Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica

Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica is the only studio album the Ronettes released, issued by Philles in November 1964. Phil Spector produced its twelve tracks in Los Angeles in 1963 and 1964: all five of the group’s Philles singles, among them “Be My Baby” and “Walking in the Rain,” and seven further recordings, including covers of the Students’ 1958 doo-wop side “I’m So Young” and Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” Veronica Bennett sings lead throughout, over the dense, echo-heavy arrangements known as the Wall of Sound.

Billboard made the album a Pop Spotlight pick, the paper’s forecast of strong sales, and Record Mirror gave the British issue four stars. It reached number 96 on Billboard’s album chart and did not chart in Britain. Brian Wilson, who took Spector as his production model, used fourteen of its twenty players on Pet Sounds, and Rolling Stone has placed the album in each edition of its 500 Greatest Albums.

Background

The group was Veronica Bennett, later known as Ronnie Spector, born in 1943; her older sister Estelle, born in 1941; and their cousin Nedra Talley, born in 1946. The Bennett sisters grew up in upper Manhattan.¹ Their grandmother encouraged the three of them to harmonize.² The sisters’ father, Louis, was a white subway worker and their mother, Beatrice, was of African-American and Cherokee descent; Nedra’s family was Black, Native American and Puerto Rican. At school the sisters were bullied for their mixed-race looks.³ Estelle, who went on to the Fashion Institute of Technology, had what The New York Times called a particular flair for fashion and design, and she helped devise the group’s look.⁴

As Ronnie and the Relatives they met the songwriter Stu Phillips, who arranged for their first records to be made for Colpix in 1961. None of the five singles Colpix and its May label issued over the next two years charted, the last three of them under the name the Ronettes.⁵ Late in 1961, under age and padded out in matching dresses, they went to the Peppermint Lounge, and the manager took them for a singing trio that had not yet arrived. During the set David Brigati of the house band, Joey Dee and the Starliters, began Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say,” a song already in the group’s act, and handed Veronica the microphone, and the club kept the three on at ten dollars a night each.⁶ In the spring of 1962 the disc jockey Murray the K put them on his shows at the Brooklyn Fox Theater, at first as dancers, and that spring they began teasing their hair high and wearing heavier mascara.⁷ Veronica later wrote that when they saw the Shirelles come onstage in wide party dresses, the Ronettes “went in the opposite direction” and wore the tightest skirts they could find.⁸

Early in 1963 Estelle telephoned Spector’s office, reached Spector himself and asked for an audition, by Veronica’s account, which Nedra later disputed. When Veronica sang a Frankie Lymon song for him, she recalled, he knocked over the piano bench and called hers the voice he had been looking for. Spector wanted to sign her alone; her mother would agree only to all three, and the Ronettes signed to Philles as a group in March 1963.⁹

Recording

“So Young,” one of Spector’s earliest recordings with the group, was cut at United Recorders on Sunset Boulevard in May 1963 and issued in March 1964 as a single credited to Veronica alone, on the Phil Spector label.¹⁰

“Be My Baby” was cut at Gold Star Studios in July 1963. Its Studio A measured nineteen feet by twenty-four under a thirteen-foot ceiling, and Spector filled it with guitars, keyboards, horns and percussion, often several players on the same part. In a room that size the drums bled into every other microphone, which his engineer, Larry Levine, rebalanced continually. Two echo chambers behind the control room, each holding a ribbon microphone and a small eight-inch speaker, supplied the reverb that fused the parts into one sound. Spector rehearsed the players for hours, then recorded the backing track live and in mono. Levine described the order he built a track in: guitars first, then pianos, then bass, with Hal Blaine’s drums coming in last, once everything else was right. Jack Nitzsche wrote the lead sheets the players read from.¹¹

The players were the Los Angeles session musicians later known as the Wrecking Crew, and twenty are credited on the album. The rhythm section included Blaine on drums; Jimmy Bond, Larry Knechtel and Ray Pohlman on bass; and Barney Kessel, Bill Pitman, Carol Kaye and Tommy Tedesco on guitar. Five players are credited on piano. Among them are Harold Battiste, the New Orleans arranger who founded A.F.O. Records and worked with Sam Cooke, and Leon Russell. The horns were Steve Douglas, Jay Migliori, Lou Blackburn and Roy Caton, and Sonny Bono, then working for Spector, played percussion.¹²

Only Veronica sang lead. By her own account she was the only Ronette at the “Be My Baby” session; the backing voices included Darlene Love, Bobby Sheen, Nino Tempo, Bono and Cher, whom Levine kept moving back from the microphone because her voice came through stronger than the others.¹³ According to a story Sound On Sound repeats, the band ran the song forty-two times over four hours before Spector let Levine roll tape; Levine said they almost never rolled tape before a session had gone into overtime. Veronica’s lead, sung into a Neumann U47, took about three days of takes, she recalled.¹¹ Blaine said the drum introduction began as a mistake: he was supposed to hit the snare on the second beat as well as the fourth, and dropped a stick.¹⁴

