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With hubbo Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich was half of one of the great New York songwriting couples in a pop era dominated by them. Together they penned smashes for Phil Spector's Crystals and Ronettes--not to mention the mighty "River Deep, Mountain High." The late Greg Shaw summarized their career in this 1982 piece--though he might have regretted his final sentence!--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

The third great husband and wife team of the Brill Building era, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich hit the scene late.

After three years of writing separately, with others, and occasionally together since first meeting in 1960, Jeff and Ellie finally married and, forsaking all others, combined their talents to create a few dozen of the most splendid teenage love songs of all time.

Though Kirshner might have envied their output, this team was clearly not in his league. Headstrong and independent, they liked to follow their songs from inception--their self-recorded demos--to the final recording session, which they preferred to produce as well, and even further into the realms of business and management. Phil Spector, who had collaborated with Ellie previously, used her and Jeff to help him create his greatest monuments: "Da Doo Ron Ron," "And Then He Kissed Me," "Be My Baby," "I Can Hear Music" and "River Deep, Mountain High."

Having heard these songs, anyone could tell that Barry and Greenwich were onto something far more interesting than the gravy train of Bobby Vee hits the Kirshner writers were hitched to. The best products of New York in the early '60s were the girl group records, and they worked because they touched a raw nerve of innocence and vulnerability in the adolescent heart. Ellie Greenwich understood the mind of the teenage girls she wrote for the same way Barry Mann knew the mind of the tender-tough punks of his songs, and more. She also had a genius for catchy melodies, monster hooks and a buoyant enthusiasm that jumps right out of her songs.

Jeff Barry had just written his first hit, "Tell Laura I Love Her," when he met Ellie in 1960. She had done some writing, mostly with Tony Powers, and was signed to RCA as a singer, with no success. After a couple of years hustling songs on her own, she accepted a staff position with writer-producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in the hope of learning from them. Soon after, Barry joined her there and they were married. Some of their song demos sounded good enough to release, and calling themselves the Raindrops they had five hits between 1963 and 1964.

In 1964, Leiber and Stoller set up their Red Bird label, on which Barry and Greenwich reached the peak of their talents. They had the opportunity to control each project totally, writing songs and handling production for groups like the Dixie Cups, the Jelly Beans, and ultimately for the Shangri-Las, and handling the production as well. In two years, they wrote and produced several dozen songs, co-produced (with George "Shadow" Morton) all the Shangri-Las hits, and recorded a few things of their own for the label.

Barry and Greenwich had become so heavily involved on the production side (though without receiving credit) that one day they approached Leiber and Stoller about starting a new company to record a demo singer with some pretty good songs of his own, Neil Diamond. When that didn't work out, they took Diamond to another friend, Bert Berns, who'd just started his Bang label after years of production work with Atlantic.

Like Leiber and Stoller, Berns was one of New York's independent maverick geniuses. He welcomed Jeff and Ellie's talents, and with Bang they produced all the early Diamond hits as well as others for the label. Then things started going sour. Diamond broke his contract, leading to years of expensive litigation. Jeff and Ellie divorced at the end of 1965, though they continued working together awhile before Barry moved to California to become a successful writer, arranger, and composer of TV themes.

Greenwich found herself unable to cope with what was happening. It was a difficult time for all the old New York crowd, after years of frenzied motion, creative peaks and constant success. Spector was in retirement, Goffin and King had split, and Ellie was confused by all the acid rock and new social turmoil in the air. Where was there a place for a nice girl from Levittown with heartfelt songs about teenage yearnings?

These writers, so perfectly in step with their time, had nowhere to go in 1966. The choice was either to go with the trend, become heavy and introspective, or retreat in disarray like Spector, Gerry Goffin, and Ellie. While Jeff Barry, the pro tunesmith, seemed to land on his feet, Ellie, whose writing had more passion, humor, gut-honesty, and soul than all the rest put together, was left to pursue one dead-end after another.

In 1973 she made a superb LP (Let It Be Written--Let It Be Sung) for Verve, who saw her perhaps as another Carole King. Unable to go along with their promotional ideas, however, Ellie backed off again and has done nothing since, despite the sincere efforts of many "new wave" girl groups who look to her as a patron saint.

Maybe, as one writer suggested, Ellie Greenwich should marry Phil Spector--for surely the rekindling of these two great talents would put all right with the world again.