Not Fade Away 1963: Be My Baby, by The Ronettes.
"In the summer of 1963 God was a teenage black girl." - Sonny Bono
That’s what I think he said anyway. That’s certainly my memory of Bono’s words, as recorded in a televised history of pop broadcast at the end of the 1980s. And if he didn’t say quite that he should have. Because in 1963 (full disclosure: the year I was born), before John F Kennedy died and the Beatles arrived (in the US at any rate), pop music belonged to black girls from Brooklyn and the Bronx.
And it belonged to Phil Spector. Difficult as that is now, there’s no way around it.
When he first heard Be My Baby, Beach Boy Brian Wilson had to pull over to the side of the road to listen to it properly. “It wasn’t really getting your mind blown,” he’d say later, “it was more like getting your mind revamped.”
From Hal Blaine’s opening drum roll - one that has been imitated and referenced time and again in the subsequent 50 years - the clacking of the castanets and the naked pleading in Ronnie Spector’s vocals, it’s clear that Spector was extending the sonic possibilities of the pop song. The producer’s vision of pop was in essence about density, building up layer upon layer upon layer of it into that fabled wall of sound. In doing so, he set the pattern for how pop would develop in the sixties - one followed by Wilson in California, Holland Dozier Holland in Detroit and George Martin, in tandem with the Beatles, at Abbey Road as an artform painted in the studio. Spector’s saturated sonic palette - definitely a full-fat thing - offered them a glimpse of how the studio itself could be used as an instrument.
It also retooled the rather polite musical signature of the Brill Building era, where Spector first started, restoring some of the rush and heat that early rock ’n’ roll had offered, while sweetening it at the same time.
And feminising it too. The girl group era has been written up as the story of men like Spector controlling young women, making them over, using them as their pawns. And there’s a truth in that. But it’s worth noting that such stories wouldn’t have been common currency at the time. And to the teenage girls listening to tracks by the Crystals or the Shangri-Las or, in this case, the Ronettes, all they were hearing were young women singing songs that soundtracked their own tentative steps into adult life.
As such these are records of their time. A pre-feminist time in some regards. It would be another four years before Aretha Franklin would be demanding Respect.
The Crystals even recorded a track entitled He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss) which, as titles and sentiments go, is pure David Lynch. A queasy Blue Velvet notion.
But in truth it wasn’t a big hit at the time and these tracks, on the whole, celebrated a thankfully more restrained vision of teenage life (the boys in these songs were, as the Shangri-Las would later sing, “good-bad, but not evil”).
In real life things weren’t necessarily so romantic. Anyone who has read Ronnie Spector’s autobiography would know that long before the tragic murder of Lana Clarkson, Spector was more than just a weird eccentric with a terrible taste in wigs. He was a controlling paranoiac with a dubious, and ultimately tragic, obsession with guns.
The question is, does that taint the music he made? For some perhaps. But why should we rob Ronnie Spector, her older sister Estelle Bennett, and their cousin Nedra Tall of their moment in pop history? Be My Baby is a Spector production, but the thrill of it owes more than a little to the voices that adorn it.
Spector would go on to make better, wilder records. Other girl groups, most notably the Shangri-Las, would extend what was permissible for girls to sing about (even if it’s difficult to know what exactly Past, Present and Future, their most intriguing, strangest track - a spoken word narrative over Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata - is actually about). But Be My Baby is a thrill of a thing, an immediate rush. It’s a pop song, pure and simple. And it’s an example of how good a thing a pop song could be.
God should be a teenage black girl.
Other Contenders
Micky’s Monkey, Miracles
Then He Kissed Me, The Crystals
My Boyfriend’s Back, Angels
Harlem Shuffle, Bob & Earl
In Dreams, Roy Orbison
Cry Baby, Garnet Mimms & the Enchanters
Surfin’ Bird, The Trashmen
(Love is like a) Heatwave, Martha & the Vandellas
Baby I Love You, The Ronetttes
Prisoner of Love, James Brown
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, Bob Dylan
Best-selling single in the UK in 1963 – She Loves You, The Beatles
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