A young Billy Joel played the piano on the sessions for this and The Shangri-Las' followup (and biggest) hit "Leader of the Pack." In a 1987 interview with Q magazine, Joel explained: "I met a guy at an Echoes gig - was about 15 and he asked me if I wanted to play piano on a recording. So I go down to this little studio in a guy's basement in Levittown, Dynamic Studios, and they've got this sheet music down there. There's two songs, one's called 'Leader Of The Pack' and the other is called 'Remember (Walking In The Sand)' and this is pretty easy stuff to play and then Shadow comes in. He's a pretty strange guy, Shadow. He's wearing this big cape and dark glasses and he played the producer role to the hilt. I think he had a thing about Phil Spector. He wanted to be the Phil Spector of the East Coast. And he talked in these wild, dramatic, theatrical terms – he wanted more 'thunder' and he wanted more 'purple' in the record. He's waving his arms in the air saying 'give me more PURPLE'. And I'm sitting there kind a nervous – this is my first time ever in a recording studio – and I'm hissing to the other musicians, What does that mean? How do I play "purple"? And the guitar player leans over and say, Oh, just play louder, kid.
So we did these songs in a couple of hours and the singers didn't actually sing with us, we just did the backing tracks and I was never really sure who it was for and then I heard 'Remember (Walking In The Sand)' by the Shangri-Las on the radio and I went Wait a minute, that's me, and the guys in the band said, Oh, what did you get paid? I didn't get paid anything. What did I know. I guess Shadow pulled in guys like me so he could save some money."