Thursday, August 27, 2009

Loss of a Legend: Ellie Greenwich

Ellie Greenwich, an eminent songwriter, producer and singer who made her mark in the early heyday of pop and girl groups, died yesterday of a heart attack at the age of 68.

Image courtesy of last.fm, where you can sign up for free and listen to Ellie Greenwich Radio


Greenwich co-wrote several of her early songs (including "Leader of the Pack" and "Going to the Chapel") with her then-husband, Jeff Barry.  The couple collaborated with producer Phil Spector to churn out hits like "River Deep - Mountain High," "Da Do Ron Ron," "Then He Kissed Me," and "Hanky Panky."1
 
When her marriage to Barry fell apart after just a few years, Greenwich had difficulty reconciling the idealism of her songs with the reality of her own failed love life.  She said:
"… well, the disillusionment, you can imagine: the person who wrote 'Doo Wah Diddy' and 'Chapel Of Love' has gotta be devastated. I realized, those words, 'Till death do us part,' they don't really mean anything. Through the good times and bad times - what happened to that? We're having bad times - why should this be over?"2
She suffered a nervous breakdown after her divorce3, but went on to produce and write more hits.  She helped discover Neil Diamond when he was "'down-and-out songwriter,'" as he put it yesterday, and "'... was one of the most important people in [his] career.'"1 Greenwich's life was made into a Broadway musical, The Leader of the Pack*, and she was a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Most importantly, Greenwich was a prominent woman in an industry overridden with and run by men.  She broke into the biz not as a singer (though she was one), but as a writer and producer, a rarity at the time.  She simultaneously believed in a kind of fairy-tale romance and proved herself a force to be reckoned with in man's world.  

Tracie, over at Jezebel, has put together a particularly wonderful youtube compilation of Greenwich's "impact... on pop culture."   This Manfred Mann video is my favorite, but they are definitely all worth checking out.

Maracas! Apathetic drummer!

Ellie Greenwich wrote songs we have probably all sung too loudly in our cars or into a hairbrush in the privacy of our bedrooms; her lyrics are with us forever.  

*Incidentally, one of the first musicals I saw.  Annie was the first professionally-staged musical I went to as a kid, but my neighbor (infinitely cool just by virtue of being a teenager) growing up was in her high school production of LotP, and I remember clapping so hard at the end that my hands hurt.  It definitely turned me on to theatre in a big way and made me want to do that when I grew up, or, you know, got to high school.

2 comments:

  1. I need to work on my HTML and CSS. I'm sick of all the line stretching with my superscript.

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  2. I think I owned that shirt . . . And her hair looks like half the pictures in my high school yearbook . . .

    ReplyDelete