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When Ronnie Spector plays New Orleans this month at the Ponderosa Stomp, the “original bad girl of rock ’n’ roll” will finally perform in that bad girl of American cities. It’s a perfect match for the woman known to many for those beehive hairdos and whoa-oh-oh-ohs of Spector’s 1960s girl group, the Ronettes. The young Veronica Bennett was born to rock.
“I went to a Catholic church and prayed for a hit record,” the 64-year-old Spector says by phone from Connecticut. “I loved [music] since I was 8 years old, while the other girls were having fun. I was thirsty for it, and I still love it, love it, love it!”
And her impact on popular music is profound and evident. She has recorded with the E Street Band, the Bangles, Keith Richards and Patti Smith. Brian Wilson is an admirer, as is Amy Winehouse (who didn’t brainstorm that beehive by herself, after all).
Spector led the Ronettes to international notoriety via slit skirts, girlish pouts and cascades of long, dark hair. Framed by (now ex-) husband/producer Phil Spector’s famous “wall of sound” production technique, Spector sang about love and longing. But what made it distinctive was her tremolo, with its soft rasp and raw edges, contrasting with her sharp diction. Early 1960s audiences responded by throwing beer bottles at each other and rolling around on the floor, moaning.
“I enjoy every second of it, riots and all,” Spector says.
Early on, hearing Frankie Lymon set the course for her: “He was most endearing, he made you feel good,” Spector says of seeing Lymon’s act as a youngster. “He had that innocence. He gave me goosebumps.” Her own fans would say the same thing about the Ronettes.
Today Spector is a chatty, flirtatious, personable woman, passionate about the old days but still enamored of performing. “I don’t sing at home. I save it all for the stage,” she says. If she gets the urge to sing, she drives to the grocery store instead.
And after all these years, her formula still works. She sports a lush, tousled mane, says she feels incomplete without high heels, and regards audiences with a sort of innocent wonder. And the audience is guaranteed to hear Spector’s favorite term of endearment: “baby.” As in “Be My Baby,” “Don’t Worry, Baby” and “Baby, I Love You.”
“I love the word ‘baby,’” she says. “That’s so innocent and pure to me.”
