Fever (7 page)

The Chantels followed “Maybe” with four more hits in the next eighteen months (“Every Night,” “I Love You,” “Summer's Love,” and “Look in My Eyes”), creating the first female doo-wop dynasty, delineating the transition between doo-wop and girl groups. The Bobettes may have scored with “Mr. Lee” a month before the Chantels, but they never hit the Top 40 again. Even the genteel Chordettes began to bear the Chantel influence. In 1959, they covered Leiber and Stoller's “Charlie Brown,” the Coasters' hit, and also Phil Spector's “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” (Spector assembled the Chordettes compilation
Mainly Rock 'N' Roll
in 1990 for Ace.)

With Arlene Smith, the Chantels had achieved a sound to go along with their concept, and they were held in the same high esteem as any other male doo-wop group of the time. Smith was to women what Frankie Lymon was to preteens, a symbol of possibility that dissolved barriers. (And Smith is analogous to Tina Turner in the way both women transcended their typically male genres.) So the Chantels were not just standout doo-woppers for being female—they were the beginning of girl groups. In April 1958, less than three months after “Maybe,” the Shirelles scored with “I Met Him on a Sunday,” and the girl-group era had begun. By 1960, when Ike and Tina Turner released “A Fool in Love,” Presley's great gender realignment suddenly suggested new possibilities for women. Even when singing about disappointment and betrayal, as Tina did, the overall effect was exultant.

*   *   *

The great myth of girl groups is that these acts were unilaterally conceived according to a dated sexist code of women attending to hairdos and dress while men controlled the song choices, production, arrangements, and management. This simplification rivals the false truism that rock 'n' roll is simply white people getting rich off black R&B styles. If girl groups were simply stooges propped up by male producers, there's no way we'd still be listening to “Be My Baby,” “Walking in the Rain,” “Leader of the Pack,” “Uptown,” “Da Doo Ron Ron,” and “Please Mr. Postman.” These songs and others like them transcend that myth, and remain regular buttons on oldies radio rotation. And there are so many other deserving girl-group records that radio has all but forgotten: not just lesser-known numbers by hitmakers (like “Girls Grow Up Faster Than Boys” or “Don't Say Nothin' Bad About My Baby” by the Cookies, “Foolish Little Girl” or “Don't Say Goodnight and Mean Goodbye” by the Shirelles, or “Sweet Talkin' Guy,” by the Chiffons) but lesser-known-gems by never-weres (“Mr. Heartbreak” by Cathy Saint or “You Don't Have to Be a Baby to Cry” by the Caravelles).

In fact, girl groups often relied on female songwriters (Carole King, Ellie Greenwich) and managers (the Shirelles' Florence Greenberg), even when produced by the most controlling of men (Goldner, Spector). By 1962, Bo Diddley's touring band featured Norma Jean Wafford, “the Duchess,” on guitar and vocals. Bassist Carol Faye played on most of Phil Spector's Gold Star sessions for the Crystals, the Ronettes, and the Righteous Brothers. Deborah Chessler wrote “It's Too Soon to Know” for the Orioles, which sounded like the undersong of “Maybe” and, perhaps because of its qualms, made for beguiling seduction. And Marion Keisker has gone down in history as Sam Phillips's “secretary,” although Peter Guralnick makes it plain that she was a Memphis radio personality in her own right, host of WNEC's daily talk show,
Meet Kitty Kelly,
for over ten years, as well as its nightly show
Treasury Bandstand,
which she also wrote, produced, and directed, along with fourteen other programs during her career for that station. Although Ike Turner and Phil Spector were certainly puppeteers in the most misogynist sense, Tina Turner, Ronnie Spector, Lesley Gore, and Dusty Springfield were far from puppets even in the most liberal sense.

To be sure, male producers held (and still hold) most of the power in the business relationship between singers and record companies. Britney Spears exemplifies this old-school arrangement, with Swede Max Martin either writing or selecting, then producing, her material. But the impact of girl-group music on its audiences relies more on the internal struggle, enacted in the great girl-group performances, between these controlling men and the defiant, powerful, independent-spirited women they fashioned recordings around. In song after song, the best girl-group records engulf and transform the typical meekness of the lyric. Led by voices as strong and supple as any in the history of popular music, waves of emotion spill out of these recordings that the lyrics can only annex. Far from passive and diffident, the result is style as grandiose and visionary as only the romantic yearnings of teenagers can be.

