Spector’s swagger made her a rock ’n’ roll immortal
Even now, more than half a century after it came out, “Be My Baby” has the power to overwhelm.
One of the most intense pop records of all time, the Ronettes’ 1963 girl-group classic is a study in toomuch: a quivering, trembling, throbbing little symphony pitched at such a high emotional register that the song made as much sense opening a Martin Scorsese movie about inner-city violence as it did a Patrick Swayze movie about forbidden romance.
Tune out the swooning strings and the madly thumping drums, though — focus instead on Ronnie Spector’s lead vocal — and what you hear in “Be My Baby” is something like total control.
Yes, Spector, who died of cancer Wednesday at age 78, is singing about giving herself over to love; no, her performance is not uninterested in the ecstasy of abandon. But as captured in the slightly serrated edges and the swaggering forward thrust of her voice, this is a woman who knows what she wants and how to get it.
It’s right there in the song’s first couplet: “The night we met I knew I needed you so,” she recalls, landing on that final word with a gymnast’s precision. “And if I had the chance I’d never let you go.” She can already see the relationship with the guy she’s talking to, already imagine folks turning their heads on the street to catch a glimpse of what they’ve got.
As Veronica “Ronnie” Bennett lays out her vision the music continues to swell, the other Ronettes (older sister Estelle Bennett and cousin Nedra Talley) filling in the sound like a couple fills a new home with furniture; eventually, the song crashes to a stop for a second so everybody can regain their bearings.
Everybody but Ronnie, that is: She just picks back up after the drum break, keeping her New York subway train of a voice pointed toward eternity.
Along with her sexy, street-smart look, the fortitude in Spector’s singing helped carve out space for fresh ideas about women in pop and in society. At a moment when girl groups were largely expected to fulfil conventions of decorum, hers was a voice of freedom that foretold her own liberation from Phil Spector, the producer-turned-husbandturned-tormentor who essentially imprisoned her at their home in Beverly Hills, as she wrote in her groundbreaking 1990 memoir, until she escaped barefoot in 1972.
Ronnie worked steadily in the studio and on the road after the Ronettes, — one overlooked highlight was a gutsy mid-’70s disco single, “You’d Be Good for Me” — but what connected with listeners was music that reaffirmed a familiar impression.
Most notably there was “Take Me Home Tonight,” the glossy and muscular Eddie Money single that brought Ronnie back toward the top of the charts in 1986. It’s about a guy trying to persuade a girl not to leave him; he’s throwing out every line he can think of — he can’t sleep, it’s too dangerous for her to walk home, he knows she wants to stay, too — until at last he admits that he’s the one “frightened in all this darkness” and that he needs a “guardian angel” to protect him.
That’s when Ronnie swoops in, of course, to deliver her signature lyric as only she could — the sweet, scratchy, soulful voice of authority, still reassuring others even as she keeps herself safe.