| | Ken Fallin Mr. Barry is responsible for the words to some of the most influential teenage love songs of the early '60s sung from the female perspective. At the height of the "girl group" phenomenon窶背hich ran roughly from 1961 to 1966窶派e co-wrote "Be My Baby," "Baby, I Love You," "Chapel of Love," "Leader of the Pack," "River Deep, Mountain High" and dozens of others. In 1964 alone, he had 17 hits on Billboard's pop chart.Fifty years ago this month, Mr. Barry's first girl-group hit co-written with Greenwich and Phil Spector窶杯he Crystals' "Da Doo Ron Ron"窶背as released and went to No. 3. Its overheated word patterns and lyrics about a heart standing still and a boy named Bill captivated a generation of lovelorn girls and set the stage for a long series of angst-ridden singles. Yet Mr. Barry's experience with music and dating was admittedly limited."My songwriting ability probably started with my blind father and intellectually disabled sister," he said. "I had to be simple, clear and supersuccinct when talking to them. I had to make my father see what I was seeing and make my sister understand what I was thinking. The rest was sensitivity and poverty."Born Joel Adelberg in 1938, Mr. Barry spent his early years in Brooklyn. His father was an insurance salesman who, despite his disability, was adept at selling policies by phone. Life changed for Mr. Barry at age 7, when his parents divorced. "My mother wouldn't take a dime from my father and moved me, my sister and my grandfather into her brother's attic in Plainfield, N.J."Four years later, Mr. Barry's family moved back to Brooklyn窶杯o a cramped one-bedroom apartment. "I lived there until I was about 20. There was no money for anything, so I had to use my imagination and rely on my wits. Everything I owned was in one dresser drawer."There was no money to buy records, and the family didn't have a radio or television. Mr. Barry took only one piano lesson and didn't fare well as a phrase-turner. "In high school, we had to write a poem. Mine went: 'I love to write poetry, / I write it all the time, / I just can't seem to get it to rhyme somehow.' The teacher told me to get out."In his spare time, Mr. Barry began writing songs for a doo-wop group he formed called the Tarrytones. "Culture? There were gangs in Brooklyn窶杯hat was our culture. They were out there somewhere, and I was constantly afraid of them."After graduating, Mr. Barry spent three years in the U.S. Army Reserve while studying industrial engineering at City College in Manhattan. "I liked car design and how things worked, but I also wanted to be a singer. A songwriter? What was that? A singer was the only way out of that apartment."Eventually, a family friend who knew Arnold Shaw, a music-publishing executive, wrangled Mr. Barry an audition in 1958. "I sang some of the weird songs I had written. Arnold thought my voice was fine, but he was really knocked out by my lyrics. He asked how much music I knew. I told him just two chords窶任 and G. So he teamed me with writers who knew all the chords."Mr. Barry dropped out of college and began recording singles for RCA. In 1959, when a song was needed for a singer named Ray Peterson, Mr. Barry pitched "Tell Laura I Love Her." "It was originally about a guy gored by a bull who was dying. So I made it a car crash instead, and the song became a Top 10 hit in 1960."Married that same year, Mr. Barry was introduced to Greenwich by family members in 1961. Bonds grew, and he divorced his first wife in late 1961, marrying Greenwich in 1962. Mr. Barry and Greenwich soon joined Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's Trio Music and began churning out songs for the Crystals, the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las and other girl groups. "I never wrote lyrics down窶祢 stil ords11.txt,1,S] l don't," Mr. Barry said. "I sing them, and they come ou Coach Factory Outlet Online t in melody form." The lyrics for "Be My Baby" came to Mr. Barry as Mr. Spector vamped Greenwich's melody line on the piano. "I was beating the side of a steel file cabinet while Phil played窶杯hat's how he got the idea for the song's big opening drum beat." But h Coach Outlet Store ow did Mr. Barry come up with words that won girls' hearts? "I'd first imagine a film of a teenage situation. For 'Be My Baby,' I pictured a couple walking together and entering a room of friends: 'So won't you say you love me? / I'll make you so proud of me, / We'll make 'em turn their heads, / every place we go.'"To write for girls, I had to become one窶祢 had to see Tommy walking down the street. It was like putting on a coat. I had to feel their obsessions, Coach Online Outlet their desires窶罵ove, marriage, socializing, excitement and status."The Beatles and the British Invasion didn't slow Mr. Barry. "When we helped start Red Bird Records with Leiber and Stoller in '64, Ellie and I wrote 'Chapel of Love' with Phil Spector. It went to No. 1 for three weeks that year and knocked the Beatles' 'Love Me Do' out of the top spot. 'Leader of the Pack' and other hits came next." Mr. Barry and Greenwich divorced in 1965 but continued working together. In the years that followed, Mr. Barry co-produced singles by the Monkees and the Archies, discovered and co-produced records for Neil Diamond, and wrote the TV themes for "One Day at a Time," "The Jeffersons" and "Family Ties."Are today's teenage girls different from those 50 years ago? "Today's girls aren't as cynical as you'd think," said Mr. Barry, who remarried in 1974, has four children窶琶ncluding two adult daughters窶蚤nd is considering a Broadway jukebox musical about his life. "Find me a 15-year-old boy singing 'I love you, baby,' and you'll see that girls still believe in true love. I still believe." Mr. Myers writes daily about music at JazzWax.com and is the author of "Why Jazz Happened" (University of California Press). A version of this article appeared April 25, 2013, on page D4 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Girl Groups' Go-to Guy.
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