Producer/songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and writers Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry fell all over themselves with laughter as they overproduced “Leader of the Pack” with revved-up chopper-engine sound effects for the Shangri-Las, but the record turned out to be a key morality play teenagers took seriously as only teenagers could. Good girls wanted bad boys, and the unspoken but clearly articulated motive was sex: bad boys came through in the backseat. If the price to pay for sex in that era was a brutal motorcycle death, so be it. This grandiose idea of sex—so forbidden, so desirable—was worth the terror. How else could Mary Weiss get away with so much lust in the first half of the song?

In the work of Phil Spector, this tension between the male desire to manipulate women and the coming female declaration of independence reached its apogee. Nowhere else does the battle between a teenage girl's towering romanticism and the overpowering male ego's huge Wall of Sound set off hits that make the earth move.

*   *   *

Phil Spector is the great wizard, the ironic “man behind the curtain” of girl-group sounds. Arlene Smith of the Chantels, Shirley Owens Alston of the Shirelles, Darlene (Wright) Love (uncredited on many Crystals tracks), and Veronica Spector were each at least as talented as their producers, but Spector upstaged them all. A notorious control freak and industry snake, Spector built his reputation on a distinctive, too-much-is-never-enough sound that he would wind up betting the bank on with Ike and Tina Turner's “River Deep, Mountain High” in 1966. (The song's commercial failure was his Waterloo.) Even his enemies speak with respect of Spector's talent; he's the Orson Welles of pop producers, a young titan who comes out of the gate roaring, only to be undone by his flamboyant promise and arrogant business sense. Spector even built his own Xanadu in Bel Air, where he married and then held Ronnie Spector hostage, secluding himself (after “River Deep” flopped) to watch
Citizen Kane
with his young bride: “Phil actually wanted to be like Orson Welles in
Citizen Kane,
” Ronnie remembered in her memoirs,
Be My Baby.
“That was his favorite movie, and he used to show it over and over and over again.”

Between 1961 and 1965, Phil Spector productions hit the
Billboard
charts twenty-seven times; seventeen made the Top 40. With the possible exception of George Martin, whose talent was unquestionably more collaborative, there's not another rock producer who can claim nearly as much success both popular and aesthetic within such a short span of time, involving such a variety of acts and writers.

The fabled Spector Wall of Sound is at least much an aesthetic ideal as it is a studio style. Spector glorified the idea of girl groups as he sought out men's most extravagant fantasies about what women inspired—his singles are microscopes to fantasy, intoxication as sound. His Wall of Sound is only the technical part of it, for that rising tide of instruments and booming echo that washes over the listener in songs like the Crystals' “Da Doo Ron Ron” or the Ronettes' “Baby, I Love You” or “Walking in the Rain” is driven by a larger idea of what the girl group can mean—their thrust is only an approximation of the feelings Spector is working out. He fell so in love with the female “Yes!” that he used it to explore his deepest longings, his confused mood swings, and his relentless paranoia. The sound of a Phil Spector record is not just that of a woman's voice glorified beyond all reason, but the sound of a man's response to that romantic fantasy and his total, unfiltered adoration of how much power women really wield over men.

After a 1960 hit with a teen act called the Teddy Bears (“To Know Him Is to Love Him” in 1960, which he wrote for his deceased father), Phil Spector jumpstarted his career by apprenticing to the R&B masters of the day, Jerry Leiber and Ed Stoller. Leiber and Stoller were powerhouse songwriters who wrote for Elvis Presley (“Hound Dog,” “Jailhouse Rock”) and masterminded the Coasters (“Searchin',” “Charlie Brown,” and “Young Blood”)—and note, nobody had much of a problem with producers puppeteering these guys. Spector got an early writing credit for coming up with the distinctive triplet piano riff on the Drifters' “Spanish Harlem” and was soon an acknowledged boy wonder, acquiring backing for his own company to catch up with his dream sounds.

The hits were quick and consistent. Once the Crystals had established themselves with “There's No Other” in 1961, they went out on tour, but Spector continued recording without them, bringing in Darlene Love (née Wright), formerly of the Blossoms. It was Love's voice on “He's a Rebel,” the Crystals' next hit, a song the original Crystals heard on the radio while touring; suddenly they had to work up a new number for their show.

