Since 1963, when Ronnie Spector added an incandescent glow to the consummate rock ‘n’ roll holiday album, “A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector,” her warm and inviting voice has lit up the season as much as Bing Crosby’s or Gene Autrey’s or Nat King Cole’s.
At age 63, Ronnie Spector’s love of Christmas not only endures, but is palpable in conversation. The erstwhile leader of New York City’s Ronettes, the girl group groomed by producer Phil Spector, whom Ronnie was married to from 1968 to 1974, merrily recalls her most vivid impressions of the season while growing up in Spanish Harlem as Veronica Bennett, the daughter of a half-black, half-Cherokee mother and a white father.
“I loved how people were so nice to you that weren’t so nice to you at other times of the year,” she says with a chuckle during a phone interview from her home in Connecticut, where she has lived for 15 years.
Since the 1990s, Spector has spread Christmas cheer with holiday concerts. Originally she performed them only at New York City’s Bottom Line, but in recent years Spector has taken her show on the road.
And though last year she had to forgo her Christmas tour when her husband-manager of 25 years, Jonathan Greenfield, took ill the day before she was supposed to leave, this year she is back.
Backed by a seven-piece band, Spector will perform “my three great Christmas songs” – “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” “Frosty the Snowman” and “Sleigh Ride” – plus the Ronettes hits “Walking in the Rain,” “Be My Baby” and “Baby I Love You.” Also on tap are two tracks from her new CD, “Last of the Rock Stars,” which was released overseas this year and includes guest spots by the late Joey Ramone, Patti Smith, the Raveonettes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zinner.
One song Spector plans to sing is “There is an End,” a ballad of hope and triumph that on disc features Patti Smith. Spector describes the song as “a personal thing for me,” alluding to the trials and tribulations she had to overcome throughout her life, especially the years she was married to Phil Spector, who, according to Ronnie’s 1989 memoir, “Be My Baby,” kept her a virtual prisoner in their home.
Fearing legal entanglements, Spector avoids mentioning her ex-husband by name. The 66-year-old record producer is awaiting trial in Los Angeles on charges he murdered actress Lana Clarkson in 2003. He is free on $1 million bail awaiting a March 5 trial.
Still, she can’t help but refer to her ex when asked to assess The Ronettes’ chances of being inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. The group, which included her sister, Estelle Bennett, and cousin, Nedra Talley, is among nine finalists for five spots.
“We have been nominated before,” she notes, “but this time we might make it. People finally have caught up with what my ex was doing all those years. Now everybody sees what was going on.”
Spector says her ex wrote a letter in 1994 telling Hall of Fame voters not to nominate the Ronettes, because the group was his creation.
Spector is asked to name her favorite renditions of Christmas songs by other artists. “John Lennon’s ‘Happy Xmas (War is Over)’ and Frankie Lymon’s ‘Christmas Once Again,”‘ she replies.
(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE) Spector then tells about the time the late Lymon, the boy soprano lead singer of The Teenagers who had one of rock’s earliest hits with the 1956 single “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” came to her home in the late 1950s and wanted her to do the song, which he had recorded in 1957.
“We lived about 15 minutes away from each other,” Spector says.
“I wasn’t even making records then. I was 15 or 16 years old. I didn’t understand why boys’ voices change, and I didn’t know he was doing drugs and drinking heavily. I told him, ‘I can’t sing like that.’ “The time before when he came to visit he left a rose stuck under the couch,” Spector continues, adding “He was trying to fondle me, but he was very nice. …
“My Grandma used to tell me, ‘Ronnie, you’re gonna go deaf, you’re so close to the radio, because I would put my ear next to it when one of his songs would come on. I loved his diction and his vibrato. He was my favorite singer and he still is. He is my all-time idol.” — (c) 2006, The Morning Call (Allentown, Pa.) Visit The Morning Call at Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
