LA Weekly

Photo by Wild Don Lewis

Hardly anyone’s heard of Jeff Barry, and yet his rhythms are in our blood; his sounds, sensibilities and worldview are part of our collective DNA. When gay couples began lining up to get married in San Francisco last year, their anthem was “Chapel of Love,” which Barry composed with his former wife and Brill Building songwriting partner, Ellie Greenwich. When Brian Wilson experienced his greatest musical epiphany, he was listening to Barry's “Be My Baby.” (Wilson responded particularly well to Barry’s “feminine” style, and covered several Barry-Greenwich compositions with the Beach Boys: “Be My Baby,” “(And) Then He Kissed Me,” “I Can Hear Music.”)

Barry’s also responsible for some of the greatest American pop-songwriting traditions. Take the tragic-accident trope: Besides co-writing “The Leader of the Pack,” Barry had his first hit with “Tell Laura I Love Her” (originally about a rodeo), in which the young hero dies in a stock-car race. The proud nonsense-lyric/slang tradition? Barry penned “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy,” “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Hanky Panky” and “Bang-Shang-a-Lang.”

Barry co-invented the girl-group sound and phenomenon, writing and/or producing for the Ronettes, the Exciters, the Dixie Cups, the Crystals and the Shangri-Las. But his influence as a producer didn’t stop there. Barry experimented early with Caribbean sounds (“Iko Iko,” “Montego Bay”), and discovered Neil Diamond and created the iconic sound of Diamond’s great early recordings (“Cherry, Cherry,” “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” “Red, Red Wine,” “Kentucky Woman,” “Thank the Lord for the Night Time”) — a sound he reproduced on the Monkees’ cover of Diamond’s “I’m a Believer.”

Barry’s Monkees work also led to a project especially dear to his heart, the Archies, whose bubblegum anthems (including “Sugar, Sugar”) recombined for children the elements that had made his early Phil Spector work special: whimsy, romance, hooks aplenty and a dose of magical gibberish.

It was an honor to sit for an afternoon in a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and ask Barry how the hell he did it.


L.A. WEEKLY: How did you write “Be My Baby”?
JEFF BARRY: I don’t know! I don’t know how I wrote any song. It’s not a how.


Sometimes I wonder how much of the Phil Spector “wall of sound” was Jeff Barry.
None. As I recall, when we were writing “Be My Baby,” I was banging on the file cabinet — you ever see the [short] ones that you roll around? I would always get a chair and bang on it; the top sounded like a snare drum, and the side was like a kick drum. I would sing and make up words, and play the piano. And to my recollection I came up with [Barry sounds out the opening drumbeat to “Be My Baby”].


That’s the ultimate Phil Spector signature!
No. The signature is the sound of what he did arrangement-wise. The epitome is “River Deep — Mountain High” — a bunch of acoustic guitars all at once.


But everyone knows that as the Phil Spector drumbeat.
Well, that’s okay. It’s not original to me, either. Probably the first time I heard it was working with Lieber and Stoller.

Lyrically, [when you’re writing], you want to come up with something that everyone is aware of, but no one ever talks about. Like a couple — and they know they’re cool. “We’ll make them turn their heads every place we go” [from “Be My Baby”] — I thought that was cool. ’Cause everyone’s going to smirk at that, relate to that, and they’ll remember that. And you know, all the rest of it is “The night we met I knew I needed you so, and if I had the chance, I’d never let you go.” And that’s stuff we’ve heard.


Yeah, but “I’ll make you so proud of me . . .” is gorgeous.
Yes, exactly, the second verse — I really like that second verse!

I end up writing lyrics that are more feminine than masculine. I can’t help it. I try to write something butch and this romantic thing comes out anyway.


Sometimes I suspect you wrote “Be My Baby” all by yourself.
No. Let me tell you this. If someone put a gun to my head and said, write a hit song or I’ll pull the trigger, and I said, can I co-write? And they said, yeah, you got one phone call — I would call Phil Spector. Maybe not at the moment, but...


Are you still friends? Do you talk?
[Sighs.] No.


But that’s not because he’s accused of murder.
No, we haven’t talked for a while.


Is that romanticism actually how you are as a person, or just as a songwriter?
It’s the same thing. I’m one person. I never thought about it, but I’m not Jeff Barry the guy, the husband, the father, the friend, the boyfriend, the lover — and then Jeff Barry the songwriter, record producer, lyricist, music-business guy. It’s the same guy. If I had a switch to write love songs and then go home and beat my wife —


That’s not unheard of!
I think you are what you eat; you are what you write. When I was writing those songs, I was socially innocent. I hadn’t been around the world and been with a million girls. I really had a very simplistic ’60s, teenager-in-the-’50s kind of outlook on life. It was simple and romantic and naive.

“Chapel of Love,” I mean, I performed that at a concert [a while ago], and I said, here’s one of the most naive songs I ever wrote. I sang it, “Today’s the day we’ll say I do . . . ,” and I said, here’s the naive part, “And we’ll never be lonely anymore.” That’s bullshit. But when I wrote that in the ’60s,