The songwriter Jerry Ragovoy—who died last month at 80—was never as well known as contemporaries Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Burt Bacharach, Gerry Goffin, and Doc Pomus. This was partly his own fault; early in his career he wrote songs under assumed names, including Norman Meade. (Growing up with a name like Rogovoy, I understand why.) Among real music-heads, however, Ragovoy ruled.

Ragovoy wrote two of the iconic soul ballads of the rock era—“Time Is on My Side,” which was made famous by the Rolling Stones, and “A Piece of My Heart,” which is forever identified with and often wrongly credited to Janis Joplin—but his greatest accomplishments lay outside the pop arena. Unlike his Brill Building contemporaries, most of whom churned out catchy, palatable versions of R&B music intended for white listeners, Ragovoy was a genuine soul man, working with black artists and writing, producing, and arranging hits for R&B singers who rarely crossed over to pop. A recent compilation album, The Jerry Ragovoy Story: Time Is on My Side 1953-2003, put out by the U.K.-based Ace Records, includes two dozen recordings that bear his imprint and sounds like a secret history of soul music. There are few big-name performers on the recording; instead, these are the originals—the jazzy, Kai Winding version of “Time Is on My Side,” and the original, 1965 recording of Ragovoy’s “Good Lovin’ ” by the Olympics, which the Young Rascals would basically copy and ride to No. 1 the next year.

But mostly there are the Jerry Ragovoy signatures: gospel-inflected soul vocals, deft horn and string arrangements (presumably why well-known music geeks like Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen and Elvis Costello are such huge fans), an emphasis on groove over melody. Not that his melodies don’t have their own sweep, just that for Ragovoy, unlike for Burt Bacharach, melody seemed to be just another form of rhythm, but one no less effective in conveying transcendent emotion. Jerry had an uncanny ear for soulful vocalists, and he nurtured the likes of Garnet Mimms, who should be as well known as Sam Cooke; Lorraine Ellison, whose wail on “Stay With Me” could well have been the model for Joplin’s vocal on “A Piece of My Heart”; and Howard Tate, whose records made with Ragovoy influenced the “Philly sound” of the mid-1970s.

Jerry’s father, Nandor Ragovoy, and my grandfather, Joseph Rogovoy, were brothers, which made me Jerry’s first cousin once removed. (As for the disparity in the spelling of the last names, that’s simply a case of an immigration officer taking liberties upon arrival.) Jerry, named Jordan at birth, and my father, Lawrence Rogovoy, were born within six months of each other. I didn’t know Jerry well; our families were not close, partly because his family grew up in Philadelphia while the rest of the Rogovoy clan was in New York. But Jerry was also not particularly interested in maintaining relationships with his extended family. He explained to me in one of a few phone conversations we had over the last 20 years that he had a strained relationship with his father, who apparently was a difficult man (as was my grandfather). Breaking away from his family was top on his agenda as a teenager, and that in no small part propelled him into a career in music.

But I didn’t need to know Jerry well to understand at least some aspects of his life and personality. In photos from the 1960s, he bears a remarkable resemblance to my father. (My then-wife audibly gasped when she first saw a photo of Jerry, saying, “That’s your father.” They had strikingly similar bearings, bone structure, and even clothes.) If his father was anything like my grandfather, he was probably also a bigot—not unusual for men of their generation and background—and that could go far to explain why Jerry wound up going native, if you’ll pardon the expression, when he went into music.

As Jerry explained it, his first exposure to black music came when he got a job as a teenager in an appliance store in a black neighborhood. The store included a record department, which Jerry managed, and he played the latest R&B hits all the time. “That’s what I listened to all day long for four years,” he once told his friend, the rock legend Al Kooper. “And little by little, by osmosis, I absorbed the black musical idiom. I could well have been born black because, ultimately, it became a natural musical expression for me.”

While Jerry’s mother, Evelyn, apparently had a beautiful voice and, according to her son, could have been a professional opera singer, he didn’t know that he came from an extended musical family. His grandfather, Herman Rogovoy—my great-grandfather—was a cantor in Eastern Europe who settled in the Bronx, where he enjoyed a large local following and a reputation as a traveling concert performer. Jerry’s uncle Joseph—my grandfather—was a facile pianist who could bang out Rachmaninoff from memory.

