-mwah!- and "Right Now
and Not Later" were among the most buoyant songs of the
time. There were war-bound boyfriends ("Long Live Our
Love") and bad-boy crushes to be analyzed ("He's good bad,"
went the interlude, "but he's not evil").
In an era that never lacked for overcooked melodrama, the
Shangri-Las stood out because of Weiss's vulnerable delivery.
Today, to listen to "Out in the Streets"-in which a girl cleans
up her hoodlum boyfriend, then realizes his soul has died and
she has to let him go-is to swoon in pop dolor: "He used to
act bad/Used to, but he quit it/It makes me so sad/
'Cause I know that he did it for me."
The group's last top-100 song, "Past, Present and Future,"
released in 1966, is an entirely spoken-word piece set to
swirling piano and strings. It has also been interpreted to be
about date rape, which Weiss says is nonsense. "It's about being
hurt and angsty and not wanting anyone near you."
The band toured nonstop for four years, with a road manager
barely out of his teens. After a man put his arm through the
plate-glass window of her hotel room, Weiss bought a gun for
protection, which resulted in her mother's being visited by the
FBI. "She must have loved that," says Weiss with a laugh.
The band emerged late on the girl-group scene; Phil Spector
protégées like the Crystals-who were even more hysterical,
with songs like "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)"-had peaked
in the early sixties. The Shangri-Las essentially closed the genre
down, pushing the teenage yearning and countercultural fixations
of West Side Story and Rebel Without a Cause as far the radio
would allow ("Leader of the Pack" was banned by the BBC
but proved irrepressible, hitting the U.K. charts three times and
as late as 1976).
In 1968, after an attempted upgrade to Mercury Records
resulted in two dud singles, the Shangri-Las disbanded amid legal
issues that Weiss still cannot discuss. "My mother kind of signed
my life away when I was 14," she says. "I'm laughing. Thirty years
of litigation. There's a storeroom of litigation up to the ceiling ...
That's one of the reasons I walked away. The litigation was much
thicker than the music. I couldn't go near another record label for
ten years."
The girl-group era was over anyway, replaced by something
more band-driven and psychedelic. Perhaps obviously, she moved
to San Francisco, where she spent a year and a half roller-skating
through Golden Gate Park, pursuing "peace and love and all that
hippie stuff-and floundering," before returning to Manhattan
("Where else was I going to go?") and living in weekly-rate hotels
like the Warwick that were popular with musicians.
Eventually, she became a secretary at an architecture firm in
midtown; later, she moved to a commercial furniture dealership.
"I ran installation-all the techie stuff. When I left there, I was
working on $20 million projects. The major project I worked on
blew up during September 11. The landing gear came through the
roof. They had asbestos, dioxin, mold growing everywhere-
I walked through it with a mask on and cried."
As for her former bandmates, Mary Ann Ganser died in 1971;
conflicting accounts cite adrugoverdoseor a seizure. "And I'll
leave it that way. It doesn't much matter anymore," pronounces
Weiss, sounding a bit like an intro to one of her old songs.
Margie Ganser died of breast cancer in 1996. "It happens a lot,"
says Weiss, sighing. "They get it, and then within five years-"
Her sister is well but "doesn't want to be a part of this," says
Weiss (Betty was an inconsistent member of the group, in any
case).
The comeback was a long time coming. In 1977, Sire Records
honcho Seymour Stein signed the three surviving Shangri-Las
to record a new album, but a summer of recording sessions
-capped by an impromptu gig at CBGB-displeased everyone
involved and went into the vaults. Otherwise, she was too
gun-shy from her legal experiences (which expanded to include
a lawsuit against a promoter who had launched an impostor
Shangri-Las act in the late eighties) to want to record.
Then last year, she had a chance meeting with Billy Miller,
head of the Brooklyn indie label Norton, at a Rhino Records
party for the girl-group boxed set One Kiss Can Lead to
Another (it featured two Shangri-Las tracks). "I was a fan
since the first record, which I remember hearing on WABC
when I was 10 years old," says Miller. "I followed every
record they made. They were on TV a lot. It was the time of
the British invasion, and it was just so unique that they were
local. It was always stressed on TV that they were from New
York City. Everybody on TV was either from Liverpool or
California." He e-mailed her and asked her if she wanted to
go back into the studio. "The first thing I told her was I'm
not interested in nostalgia. That's what she wanted to hear,
I think."
"I always said I would do this once more," she says. "And I
didn't feel like I wanted to-it just wasn't right." Still, the fans
didn't forget her; sometimes they went through her trash and
showed up unannounced at her office. "When I walked away,
it took me twelve years to get lost in the street and not be
recognized." After stints in Forest Hills and an eleven-year
marriage that ended in 1985, Weiss now lives in Babylon, on
Long Island, and has ducks on her front lawn. Her husband is a
legal-case manager. ("I never thought I'd get married again,"
she says. "I called it the M-word.")
She decided to go for it. She listened to records in Miller's
Prospect Heights apartment. People wanted her to record
their songs. "A ...
read more »

[Bill Schenley]

Post by Health Solutions
Know, too, that mixing certain medications or "street"
drugs with alcohol can also kill.
I hope the above is of some help to you as well.
Regards,
Monica

I never knew that. Thanks, Monica. You're a real life-saver.

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