A conversation with Ronnie Spector

At the Chicago Fest for Beatles Fans in 2009, the band struck up the opening chords to “Be My Baby,” and from the wings came THAT voice … “Uh oh, uh oh oh oh ... ”

Enter Ronnie Spector, looking great and sounding just like she did as lead singer of the Ronettes in 1963. 

Ronnie, former wife of Phil and one of the most distinctive voices of the Wall of Sound, was an early, close --- VERY close --- Beatle friend. Through the highs of the Ronettes’ success, lows of her troubled marriage to Phil Spector, lean times and a comeback that included touring with Bruce Springsteen, Ronnie has continued to give music her all.

I spoke with her a couple of weeks before the Fest for a Chicago Sun-Times preview. At the time, she was putting the finishing touches on her CD, “Last of the Rock Stars,” released later that year.

The running theme of these posts has been that I can only use three or four short quotes in a 400-to-500-word newspaper story, and these folks have had so much to say. Here’s a longer transcript of my conversation with Ronnie Spector.

JG: I’m really looking forward to seeing you in Chicago, and I understand you’re working on a new CD. What can you tell me about it?

RS: The CD is coming out now, I’m just finishing up on the bonus album. And the rest is a secret. The minute I tell people what I’m doing, it spreads like a disease. So this time, I’m not saying anything. The CD is all finished and I’m just putting on the bonus tracks.

JG: You’re still enjoying recording after all these years? 

RS: I’m in  studios, out of studios. It’s what I love, it’s my passion, to be in the studio and have the record come out and see if it’s going to be a hit or a bomb. Either way, I don’t care, I’m moving. I always go up, up, up. I never stay with the oldies or the classics, I’m just there. And I love where I am now.

JG: There’ll be a little looking back at the Fest, though.

RS: Just Beatlefest, because I love them. We were close friends, and I knew them before Beatlemania and all in America, and so we became really good friends, and they took me to places on Carnaby Street, so I could get the hippest outfits. So they were like real friends. 

How it happened was we were on Decca Records, and the Beatles, they were here and there around town, the café and all that, but they wanted to see us, these three girls with the looooong black hair, and the skirts up the thighs. So Decca Records gave a party, because our record over there was like No. 1, and the Beatles weren’t heard of in American yet. Decca threw us a party, and it was so great. John Lennon and I became instant friends. To the point of he was pushing me back into this room, and I had to get like a whip and a chair to get him back to this party, we were having so much fun. He would make you laugh. 

JG: How long was it before you saw them again?

RS: After the Decca party, I don’t remember if it was a couple of days later, you have to remember this was a long time ago, before the Beatles had Beatlemania. And so we went to [disk jockey] Tony Hall’s house, he had given a party at his house, and he had this beautiful townhouse. And so Tony Hall’s wife was showing us all these expensive vases. They had gone all around the world. I didn’t know all this stuff. Here was a girl from Spanish Harlem who had a beehive. What I do I know about all these artists and antiques? Not a thing. But I’d say, “Oh, that’s so beautiful.” John knew I didn’t know, and he came over and told her, let me show her. And she got disgusted and threw her hands up in the air and said, “Oh, you show her the rest of it.”

The other Ronettes were there, and John starts taking me on this tour. Forget about the vases and antiques, because he knows I don’t know, so we go down this long hall, and we try to jiggle on the doorknobs, and most of them were locked, and we go and jiggle on another one, and my sister and George were there. They weren’t having sex or anything, they were just talking. So John and I finally found a door that was open, so we went in. In England, they have sofas right where you can look out the window, and there was a soft sofa and we were looking out the window, and I said, “This is the most beautiful view I have ever seen,” and it was in London, and John said, “She sure is,” and he was looking straight at me. We had giggles, he would make me laugh.

He said, “I see you’re a serious girl. Do you want to talk about rock and roll, and what makes it happen?” Cause I did, I was young. And he said, “OK, let me get an ashtray,” and I’ll never forget that either, he had an ashtray because he was a chain smoker, and he started telling me the dos and don’ts --- and he didn’t know either, really. In the magazines over there, they had like every other page, the Beatles are coming, and I’d say, “What’s the Beatles,” because they weren’t big yet, only in Liverpool town. 

 JG: On that trip, you were on the same bill as the Rolling Stones …

RS: The Rolling Stones were on MY tour, and so was Eric Clapton, so were the Yardbirds, and all those. We were the headliners. All those guys love us. Eric Clapton was dying to see us, so he waited outside the hotel. So we knew all those groups for that era.

 JG: I’ve heard you had some scary moments at the Beatles’ Shea Stadium concert [in 1965].

RS: What happened was I wasn’t on their tour. The fans knew exactly what I looked like because all the papers in America had me coming out of  the Plaza where they stayed, so they knew the Ronettes and the Beatles went out together all the time. So we were leaving Shea Stadium, and it was a guy named Jerry Schatzberg and Scott Ross [a New York DJ and one of the show emcees; Schatzberg was his agent at the time], and they shouted, “There they are, the Ronettes!” And there I was. The car was rocking back. 

I’ll tell you, it was the scariest moment of my life. That car. And it was more than a hundred kids around the car. Thank God it was a Bentley. That’s what saved us. Can you imagine? Because it was a Bentley it was so heavy. We were lucky. We inched along, and I’m telling Jerry, you’ve gotta move the car. You’ve gotta move. I’ll never forget. I was so scared we were gonna die. So he inched it along and inched it along, and then you’d see those kids just flopping off. You didn’t want to hurt the kids. But you didn’t want your name in the paper, singer murdered or killed trying to get away from the Beatles concert. 

JG: Did you stay in touch with the Beatles after they broke up? 

RS: I saw John in New York, walking down the street with May Pang, I was with Buddha Records, and I hear this voice “Ronnie, Ronnie,” and it was May Pang. And she said, “John Lennon’s upstairs, and he would die to see you. Come on up.” I went up and John was on a top bunk, and he was ragged, he looked like he had been on drugs and had been drinking, and he had a beard that was like Santa Claus, only darker and stuff. He was such a mess, and it just hurt my heart because he was such a great writer and great everything. 

And the next time I saw him, I heard a voice, and he said, “Ronnie,” he called me “Ronnie Ronette, Ronnie Ronette,” and I turned around, and John was dressed immaculately, no beard. He hadn’t drank or taken drugs for months. He looked great. And I was so happy.

He wanted to help me. And I was with [producer] Jimmy Iovine at the time, he wasn’t big then but he’s huge now, and John said, “Jimmy, set it up at the Hit Factory, and I’ll be there.” He wanted to help me. He loved my voice, and he knew I wasn’t getting anywhere with it, but we won’t talk about that part, he knew, and I knew he knew. So he introduced me to Jimmy Iovine, who introduced me to Springsteen, and that’s what got me back out there in the rock and roll world. Springsteen put me on his tour. So I have all of that, to look back for John Lennon. He got me into the recording studio, he got me onto the Springsteen tour. He knew I loved it, and he knew what took it away from me.

 JG: At one point, you recorded for Apple, with the single “Try Some, Buy Some.”

RS: I go in there, and I see this guy, his hair is so long, I can’t see his face. And I walk up, and I say, I guess this is the guy I’m supposed to go over things with, and he slowly looks up, and it’s George Harrison. And when he sees me, and when I see him, we go …. And we’re hugging and kissing. And we sit down at the piano, and we start going over this song, and it’s Try some … buy some. And I’m wondering, what is it that I’m trying to buy? It’s the most weird song for the “Be My Baby, “Walking in the Rain” girl. I said, “George, what kind of lyrics are these?” And he said, “I don’t know either, and I wrote it.”