ABSTRACT
Sandwiched between rock ’n’ roll’s supposed decline at the end of the 1950s and the rejuvenating arrival of the Beatles on America’s shores in 1964, the explosive rise in popularity of early 1960s girl group music has often been trivialized and overlooked within mainstream histories of rock. And to the extent that rock histories have celebrated girl groups like the Ronettes, it has often been to praise the innovations of their Svengali-like male producers or the songwriting teams that provided them with their hits.1 Lead singer Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes speaks from the perspective of the performer in the two following passages from her 1990 autobiography Be My Baby, offering a littleseen window into the complex creative processes and inordinate power relationships behind the girl group phenomenon. In the first excerpt, Spector describes the genesis of the group’s breakout hit, “Be My Baby,” recorded in 1963 at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles. The second excerpt rejoins the Ronettes in 1965, at which point their career was already in a state of decline (they would break up the next year). Reading these two passages from Be My Baby, it is hard to believe that Ronnie Spector (born Veronica Bennett, 1943) and her producer, Phil Spector (born 1940), were separated in age by only three years. Even though the two were romantically involved during the Ronettes’ meteoric rise to success, Spector held a firm control over the young singer, inserting her as the final jigsaw puzzle piece in his celebrated “wall of sound.” Ronnie would eventually marry Spector in 1968 only to divorce him in 1974.
