by Mick Brown
Even as Phil Spector was reciting his marriage vows to Annette, he had another girl on his mind. Veronica Bennett was the lead singer of the Ronettes, three spectacularly beautiful girls from Spanish Harlem, who embodied the racial melting pot that was New York. The mother of nineteen-year-old Veronica and her twenty-year-old sister Estelle was half black and half Cherokee, and their father was white. Their eighteen-year-old cousin Nedra Talley was half Spanish.
Of the three girls, Veronica—or Ronnie, as she was known—was the most extrovert; the precocious child who would push herself forward at family gatherings to sing and dance, the attention seeker, the best singer and the natural focal point for the group.
Inspired, like every girl group of the period, by the Chantels’ “Maybe”—Nedra Talley remembers sitting in her bedroom and listening to the song “over and over and over again”—the group started singing in local sock hops and talent contests. They landed a job dancing at the Peppermint Lounge, and performed at the disc jockey Murray the K’s “caravan of stars” nights at the Brooklyn Fox Theater. The standard demeanor of girl groups of the day was one of demure innocence. Publicity photographs would usually show the groups modestly attired in formals, like high-school prom queens, or in their Sunday best. But the Ronettes looked as if it was Saturday night and they were cruising for trouble—figure-hugging dresses, hair piled into improbable beehives, and lashings of mascara, which transformed the youthful high school girls into vamps. In 1961, the group signed for Colpix, the recording arm of Columbia Pictures, and was put together with the house producer Stu Phillips, who had enjoyed a number 1 hit earlier that same year with the Marcels’ “Blue Moon.”
“This wasn’t an amateur-looking bunch of little girls who were shy and retiring,” remembers Phillips. “They were nice-looking, trim and danced like crazy, and they had the big hair, which was important in those days. They put on a show. They looked like they could taste being stars.”
But try as he might, Phillips couldn’t find the right musical formula for the group. They released a handful of singles on Colpix, and the label’s RB subsidiary May, under the names Ronnie and the Relatives, and the Ronettes, but without success. They were on the verge of quitting the business altogether when, in the first months of 1963, they met Phil Spector.
Accounts vary as to how this happened. Writing in her autobiography, Be My Baby, Ronnie Spector tells the story of how the girls, frustrated with their lack of success, decided to track down Spector themselves, dialing information and asking for the number of Philles Records. When Estelle called, she was put straight through to Spector, who immediately invited the group to audition. Nedra Talley offers a less fanciful account, recalling that Spector was told about the group by his friend Arnold Goland, and went to see them perform at one of Murray the K’s shows at the Brooklyn Fox. After the show, he went backstage to introduce himself and invited the group to audition for him. A few days later, the Ronettes duly presented themselves at Mira Sound Studios, where Spector put them through their paces. “He sat there hunched over his piano, attacking it, playing different songs for us,” Nedra Talley says, “and I remember looking at him and thinking, Boy, he’s really not much to look at; but he had this reputation for being a boy genius. I was impressed with him in that sense. So it was okay, but what could he bring to us?”
Spector himself was apparently no more impressed with the group as they launched into a rendition of the song on which they had traditionally practiced their three-part harmonies, the old chestnut “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin’ Along.” But when Ronnie took the lead on the Frankie Lymon hit “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” he was galvanized. “Stop!” Ronnie would describe him saying. “That’s it. That is it! That is the voice I’ve been looking for.”
The problem was that the Ronettes were still under contract to Colpix. Knowing full well that Colpix would balk at any attempt by him to buy out the group’s contract, Spector instead suggested the girls tell the label that they were giving up singing to follow other plans.
“They came into Colpix,” Stu Phillips remembers. “And one of them claimed she had nodes on her vocal cords and couldn’t sing anymore; another one said she was sick of the business and was going to be a nurse. I said to my boss, Paul Wexler, ‘Don’t believe them; I think they’re full of shit.’ But Paul said, ‘We’re not having any success, let them go.’ The next thing I hear is that they’re on Philles. I put my head in my boss’s office and said, ‘I don’t want to say I told you so…but I told you so.’”
