Jack Lee Dead: Singer and Writer of ‘Hanging on the Telephone’ Was 73

Jack Lee, who co-fronted the influential L.A. band the Nerves in the late 1970s and saw his songs turn into major hits for Blondie and Paul Young, died May 26 in Santa Monica, Calif. at age 71. His death was revealed Wednesday in a press release, which revealed Lee died after battling colon cancer for three years.

Although Lee had not had much public visibility in recent years, “he never gave up on his music,” his family said in a statement, “to the very end. His guitar, right by his side. He lived his songs. One by one they told the story of his life. Some dreams die. His never will.”

His greatest success as a musician came with a pair of high-profile covers. Blondie recorded an extremely faithful cover of the Nerves’ “Hanging on the Telephone” in 1978 that remains one of the group’s most instantly identifiable signature songs to this day. (Blondie’s version went to No. 5 in the U.K., although, as an FM hit, it never charted in the U.S.) Paul Young found success in 1983 with “Come Back and Stay,” a song the Nerves wrote but never recorded; it first appeared on a Lee solo project a couple of years before Young had the hit. (The cover reached No. 4 in the U.K. and No. 22 on the Billboard Hot 100.) Young recorded a total of three Lee songs for his Euro-chart-topping debut album that year.

Although Lee wished he’d had a hit with “Hanging on the Telephone,” too, he relished the idea that it had become a success. “I remember the day vividly,” Lee told Mojo magazine about learning the Blondie song was becoming a hit. “It was a Friday. They were going to cut off our electricity at 6 o’clock, the phone too.” It went on to be covered as well by Def Leppard, Girls Aloud and other artists. Even the original Nerves version occasionally surfaces, as it recently did on the series “Outer Banks.”

“Even people who hated me – and there were plenty – had to admit it was great,” Lee one said.

But Lee’s greatest influence came as one of three singer-songwriters in the Nerves, a band that seemingly every rock ‘n’ roll fan in Los Angeles at the time heard of, even if far fewer actually heard them during their few years together together. The trio, which started in San Francisco in 1974 before moving to L.A. at the beginning of 1977, was often characterized as a seminal power-pop band and consisted of Lee on guitar, Peter Case on bass and Paul Collins on drums. The latter two achieved greater notoriety after the Nerves broke up, with Case going on to form the Plimsouls and Collins fronting the band alternately known as the Beat and Paul Collins’ Beat. Although the other two achieved greater notoriety on their own in the early ’80s, it was Lee who presumably collected the greater royalty checks.

The story of the Nerves provides a chapter in the just-released documentary “Peter Case: A Million Miles Away,” for which Lee was interviewed prior to the pandemic and became one of the doc’s more entertaining and candid participants. Lee ascribes the too-quick breakup of the trio to it having consisted of “three narcissists.” The film also explores how the band had an image that was either a success or a liability, depending on one’s thinking: They wore matching suits, a la the early Beatles or Raspberries, which they considered a counterculture move in reaction to the reigning punk sensibilities of the club scene at that moment.

The Nerves’ recorded output consisted of just one self-titled four-song EP in 1976, released on Bomp!, which had the Lee songs “Hanging on the Telephone” and “Working Too Hard” augmented by singular writing contributions from Case and Collins. (Long a rarity, the EP was re-released on CD and vinyl in 2008 with demos and other extras as “One Way Ticket.”)

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In 2012 Case and Collins came back together for a tour, but Lee chose not to participate and it was not billed as a Nerves reunion.

After the Nerves’ breakup, Lee released two solo recordings and performed occasionally with his group Jack Lee Inferno. The ironically titled “Jack Lee’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 1” was issued in 1981 and included a re-recording of “Hanging on the Telephone” as well as the first-time recording of the song that would come to be a hit for Paul Young two years later. His second and final solo project to be released was a self-titled album in 1985, issued only in France. A compilation of the two solo projects, “Bigger Than Life,” came out in 2016.

Another Lee song, “You Are My Lover,” which did not appear on any of his albums, was covered by Suzi Quatro for 1979’s “Suzi… and Other Four Letter Words,” her second-highest charting album.

The obituary provided by a publicist notes that while Lee “never duplicated those initial successes… he continued to write and record music for the rest of his life, and plans call for a documentary film and the release of some 30 unissued recordings sometime in the near future.”

Lee’s remains were cremated, and he will be remembered with a plaque in the Rose Garden at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. The official obituary said a memorial celebrating his song catalog — including unreleased material as well as the known catalog — is being planned to take place at the Echoplex club in L.A.’s Echo Park.

Lee’s survivors include his children Wallie Autry, Grace Lee, Mary Lee, and Cynthia Jacqueline Lee Cook; grandchildren Jack Autry, Brenlee Autry, Adam Mejia, Alana Joy Nichols, Jackson Cook, and Hudson Cook; half siblings Robert Emiel Lee, Virginia E. Lee, and Katherine Lee; and wife Mieke Sofia Lee.

Condolences and any archival material friends and fans wish to send in can be emailed to jackleeinmemory@gmail.com.