Back in 1952, two young songwriters named Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote a blues number called “Hound Dog.” They wrote it for Big Mama Thornton, a big-voiced blues singer, and her record did well on the R&B charts before it quietly faded. The two of them moved on to other songs and other singers.
Four years later, Stoller was on a ship coming home from a trip to Europe. The ship was the Andrea Doria, a grand Italian ocean liner. One night off the American coast it collided with another vessel, and the Andrea Doria began to sink.
Stoller escaped in a lifeboat.
“Fortunately, I got off in a broken lifeboat,” he told NPR years later. Another ship picked up the survivors and carried them the rest of the way to New York. While he was out there on the water, he had no idea that the old song he’d helped write was suddenly all over the radio back home.
His writing partner was waiting for him when the ship finally pulled in.
“When I arrived on a freighter that picked us up, Jerry was at the dock,” Stoller said. “First thing he said to me was, ‘Mike, we’ve got a smash hit!'”
Stoller had no clue what he meant. A smash? Which one? Leiber told him it was “Hound Dog,” and that it was being sung by some white kid named Elvis Presley. Remember, Stoller had been at sea for days with no news at all. His reply is now one of the most famous lines in rock history.
“I said, ‘Elvis who?'”
That “kid” was about to become the biggest star in the world. Elvis’s “Hound Dog” spent 11 weeks at No. 1 in 1956 and turned into one of the signature songs of his whole career. For Leiber and Stoller, it opened the door to a long run of hits that made them two of the most important songwriters in music.
And yet, when Stoller finally sat down and listened to the Elvis version the whole country was going wild for, he wasn’t sold. He thought it sounded “kind of stiff and a bit too fast, a little nervous.” That’s the man who wrote it talking. He just didn’t love what Elvis did with it, not at first.
Jerry Leiber passed away in 2011, but the two of them sat for plenty of interviews together over the years. In the clip below you can watch both songwriters side by side on late-night TV, trading stories about the songs they gave Elvis and a dozen other stars.
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller together on David Letterman in 1987
So what turned Stoller around on a record he found stiff and nervous? Plain old numbers. “After it sold seven million copies it began to sound better, yeah,” he said with a laugh. Seven million records has a way of changing a songwriter’s ears. By then the song he’d almost missed the news about, stuck out in a lifeboat in the Atlantic, had already made him and Leiber famous.