Born Veronica Bennett, Spector, who grew up in New York’s Spanish Harlem, has sung in The Ronettes with her older sister Estelle and their niece Nedra Talley since 1961. Success was not long in coming for the trio.
That only came when producer Phil Spector took care of them. Especially the raw and at the same time tender, ever yearning voice of Ronnie, as Veronica came to call himself, made a big impression on him when he invited the trio for a kind of audition in the spring of 1963.
Together with composer duo Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich he wrote Be My Baby, which was recorded in Los Angeles with the best studio musicians imaginable, the so-called Wrecking Crew. The intro with drummer Hal Blaine’s bomb-do-do-bomb hits, the technically not perfectly sung – and precisely for that reason well-functioning – vocals and the almost impenetrable wall of sound (Wall of Sound) that Spector built around the song: after For almost sixty years the song has lost none of its luster.
Be My Baby was not the only success for the Ronettes in the early 1960s. Baby, I Love You and Walking in the Rain also proved indestructible.
Tyrant
The same cannot be said of the marriage between Ronnie and Phil. It was, as Ronnie in 1990 in her autobiography Be My Baby wrote, love at first sight, but Phil behaved like a tyrant who humiliated, mistreated and imprisoned his wife. ‘A brilliant producer, but a lousy husband’, she still euphemistically described the producer who was later convicted of murder when he passed away a year ago.
Ronnie Spector managed to escape the marriage, but was not allowed to sing her own hits for years. She fought in vain for decades for a better distribution of music rights.
Despite this, she continued to sing and record. Be My Baby or the masterly version of I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus it didn’t make her forget, but there was always a new generation that embraced her. Unforgettable in 1973 was the way director Martin Scorsese Be My Baby used under the opening shot by Mean Streets.
Timeless
Although her Ronettes were the figureheads of the Girl Group Sound of the 1960s, Spector (she kept the name because of its recognizability) was generously included in the rock circuit. In 1976 her career got a boost from Stevie Van Zandt, punk band the Ramones adored her and in 2006 Spector recorded an album with rock and punk musicians.
Beautiful is still her version of Johnny Thunders’ You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory. True words. But Be My Baby escapes memories or nostalgia; a timeless masterpiece of less than three minutes.