How “one of greatest songs ever“ made Keith Richards fall in love: “And she fell in love with me”
Every man needs love, but you don’t really picture Keith Richards as a man: he’s a high seas captain, more spectre and myth than mere human.
But behind this rum-soaked facade is a soul at least slightly comparable to yours and mine. And in 1964, as a fresh-faced lad facing up to the perils of touring, he needed love more than he cared to admit.
Dartford had hardly prepped the young would-be rocker for the squalor of rock ‘n’ roll that lay ahead. The band had been battered during their first outings in London by the jazz purists on the scene, and when they finally found some acclaim in the months that followed, it became clear that success didn’t make things any easier.
So, he decided to dabble in a little recreational intake to ease the nervous hours before The Rolling Stones were set to take the stage. Suddenly, their backstage room felt cloistering. “[In the] North of England, on the road as usual, I climbed out of my little cubicle and I’m walking down that corridor. It’s green, it smells, it’s damp and it’s dark,” he recalled years later at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
“As I get to the stairwell, I start to hear these voices,” he continues. Staggered by the sound, he staggered towards the staggering voices. Every variable of the verb/adjective seemed to apply. “I’m thinking, ‘Have I overdone it already?’” he joked.
“But as I go down the stairwell, I hear this beautiful little chant set up by Nedra and Estelle. And I realise I’m listening to The Ronettes. Then that pure, pure voice over the top singing ‘Be My Baby’. And I got a command performance all for myself,” he continued.
He was floored and comforted in that moment. Suddenly, music wasn’t about wildness or getting bleary-eyed on the road. It was a form of magic that, in a very literal sense, medicated him in that moment. The “pure, pure” voice of Ronnie Spector was angelic. This was the greatest group that Richards would ever tour with, and ‘Be My Baby’ would remain “one of the greatest songs ever recorded” in Richards’ esteemed view.
“I realised that despite Jack Nitzsche’s beautiful arrangements they could sing their way right through a wall of sound. They didn’t need any of that. They touched my heart right there and then. And they touch it still,” he said. And he realised that Ronnie Spector had touched it in a way that stretched beyond musical appreciation.
As he would later recall in his memoir, Life, “She was twenty years old and she was extraordinary, to hear, to look at, to be with. I fell in love with her silently, and she fell in love with me. She was as shy as I was, so there wasn’t a lot of communication, but there sure was love.”
If anything, you can hear this love in the sound of The Rolling Stones from that moment on. The band, until that point, had largely been covering the blues, but they soon sought to bring their own expression to the sound of the Stones, and at that moment, it was a sound of longing and soul. It was a sound of lust and guarded frustration that was crystallised in the classic, ‘Get Off My Cloud‘.
In that harmonious moment, as the Ronettes sang ‘Be My Baby’ like starlings in a murmuration, Richards came to realise that music swells and flows as it is being created with simple sincerity. As he would put it himself years later, “There’s something beautifully friendly and elevating about a bunch of guys playing music together. This wonderful little world that is unassailable. It’s really teamwork, one guy supporting the others, and it’s all for one purpose, and there’s no flies in the ointment, for a while. And nobody conducting, it’s all up to you.”
For the Ronettes, everything being up to them was a rarity. Trapped in the fierce grasp of Phil Spector’s controlling ways, music became an odd prison to which they held the key, able to escape in the soft moments backstage when the very songs that shackled them from the murderous monster also set them free.
Richards got to witness that at its most magical, and he fell in love. It’s a moment that humanises the mythological man, because, my god, wouldn’t we all?
