The recording started with an accident. “I was supposed to play the snare on the second beat as well as the fourth, but I dropped a stick,” drummer Hal Blaine
said in 2015, recalling the start of the 1963 session with Phil and Ronnie Spector (then 19-year-old Veronica Bennett) that produced The Ronettes’ legendary single “Be My Baby.” “Being the faker I was in those days, I left the mistake in and it became: ‘Bum-ba-bum-BOOM!’ Soon, everyone wanted that beat.”
This is one of those rare cases in which an artist isn’t being hyperbolic about the influence of their own work: Everyone did want the beat, and to recapture the song’s transcendent production -- the first time Phil Spector would record with an orchestra to create his now-iconic “wall of sound” aesthetic, which was anything but an accident.
Per the song’s now-mythic origin story, Spector made the orchestra rehearse the song 42 times before he started recording, and Ronnie spent three days getting the vocals right -- a style of recording that’s standard now, but was anything but in the early ‘60s. The backing band was a supergroup before there were supergroups, with Leon Russell on keyboards and Darlene Love, Sonny Bono, and a 17-year-old Cher on backup vocals.
“Be My Baby,” released as The Ronettes’ first single, peaked at no. 2 on the Hot 100 in October 1963 -- but its influence was much more enduring than even its record sales and radio play.
Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson has called it his greatest inspiration, and the “greatest record ever produced.” “I felt like I wanted to try to do something as good as that song and I never did,” he told the
New York Times in 2013. His efforts were most explicit on
“Don’t Worry Baby,” a 1964 hit that paraphrases the “Be My Baby” groove and lush sound -- one of the earliest of a legion of imitators that would keep the song feeling as ubiquitous today as it was 50 years ago. (Billboard recently ranked the song at No. 1 on its list of the greatest girl group songs of all-time.)
Some of the many artists who’ve recently reprised the song’s famous drum intro spoke to Billboard about The Ronettes’ impact on their work, and just what makes the seemingly simple song so unforgettable.