In March 1963, the Ronettes signed with Philles. Spector quickly moved the group to the top of his list of priorities, and for the next few weeks devoted most of his time to rehearsing them in New York. LaLa Brooks was given an early portent of the Ronettes’ growing importance when the Crystals were gathered in Spector’s office one day, and the Ronettes walked in, giving every sign of being very much at home. It was the first time the two groups had met. “That was the end of our rehearsal. All of a sudden he wanted to rehearse them.” LaLa also noted a certain chemistry between Spector and the Ronettes’ lead singer. “Ronnie was paying a lot of attention to Phil, and he was married to a very nice girl.”
In May 1963, after a few weeks of rehearsal in New York, Spector was ready to take the Ronettes out to California to record. Spector and Ronnie had begun stealing kisses between rehearsals, and it was now clear that, in his mind, Nedra and Estelle were already beginning to fade into the background. Telling them he could not afford to pay the airfares for all three members of the group, Spector flew to Los Angeles with Ronnie—with her mother Beatrice in attendance as chaperone—leaving Nedra and Estelle to make the 3,000-mile journey by car with Bobby Sheen.
One musician remembers Spector walking into Gold Star with the Ronettes for the first time, looking like the cat that’d got the cream. “He whispered to me, ‘Can you imagine just piling the three of them on top of each other and just…licking…?’ I said, ‘Well, yeah, there’s an idea…’”
Later, Spector and Jack Nitzsche gave the girls a lift back to their hotel. At a stoplight, a car filled with young black men drew up next to them, and the men started shouting and wolf-whistling. Staring fixedly ahead, Spector jokingly barked at Nitzsche, “Jack, if they open the car door, give ’em the girls…”
At Gold Star, Spector recorded the group singing a new Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry composition, “Why Don’t They Let Us Fall in Love?” The group was thrilled with the result, but received an early tutorial in Spector’s working methods when he told them that he had decided not to release the song, instead sending them out on the road to polish their stagecraft.
It was to be another few weeks before he would summon them back into the studio to record the song that would launch them to the top of the American charts.
Whether or not Spector intended “Be My Baby” as an explicit declaration of his growing feelings for Ronnie, the song he composed with Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich in his Sixty-second Street office seemed a portent of the part each would soon come to play in the other’s lives—a heartfelt declaration of a need that was flowering into full-blown love.
In Los Angeles, Spector visited Nino Tempo at his parents’ house and played him the finished song on the piano. Tempo told his friend he didn’t think much of it. “Phil said, ‘You will by the time I finish with it…’”
On July 29, Spector marshaled the full complement of his troops in Gold Star—battalions of pianos and guitars, brass, strings, the full regiment of backing singers—determined to make his most towering production yet. Jack Nitzsche suggested a thunderously nagging drum figure to Hal Blaine that would kick the song into orbit from the second the needle dropped on the groove—Boom, boom-boom, bang! Boom, boom-boom, bang! Spector took the soaring melody and brought to it all the classic ingredients of the Wall of Sound; a sinuous rhythm that hinted at the baion, dramatic castanet flourishes, a cushion of ecstatic harmonies, an achingly romantic string section, Hal Blaine’s magi
sterial drum fills. Michael Spencer was one of the four keyboard players on the session. “On my right was Al DeLory. On my left was this fellow in a three-piece suit with a DA hairstyle. That was Leon Russell before he took acid. We each had a different kind of piano. That session took three and a half hours. There’s this pause toward the end of the song where the drums go boom-ba-boom-boom before the song picks up again. I remember that by the fortieth or forty-first take I was so punchy, I played right through it, and we had to do it again. And that subsequent take was the one Phil used.”
In her autobiography, Ronnie recounts that she was so nervous about recording that she would spend hours in the ladies’ room at Gold Star, endlessly fixing her makeup and teasing her hair while developing the heart-clutching whoah-ohs that would become her signature vocal mannerism. It took three days to record her vocal, but her performance struck a perfect balance between teenage innocence and sexual precocity—sweet, seductive and totally irresistible. Jack Nitzsche would later declare himself “amazed” at the vibrato in Ronnie’s voice. “That was her strong point. When that tune was finished, the speakers were turned up so high in the booth that people had to leave the room.”
