The Ronettes song inspired by touring with The Rolling Stones
As successful as The Ronettes were in the 1960s, scoring a string of hits including ‘Be My Baby’ and ‘Baby, I Love You’, the group was still a “what if” case in many ways, as singer Ronnie Spector’s doomed marriage to the sadistic producer Phil Spector derailed her career and continued to cast a shadow over the group’s legacy for decades.
There was a time, though, when Ronnie (born Veronica Bennett) was undeniably at the top of the pop totem pole. “When I met The Rolling Stones,” Spector told the Hartford Courant in 2000, “They had nothing. They slept on my bedroom floor. They looked up to me then, and that’s how they think of me still.”
The Stones did indeed tour the UK alongside The Ronettes in January 1964, when the ‘Glimmer Twins’ were just beginning their ascent and Ronnie’s group were already topping the charts. During that tour, she befriended the young lads – she’d collaborate with Richards again well into the 2000s – and also gained an appreciation for the British weather.
“I loved the English rain and fog,” Spector recalled to Uncut in 2016, “We had to stop the tour bus with the Stones to wait for the fog to lift”.
This experience, relayed to the songwriting team of Phil Spector, Barry Mann, and Cynthia Weil, led to the creation of ‘Walking in the Rain’ and what would prove to be The Ronettes’ last top 40 hit, as the age of the early ‘60s singing groups was giving way to Motown and the British invasion.
According to Ronnie, her knockout lead vocal, recorded shortly after her return from that UK tour, was in the can in one take: “I went in the booth, closed my eyes and boom!,” she told Uncut, “I said, ‘Shall I do it again?’ And they said, ‘No, that was it’”. Incidentally, one of the backing vocalists in those same sessions was a 19-year-old Cher, just before she broke out as a duo with Sonny Bono.
While ‘Walking in the Rain’ peaked at 23 on the US Billboard charts in 1964, the song was covered multiple times to even greater success in the ensuring years, first by the Walker Brothers, who notched a UK hit with the tune in 1967, and then by Jay and the Americans in 1969, breaking it into the top 20, the Partridge Family bringing it even higher in 1973 as a number ten UK hit, and Cheetah in 1978 with a number ten Australian hit. Unfortunately, virtually all those royalties went to Phil Spector, the same man who’d torpedoed Ronnie’s career during their marriage, forcing her into prisoner status in their home for several years.
At the 2000’s turn of the century, Ronnie sued her ex-husband and finally won over $2million in royalties and reparations owed to her from ‘Walking in the Rain’ and several other hits. “It was a long wait,” she said at the time, “but I knew what I put into those records. Every ounce of my heart went into those songs”.
Ronnie passed away in 2022, but her success in overcoming injustice and reviving her career became part of her legacy, just as much as those classic 1960s songs. “What’s great about my court victory,” she mused with fire, “is that it will help all the other artists get what’s due them. Long after I’m gone, people will say ‘Ronnie Spector did that, we can do it too’”.
