Ronettes - Be My Baby

my mama had this on vinyl

http://www.youtube.com/wa...ONH3hIjO3c

Ronnie Spector

One of the greatest pop songs ever recorded. I love it, and that was a fun clip. Thanks for posting that! One of the comments mentioned that the other two Ronettes didn't actually sing. That right? I never knew that.

ok I can hear the Ramones in that.

heartbeatocean said:

TommyRoss said:

As Brian Wilson said, "Be My Baby" is the greatest pop record ever made. That may very well be so.

She was sooooo sexy

Stax said:

The Ramones were huge Ronettes and 60's girl group fans and covered the Ronnette's "Baby I Love You."

Now, we've established that Ronnie Spector is singing that song specifically to me a long time ago...



...So back the f**k off!


Own it, love it...



...


tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

GangstaFam said:

Ronnie Spector

Ronnie's spectre
Sunday March 26, 2006
The Observer



As leader of the Ronettes she was the sassiest Sixties singer around ... until she married record producer Phil Spector and spent five years as his prisoner in Hollywood. They divorced 30 years ago but, as Sean O'Hagan discovers, the shadow of her ex-husband - soon to stand trial for murder - still looms large.

Ronnie Spector Greenfield strolls into the nondescript foyer of the Sheraton hotel in Danbury, Connecticut, a few paces behind her husband, Jonathan. Her face is hidden behind large shades, and an extravagantly floppy hat sits atop her mane of dark hair. She looks like an ageing baby doll, diminutive and fragile under her shapeless winter coat. The shades and the hat remain in place for the whole of the interview and so does Jonathan, who is also her manager, minder and constant chaperone. 'I'm here regardless,' he says, when I ask him to leave. 'We've been doing this for 25 years, and I have to stick around in order to facilitate the process.'

I would have thought that, at 62, Ronnie was perfectly capable of speaking for herself but it seems this is not the case. She remains silent as Jonathan drawls on, playing nervously with an unlit cigarette, while he tells me what's good for her and what isn't. 'She's already had to hire council to avoid getting subpoenaed,' he sighs, managing somehow to sound both exhausted and exasperated, 'and because of that we cannot get anywhere involved in having anything printed that opens up a whole other can of worms with the guy she has already spent a quarter of a century dealing with in court.'

The completion of this strung-out sentence seems to exhaust Jonathan, who seems slightly disconnected, and he slides further down in his chair, his eyes falling shut beneath his woolly hat. He remains like that for the rest of the interview, which is one way of 'facilitating the process', I guess.

The 'guy' in question, of whom Ronnie is forbidden to speak, is her ex-husband, Phil Spector, whom she left in 1973 and divorced in 1974, after five dreadful years as a virtual prisoner in her own Hollywood home, but who continues to cast a long, dark shadow over her life. His psychological hold on her is such that she never once refers to him by his actual name in the course of our conversation.

The 'can of worms' to which Jonathan refers is Phil Spector's impending trial for the murder of Lana Clarkson, a 40-year-old B-movie actress who died from gunshot wounds in his Californian mansion in February 2003. It was scheduled to start next month, when, coincidentally, Ronnie releases her latest album, the optimistically titled The Last of the Rock Stars, but has just been postponed until September.

'I just want to get on stage and sing and be happy,' she says, plaintively, in a voice that is a dead ringer for that of Janice, the loud and trashy Noo Yoiker who sometimes appeared on early episodes of Friends as Chandler's on-off squeeze. 'That's all I've ever wanted, and, this time, I feel I'm really getting there, so I can't let someone else take it from me again. They're trying to get me to go out there and testify, but I cannot go through that again in my whole life. No way, I'd be a basket case. Believe me, I'm not a happy camper about this. It upsets me. It's not really a good subject for me right now.'

As Jonathan's ears prick up beneath his woolly hat, she pointedly steers the conversation towards her new album, which is surprisingly good. The voice that soundtracked a thousand wet dreams in the Sixties is still a thing of ragged but powerful beauty, though, inevitably, the best songs recall the Ronettes in all their innocent and suggestive glory. While there is nothing here as groundbreaking as the epochal 'Be My Baby', as windswept as 'Walking in the Rain', or as heart-stirring as 'Baby, I Love You', there is enough to suggest that Ronnie Spector could yet pull off a late comeback of sorts at her third attempt.

She has cajoled the likes of Keith Richards and Patti Smith to lend a hand, as well as young contenders such as the Rave-onettes and the Greenhornes. She covers songs by the Ramones and Johnny Thunders. The Last of the Rock Stars might have been more aptly titled after the Thunders song 'You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory' as its underlying theme seems to be the shedding of one life and the tentative late embrace of another. For all her tribulations, which read like a veritable gothic rock'n'roll soap opera, she is certainly not lacking in confidence when it comes to talking up her talents.

'I look around me and I don't see any rock'n'roll at the moment,' she says. 'Instead it's all choreography and stylists and wigs and stuff. It's like they're afraid to let the music breathe. No one has their own identity like the Ronettes did back in the day. We had the skirts with the slits up the side, sort of tough, sort of Spanish Harlem cool, but sweet too. We didn't have no dancers, we didn't have no goddamn wigs.'