These things sometimes apparently skip generations. My dad, perhaps due to severe hearing loss as a child, is somewhat tone deaf and became a CPA. He has no appreciation for music made after 1955. But as a young teenager I got stung by rock ’n’ roll—Bob Dylan in particular—and when it became clear to my father that I was obsessed with rock music, he remembered he had a cousin who was “in the music business” (although he knew nothing of the nature of his cousin’s work and accomplishments). The three of us had lunch in New York, where Jerry was based, in 1975.

We met at Jerry’s office, where he showed me his collection of keyboards, which included a Hohner Clavinet, a kind of proto-synthesizer used primarily by funk and R&B artists. Over lunch, my dad and Jerry caught up on family history, while I tried my best to pepper Jerry with questions about which rock stars he knew and what they were like. He was singularly unimpressed with them as a group, saying they weren’t that interesting and didn’t have much more to say beyond talking about what kind of guitar strings they used. Jerry was kind enough to offer to listen to a cassette recording I’d made of some songs I’d written—and merciful enough never to respond with his critique. After parting, my dad’s comment on the train back to Long Island was, “I didn’t expect to pay so much for a hamburger.”

It would be years before I’d have any contact with Jerry again. The next time came via a phone call from a mutual friend—a fellow songwriter of Jerry’s named Aaron Schroeder, who had written hit songs for Elvis Presley and Gene Pitney, among others. “Guess who I’m sitting with?” Aaron asked me when he called. “Your cousin Jerry. He wants to say hi.” We spoke briefly and agreed to renew our correspondence, which I was happy to do, given all that I had learned about Jerry in my work as a music journalist—much of it directly from musicians who had worked with him or were influenced by him.

“ ‘Rags.’ That’s what we called him,” Dionne Warwick told me when I interviewed her in advance of a one-woman show she was doing at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Mass. Jerry had produced an album of Warwick’s in 1974; along with Bonnie Raitt’s Streetlights, it was one of his highest profile efforts in the pop realm. While Warwick had only good things to say about her experience working with him, and while the album was a success for her, Jerry was quoted as saying, “I think it’s one of the worst albums I ever made in my whole life.”

If there remains a bit of a mystery about cousin Jerry, and how this son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants wound up creating some of the most affecting, hardest-hitting gospel-laced soul music of the 1960s, maybe the answer comes in reassessing what we mean by soul music. Jerry, remember, was the grandson of a cantor, and what is cantorial music if not soul music? Certainly if, as he suggested, he was imbued with the sound of R&B through osmosis, he also was primed for it by being born into a religious and family tradition that knew how to move people’s hearts and spirits through the keening wail of soulful song.

Seth Rogovoy, a music critic living in Great Barrington, Mass., is the author of Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet and The Essential Klezmer: A Music Lover’s Guide to Jewish Roots and Soul Music.

The band was started in Tel Aviv in 2005, by veteran punk frontman Ami Shalev. As a young Israeli with left-wing tendencies and a passion for everything that was fast, loud, and out of control, Shalev was always something of a hero of mine. His first band, Subway Suckers, made the sort of noise that very few Israeli artists in the mid-1990s dared make. If you tuned in to Army Radio circa 1994—and you would, if you lived in Israel at the time, as there was precious little else to tune in to—you would hear sweet songs about love and loss and loneliness. If you want to get the vibe, swallow a pack of Xanax and listen to this late-term musical abortion. And then there were the Suckers. You can listen to them for yourselves here, or simply learn all you need to know about them by the fact that their one modest hit was named “Shit Country,” the chorus for which consisted of Shalev shouting “Shit country! And shit government!” All of the band’s members were stage hands and soundmen, hard-working dudes who had made their acquaintance with the stage and the limelight by schlepping heavy crates and setting up equipment so that someone else could look and sound great. The Suckers were the proletariat of punk. Like Fugazi, the greatest working-man’s rock act this side of the E Street Band, they had a strong DIY ethic. They were real, and it came through in every note they played on stage.

