!["While driving, I had to stop along the road—it amazed me. It was a revelation: Brian Wilson's fascination with 'Be My Baby'—here's the tale behind it."]](https://backingtracksfullcollection.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/While-driving-I-had-to-stop-along-the-road—it-amazed-758x426.jpg "\"While driving, I had to stop along the road—it amazed me. It was a revelation: Brian Wilson's fascination with 'Be My Baby'—here's the tale behind it.\"] 1")
For some, it is the greatest pop song of all time.
For Brian Wilson – a man whom many consider to be pop’s greatest visionary – Be My Baby by The Ronettes was the record that changed his life. Recalling the first time he heard it to the New York Times back in 2013, he said: “I was driving and I had to pull over to the side of the road – it blew my mind. It was a shock.
“I started analysing all the guitars, pianos, bass, drums and percussion. Once I got all those learned, I knew how to produce records.”
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Phil Spector had been refining his techniques and gradually constructing what would become known as the ‘wall of sound’. Using a group of musicians that would later come to be known as ‘the Wrecking Crew’, Spector would rehearse the ensemble over and over again until he could hear what we wanted.
“Phil’s routine almost never varied,” said Larry Levine who was engineer on Be My Baby in an interview with Sound On Sound in 2007. “He would start off with the guitars – usually three or more – and have them play the figure that was written on the lead sheet. Jack Nitzsche (co-arranger) built the lead sheets, and that was the thing – it all got built.
“I’m not sure that Phil had the sound in his mind as to the finished product. He would have the guitarists play eight bars over and over while the rest of us were listening, and then he might change the figure. Once he thought it sounded OK, he would bring in the pianos.
“Then, if all of that didn’t work together, he’d go back to the guitars, return to the pianos, and when everything fit he’d bring in the bass. He always brought in the instruments piecemeal in the same way.”
Then, finally, would be the drums. “The guy who worked the least on all of those sessions was the drummer Hal Blaine,” said Levine. “Because he didn’t come in and start playing until everything else was right. Then, when he did play, it was magic. He didn’t play his instrument, he was part of it. He totally owned those drums.”
Spector was fast gaining a reputation. He’d already had a Billboard Number One with The Crystals’ He’s A Rebel, but things moved up a gear when the Ronettes entered Spector’s orbit in early 1963.
The group had auditioned for the producer, and for Spector, it was love at first sight. Talking to the Guardian in 2015, Ronnie Spector (nee Bennett) said: “He just freaked out. ‘That’s the voice I’ve been looking for,’ he said. He went nuts over me from that moment.”
The first original song the Ronettes recorded for Spector’s Philles label Why Don’t They Let Us Fall In Love was so-so, but Spector knew he and his co-writers Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry could do better. Inspired by the growing attraction between the producer and lead Ronette, they came up with Be My Baby.
Speaking to NME’s Roy Carr in 1975, Greenwich recalled how the trio would write: “No matter what happened, Phil was the boss. Both Phil and I were stronger on the melodies than the lyrics, while Jeff was the opposite.”
“Really, it was a hotchpotch way in which the three of us wrote all those songs because Jeff, Phil and I were all spewing out ideas simultaneously.
“Many times Jeff was banging on something, I was working at the piano and Phil was in another room strumming a guitar. Suddenly Phil would hear something that would appeal to him, dash into the room and before we knew what was happening, we’d written a new song.
Interviewed in 2010 by Best Classic Bands, Ronnie remembered overhearing the construction of the song: “I used to have to go to (Phil’s) penthouse, because he had a piano, to learn the songs. One day, Jeff and Ellie were coming up.
“He said, ‘Go into the guest room because I don’t want them to see you.’ I’m listening to them and Ellie kicking ass on the piano. And they said, ‘It’s perfect for her. Because she’s like a child. She’s like a baby. Put that down. Be my baby.’ And she said, ‘Phil, you like her, right?’ And he said, ‘I love her!’ Be my little baby!
“Everything from that day came from my actions and my voice and the love Phil had for me.”