Her laugh is oddly infectious, but at times she seems oddly overexcited, and talks 19-to-the-dozen, one topic flowing without pause into another only tangentially connected. When I ask, for instance, about her collaboration with Keith Richards on a song called 'All I Want', she says, 'We only live 10 minutes away from each other but we were writing this song for years. Things kept holding us up, Bin Laden and stuff like that. But, you know, the Stones were my opening act in the Sixties. I loved those British guys, the way they just stood there and shook their hair. There was no alcohol back then, and no drugs. I remember people bringing cakes back to us after a show, but I never even smelled marijuana back then.'

Phew, I say, but she just giggles and keeps right on going, recounting a surreal anecdote from the pre-swinging Sixties in which she and the young Richards left their shared tour bus in search of food when it was stuck in fog 'near Manchester or Lincolnshire or somewhere like that where they have all those little English cottages and sheep and stuff'. The mind boggles at the notion of her in her beehive and mascara, and Keith in his drainpipes and cockatoo barnet, appearing out of the mist in someone's front garden, but the story ends happily with the Stones and the Ronettes and their respective road crews tucking into tea and scones in some mystified farmer's front room.

'There were riots at some of the shows, too,' she says, lest I think touring with the Stones was all bucolic bliss. 'The English audiences had never seen anything like the Ronettes. We looked innocent and wild, that was our thing. We played a show for the American troops in Germany and the guys were having orgasms on the floor. I was like, "What are they doin'? Ain't no dance I recognise." Then it was, "Oh my God! Get me out of here!" These guys came on stage with machine guns and escorted us out of there in a bullet-proof truck. It was a scene.'

Before she caused mayhem with her suggestive stage persona, Ronnie was just plain Veronica Bennett, born in 1943 in New York's Spanish Harlem. As a child, she was an outsider due to her exotic looks - her mother was black and Cherokee, her father white - but her voice, she says, made her popular. She paid her dues the hard way at the weekly amateur nights at Harlem's Apollo Theater, famously grabbing the microphone when her younger cousin froze before the most intimidating audience in New York. Her teenage hero was the doomed Frankie Lymon, who sang 'Why Do Fools Fall in Love' at the tender age of 13, and was dead of a drug overdose at 25. It was Frankie, she says, that made her want to sing and be a pop star. It was Phil, though, that made those pubescent dreams come true.

Ronnie met Phil when she was 20. His fame was such that Tom Wolfe famously christened him 'the First tycoon of teen', describing him as 'the first millionaire businessman to rise up out of the teenage netherworld, king of rock'n'roll producers'. Phil Spector had written and produced his first Number One hit song, 'To Know Him Is To Love Him' by the Teddy Bears, at 17, and quickly moulded the Ronettes - Ronnie, her sister, Estelle, and cousin, Nedra - into the foxiest purveyors of a certain kind of overblown teen angst, one part innocent, one part profane, that perfectly caught the changing tenor of the time. Her soulful, street-corner voice, reflected through Phil Spector's famed Wall of Sound production technique, was the sound of mid-Sixties American girl power in all its over-heated, pubescent drama. 'Be My Baby', in particular, remains one of those rare records that articulates a pivotal moment in pop culture when the notion of the bad girl as role model was formed. Not by accident did Madonna later say, 'I want to look like Ronnie Spector sounds.'

Ronnie's marriage to Phil coincided with the sudden waning of his spectacular but short-lived success, and, as he struggled with his creative demons, his moods turned blacker. 'My honeymoon night was spent on the floor in the bathroom with my mother,' she later recounted in her racy memoir, Be My Baby, How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts and Madness, published in 1989. 'The next morning when I got up, two men were putting barbed wire and gates around the mansion.' From that moment on, Ronnie's friends and family were barred from visiting his sprawling Beverly Hills home, and during one spell she was granted permission to leave but once a year on their wedding anniversary. In some ways, you suspect, she is still trying to escape his clutches.

'I never tried to kill myself or anything,' she says, when I ask how bad it became back then. 'I just knew I had to leave but I didn't know how. There was barbed wire. Dogs.' She picks up another cigarette. 'I knew I was going to die there, though,' she says, quietly. 'I don't know much else, but I can tell you that. I knew in my heart.'

Alongside the equally abusive Ike Turner and the demonic Jerry Lee Lewis, Phil Spector has achieved a kind of gilded notoriety among connoisseurs of Pop Babylon. His paranoia is now the stuff of legend: he once insisted that Ronnie always place an inflatable life-sized model of himself in the back seat of her car while she drove around Los Angeles. Likewise his incandescent rages, which erupted at the slightest perceived provocation. He famously discharged a gun into the studio ceiling while working with John Lennon, and later held a loaded gun to Leonard Cohen's head. In an interview conducted months before the Clarkson shooting, Spector admitted that he suffered from bipolar disorder and described himself as 'relatively insane'.

