The group Keith Richards said touched his heart: “That pure voice”
The human voice is always the best way to communicate one’s feelings. Anyone can try to hit on something raw by having an instrumental track, but they’re not getting anywhere until they put words to those melodies and make people relate to them on a more visceral level. Although Keith Richards could normally get people excited within two notes of one of his riffs, he remembered that his heart turned over itself a few times when listening to The Ronettes sing for the first time.
But considering where The Rolling Stones were when Ronnie Spector first burst onto the scene, they were still firmly entrenched in the blues. Half of their songs were still covers of blues standards, but when they started penning their own pop-flavoured tunes for the likes of Marianne Faithfull, rock and roll had also begun to turn a corner.
The Beatles had already shown people what could happen when a rock band transitions to the pop format, but whereas George Martin acted as their songwriting coach half the time, Phil Spector was the mad professor putting The Ronettes exactly where they needed to be. Spector’s production style was already a hit factory before reaching the girl group, but no ‘Wall of Sound’ could get in the way of Ronnie Spector’s voice.
While she didn’t claim to have the same show-stopping set of pipes that Aretha Franklin or even Tina Turner had, her vocal tone was still just as powerful as anyone in the pop sphere. As soon as she began belting out songs like ‘Be My Baby’, she sounded like she was on the verge of heartbreak when singing every note, especially with her fellow Ronettes crying with her in the background.
This kind of thing hadn’t been anything new, though. The girl groups of the 1950s had been around for a while, but once Phil got his signature production touches behind the band, Ronnie finally had the kind of sound and production that could match her voice.
Richards was definitely of a different breed of musicians than Ronnie was, but he still thought that nothing could move someone quite like her voice, recalling at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “Let me set the scene for you. In the north of England in 1964. On the road, as usual. As I go down this stairwell, this beautiful chant is set up, and then that pure, pure voice over the top singing ‘Be My Baby’. They could sing right through that Wall of Sound. It touched my heart right there and then, and it touches it still.”
If Richards couldn’t get that kind of raw beauty when he wrote his own tunes, though, he would spend the rest of The Stones’ career writing ballads that could reach it. There are a handful of tunes that would have been better suited to a female voice, but when listening to ‘Wild Horses’, Richards sounded like he was writing the kind of showstopping that Ronnie could have performed in her sleep.
Although The Rolling Stones were always about a sense of danger in their music, The Ronettes proved that rock and roll could still power by being gentle. Because the minute that ‘Be My Baby’ came on, nothing else mattered in the world except that voice.