The same thing is true of Monotonix. Together with drummer Haggai Fershtman and guitarist Yonatan Gat, Shalev’s current band is a paragon of self-sufficiency. At first, they arranged for a few shows in Israel, but these didn’t end too well: A tense, on-edge nation, unsurprisingly, wants something soothing at day’s end, and Monotonix’s sound was too much for most Israeli venues. Some shows were shut down mid-song, and clubs got harder to book. The fans were there; the venues weren’t.

With that, the trio cast its glance toward America. They went online, found the names and telephone numbers of bars and clubs that featured live music, and before too long, they had booked themselves a 21-date tour. In July of 2006, they were off on the road.

Listen to “Before I Pass Away,” from Not Yet:

Judging from interviews the members of Monotonix gave at the time, the tour took its toll. For one thing, Shalev was already in his forties and a family man. And even though the band sang in English—not an uncommon practice among Israeli bands, particularly those working in genres, like punk, with limited homegrown audiences—the cultural scene in the U.S. was something the three musicians weren’t used to at all.

“When we started playing,” Shalev told the Israeli website Ynet in 2009, recalling one particularly rowdy show in Richmond, Va., “mayhem broke loose, the sort of chaos we really weren’t used to.” Monotonix started playing, and the audience, entranced, grabbed the musicians and lifted them in the air, passing them along like puppets in a frenzy of shouting and sweat. It was love at first sight.

Until Monotonix’s next visit the United States—they are currently on tour in Europe—the best you can do is to take a look at this video, shot live during a 2007 performance in Tennessee.

All the staples of a great Monotonix show are there: The band plays not on a stage but amid the audience, the drum snares are set on fire, and the crowd looks less like a pack of rock aficionados and more like a group of protesters in Tahrir Square hell-bent on revenge.

Herein, however, lies the problem, the reason why, most likely, Monotonix—despite a cascade of recent rave reviews in well-regarded music blogs and magazines—will never become a household name: To dig Monotonix, you need to see them play live.

Their album, Not Yet, released in January on the ultra-prestigious Drag City label (home of Pavement, Joanna Newsom, and Silver Jews, among others), is fantastic. The band’s second, it was recorded by Steve Albini, the so-called Indie Godfather who worked with the Pixies and Nirvana. It delivers more raucous fun in 30 minutes than most bands manage to produce in a lifetime. But listen to the album, and then take another look at the live concert video, and it becomes clear that something crucial has been lost in translation. The difference between listening to Not Yet and seeing Monotonix play live is the difference between sexting and having sex.

Listen to “Give Me More,” from Not Yet:

Further proof of this chasm—call it the mind/body divide—was delivered to me when I tried to interview Monotonix for this article. I asked for an hour-long telephone conversation. A public relations representative replied “no one gets an hour. My mom doesn’t get an hour with me,” and then signed off with the emoticon “:P.” I bring up this example not as a criticism on one particular public relations representative, or even as an indictment of the public relations representative as a subspecies of mankind, but merely to point out that when bands that set their drum snares on fire rely on people who use emoticons to communicate, something very, very bad is happening.

What, then, to do? First, go to Monotonix’s Myspace page, listen to samples of Not Yet, and revel in that filthy, fast, and freaky energy that, once upon a time, we used to call rock ‘n’ roll, before Vampire Weekend became the cool band to listen to. And if you like what you hear, pray that I’m wrong, and that Monotonix will make it big in America after all.

I have always looked on Bruce Springsteen as the embodiment of lower-middle class, Jewish-American culture. He built up his career in a very Jewish way, shrewdly and carefully. He looked after himself, and never went wild on drugs or drink, just as those other New York-area Jews, Simon and Garfunkel, stayed clean. He was and is good with money…

He was, to my mind, the archetypal Jew who completed the Jewish journey, of taking a format that began with fusions of country and western and black soul music, that had been reinterpreted by Jewish writers, but was now finally being performed by a Jew.

The answer eventually becomes obvious to the writer, Kevin Myers of Northern Ireland: “Bruce Springsteen is as Jewish as hurling or the Christian Brothers.” Of course, his mistake is an honest one (we know where Jackie Mason stands on Italians from New Jersey). We all want to “own” our heroes, and the difference between “steen” and “stein” is subtle but significant. But Myers’s error also involved a leap of, if not impeccable, than at least solid deduction: “it was logical that there should be a Jewish rock star, because for over a generation, Jews had been the intermediary between black music and the larger white population in the US and abroad.”