In August 1963, “Be My Baby” entered the American charts, eventually rising to number 2. Ronnie would later recall that the group was on tour when Spector presented them with their first royalty check for $14,000, taking them to celebrate at an all-night diner with coffee and pie. At the end of the meal, Spector proffered a $100 bill. When the waitress told him she wouldn’t be able to provide change at that late hour, he asked the girls if they would mind picking up the check. “For a millionaire,” Ronnie writes, “he sure could be cheap.”
Even as he was recording “Be My Baby,” Spector was planning his next, and most ambitious, project yet. Notwithstanding the fact that he was Jewish, Christmas was Spector’s favorite time of year. He enjoyed the seasonal bonhomie, the ritual of cards and presents, all the trappings and frills, the cornier the better. (When, a couple of years later, he bought his own mansion, he would regularly deck it out with twinkling fairy lights, illuminated reindeer and snowflakes—“it looked like Disneyland,” remembers one friend.)
He also loved Christmas songs, the schmaltzier the better—“The Bells of St. Mary,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and, of course, “White Christmas”: the fact that the Jewish Irving Berlin would reap a harvest of ASCAP royalties for the song that defined the most important date in the Christian calendar was a source of particular amusement. What could be better, Spector reasoned, than giving his favorite Christmas songs the Wall of Sound treatment? Little symphonies for the kids to wake up to on Christmas morning: yesterday’s Christmas sound today.
The idea was hardly original. Elvis Presley had recorded a Christmas album in 1957. In 1961 Cameo Parkway Records, one of Philles’s principal rivals, had released an album of Christmas songs set “to the beat of today’s popular music” by two of its best-selling artists, Chubby Checker and Bobby Rydell. Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” had been a hit in the same year, and in 1962 the Four Seasons recorded their own album of Christmas songs. But Spector was to take the genre to a completely different level, and one that has never been surpassed.
In August, Spector called all his performers into Gold Star, and over the next six weeks, in the sweltering heat of high summer, cajoled, bullied and charmed them into capturing the spirit of Christmas. “Recording the Christmas album was just the best time of all, because it was all the artists together,” Nedra Talley remembers. “You could sense that there was this side of who was gonna get what songs, and the fact that Ronnie and Phil were becoming an item, the others might have felt that there might be some favoritism to the Ronettes. But the other side was that it was so much fun being together and supporting each other and all singing on each other’s songs.”
Sparing no expense, Spector kept the studio booked for almost twenty-four hours a day, sometimes working through the night until dawn. “You’d get so tired you’d get hysterical,” Nedra says. “I remember one night we were all sitting around waiting for the music track to come back—Darlene, Bobby and Fanita Barrett—and by this time we’re all delirious—and Darlene throwing back her head, laughing at something, and her wig flying off. That was it. There was no more recording after that, nobody could get their composure.”
For Larry Levine, the project became a nightmare. “It got to the point where Phil and I were at each other’s throats because night after night we were in for six weeks doing that album,” he remembers. “He had to have it out and then he wanted the tracks done as singles, not as album tracks. I never wanted to work with Phil again after that. My nerves were shattered, and everyone was exhausted.”
Spector poured everything into the record—sleigh bells, chimes galore, the sound of music boxes and neighing horses. Darlene Love singing “White Christmas,” the Ronettes performing “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” and LaLa Brooks singing “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers”—the result should have been kitsch of the highest order. But Jack Nitzsche’s gorgeous arrangements, and the sheer, unadulterated joy evident in all the performances, elevated the music to something quite magical—innocent and knowing at the same time: a vision of all the happy Christmases Spector had dreamed of and never known.
