Be My Baby. Ronnie Spector (1943-2022)

You heard I'm sure that Ronnie Spector passed away last week. Today's BBC Radio 4 flagship current affairs programme "Broadcasting House" managed to fit a Ronnie Spector tribute in between the dismal Boris and Novak sagas. The emphasis was actually on the thunderous bass drum intro to Be My Baby delivered by Hal Blaine (who was also the drummer on Bridge Over Troubled Water and Wouldn't It Be Nice - amongst many others listed here) -  under the direction of Phil Spector. 

Spector would also put the drum sound up front to great effect right from the start on Instant Karma. Ronnie Spector's single for Apple "Try Some, Buy Some" - one of George's songs of mystic revelation that was left off All Things Must Pass - was a flop, however, something she bitterly regretted doing for her increasingly erratic husband. It was planned by him to be a trailer for a come-back album on Apple that never happened. George subsequently re-used the backing track with his own vocals replacing Ronnie's, for inclusion on his less impressive follow up to ATMP. Living in the Material World. 

Be My Baby probably has the most famous bass drum opening of any pop song and tingled the spine again when it unexpectedly blasted out of the radio this morning - and superbly matched with Ronnie Spector's voice too. She looks fabulous in the classic TV show clip shown on the TV news obituaries. Brian Wilson said it was the greatest record ever produced which is a fitting accolade and memorial for her, for Phil Spector at that time in his prime as a genius producer, and for Hal Blaine who passed away in 2019.

 

Mark Carvell

 

A P.S. from Gary Hunt, a drummer in his own right:

 

Yes Mark, yet another sad passing…. Just on technical point, the drum intro consists of three bass drum beats (single and two double notes) followed by a highly reverberated snare hit. The snare is the sound that really draws your attention to the bass drum rhythm… In those days only one or two mics were used for recording the drum kit and so any processing would be applied across the kit.

Hal Blaine really was the original ’session drummer’, most of his miking techniques were copied by nearly every ‘name’ drummer thereafter and some are still used today… The Spector massive reverb sound was not the first time it was used on drums however, Joe Meek was probably the first to use the idea… in fact Meek had much more technical expertise than Spector, in fact he invented a lot of it… There are unsubstantiated tales of Spector coming to London and being accused by Meek of stealing his production ideas!