Maybe/I Can Never Go Home Anymore

Song of the Day 07/13/2022

Maybe and I Can Never Go Home Anymore by The Shangri Las

In 1963, The Shangri-Las formed in Cambria Heights, Queens. The group consisted of two pairs of sisters: Mary and Betty Weiss, and identical twins Margie and Mary Ann Ganser. They were all Jewish. 

The girls gained incredible success quite quickly. In 1964 alone, they performed along with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Drifters, and James Brown. At the time, the oldest member of the group was 17. 

In 1966, their success began to taper off following a string of releases that failed to crack the US top 50 charts, although they remained famous in the UK and Japan. Soon later, the group’s label, Red Bird Records, folded. They received hardly any royalties from the millions of records they sold. 

Mary Weiss would spend the remainder of the 60s enmeshed in lawsuits, desperately trying to receive the recording and touring money that was stolen from the group. After a string of failed attempts, she took a job as a secretary at an architectural firm, eventually becoming the head of a commercial furniture dealership. At the beginning of the new millennium, she started work as an independent furniture consultant. She married twice. 

Mary’s sister, Betty, is the only member of the Shangri-Las to have given birth to a child. She held several administrative jobs and now lives on Long Island. 

In 1968, broke and careerless, Mary Ann Ganser became an alcoholic and then a heroin addict. She died in March 1970 of an overdose (22 years old). 

Marge Ganser went back to school. She would land a job with NYNEX, a telephone company that doesn't exist anymore. She died of breast cancer in 1996 (48 years old). 

The group has been covered by everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Amy Winehouse and has been cited as an influence by artists such as Pink Floyd and Lana Del Rey. Their music has featured in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Jean-Marc Vallée’s Wild, and the TV series Beverly Hills, 90210. 

My mother and her siblings were also Jews raised in Queens. They have similar accents to the members of the Shangri-Las. Something about this group’s story causes in me a feeling of pure terror I can’t quite explain.