The title of the album, A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector, was a measure of just how much Spector now saw himself as the main attraction. But his most vainglorious gesture was to be found on the final track. While violins played “Silent Night” and an ethereal choir crooned behind him, Spector delivered a soliloquy of wincingly contrived sincerity, thanking all those who had worked on the album, and his audience “for giving me the opportunity to relate my feelings of Christmas through the music that I love.” Larry Levine would recall that the soliloquy originally lasted more than five minutes, Spector “extolling his virtue, how great he was, while trying to sound humble,” until he was persuaded to trim it back to two minutes.
Afterward, according to Denny Bruce, Spector and Jack Nitzsche amused themselves by recording alternative versions: “Hello, this is Phil Spector. It’s Christmas—why don’t you go fuck yourselves.”
As well as playing on Spector sessions, Nino Tempo was also pursuing a career as a singer. Along with his sister April Stevens, he recorded singles for United Artists and Capitol, before signing for Ahmet Ertegun’s Atlantic subsidiary, Atco. Their first release in 1962, “Sweet and Lovely,” charted at number 77, but the follow-up, “Paradise,” failed even to make the Top 100.
Spector felt he could do better with the duo and, one night over dinner, told Tempo that if he could extricate himself from his Atlantic contract, he, Spector, would sign Nino and April to Philles “and make us stars.” Tempo asked Ahmet Ertegun to be released from his contract, but Ertegun told him that Atlantic wanted one last try; if the next record flopped, then Nino and April were free to go. The record Ertegun decided to release was a version of the 1934 standard “Deep Purple.” Recorded at the same sessions as “Paradise,” the song had already been dismissed by Ertegun as “embarrassing” and “unreleasable.”
Tempo couldn’t have been happier. “I played Phil a DJ copy on this little broken-down Victrola at my parents’ house, and he said, ‘This could be a smash.’ I said, ‘It could be, but it won’t—it’ll be one of the best-kept secrets in the world.’ So after about three weeks and bad reviews, Phil says, ‘How’s it doing?’ I said, ‘It died.’ He said, ‘Okay, good. Start looking for material.’
“Then one day I’m gazing at the sun in the backyard and the phone rings: ‘This is Jerry Wexler at Atlantic. Do you realize that you’ve got a smash? It’s breaking all over the place.’ And all I could think was: Oh shit!”
In the autumn of 1963, “Deep Purple” went to number 1 in the charts. Tempo never signed with Philles. But his friendship with Spector stayed strong. Whenever he was in Los Angeles, Spector would make a point of dropping by the family home, where Tem
po still lived with his parents, for the ritual spaghetti dinners. Spector adored Tempo’s father, and had his own pet name for him, Daddy Sam (it was the name that Tempo gave to his music publishing company, aping Spector naming his company Mother Bertha). Some years later, when Tempo’s mother died, Spector would confess to his friend that he had always envied Tempo the warm family life that he had never experienced himself: “Phil told me it was almost like his own mother had passed away.”
By comparison, Spector’s relationship with his own family was as fraught as ever. Shirley had once been devoted to her younger brother, but his burgeoning success had put an increasing distance between them. At the same time, the incipient symptoms of mental neurosis that had been apparent to Annette Kleinbard and Marshall Lieb on the Teddy Bears’ tours—the mood swings, the irrational temper tantrums and screaming fits—were now flowering into mental illness. Don Randi would remember her as “never quite all there.” Spector had attempted to help Shirley, writing out checks and sometimes adding her name to his compositions so that she would receive some income from royalties.
He would often answer the phone to find her on the other end of the line, rambling incoherently. On one occasion, when Spector was at home in New York with Annette, Shirley called in a highly distressed state, claiming that her doctor wanted to hospitalize her, but that she didn’t have the proper pajamas. A bemused Spector immediately contacted the doctor to see whether the hospitalization was necessary. When the doctor started talking about the cost of the hospitalization, Spector, suspicious he was being taken advantage of, started haggling over the price. “That was very characteristic of the way Phil did things,” says Annette. “Very aggressive, and just nail them…” He eventually agreed to pay up—the first of many such payments he would make for Shirley’s treatment.