In the aftermath of CBGB’s founder Hilly Crystal’s recent death and the shuttering of the “epicenter of the punk movement,” as one academically inclined rock critic dubbed the club, a lot of New Yorkers are taking a few steps down memory lane to remember the Bowery’s legendary music venue. “It was a cool place to be,” the Queensborn Mary Weiss recalled, “a great place to hang out, I thought.” During initial visits to the club in its 1970s heyday, Ms. Weiss, who describes her CBGB’s attendance as “pretty frequent,” was particularly impressed with one detail. “I couldn’t believe how much Shangs stuff they had on the juke box,” she said. “That blew me away. Very cool.”

The “Shangs” she refers to is short for the Shangri-Las, the paradigmatic 1960s New York vocal group. Ms. Weiss was a founding member and sang lead on all of their hit records. Shangri-La’s songs such as “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” and the no. 1 smash “Leader of the Pack” helped defend the American pop charts from the British Invasion between 1964 and the group’s demise in 1969. In harmony with her sister Betty and twins Mary Ann and Margie Ganser, and in close collaboration with producer George “Shadow” Morton, engineer Brooks Arthur, and arranger Artie Butler, Ms. Weiss helped create a hypnotic, dynamic, emotional, and unabashedly dramatic New York rock ‘n’ roll sound that continues to provide a soundtrack for real-life heartbreak and fortitude some 40 years after the group called it quits.

On Sunday, Ms. Weiss, who was absent from the recording studio for four decades until the release this spring of her brilliant new solo release “Dangerous Game” (Norton Records), will headline the 33rd Atlantic Antic Street Festival’s Rock and Soul fest, performing live outside Magnetic Field at 97 Atlantic Ave. Just how long has it been since Ms. Weiss played Brooklyn? “Oh, I don’t remember,” she said with a low, cool laugh. “At least the ’60s.”

As a veteran of the grueling package shows assembled by top-40 impresario Murray “the K” Kaufman at the Brooklyn Fox Theater, she can be forgiven for not having the date on the tip of her tongue.

“It was bizarre,” Ms. Weiss said of the Shangri-La’s appearances in and among eight to 10 other acts in William Fox’s now demolished “Siamese-Byzantine” show palace monument to himself on Flatbush Avenue. “You’d get there in the morning, and the whole cast had to be onstage for the opening. Then you go back upstairs. The elevator never worked and they’d have you on, like, the sixth floor. Then you’d come back down and do your set, five songs, six songs, or whatever. Then you go back up, then come back down for the finale. And you’d do that seven times a day. It’s insane, absolutely insane. Murray the K would have it running for weeks. It was a grind.”

The upside was, of course, the company that the Shangri-Las’ endurance on the pop charts allowed them to keep. “There were so many great people that I worked with and got to meet there,” Ms. Weiss said. “The Rascals, the Zombies, Dusty Springfield, Marvin Gaye, you name it.” Meeting the headliners at a gig farther up the street at the Brooklyn Paramount was another story. “The Paramount was with the Beatles,” she said. “It was weird. They had them on one floor and everybody else on the show on another floor. It was very strange.”

Though the Fab Four remained safely cloistered for the bulk of the show, one delegate from either group did eventually go boot to boot. “Mary Ann was backstage and somebody was shoving her,” Ms. Weiss said. “She turned around and it was Ringo. So that was some contact, anyway. I almost wanted her to take his drumsticks.”

Though Ms. Weiss and the Shangri-Las did their share of club dates and arena shows on their own, “everybody has the impression that everything was a package tour back then,” she said. To the uninitiated, life on a bus in a Dick Clark caravan crossing the country bears some kind of romantic sheen. Not for Ms. Weiss.

“You were like fricasseed when you came home from one of those tours,” she said. “Every other night you slept on the bus. Try to look perky after you’ve slept on a bus. I’d go to bed and I wouldn’t even know where I was when I woke up. Some of those tours could actually go two, three months. That was my life. Picture that for months and then years. That’s where I was. Basically, all you’re doing is working constantly. Some people thrive on that. I’m not one of them.”

Life after the Shangri-Las led Ms. Weiss into a few abortive musical ventures that were hamstrung by legal entanglements, the dubious souvenirs of poorly counseled music business success at age 15, and eventually a second career in architecture and industrial interior design.

“I’m a survivor,” Ms. Weiss said, sounding more like a pragmatist. “A lot of people get off on meaningless adulation, and I just never did.” When the chance came to move on in life, “I didn’t walk away,” she said, “I ran away.”

But with a new album out that toes the line between past and present with an unapologetic and unsentimental aggressive precision, the voice that Patti Smith majordomo and CBGB’s mainstay, Lenny Kaye, calls “one of the most soulful I’ve ever heard,” is back. If Ms. Weiss’s jaw-dropping set at this spring’s South By Southwest Music Conference is any indication, Sunday’s Brooklyn return — accompanied by such seasoned garage pros as guitarist Richard X. Heyman, Roxy Music and Cracker vet Sal Maida on bass, Dave Amels on keyboards, and the Smithereens’ Dennis Diken on drums — should be nothing short of amazing.

“It’s kind of the best of both worlds,” Ms. Weiss said of a comeback that’s so refreshingly free of prefabricated oldies nostalgia. “Nothing I do now will ever take away from what I did in the past. I’m not trying to climb the ladder. I’m just going to have some fun. Why not? You only go around once.”