WHO PUT THE BOMP?

Vanities

Ellie Greenwich scored America's adolescence. Now she’s back!

WTHAT becomes a Legend most? Leave the sable to Lena Horne. In the case of songwriter Ellie Greenwich, it’s a musical revue called Leader of the Pack!, which wraps her songs—“Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Be My Baby,” “Leader of the Pack,” “Chapel of Love”—in vintage leather and mohair and emerges as an exciting, affectionate tribute to a living pop genius.

Brooklyn-born and Long Island-bred, Greenwich got her start in the music business right after college and a three-and-ahalf-week stint as a high-school English teacher. She was signed, practically off the street, as a staff writer to Trio Music, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s publishing company, headquartered in the hit machine known as the Brill Building. Greenwich and another writer, Jeff Barry, began collaborating (and soon married), and in 1963 the hits started rolling with “Da Doo Ron Ron.” Greenwich and Barry didn’t invent the girl-group sound, but they interpreted it better than just about anyone. The Ronettes, the Shangri-Las, the Dixie Cups, the Crystals—all had their biggest hits with GreenwichBarry’s irresistible Top 40 anthems.

Greenwich is now forty-three. The seventies were a disappointing time for her, personally and artistically, but the music has come around again. Hits by Cyndi Lauper (Greenwich sings background on “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”) and Tracey Ullman have re-established the place of the frothy, hook-filled pop song, a style that had floundered amid what Greenwich calls the sheer “heaviness” of seventies pop.

After toiling for a decade as a jingle writer and background singer, she’s back in demand as a songwriter, with recent work for Lauper, Irene Cara, Nona Hendryx, and Ellen Foley. She’s been talking with Diana Ross, and recently had lunch with Bob Dylan. She was a little mystified by his interest (“You want a political song, Bob?”), until he explained that he wanted to collaborate on a pure pop song. She had to put him on hold for a while.

Resting up in the music room of her Manhattan apartment before a performance, Greenwich perches on a piano bench, wearing black velour sweatpants and a pink-and-white sweatshirt. There are two charms around her neck: one that says “Da Doo Ron Ron,” the other a quarter-size gold record. She’s crammed just about everything she needs to make music into this small room. There’s a “porta-studio” for recording, a piano, stacks of tapes, memorabilia (framed record jackets from her old group, the Raindrops, and her solo record, inspired by, but hardly as lucrative as, Carole King’s Tapestry), and tchotchkes bearing homilies like “Hey, music business, let’s put the fun back in.”

Her schedule is running double-time lately, but it hasn’t killed her enthusiasm for the show, which will open on Broadway this month. The idea for Leader of the Pack! came from Greenwich’s friend Allan Pepper, who runs Manhattan’s Bottom Line. He wanted to do a revue based on her life and music, and wanted her to appear in it. She was willing to consider the proposition, but balked at performing, which she’d always avoided out of stage fright. When she finally agreed to let them go ahead with the project, they cajoled her into singing from the audience during rehearsals. They’d hand her a microphone and ask her, between bites of fruit salad, to provide a lead vocal—just to get the sound right. Little by little, she found herself being written into the show. “I thought, I’m not gonna wait another twenty years, and with this kind of support system, what better time and what better way?’ ’

The support system has enough collective juice to send Challenger into space for a year. Darlene Love, who looks about eighteen, makes her oldies— “Wait ’Til My Bobby Gets Home’ ’ and “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Gonna Marry’’—seem like brand-new goodies. Snaggletoothed little Annie Golden, her foal’s legs wobbling uncertainly on stiletto heels, belts out a “Leader of the Pack’’ so full of throat-catching drama you almost forget the Shangri-Las. Golden, who played the pregnant hippie waif in the movie Hair and fronted a Brooklyn band called the Shirts, was stealing the show by the end of its run in May. In the first half, which consists of vignettes from Ellie’s Brill Building days, lanky Ula Hedwig plays the young songwriter with awkward, impetuous charm. Phil Spector, who produced some of Greenwich-Barry’s biggest hits, is impersonated by Paul Shaffer, the former Saturday Night Live pianist who’s now playing Doc Severinson to David Letterman’s Johnny Carson on Letterman’s late-night TV show. Wearing a cape and tinted granny glasses, Shaffer has Spector’s tics down pat, says Greenwich. “He’s being kind sometimes. Phil was a wonderfully talented, unique person, but nevertheless very strange. All those noises. Yes, that’s him.’’ Ronnie Spector, lead Ronette and Phil’s ex, found Shaffer’s mad-scientist turn so close to home she sent him a telegram that read, “You make a wonderful Phil.”

Greenwich ran into Mary of the Shangri-Las after a performance last January. “The Shangri-Las, they were okay,” Greenwich says of the four tough chicks from Queens. “They were sixteen, and compared to me they were tough.

There was a little rub initially, but then we had a big blowout in the ladies’ room in the Brill Building one day. It was fine from then on.” Their 1984 reunion was tearful. “We hugged and kissed and cried, and she said, ‘Now that we’re both grown-up, can we, like, have dinner or lunch one day?’ ”

Jeff Barry, from whom she’s now divorced, didn’t see the show, which rankles Greenwich slightly. “I don’t know exactly what’s going on. I got telegrams, he was in town, he came by, but he never went to see it. We’re not friends, though I think we’re friendlier now than we have been over the past fifteen years, probably because he’s on the West Coast and I’m here. ” Other friends and strangers are eager to press their thanks on her: “People have said, ‘I was in another world. I lost myself.’ That’s what it’s about."

Lisa Henricksson