Having learned the words to the song, Ronnie – the only Ronette to feature on the actual recording – flew out to LA to record it. Just 19, it was the first time she had flown on her own, without her mother.
The recording was set for 29 July 1963, at Gold Star in Hollywood, Spector’s favourite studio. “He was very superstitious,” drummer Hal Blaine told the Guardian in 2015. “He always wanted the same studio, the same microphones, the same night – Friday. For a normal session, you’d have piano, drums, bass and guitar. But Phil would have at least three bass players and four pianists playing at the same time, with seven or eight guitarists strumming.”
The band that were assembled that night reads these days like a supergroup. It includes some of the most famous Wrecking Crew notables – Blaine, Carol Kaye and Ray Pohlman on bass, three pianists that could have included Leon Russell and Al Delory, four guitarists including Tommy Tedesco and Bill Pitman (whom the instrumental B-side Tedesco and Pitman is named after) and possibly Glen Campbell.
Sonny and Cher ended up doing backing vocals; others came in too. “Friends or admirers of Phil would show up to see and hear what was going on,” Levine recalls, “and most of them would invariably end up in the studio playing percussion or some other instrument.” As well as all this, there was a full orchestra. Indeed, this was the first time Spector had worked with one.
Together, they formed the components of the wall of sound. But to ensure there were no gaps in this edifice, Spector rehearsed them over and over. And over.
Reputedly, the musicians were made to do 42 run-throughs before tape started rolling during the Be My Baby session, but as Levine confirms, this was not unusual.
“We almost never got into rolling tape before we got into overtime on a session,” said Levine, who suggested it was a deliberate ploy of Spector’s to ensure the musicians were tired and less likely to go off piste. “I often had a hunch that Phil needed that to happen. All of them were really great musicians, and what he didn’t want was any individuality to show. They had to fit into the overall picture, whereas until they got tired enough, they might be playing their hearts out.”
The exception was the main drummer: Hal Blaine. “It was the opposite with the drums,” he said in 2015. “I was like a racehorse straining at the gate. But he wouldn’t let me play until we started recording, because he wanted it to be fresh. That famous drum intro was an accident.
“I was supposed to play the snare on the second beat as well as the fourth, but I dropped a stick. Being the faker I was in those days, I left the mistake in and it became: “Bum-ba-bum-BOOM!” And soon everyone wanted that beat.”
Finally, it was time for Veronica Bennett to lay down her vocals. “In the studio, I had to hide in the ladies’ room so the musicians could get their work done – I was very pretty and they’d keep looking at me,” she said in 2015. “While I was in there, I came up with all those ‘Oh oh ohs’, inspired by my old Frankie Lymon records.”
“It took three days to record my vocals, take after take. The recording captures the full spectrum of my emotions: everything from nervousness to excitement. When I came in with ‘The night we met I knew I needed you so,’ the band went nuts.”
Be My Baby was the most perfect realisation of Spector’s vision yet. Released the following month it climbed to Number Two on the Billboard (though it reached the top on Cashbox). In the UK it reached Number Four that autumn. The Ronettes had arrived.
There would be other peaks in both Spector’s and the Ronettes’ careers to come – arguably Walking In The Rain is just as good. But Be My Baby has become emblematic, not just as the apogee of the wall of sound, but of pop music itself.
There’s something prelapsarian about it, coming as it did before the Kennedy assassination, before The Beatles turned American culture upside-down, before we knew the horrible truth about Spector’s abusive relationship with Ronnie. Listened to now, it’s a love letter from an innocent age, when pop itself was a teenage art form still grappling with its place in wider society.
Rick Nowels, producer of several generations of LA pop stars, including Belinda Carlisle and Lana Del Rey, described it in a 2017 Billboard interview as “Ground Zero” for modern pop. “It was a line in the sand that left everything that came before in the rear view mirror. It was the beginning of pop music being a serious American art form.”
“To me, Be My Baby is one of the great art pieces and testaments to the essential goodness of humanity of the 20th century. Along with Picasso’s Guernica, Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup can and (Salvador) Dali’s Persistence of Memory, I’ll take Be My Baby.”