“Baby, I Love You” was cut in the fall of 1963, with Love, the Blossoms and Cher singing behind Veronica.¹⁵ Most of the tracks that were not singles followed in April 1964, according to the Phil Spector website, among them “You, Baby,” “How Does It Feel?,” “I Wonder” and “When I Saw You.”¹⁶ The group also recorded “Chapel of Love,” which Spector refused to release as a single; Veronica remembered that they “practically begged him to put it out” and that he told them it did not sound like a hit. Jeff Barry, who had written the song with Ellie Greenwich and Spector, produced it instead with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for their new Red Bird label, sung by the Dixie Cups, and it reached number one in June 1964.¹⁷

Spector’s name is in the writing credit of ten of the twelve songs; the two without it are the covers. His co-writers came in three teams: Barry and Greenwich on four songs, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil on two, and Pete Andreoli and Vini Poncia on three, with “When I Saw You” his alone. Poncia also played guitar on the album, the only one of the co-writers credited as a player.¹⁸

Music

The album is girl group pop of the Brill Building school, with two departures: the doo-wop of “So Young” and Ray Charles’s rhythm & blues in “What’d I Say.” Over all of it sits Veronica’s voice, which The Guardian described as “marked by a slow, wide vibrato.”¹⁹ Keith Richards, inducting the group into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, said that despite Nitzsche’s arrangements the Ronettes “could sing all the way right through a Wall of Sound.”²⁰ The songs are about young love: devoted in “Do I Love You?”, defiant in “So Young,” where adults dismiss the couple’s feelings, and cheerful in “(The Best Part of) Breakin’ Up,” which Rolling Stone calls an anthem “about the joys of temporary heartbreak.”²¹

“Be My Baby” begins with its drum figure alone; handclaps, castanets, strings and horns then join it behind the voice, and its sessions were the first at which Spector used a full string section at Gold Star.¹¹ Handclaps and heavy drums also open “Baby, I Love You,” over a piano part by Russell, with the backing voices overdubbed many times to stand up to the instrumental track.²² Recorded thunder introduces “Walking in the Rain,” and a storm runs under the song to the end; the effects earned Levine a Grammy nomination for best engineered recording with special or novel effects. Veronica said she sang it slowly so that people could hear her voice, and she cut her lead in one take.²³ In “Do I Love You?” finger snaps and handclaps lead into a guitar and keyboard riff, with brass behind the vocal.²⁴ “(The Best Part of) Breakin’ Up” is a shuffle with an arrangement led by the percussion, a record Cash Box called “a tantalizing shuffle-thumper”; Veronica remembered Spector spending hours working out its harmonies with Estelle and Nedra.²⁵

Two of the album tracks use Latin rhythms. “I Wonder” rides a Spanish one,²⁶ and “What’d I Say” keeps the Latin rhythm of Ray Charles’s original and lightens it. At four minutes forty, much the longest track, it is presented as a live performance; Peter Viney, writing for the website Toppermost, says its audience was dubbed on afterward.²⁷ “You, Baby” rests on a quieter beat that Matthew Greenwald of AllMusic calls “subtle, tribal.”²⁸ “How Does It Feel?”, the B-side of “Walking in the Rain,” is fast, with insistent percussion and big band horn flourishes.²⁹ “When I Saw You” is set for a jazz trio with an orchestral arrangement by Nitzsche, which Greenwald calls “a simple, jazzy blues.”³⁰ “So Young” gives the old doo-wop ballad what Rolling Stone calls “weepy orchestration and over-the-top drum fills.”³¹ “Chapel of Love” closes the record in Spector’s full, reverberating arrangement.³²

Title and artwork

The title billed Veronica apart from the group, and the next two singles, “Born to Be Together” in January 1965 and “Is This What I Get for Loving You?” that May, were labeled “The Ronettes featuring Veronica.”³³ The label of the original blue-label pressing misspells the group as the Ronnettes.³⁴

What it inherits and what it introduces

Asked for her influences, Veronica named Frankie Lymon first, then the Schoolboys, the Students and Frankie Valli. She said she had sung Lymon’s songs at the Apollo Theater at eleven and kept the boy singers’ repertoire after their voices dropped, in the same keys,³⁵ and she traced the “oh-oh-oh” of “Be My Baby” to Lymon’s records.³⁶ “So Young” is a cover of one of those influences: the Students’ “I’m So Young,” written by a Cincinnati high-school student, William Tyus, and issued in 1958 on the Indianapolis label Note and then on Checker.³⁷ The production method was Spector’s own: Sound On Sound dates it to Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans’ “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” after which, it says, the procedure was largely always the same.¹¹

Reviewing the label’s albums as a set in 2011, Joe Marchese of The Second Disc called this one “the most cohesive album in the collection, with the repeated cuts kept to a minimum.”²⁹

Release

Philles issued the album in November 1964 as PHLP 4006, the seventh of the twelve album numbers the label used, and Billboard listed it in mono only.³⁸ Six of its tracks had already been issued as commercial A-sides: the group’s five Philles singles, from “Be My Baby” in August 1963 to “Walking in the Rain” in October 1964, and “So Young,” credited to Veronica. “How Does It Feel?” had been the B-side of “Walking in the Rain.”³⁹ London issued the album in Britain as HA-U 8212.⁴⁰

