#Let5D0It 1: “Be My Baby” (1963)
Label image via Discogs
1. The Ronettes, “Be My Baby” (1963)
(Spector/Greenwich/Barry) prod. Phil Spector
Philles 116 | #4 R&B, #2 US, #4 UK
“For every kiss you give me, I’ll give you three”
Dun. Da-dun DAH. Dun. Da-dun DAH. Shakers, piano, guitar, castanets, and miles and miles of echo. Then her voice comes in: a little nasal, a little tough, a Washington Heights girl who’d just as soon be chewing bubble gum and flicking her heavily winged eyes uninterestedly over you while leaning coolly against whatever surface is most convenient, but no instead she’s standing here making a confession. She loves you, she wants you, she needs you. The words are conventionalized, banal, cheap jukebox poetry. The crack in her voice, the hint of hoarseness in the back of her throat, is real. Strings swirl up, other voices sashay in and sing ooh-ahh-ooh’s behind her. The music swells, towers and crashes like a tidal wave. She’s nineteen years old and she wants you to be her baby.
She’s twenty years old and she’s being arrested for prostitution after leaving her producer’s hotel room. “The night we met I knew I needed you so.” She’s twenty-three and her paranoid, jealous producer boyfriend won’t let her go anywhere near the Beatles on their final concert tour, so her cousin takes her place in the opening act. “We’ll make um turn their heads every place we go.” She’s twenty-four and the hits have dried up but she’s marrying famous record producer Phil Spector at City Hall at the insistence of her mother, who has never been happy about their live-in arrangement. “You know I will adore you till eternity.” He keeps her a prisoner, entombs her career, threatens to kill her and put her body on display in a glass coffin if she ever tries to leave him. “And if I had the chance I’d never let you go.” She’s twenty-nine and running barefoot from a razor-wired, security-guarded, camera-surveilled mansion in Beverly Hills. “So come on and please.” She’s thirty-one and signing away all future record earnings so she can be divorced from a glowering monster. “Be my little baby.” She’s fifty-nine and the New York State Court of Appeals determines that she is, in fact, entitled to a share of royalties from her recordings. “Say you’ll be my darlin’.” She’s sixty and her ex-husband kills an actress he had met earlier that day in his home. “Be my baby now.” She’s seventy-seven and he dies of COVID-19 in prison. “Woah-oh-oh-oh, ohhh ohhh ohhh.” Almost exactly a year later, cancer takes her too in her Connecticut home, surrounded by loved ones. Dun. Da-dun DAH.
The diabolical entwining of Veronica Bennett’s life with and by the man who produced her most famous and beloved and, not to overstate anything, immortal work is one of the great tragedies of pop, the equal of the crash of plane N3794N or any overdose at the age of twenty-seven. The Ronettes’ pre-Philles singles are undistinguished but lively; Phil Spector’s often-repeated (and widely believed, even by pop fanatics) claim that he plucked them from obscurity and made them the stars that their lack of talent and ability never could have is not just transparently self-serving but entirely belied by his obsessive efforts to prevent Ronnie from existing and especially recording outside of his sphere of influence. That voice, limited and even fragile as it was, and even more her tender-tough image and persona, belonged to her, never to him, and it was not (just) the Spector production that made Brian Wilson, George Harrison, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and Joey Ramone want to write songs for her to sing. If history had slid into a different groove, if the Ronettes had recorded “Don’t Worry Baby” in 1964, gotten out of their contract with Spector, been allowed to grow and change and explore even in the restrictive ways that the similarly trapped Tina Turner was instead of being frozen eternally in a diorama labeled 1963–65, if Ronnie had been allowed not just the packaging but the support that Diana Ross or Dionne Warwick got in the Sixties — ah, what’s the use of what ifs? Ronnie was a mixed-race working-class “bad girl” from the hood, not a middle-class church girl from the Garden State or the Midwest. Anyway, she got forty-three years of a solo career after wresting herself loose from Spector’s clutches, and since her legion of fans included some of the most famous and influential people in popular music, she never had to go begging to the oldies circuit. Her last record was released in 2017, a day before her seventy-fourth birthday.
Phil Spector was not the first abusive man to assume credit for the success of a young woman singer (the Svengali archetype of the 1890s resonated as much for its universal recognizability as for its antisemitism), nor would he be the last. But because pop attracts myths, and the myth of the “genius” behind the Wall of Sound is a persistent one, thanks in great part to Spector’s own self-aggrandizing promotion, he has come, especially in the last twenty years, to represent a kind of poison at the heart of pop, if not of entertainment itself. There is a very real sense in which the old colonialist canard of the uncivilized tribe who ritually sacrifices a virgin to ensure a bountiful crop is in fact true of the modern global entertainment industrial complex, that the lives and hearts and hopes of thousands if not millions of young women (and worse still, children) must be broken upon the recklessness, appetite, and egotism of powerful and money-making men in order for the sausage to continue to grind, that any amount of sexual and physical and psychological abuse is worth a brilliant music career or a beloved television institution or a raft of Oscar nominations or even just a D+ standup career. In the foregoing pages I have praised the work of many people who I know have done awful things, and I am sure many more of whose sins I remain ignorant. But then few of their sins are as embedded into the fabric of the music as Spector’s.
