The Ronettes

"Be My Baby" opens with a drum figure you have heard a thousand times even if you have no idea where it comes from.

Boom. Boom-boom. Crack!

Hal Blaine played it in 1963, at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles, and it has been copied in hundreds of songs ever since.

What came next was stranger still.

Putting everybody in the same room

The technique was called the Wall of Sound, and it was the opposite of how records are made today.

Instead of capturing each instrument separately, clean and tidy, they crammed dozens of musicians into a small room, playing at once: several pianos, several guitars, strings, percussion.

All of it blended into a dense, enveloping mass that came out of even a tiny transistor radio like a wave.

The players were the Wrecking Crew, the arrangements were Jack Nitzsche's, and the method defined the whole of sixties pop. Brian Wilson became so obsessed with that song that he listened to it, by his own account, at least a thousand times, trying to work out how it was built.

Riding on top of that wall was a single voice: Ronnie Bennett's. Sensual, yearning, with a tremor nobody else had.

One detail is worth noting because it tends to get missed: on that recording only Ronnie sings. Her sister Estelle and her cousin Nedra did not take part; the backing vocals are session singers.

"Be My Baby" reached number two. For sixty years it has been regarded as one of the greatest pop records ever made.

The bad girls

The Ronettes were three: Ronnie and Estelle Bennett, sisters, and their cousin Nedra Talley.

And they looked like no other girl group of the era. While the rest came out in party dresses with schoolgirl manners, they turned up with their hair piled high, heavy eyeliner and tight skirts.

They were neighbourhood girls, and they did not hide it. That image — the "bad girls" of pop — was a deliberate stance and, for 1963, a fairly daring one.

The man who produced them

The producer of the Wall of Sound was Phil Spector, and it is impossible to tell this story without him.

Ronnie married him in 1968. In her autobiography, published in 1990, she described years of isolation and control: shut inside the mansion, unable to go out alone. In 1972 she escaped from the house barefoot. They divorced in 1974.

We have to be precise here: all of that is her testimony, published in her book. Spector was never prosecuted for anything concerning Ronnie.

What he was in fact tried and convicted for was something else: on 13 April 2009, a jury found him guilty of second-degree murder in the death of the actress Lana Clarkson, which took place on 3 February 2003. A first trial, in 2007, had ended without a verdict. He was serving a sentence of nineteen years to life when he died, in custody, on 16 January 2021, from complications of covid.

The lawsuit they lost

There is a part of this story that usually gets told with a happy ending that never happened.

The Ronettes sued Spector over royalties and won at first instance, around three million dollars. But in October 2002 the New York Court of Appeals ruled against them, five votes to nil, and overturned that award: the 1963 contract left the synchronisation rights for film and advertising in Spector's hands.

They fought, and they lost. It is harsher than the story of recovery, and it is what happened.

What to remember

The Ronettes are the proof that a single voice can hold its own above any amount of noise.

Put on "Be My Baby", "Baby, I Love You" or "Walking in the Rain" and you will hear that enormous wall, and on top of it, with no apparent effort, a twenty-year-old girl from Spanish Harlem singing as if she were telling you something in your ear.

None of them is left. Estelle died in 2009, Ronnie in January 2022 and Nedra in April 2026, at eighty.

Remember them this way: not as some famous producer's group, but as the three women who put a face and a voice to the best pop song of their decade, and who then had to fight for decades for what was theirs.

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Sources

The Ronettes, a trio formed by the sisters Veronica "Ronnie" and Estelle Bennett and their cousin Nedra Talley, from New York. "Be My Baby" was released in August 1963 on the Philles label, written by Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich and Phil Spector, recorded at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles with musicians of the Wrecking Crew, arrangements by Jack Nitzsche and the drum introduction by Hal Blaine; it reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100. Ronnie Bennett is the only member of the group singing on the recording; the backing vocals are session singers. Brian Wilson has said he listened to the song hundreds of times in order to analyse its construction. Ronnie Bennett married Phil Spector in 1968; in her autobiography "Be My Baby" (1990) she described years of isolation and control, left the house in 1972 and divorced in 1974; this is her personal testimony, and Spector was never prosecuted over those events. Spector was found guilty of second-degree murder on 13 April 2009 for the death of the actress Lana Clarkson, which occurred on 3 February 2003, after a first trial in 2007 that ended without a verdict; sentenced to nineteen years to life, he died in custody on 16 January 2021 from complications of covid-19. In "Greenfield v. Philles Records", the New York Court of Appeals ruled on 17 October 2002, five votes to nil, against the Ronettes, overturning the damages they had been awarded in the lower courts: the 1963 contract granted Spector the synchronisation rights. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Estelle Bennett died on 11 February 2009; Ronnie Spector on 12 January 2022; Nedra Talley Ross on 26 April 2026, at the age of eighty. Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Interpretations of the meaning of their work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, Justia, Billboard, Variety and other coverage.