The singer of Soul Ronnie Spectorha died at age 78, according to a statement from his website.
“Ronnie has left this world after a brief fight against cancer,” says the text, who remembers that the singer lived “with a brightness in his eyes, a brave attitude, a perverse sense of humor and a smile on his face.”
That brightness in the eyes and that smile on the face and, above all, the rubbish of his electric voice, were one of the soundtracks of the US in the mid-60s, when the wonderful vocalist burned radio stations and turntables
Pick-up with his brief romantic songs interpreted with an overwhelming stroke.
Always in the center of the Ronettes, the small singer (measured 1.56 m) offered wild interpretations and an exotic image against the thousand and a female groups that extended by the country.
“Be my baby”, “Walking in the Rain”, “Do I Love You”, “(The Best Part of) Breakin ‘Up”, “I Can Hear Music” and, of course, his immortal Christmas interpretations like “Sleigh
Ride “and” Frosty The Snowman “, were some of the largest pop cathedrals that Phil Spector erected for them.
Facing, let’s say, the Supreme Elegants of Diana Ross, the Ronettes offered the same crystalline waters in their intertwined voices, but below there was a turbulent current of emotions and experiences.
And it also happened in his life that after the spark of his voice and the crazed perineum of his hairstyles ran a spooky whirlpool.
Ronnie Spector, born in New York in 1943 (with the name of Veronica Bennett), had formed The Ronettes with his sister Estelle and a cousin when they were a chiquillas that mimicked the harmonies of Doo Wop.
In 1961 they won a famous talent contest of Harlem Apollo Theater, which was like the center of the New York black music universe, and began to record until 63, when Ronnie was 20 years old, he discovered the ineffable producer
Phil Spector.
Phil, also New Yorker, made of them his greatest creation: he composed some of his best songs for the group and produced them with an ambition and a grandiloculence never before seen in pop.
They were juvenile symphonies for a new time in the US, and the success was simply fabulous (on its 1963 tour by the United Kingdom its Telonero group were some no less young Rolling Stones).
But those dreams involved in the tremendous sound of the Wall of Sound were a double-sided letter that hid sinister nightmares on the other side.
Phil fell in love with Ronnie and after four years of chained successes, he chained her at the craviness of her until she turned the existence of her in endless atrocities that the singer unveiled in 1990 in her autobiography, Be My Baby.
The Ronettes had finished their career at the beginning of 1967, after being teller of the Beatles tour by the US a year earlier, which gives a measure of its impact.
Shortly after, Phil and Ronnie got married and settled in a 23-room mansion from Los Angeles who became his dungeon: the obsessive producer, crazed by his ego, jealousy and a feeling of demented possession (the lyrics of “BE
My baby “as a prophecy), I locked it in the house, arriving around the land with barbed wire and guard dogs.
Fans of firearms, Phil often encouraged her and the death threats culminated with the installation of a golden coffin in the basement in which he said that he would exhibit it dead if he left him one day.
That day he arrived in 1972, when Ronnie managed to escape barefoot, since he had removed all the shoes to avoid his escape.
Phil did not murdered her, although he achieved an insulting divorce agreement for which she lost any possibility of receiving benefits from the glorious recordings of her.
He did murdered another woman;
It was in 2003, the actress Lana Clarkson, so he was tried and condemned.
He died in jail now a year ago.
Ronnie rebuilt his life and tried to relaunch his career several times from his break with Phil, but the success shone it so many times as he tried, that there were either, in fact.
In any case, only those five years, between 1963 and 1967, were worth one of the most emblematic and popular singers of her time, a truly incredible time for modern music.