Anyway. Phil Spector is no more single-handedly responsible for “Be My Baby” than David O. Selznick is for King Kong. Jack Nietzsche’s orchestrations, Larry Levine’s sound engineering, Sonny Bono’s production assistance, Hal Blaine’s drumming, and dozens of other instrumentalists, singers, and studio rats — Cher is in there somewhere — are the ones who built the wall. And none of it would work without the teenage girl trembling with nerves who had been practicing her woah-oh-ohs in the studio bathroom minutes before. Even the song itself has never been convincingly covered in any mode but the explicitly nostalgic; without either the massive sweep of the Wrecking Crew or the small pleading voice at the center of the hurricane, it’s a trifle, one of the least in the Greenwich/Barry canon.
Which is what makes it perfect pop. It can’t be anything else but a record. Try it in any other context — the Act 1 curtain of a jukebox musical, the bones of a jazz workout, electronically retooled into a disco or techno or EDM banger — and it simply won’t work. The stop-start heartbeat rhythm (Dun. Da-dun DAH) that introduces and, at the climactic middle eight, interrupts it makes it impossible to dance to, and even the main section is too slow and stately; rhythmically, it has more in common with “Pomp and Circumstance” than “Twist and Shout.” But cue it up again and it takes the breath away all over again. Brian Wilson spending the entirety of the 1970s playing it over and over again in a marijuana fog is a cautionary tale but a tempting or at least an understandable one. If you could just crack it open a little bit more widely, maybe you could fall into that world, and Ronnie would be singing not to the generalized “you” of pop-song convention, but to you, specifically, forever and ever.
First encounter:
In 2003, at the automotive filing job, I listened to the only in-print CD available to me, ABKCO’s 1992 Best of the Ronettes, on headphones and found it muffled and thin, at complete odds with how Spector’s Wall of Sound was described by reviewers and critics. I had better luck getting lost in Spector’s Righteous Brothers productions, but the girl-group stuff, frozen in amber by two legendary music-biz assholes, sounded airless and shriveled compared to the compression-maxing reissues I was listening to otherwise.
In 2004, at the bad job, I was checking Pitchfork’s Tracks column daily and downloading whatever sounded interesting. Liverpool indie-pop band Johnny Boy’s “You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve” cropped up there; I liked it, it became part of my regular listening. The heartbeat drum intro (Dun. Da-dun DAH) sounded familiar; but I associated it with their tinkling widescreen kitchen-sink pop and thought no more about it.
In 2005, Danish noise-pop duo the Raveonettes, whose Jesus and Mary Chain (Dun. Da-dun DAH.) cosplay I knew and liked from Pitchfork reviews, released their second album, featuring an aging Ronnie Spector on “Ode to L.A.”. That, implausibly enough, was when everything finally clicked into place, and I suddenly understood Bruce Springsteen’s and Elvis Costello’s “woah-oh-ohs” as the tributes to Ronnie they always were. I became obsessed with her post-Ronettes work, and still count “Try Some, Buy Some” and “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” among my favorite relatively obscure pop treasures.
In 2006, Rhino’s One Kiss Leads to Another: Girl Group Sounds Lost and Found tempted me from the Tower Records box set pile, but I couldn’t ever justify the expense. Still, it nagged at me: why did pop music by and for young women have to be rescued from oblivion and have a case made for it when the boy bands of the same era (whose music I had already internalized half a decade ago) were endlessly reissued and kept in print and had their own dedicated rows in the same store?
In 2007, I took a solo road trip to L.A. to catch two shows: the release party for Paul F. Tompkins’ Impersonal at the UCB and the Pipettes at the Troubadour — the Pipettes (also introduced to me by Pitchfork) were my new favorite band, a blend of irony and sincerity, camp and reverence, nostalgia and modernity. “Girly music,” as I was still kind of calling it in the back of my head, was becoming increasingly central to my understanding of pop.
In 2008, I found myself beginning to listen less and less to the oldies and classic-rock stations and more and more to the current pop and R&B and hip-hop stations, not sure how to assimilate what I was hearing because it was so different from the classic pop (and classic-pop-inflected modern indie) I had been soaking in for nearly a decade, and I kept reminding myself that there were young women out there listening to the radio too and loving this music desperately and that they deserved as sympathetic a hearing as the young women who had bought Ronettes and Crystals singles in 1963. And so I taught myself how to love contemporary pop, just in time to ride a new wave of brilliant chartpop by and for young women: Gaga, Ke$ha, RiRi, Nicki, Katy, Taylor, Miley, Carly Rae, and more beyond, until the tide shifted and sleazy men reasserted chart dominance once more.
In 2009, I started posting on Tumblr and found myself part of a thriving music-critic discussion ecosystem, which has continued on Twitter and newsletters and Bluesky and wherever else it must go next.
In 2012, when Spotify came to the US, I learned that the Spector library had at last been remastered to compete with contemporary standards.
In 2021, my second most popular tweet ever was about “Be My Baby,” the day after Phil Spector’s death.
In 2024, the first thing I did after making a list with 50 entries was to put “Be My Baby” at #1. Dun. Da-dun DAH.
