The Ronettes: The Best Of The Ronettes : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

When you think of Phil Spector's legendary Wall of Sound, you hear the instruments: the strings, horns, thundering percussion, sleigh bells, cascades of guitars, all recorded in mono, all awash in an endless amount of echo. Then, of course, there are the voices. Spector worked with some of the greatest singers in rock & roll history - Darlene Love, Tina Turner and John Lennon among them. But the perfect singer for Phil Spector's lavish productions, the crowning glory of the Wall of Sound, is Ronnie Spector, the incomparable lead singer of the Ronettes.

The relationship between Phil and Ronnie Spector has been buried under decades of acrimony - their marriage and split was a Behind the Music story before its time. But none of that clouds the singles they recorded together, which stand to this day, nearly four decades later, as among the most glorious paeans to romantic love in all of popular music. Veronica Bennett was all of eighteen when Spector first laid eyes on her, and he was hooked. In his early twenties himself, the producer was already the biggest story in the music industry, and he was determined to make the Ronettes (Bennett, her sister Estelle and her cousin Nedra Talley) his next triumph. The first masterpiece came in the summer of 1963 with "Be My Baby." The dizzying rise and fall of the "Whoa-oh, whoa-oh-oh-oh" that opens "Baby, I Love You," the Ronettes' next single, remains Ronnie Spector's definitive moment on record. Innocent and alluringly sexual, ecstatic and wonder-struck, her voice captures all the overwhelming emotions she could summon so effortlessly.

Against the actual summer storm that Phil recorded to open the classic "Walking in the Rain," Ronnie nailed the vocal in a single take. As always, her tremulous vibrato suggests a woman in awe of what she is expressing but gripped by undying conviction, an effect underscored by the grandeur of the arrangements. That sense of expectancy, of love descending and everything transforming, informs all the Ronettes' best songs, preserving, in art, emotions that could not survive in the world.