Spector imposed this kind of production hubris on all his performers: the record was the act, not the singer, and he was more interested in propping up a fake version of the Crystals than he was launching Darlene Love's solo career. In retrospect, this may be Spector's biggest mistake, even bigger than Ronnie Spector's forced retirement in his mansion after they married. Love has long been recognized as one of pop's greatest vocalists, but she never got her big break. She would spend her career singing backup on records by the Mamas and the Papas, the Beach Boys, Luther Vandross, U2, Dionne Warwick, and Whitney Houston, and appeared as Danny Glover's wife in the
Lethal Weapon
movies.

That Spector shaped his empire by singing metaphorically through women is only the first level of irony at work in his career. When he found his dream voice in Ronnie Spector, he immediately went about building a sound around her. (The second level of irony would be that the Ronettes sought out Spector, not the other way around.) After months of merciless rehearsing, the Ronettes finally debuted with “Be My Baby” (another Spector, Barry, and Greenwich credit) in August 1963. But the record wasn't a pop debut so much as an otherworldly visitation of sexual rapture—hyperbole cheats this music. “Be My Baby” is a pillar of rock excitement, as penetrating and ominous a moment in music as anything by Presley, the Beatles, Springsteen, the Clash, or Prince. This is sexual delight woven so clearly, so gapingly, that it became a symbol for the entire girl-group experience, answering in three minutes of eternal bliss what Presley had been begging to hear since 1955.

The defining beat, held aloft at the opening like a rhythmic magnet pulling the rest of the song along behind, is spacious and beatific—it maps out a cosmic space, and it's one of the few imperious statements of rhythm alone (boom!… boom-boom BLAM!) in rock that cannot be copied without referencing the original (it rivals as strong a contender as the Bo Diddley beat, used by everybody). But although the beat alone is vast, suggesting realms of feeling for the song to explore, what the rhythm is holding back is what gives it its power. It's the pauses between beats that give it its candid flirtatiousness, and when Ronnie Spector's voice unfurls in the opening verse, its promise is fulfilled. Such a voice deserves to be ushered in by a beat that holds the essence of rock's cocky assurance—which was suddenly trumpeting a woman's desire just as confidently as any man ever had. Richard Goldstein once called “Be My Baby” “the baby boomers' Liebestod,” but it also serves as feminism's wake-up call, an early vision of parity between the sexes. After all, if women could suddenly define their own sexual sensibilities for themselves in rock, where else could they then define it?

That Ronnie Spector manages to turn this beat into her platform, and render the opulent backdrop into mere setting, is at least half of the record's outlandish charm. It's impossible to hear what this record does with the familiar I–vi–IV–V doo-wop progression without linking it up to the dreams and ingenuity of its generation. “Be My Baby” is the sound of the fifties graduating into the sixties, as romance and sexual energy flower into larger romantic metaphors: this is a new kind of pop love which extends beyond couples to an entire generation, beyond romance to agape, beyond pitching woo to making a larger promise to an audience—the kind of promise that could suggest the Beatles and everything that followed. It's a love song addressed to all of rock 'n' roll, the music's short history thus far and the worlds it would yet conquer, the teenagers who loved it then and the middle-aged boomers they would become.

With less of a beat the lyric to “Be My Baby” would be one extended cliché. But the love it suggests outstrips teen romance of even the most fantastical kind. In part the love story is about Phil Spector's awe and reverence for Ronnie's half-breed voice, that huge, booming contralto that sprang like a geyser from her lithe, beehived frame. She didn't create excitement by singing higher and higher, as do most singers; she built tension by swerving between her thick, sultry vibrato and her coy, playful pauses. The final “Whoa-oh-oh-oh_____”s at the end of each verse aren't so much climactic as they are cathartic—an exhalation of carnal triumph.

“Be My Baby” has layers of meaning to match its feelings. It's about Spector's high-flying notions that his Wall of Sound could conquer the world, dominate the industry, and turn a reverence for women into a heady pop theme. That these passions were more than justified by the music is only part of his genius. That this nerdy dial-spinner's reverence for female power made his sound at once girlish and manly only hints at its poetry.