Ellie Greenwich, a songwriter who collaborated with Phil Spector, Jeff Barry and others to create a greatest-hits list of 1960s teenage pop songs like “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Then He Kissed Me,” “Hanky Panky” and “Leader of the Pack,” died on Wednesday in Manhattan. She was 68.
Ms. Greenwich was among the songwriters, music publishers and producers working at the Brill Building, at 1619 Broadway in Manhattan, which (along with 1650 Broadway, across the street) became a center of pop music in the early 1960s.
The buildings were home to the songwriting teams of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and Carole King and Gerry Goffin, among many others, and from their offices and studios came a flood of teenage anthems, story songs and achy love songs fraught with the hormonal angst of the young.
For a time Ms. Greenwich and Mr. Barry, who was then her husband, were the most successful of the teams, especially when they wrote for the girl groups the Crystals, the Dixie Cups, the Shangri-Las and others.
In 1964 alone, 17 singles by Ms. Greenwich and Mr. Barry landed on the pop charts, according to “Always Magic in the Air,” a 2005 book by Ken Emerson about the Brill Building days. They included “Chapel of Love,” a No. 1 for the Dixie Cups, and “Do Wah Diddy Diddy,” which became a No. 1 for Manfred Mann.
Ms. Greenwich and Mr. Barry also wrote “Be My Baby,” “Baby I Love You” and “River Deep — Mountain High” (all with Mr. Spector). They were also singers, recording their own songs and those of others as the Raindrops.
Perhaps their most famous song was “Leader of the Pack,” which Ms. Greenwich and Mr. Barry wrote with the producer Shadow Morton. His previous hit, for the Shangri-Las, was the idiosyncratic “Remember (Walking in the Sand),” a song about a girl’s heartbreak that included sound effects and spoken words.
“Leader of the Pack” made use of similar tools, creating what Mr. Barry called “a movie for the ear.” Telling a soap-opera-like story of a girl who is in love with a biker but forbidden by her parents to see him, it ends with the biker’s death as he speeds away from her after their breakup and crashes. The music is melodramatic — “I met him at the candy store” was its signature wail — and woven into it are the sounds of a revving motorcycle, the fatal crash and the cooing, speaking voices of the girl’s friends.
“Leader of the Pack” was a No.1 hit for the Shangri-Las in 1964, and it became emblematic enough to be lampooned almost immediately by a band calling itself the Detergents, which recorded a song called “Leader of the Laundromat.”
Bette demonstrates:
And, we can't forget:
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