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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
How the genius of Phil Spector and Ronnie Spector met and created a song of magnificent carnality.
Jan 28, 2002 | There's a photograph of Phil Spector and Veronica Bennett taken in the early '60s, before Miss Bennett became Ronnie Spector, and quite a few years before she became the sad princess locked in the mad prince's tower (which was really a California mansion). The photograph isn't dated, but from the clothes it's clear that it must have been taken sometime shortly after 1963, the year Spector and the Ronettes (Ronnie was their lead singer) released one of the most consumingly beautiful pop songs of all time, "Be My Baby."
Phil stands in the background leaning casually against a mike stand; he's wearing sunglasses too large for his face, but not nearly big enough for his ego. Ronnie is the giantess in the foreground, tall and shapely in a trim-checked pantsuit, her head cocked to one side, her eyes gazing straight at us through heavy, half-closed, smoke-rimmed lids. But her lips are the thing: Curved into a sensual smile, they're 90 percent innocent seduction and 10 percent sneer.
Be my baby -- or else.
The picture -- Ronnie's half of the picture -- is the key to the magnificent carnality of "Be My Baby," the thing that makes it one of the greatest seduction songs of all time, and also either the saddest or the most joyous, depending on the state of mind it catches you in. In both sound and mood it's an iridescent song, one that turns color depending on your perspective -- like fish scales, or swirls of gasoline on the surface of a pond, or those shimmery, shimmying paillettes sewn onto the wiggly dresses worn by any number of '60s girl groups. It's a song about wistfully wanting to draw the object of your desire close, about plumbing the risk that your dream won't come true. And it's also a work of innocent witchcraft, because there's no way most of us can resist drawing close to this singer and this song.
The singer -- the girl who will go on to become the confident looker in that checked pantsuit -- doesn't know her own power. But the smallish guy in the sunglasses does, and how. And so he allows the spell to be worked around him, not in a wall of sound, as it's so often referred to, but in a web. He meets her sunlit magic with lightning bolts, and the combination is killer.
The New York City-based Ronettes, consisting of Ronnie, her sister Estelle and their cousin Nedra Talley, had been together for several years before Phil Spector took them under his wing. It appears he didn't have all that much faith in them originally, but he must have seen them as potentially moldable. The liner notes to the first record they made together, "Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica," included this overtly condescending little story, as relayed by sound engineer Larry Levine: "When I first met the Ronettes I didn't think they were going to be a very good group. Phil had said to me, 'I found this group, they're good looking, but they don't sing too well.' So I said, 'Well, why bother?' He said, 'I kind of promised their mother.'"
If it was a thoughtless remark, at least Phil Spector made good on his word. As the lore has it, although Spector had rehearsed several songs with the group, he was looking for the perfect one, the one that would show Ronnie's voice off like a jewel. Phil invited Ronnie to his penthouse apartment one day, only to disappear into another room -- one with a piano -- from which she could hear him at work with fellow songwriters Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. The song they came up with, "Be My Baby," was recorded in July 1963 at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles. It would become the Ronettes' biggest and most beloved hit.