However, in an attempt to forgive himself for “deal[ing] in stereotypes,” Myers makes another leap, this one also naïve and, in some ways, as reductive as stereotypes themselves: “There is, in reality, no true ‘Jew’, no ‘Protestant’, no ‘Traveller’, no ‘Palestinian’, no ‘Zulu’, no ‘Ibo’…And we on this small island should by now have learnt that tribal divisions are usually a toxic confection in the mind of the beholder.” Quite a jump from this insight on the top of the page: “[A]s we all know, sooner or later, Jews naturally get to the top of the tree. This is one of the simple truisms of life.”

Why it Doesn’t Matter if Bruce Was Born in the USA or in Bray [Belfast Telegraph]
Related: A Fine Romance [Nextbook Press]

It was the instrument of a revolution in bourgeois manners and mores. What other country would dress its privileged children in the garb of its sharecroppers and coal miners, or school them, three minutes at a time, in the sexual mores of the ghetto, selling them commercial fantasies of freedom and authenticity that would seduce the young everywhere? The industry spawned by the music has long since grown (like the old Elvis) cynical, corpulent, corporate, and corrupted; and (like the aging Michael Jackson) inhumanly strange, sequestered in appalling opulence, frozen in childhood, and besieged by creditors. But as with all things that go wrong on a grand scale, rock and roll was once, like the young Elvis, extraordinary—a vision of a miscegenated American future as compelling as the linked arms of Freedom Fighters that were then rising up across the South.

It was the early 1950’s and America was changing. Who would serve as the vanguard of this change? You would need people eager to embrace the new, able to serve as intermediaries linking black and white, high and low, sensitive enough to hear joy where others heard only squalor, clever enough to hear opportunity where others only heard noise, alive to the mordant humor of the ghetto, heedless of existing prejudices and conventions, enterprising enough to invent an industry where none had existed before. You needed Phil and Leonard Chess in Chicago; Syd Nathan at King Records in Cincinnati; Lester, Jules, Saul, and Joe Bihari at Modern Records in Los Angeles; Leo and Eddie Mesner at Aladdin Records just down the road; and Alan Freed on first the Cleveland, then the New York City airwaves. You needed Jerry Wexler and Herb Abramson at Atlantic Records in New York; a teenaged Michael Bloomfield playing in the first integrated electric blues band in Chicago in 1963; and the former Robert Zimmerman in the cafes of Greenwich Village. You needed people who could operate at the bloody crossroads where commerce, art, and social change were converging. All of which is to say that you needed Jews.

Here is how Lester Sill, national sales manager for the independent blues label Modern Records explained it to a teenaged Jerry Leiber, (“Kid, I think you’re going to like this music,” Sill told Leiber before handing him a recording of John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillun,”) then a part-time clerk at Norty’s, a little record shop in Los Angeles that sold Frankie Laine records and cantorial music from Russia and Poland:

“‘The big labels,’ explained Lester, ‘like RCA, Columbia and Decca are ignoring the really great popular Negro artists because they just don’t understand or care about the music. They don’t think it’s worthwhile, artistically or commercially. Well, I don’t have to tell you how wrong they are.’”

The voice reminiscing above belongs to Jerome Leiber, who would go on to become one half of the songwriting team that wrote and produced some of the most important and best rock and roll singles ever, including “Kansas City,” “Stand By Me,” “Poison Ivy,” “Yakety-Yak,” “This Magic Moment,” “Spanish Harlem,” “Searchin’,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and “Hound Dog.” Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller began writing songs in 1951, at the age of 18, for a label producing what were then known as “race records” for Ray Charles, Charles Brown, Jimmy Witherspoon, the Robins, the Drifters, Big Joe Turner, and Ruth Brown. By 1958, at the age of 25, Leiber and Stoller had been dubbed “the Gilbert and Sullivan of rock and roll,” and “the Grandfathers of Rock and Roll.” They would go on to write and produce the major hits of the Drifters and the Coasters, establish themselves as the first independent record producers in the industry, and nurture the talent of one Phil Spector.