In August 1998, when Ronnie went to court to begin her protracted but ultimately successful suit for the retrieval of unpaid royalties amounting to $2 million, she claimed he had frequently pulled a gun on her during their marriage and even once threatened to kill her unless she surrendered custody of the couple's children. Last year, though, when she was door-stepped by the New York Daily News after his arrest, she seemed to have revised her opinion somewhat. 'I'm, like, devastated, really,' she said. 'He was my husband, you know. I had never seen him violent like that, with a gun or anything. I feel awful. I don't think he would do anything like this.' When reminded by the reporter of her previous court testimony that her ex-husband had once tried to kill her, she added. 'Not personally, though, that was with a hit man.' The absence of irony in that last statement speaks volumes about Ronnie Spector's singular worldview.

I ask her, in conclusion, if she has any regrets. She pauses for perhaps the first time in the interview. 'Put it this way, I used to cry myself to sleep every night. I missed singing so much. And performing. Man, I missed it so much. I'd go to the studio but the records never came out and I never knew why. I cried too when I lost my apartment on Riverside Drive, that was my dream home. I used to walk by there every day as a kid and say, "One day ... one day ... " I made it there, then I lost it. In fact, by being with this so-called millionaire, I lost everything I owned.'

For an instant, the bubbly persona disappears and you catch a glimpse of the continuing cost of her one monumental wrong move all those years ago. Then she shakes her head furiously as if to rid it of all the bad memories. 'I don't do regrets,' she says firmly, 'and I ain't bitter. As I get older, I think maybe everything in life was meant to be. The way I look at it, I'm still here. I'm still singing. People still love my voice. And I made some great pop records, songs that people hold in their hearts through their whole lives. Ain't nobody can take that away from me.'

Ron facts

Born - Veronica Bennett on 10 August 1943 in New York.

Early career - Made her first record, aged 13. A meeting with Phil Spector in 1963 triggered worldwide success for the Ronettes.

She says - 'We used to have a ball, partying with Dylan and the Stones. Hendrix would lead the house band and I'd sing along.'

They say - 'Everyone loves Ronnie' - Steven Van Zandt of the E-Street Band.
'"Be My Baby" was the most perfect pop record of all time' - Brian Wilson

· The Last of the Rock Stars is out on 10 April

http://observer.guardian....48,00.html
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=




tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

Ronnie Spector: The Original Bad Girl of Rock & Roll.

Respect it.

theAudience said:

Stax said:

The Ramones were huge Ronettes and 60's girl group fans and covered the Ronnette's "Baby I Love You."

tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

theAudience said:

Wow, I was just listening to this today. I had put it on a playlist just yesterday for a party we had last night.
[Edited 12/17/06 13:24pm]

"I saw a woman with major Hammer pants on the subway a few weeks ago and totally thought of you." - sextonseven

My shop! www.cafepress.com/spacequake

theAudience said:

"I saw a woman with major Hammer pants on the subway a few weeks ago and totally thought of you." - sextonseven

My shop! www.cafepress.com/spacequake

heartbeatocean said:

theAudience said:

I like the hair.

phunkdaddy said:

VoicesCarry said:

phunkdaddy said:

How could some stanking dork like ronnie spector pick up
on a fine sister like that back in the 60's damn. I did not
know they even had fine sista's like that back then.

I assume you mean PHIL Spector.

Phil was scrate crazy, and crazies often have a way with the ladies.

GangstaFam said:

VoicesCarry said:

I assume you mean PHIL Spector.

Phil was scrate crazy, and crazies often have a way with the ladies.

what's up with all the scrate lately?

VoicesCarry said:

I like the term sassy has "ole girl", I have scrate

Do I Love You is even better!

Fabulous! it reminds me of a Boston Public episode..

phunkdaddy said:

"I saw a woman with major Hammer pants on the subway a few weeks ago and totally thought of you." - sextonseven

My shop! www.cafepress.com/spacequake

minneapolisgenius said:

phunkdaddy said:

I did not
know they even had fine sista's like that back then.

Why wouldn't there have been?

phunkdaddy said:

minneapolisgenius said:

Why wouldn't there have been?

Just a figure of speech. The ronettes were before my
time. They was fine as a mofo though. If i was alive
during that era i sure would have preferred them to
the supremes.

"I saw a woman with major Hammer pants on the subway a few weeks ago and totally thought of you." - sextonseven

My shop! www.cafepress.com/spacequake

phunkdaddy said:

blackguitaristz said:

theAudience said:

blackguitaristz said:

Hey Aud, Ronnie was fine, wasn't she? She's got a classic cameo on "Take Me Home Tonight" doing her "Be My Baby" bit. Yeah, Phil, although he was/is a lunatic, was vastly ahead of his time as a producer. Listen to Bruce's "Born To Run" and you'll hear Spector's influence.

In her case...



..."Fine" is an understatement.


It was great to hear her distinctive voice re-emerge in the...



...Eddie Money single.

Her description of The Ronettes being, "...sort of tough, sort of Spanish Harlem cool, but sweet too.", is right on the money.

Growing up in NYC, that "type" is very familiar to me.

tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431