Prolific songwriter Jerry Leiber dies, 78

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 22 (UPI) -- Jerry Leiber, one-half of one of the most important songwriting duos of the rock era died Monday in Los Angeles, the president of his publishing company said.

Randy Poe said Leiber, 78, died of cardiopulmonary failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Rolling Stone Magazine reported.

Together with his partner, Mike Stoller, Leiber wrote hits for a wide commercial audience during the nascent rock 'n' roll era.

"When Jerry and I started to write, we were writing to amuse ourselves," Stoller, 78, told Rolling Stone in 1990. "It was done out of a love of doing it. We got very lucky in the sense that at some point what we wrote also amused a lot of other people."

Leiber and Stoller met in Los Angeles in 1950, coming together through a mutual love for blues, rhythm and blues and pop. They spent 12 hours a day at Stoller's house -- Stoller on his upright piano and Leiber riffing on the words, Rolling Stone said.

"Jerry was an idea machine," Stoller said in their 2009 memoir "Hound Dog." "For every situation, Jerry had 20 ideas. As would-be songwriters, our interest was in black music and black music only. We wanted to write songs for black voices. When Jerry sang, he sounded black, so that gave us an advantage. His verbal vocabulary was all over the place -- black, Jewish, theatrical, comical. He would paint pictures with words."

Their breakthrough success was with a cover of Willie Mae Thornton's, "Hound Dog." That 1955 pop remake may have been the shot heard 'round the world musically, but to Leiber, the changes made for the remake by Elvis Presley made no sense.

"The song is not about a dog; it's about a man, a freeloading gigolo. Elvis' version makes no sense to me, and, even more irritatingly, it is not the song that Mike and I wrote. Of course, the fact that it sold more than 7 million copies took the sting out of what seemed to be a capricious change of lyrics," Leiber said.

Leiber and Stoller were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1985 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, the Los Angeles Times reported.