Hound Dog, the Leiber and Stoller Autobiography, just released by Simon and Schuster, is a slight volume of edited interviews that recapitulates much of what was already known about the songwriting duo, and some delightful new anecdotes of uncertain veracity. The first third of the book captures the excitement of those early days when the music was still unknown to white audiences and the big record companies had no regard for it. For anyone remotely susceptible to the heartbreaking innocence of that period, the sly, keen, slightly-outdated hip patois recorded in that book is an unmitigated delight.

“Like Lester, many of the label owners were Jewish. ‘Look at the way the big iron and steel companies threw the scraps to the Jews,’ said Lester. ‘That’s how Jews started in the scrap metal business. Same thing in music. The majors see a great artist like Jimmy Witherspoon as scrap. They don’t want to deal with what they consider junk. Well, some of these small labels were actually junk dealers before they got into the music game. Through experience, they learned what some see as junk might actually be precious jewels.’”

Jerry Leiber first heard black music in homes where he delivered “five-gallon cans of kerosene and ten-pound bags of soft coal,” as an errand boy for his mother, who owned the only grocery store willing to extend credit to blacks in the neighborhood. His father had been a “door to door milkman who died penniless,” when Leiber was five. Leiber’s first language was Yiddish; his earliest attempt to play boogie-woogie on piano ended when his Uncle Dave, “without warning, violently slammed down the wooden keyboard cover,” in the midst of a lesson.

Mike Stoller’s aunt was a child prodigy who graduated from the Vienna Conservatory at 12, but his introduction to boogie-woogie came under the gentle direction of the stride pianist James P. Johnson. Stoller grew up listening to Richard Strauss, Shostakovitch, and Sibelius, but “it was black music,” he explains, “that excited my deepest passion. I heard the lyricism in Richard Strauss, I felt the elegance of Bach, but boogie-woogie really reached my eight-year old soul.” Where music had been, for his mother’s German Jewish family, the hallmark of social superiority, young Stoller’s interest in music “was purely visceral.” Is there a clearer illustration of the Old World’s cultural hierarchies succumbing to the blandishments of the New World’s freedom to reinvent oneself in any guise?

Stoller would write the music, noodling along on the keyboard while Leiber tossed out phrases off the top of his head. Many of their hits were written in fifteen minutes or fewer. The story of their ascent within their field is rapid and untroubled. “Our interest was in black music and black music only,” Stoller declares. His own musical vocabulary spanned the blues, R&B, avant-garde jazz and classical music of his day, but he deployed all of it in search of the most immediate impact, and without any consciousness that the music they were making was other than ephemeral. “If you had asked me and Mike back then,” Leiber says about the great Robins song “Smokey Joe’s Cafe,” we would have said that we loved the recording, that it might even be a hit, but we assumed that in a few months the song—and, for that matter, all our songs—would be, like a pile of old comic books, discarded and forgotten.” Stoller observes that when he was writing hit songs “stratification of popular music was absolute. At the top were giants like George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. At the bottom were guys like us.” Leiber quotes Random House’s co-founder politely inquiring: “Why did you write something called ‘Hound Dog’?” The “highbrow view of the day” was that “rock and roll was trash.” The view had something to recommend it, according to the sexual mores of the day. Leiber wrote the lyrics with a vocabulary, as Stoller puts it that was “black, Jewish, theatrical, comical,” telling stories, as Leiber tells it, about “heartache and pain, but also unrestrained joy and unrestrained sex.”

“She wasn’t built for power
She wasn’t built for speed
But she was built for comfort
And that’s what I need.”

In 1953, Leiber and Stoller wrote a song for Big Mama Thornton called “Hound Dog,” which became a hit on the R&B charts. At one point during the session Leiber encourages Thornton to “attack” a certain part of the song. Thornton interrupts him. “‘Come here boy,’ she said, motioning me to stand even closer to her. ‘I’ll tell you what you can attack. Attack this…’ she added, pointing to her crotch.” The opening lyric, as Thornton had sang it, went like this:

You ain’t nothing but a hound dog
Quit snooping ‘round my door
You can wag your tail,
But I ain’t gonna feed you no more”

In 1956, Elvis Presley appeared on the Ed Sullivan show singing

You aint’ nothing but a hound dog
Crying all the time
You ain’t never caught a rabbit
And you ain’t no friend of mine”

“The song is not about a dog,” Leiber observes. “It’s about a man, a freeloading gigolo. Elvis’s version makes no sense to me,” going on to opine that “there’s no comparison between the Presley version and the Big Mama original. Elvis played with the song. Big Mama nailed it.” Nonetheless, Presley’s choice of the song made Leiber and Stoller, as Leiber puts it “awfully goddamn lucky,” to be placed at the forefront of “the bigger commercial revolution in American music: teenage rock and roll.”

