I have enjoyed a life long fascination with the workings of the heyday of life at the Brill Building & the advancement of the American Popular Song. The Brill Building is an office building located at Broadway & 49th Street in Manhattan. It is famous for housing music industry offices & studios where some of the most popular American tunes were written.
In the 1960s the Brill Building contained 165 music businesses. A musician could find a publisher, printer, cut a demo, promote the record, & cut a deal with radio promoters, all within the building. The creative culture of the independent music companies of Brill Building gave birth to the influential "Brill Building Sound" & the style of popular music songwriting& recording created by its artists & producers. The songwriters included: Burt Bacharach & Hal David, Neil Diamond , Gerry Goffin, Carole King , Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller, Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil, Laura Nyro, Neil Sedaka, Paul Simon, Phil Spector.
Carole King: "Every day we squeezed into our respective cubby holes with just enough room for a piano, a bench, & maybe a chair. You'd sit there & write & you could hear someone in the next cubby hole composing a song exactly like yours.”
Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest songs of all time included 6 by Ellie Greenwich & her husband/writing partner, Jeff Barry, more than by any other songwriting team. They had 17 singles in the pop charts of 1964, surpassed only by Lennon/McCartney.
Oh, How I loved these tunes. Little Steve singing- Be My Baby in the bathroom mirror, with a shampoo bottle microphone!
In 1962, the songwriter Jerry Leiber discovered Ellie Greenwich, then 21, singing at a piano in the Brill Building in New York. He thought she sounded like Carole King, but looked more like the Judy Holliday. She young lady wearing a college blazer over a prim blouse with a Peter Pan collar, with her hair teased into a platinum helmet. Very Mad Men.
Her first success was the dance song Hanky Panky, which did well for Tommy James & The Shondells & topped the American charts.
Although 1964 was the year the Beatles conquered America, it was also the apex of the Greenwich-Barry hit factory. The Dixie Cups had a #1 hit with her Chapel of Love in the US, & Greenwich had her first British number #1with Do Wah Diddy – a huge hit for Manfred Mann, who soon followed with Da Doo Ron Ron (written in a day).
Ellie Greenwich considered both Da Doo Ron Ron & Do Wah Diddy to be rooted in the tradition of nursery rhyme: "Everybody of every age can sing them because they are so easy to remember."
Eleanor Louise Greenwich was born in Brooklyn, New York, but moved to Long Island when she was 11. At 14 she formed her own group, the Jivettes, singing at schools & hospitals, & while still a schoolgirl, started writing her own songs. Cha-Cha Charming & Silly Isn't It, were recorded by RCA in 1958, but they flopped.
Rejected by the Manhattan School of Music because it did not accept accordion students, Ellie enrolled at Queens College to study piano & after graduating, she briefly taught English at a high school before choosing a career in music.
She found a place at the Brill Building working with the songwriting partnership of Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller, selling her songs for $25 a pop. Greenwich played another of her songs to Phil Spector, but the young producer seemed more interested in preening himself in the mirror. Greenwich: "Listen to me, you little prick, did you come to look at yourself or to hear my songs?"
In 1963, after Spector had recorded her doo-wop song Why Do Lovers Break Each Other's Hearts? with The Blue Jeans, Greenwich, hearing her work on the radio for the first time, was so thrilled that she crashed her car into a toll booth. The record reached #38 on the charts, & her follow-up (Today I Met) The Boy I'm Gonna Marry was at #39 that year.
(And) Then He Kissed Me & Da Doo Ron Ron were both recorded by the Crystals, with Spector. Then came- Be My Baby, a huge hit for the Ronettes, reaching #2.
Spector's collaborations with Ellie Greenwich & Jeff Barry were already waning by 1965 & a week-long songwriting session between them produced only 3 songs, but 1 of those songs was a little ditty called River Deep – Mountain High, recorded by Ike & Tina Turner in February 1966, which perhaps more than any other Spector production defined his "Wall of Sound".
Ellie Greenwich had recorded one of her own songs- You Don't Know, & there was talk of launching her as an American Dusty Springfield & touring Britain. But the record flopped, the idea was dropped. She divorced Barry in December 1965.
Although the Greenwich/Barry writing partnership foundered with the marriage, the pair enjoyed continued success as producers of Neil Diamond's early hits. Ellie Greenwich had discovered Diamond & persuaded Leiber & Stoller to give him a songwriting contract. With Diamond & Barry, she formed a company to publish & promote Diamond's songs. She produced & sang backup on most of Diamond's 1st decade of hits.
In the late 1960s Ellie Greenwich again tried unsuccessfully to launch a solo singing career, but suffered a nervous breakdown & turned to writing & singing commercials & jingles.
Ellie Greenwich died in the summer of 2009. She was a member of the American Songwriters' Hall of Fame. Besides the hits mentioned before, this is the legacy that she left us with: Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), Leader Of The Pack, What A Guy, You Don't Know, I Can Hear Music, Right Track-Wrong Train, Baby Be Mine, A Girl Like That, Baby I Love You, Chapel Of Love, Don't Stop My Heart, I Wonder, Midnight Feeling, Take Me Home Tonight, Going To The Chapel, & countless jingles & commercials. Which one is your favorite?
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