Reception

Billboard gave the album a Pop Spotlight on November 28, 1964. The paper’s review panel rated every album it received for its sales potential within its category, and Pop Spotlights were among the albums given a full review. The short text is about the singles and the producer: it cites the group’s run of hits and its distinctive sound, says that “Walking in the Rain” is selling, and ends with the group, Veronica in the lead, taking up “the Phil Spector gauntlet.”⁴¹

A British review came six months later. Record Mirror’s Norman Jopling and Peter Jones gave it four stars in May 1965, describing “that muzzy, throbbing backing sound” and “the shrill girlie voices going all out to be heard,” and adding: “Yet there’s a certain delicacy and subtlety here that none of Phil’s imitators have managed to reproduce.”⁴⁰

Billboard listed the album among New Action LPs, albums not yet on its chart but reported selling strongly in major markets, on December 12 and again on December 19.⁴¹ It entered the chart in the issue of December 26 and peaked at 96 on January 23, its fifth week; it did not chart in Britain.⁴² None of the singles that followed approached “Be My Baby,” which spent three weeks at number two in America behind Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs’ “Sugar Shack” and reached number four in Britain.⁴³ In America the best of the four was “Walking in the Rain,” at 23; in Britain it was “Baby, I Love You,” at 11, and “Walking in the Rain” did not chart.⁴⁴

Legacy

The Ronettes made no second album. They kept recording through 1965, but Philles issued only two of their singles that year and sent others out as promotional copies, and after a tour of Germany the three went their separate ways; The New York Times dates the break-up to 1967, the Vocal Group Hall of Fame to the end of 1966.⁴⁵ Veronica married Spector on April 14, 1968. In her memoir she wrote that he had essentially held her prisoner, surrounding her with guard dogs and taking away her shoes; she left him in June 1972.⁴⁶

Rolling Stone has placed the album in each edition of its 500 Greatest Albums, and its entry has changed with them.⁴⁷ The 2003 entry called the group more a Spanish Harlem “street gang” than a girl group, and Veronica Spector’s “teen protegee.” The 2012 entry dropped both, named her Ronnie Bennett and made Spector her “future husband.” The 2020 entry restored the 2003 wording and added “and future wife.”⁴⁸ “Be My Baby” entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999 and the National Recording Registry in 2006.⁴⁹

Brian Wilson heard “Be My Baby” on his car radio, pulled over, and called it the greatest record he ever heard.⁵⁰ He co-wrote “Don’t Worry Baby” in answer to it and thought of offering it to Spector; the Beach Boys recorded it themselves, and Veronica sang it in 1999 on She Talks to Rainbows.⁵¹ Mark Linett, who remixed Pet Sounds in 1996, calls Spector Wilson’s “main production influence.” Pet Sounds used fourteen of the twenty players credited on this album, among them Blaine, Kaye, Knechtel, Don Randi, Kessel and Douglas, cut some of its tracks at Gold Star, and had Levine engineer two of them.⁵² The Beach Boys also recorded “I’m So Young”, first in September 1964 and again in January 1965 for The Beach Boys Today!.⁵³

The Ramones recorded “Baby, I Love You” for End of the Century, which Spector produced in 1980; it reached number eight in Britain, their only top-twenty hit there.⁵⁴ The Jesus and Mary Chain opened Psychocandy in 1985 with “Just Like Honey,” which begins on the beat of “Be My Baby.”⁵⁵

Martin Scorsese opened Mean Streets (1973) with “Be My Baby,” which the critic Owen Gleiberman, reviewing a documentary about Spector in 2010, called “arguably the single greatest use of a pop song in Hollywood history.”⁵⁶ In 1987 Philles licensed the recording to Dirty Dancing, the best known of the licenses that led the Ronettes to sue Spector and his companies that year; apart from a single collective advance of about $15,000, they had been paid no royalties. In October 2002 the New York Court of Appeals held that their 1963 contract let Philles license the recordings for film and television, which, the court acknowledged, kept them from sharing in that income.⁵⁷

In 1994 Spector had written to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s nominating committee that the Ronettes did not belong in the Hall because only their lead singer appeared on their records; Rolling Stone reports that he worked against their induction as a member of that committee, and Veronica made the letter public in 2007.⁵⁸ The group was inducted on March 12, 2007, at the Waldorf-Astoria, by Richards. Estelle, whose family worried that the ceremony would overwhelm her, did not perform, but she gave a brief acceptance speech.⁵⁹ Estelle died in 2009, Veronica in 2022 and Nedra in April 2026.¹

See also

• The Ronettes — the group, and the years on either side of this record
• Phil Spector — the producer and his method
• Gold Star Studios — the room the sound was built in
• “Be My Baby” (1963) — the single at the record’s center
• Girl group — the form the group worked in
• Pet Sounds (1966) — Brian Wilson’s album, made with many of the same players
• The songwriter-performer divide — Spector and his co-writers wrote and produced the record, and Veronica sang it
• Pop as craft — the Wall of Sound as the case for production as composition