The book then settles into the rhythm of professional success, punctuated by conflict, as the duo negotiates the treacherous waters of the music business. They go on to write Peggy Lee’s signature mid-life crisis hit “Is That All There Is?” in which the aging singer faces mortality with resignation that is at once cheerful, rueful, and mordant. The book ends with the obligatory flourish of showbiz gratitude for blessings bestowed by fate, but ends on a note struck all those decades ago by the nihilistic chanteuse. Leiber and Stoller began life as “horny teenagers” obsessed with the sound, rhythm, and preoccupations of the lustful music emerging from the black underground. They managed to make being a horny teenager into a profitable vocation, and became rich, honored, and successful men, carving out a permanent place in American cultural history for the ephemeral songs they wrote in 15 minutes or fewer. Facing mortality and clinging to life amid failing health, Leiber admits that he thinks back “to the days of cognac and tobacco with deep nostalgia.” Aging and mortality—the insistent facts for which rock and roll has no reply. And he tells his interlocutor that:

“If my next medical report is ‘Leiber, you’ve run out of options. You’ve got a month at most to put your affairs in order,’ then this is my plan: I’m going to buy a fifth of Maker’s Mark bourbon, a carton of Camels, and as many Billie Holiday records as I can carry. I’m going to break out the booze and have a ball.”

“If that’s all there is.”

His reference point for the legendary story? Metallica, who wrote “Creeping Death” while watching the rain of hail, vermin, and frogs befall Yul Brynner and his posse in The Ten Commandments. Later, Ian, whose collaboration on “Bring the Noise” with Chuck D. was seen in the metal community as “sacrilege,” shares the moment of his own personal liberation: He saw Kiss perform at Madison Square Garden when he was a teenager and realized any path other than rock would be nothing short of enslavement.

I paraphrase. But the spirit of the metaphor is applied throughout this kaffeeklatsch of mostly endearing musical has-beens, which includes too JJ French, also of Twisted, as they knowingly call it, and Leslie West, a Hebrew school dropout from Forest Hills who wears a shirt embroidered with guitars and insists, as if challenged, that his band, Mountain, had more than one hit (“Mississippi Queen,” if you must know). But it is Snider who is the ceremony’s driving force, noting the imperative to invite those who have, like him, nowhere to go to join in the proceedings. Addled like a fifth grader at recess, he plays somewhat guileless as the least identified participant, prodding, Why matzo? Wherefore parsley? What is it you cherish about Pantera?

The answers may not be wholly satisfying, and the Seder, rife with Manischewitz product placement (macaroon tins, wine bottles), is far from complete; except for West’s bluesy guitar interpretation of the blessing over the wine, not a single song is sung. Still, the queries provoke somewhat entertaining discussion about rocking and rolling with a few educative elements thrown in: Saltwater equals tears of bitterness. Egg means rebirth.

But the recitation of the Ten Plagues is not followed by iteration of Rabbi Yehuda’s mnemonic—it would assuredly detract from the Behind the Music vibe that yields such nuggets as Snider boasting improbably that he’s a trained countertenor. We learn that Ian used his bar mitzvah money to go skateboarding, that West dropped acid the first time he saw Eric Clapton, and that French’s tattooist spoke Yiddish—from which he infers that there’s no prohibition against getting a tattoo, only against being buried in a Jewish cemetery if you have one.

I had the misguided hope that Snider, who reveals himself to be the grandson of a Russian Jew, would cheer the semantic parsing by suddenly yelling, “Rashi, eat your heart out. Then, let’s get the lead out!” Instead, the gang of four reflected on what it was like to play Germany where metal is much more menacing, sent Ian to search for the afikomen, and rigorously protested misconceptions that metalheads are just hard-partying dummies. Moses too had his Waterloo.