{"id":156704,"date":"2022-01-13T17:50:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-13T22:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=156704"},"modified":"2022-03-21T11:53:12","modified_gmt":"2022-03-21T15:53:12","slug":"the-reviews-review-ronnie-spector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/01\/13\/the-reviews-review-ronnie-spector\/","title":{"rendered":"You Can\u2019t Put Your Arms Around a Memory"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Publicity photo of the Ronettes\u2014Nedra Talley, Veronica Bennett (Ronnie Spector) and Estelle Bennett\u2014by James Kriegsmann.<\/p><\/div>\n

On Wednesday, in the hours after Ronnie Spector\u2019s family announced her passing from cancer at seventy-eight, I played, on loop, her cover of the Johnny Thunders punk anthem \u201cYou Can\u2019t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.\u201d Recorded for The Last of the Rock Stars<\/i><\/a>, her 2006 comeback album, the song is also a dirge for Thunders, who died in 1991; he had been one of Ronnie\u2019s crucial supporters in the period after she left her abusive ex-husband, the megalomaniac, murderer, and iconoclastic music producer Phil Spector. On YouTube, you can watch her perform a live version of the song from 2018<\/a>: after showing footage from an archival interview the Ronettes did with Dick Clark sometime in the sixties, she comes out, to applause, and says, \u201cSorry, I was backstage crying.\u201d Dabbing her eyes, she mourns the breakup of her iconic girl group, which also featured her older sister, Estelle, and cousin Nedra. \u201cI thought 1966 was the end, no more Ronettes, no more stage, no more singing. I was out here in California and out of show business for seven or eight years. Let me tell you, life was a bitch.\u201d She then describes starting over back in New York City in the \u201870s (she was raised in Spanish Harlem), and meeting Thunders while singing at the legendary gay club and bathhouse Continental Baths, where he cried all through her set. Later, she also met Joey Ramone, who produced an EP of hers and whose contributions to The Last of the Rock Stars<\/i> include backing vocals on \u201cYou Can\u2019t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.\u201d <\/p>\n

On the haunting track, Ronnie\u2019s voice, its teen-dream girlishness scratched with nicotine, bears witness to the time that\u2019s passed. Although The Last of the Rock Stars<\/i> is more produced than Johnny Cash\u2019s stripped-down American Recordings<\/i> (1994)<\/a>, the blueprint for such back-to-basics music projects, it served a similar purpose, reintroducing her to the public while reimagining her past. Where Erma Franklin shot a new video for an old song<\/a>, Joni Mitchell rerecorded earlier hits of hers<\/a>, and Cash reinterpreted foundational country tunes<\/a>, Ronnie chose to cover tracks from her own heyday (\u201cHey Sah-Lo-Ney,\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s Gonna Work Out Fine\u201d), putting her cool, inimitable stamp on them.<\/p>\n

In her 1990 autobiography Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness, Or, My Life as a Fabulous Ronette<\/i>, Ronnie recalls a bathroom in the famous recording studio Gold Star: \u201cPeople talk about how great the echo chamber was at Gold Star, but they never heard the sound in that ladies\u2019 room. And, between doing my makeup and teasing my hair, I practically lived in there anyway. So that\u2019s where all the little \u2018whoa-ohs\u2019 and \u2018oh-oh-oh-ohs\u2019 you hear on my records were born, in the bathroom at Gold Star.\u201d In my late teens, not long after the release of The Last of the Rock Stars<\/i>, I spent a significant portion of 2007 primping in front of the cloudy mirrors in the girls\u2019 bathroom of my public school, examining my relaxed, chin-length bob\u2014one of the Black American girl\u2019s evergreen coiffures\u2014and combing the curled flip at the end just so. The ladies\u2019 room: where teen girls gather to avoid class, and where iconic vocal stylings are born. I hadn\u2019t yet figured out, then, how much my particular style of performing adolescence owed to Ronnie Spector. But it so happened that Ronnie\u2019s aesthetic was on the rise again. Amy Winehouse had recently released Back to Black<\/i> (at the time, I was an inveterate Amy-head), borrowing from Ronnie\u2019s musical sensibilities and bringing back the piled-high beehive hairdo, that relic of teenhood the Ronettes had popularized five decades before.<\/p>\n

Around the same time, on television, The Sopranos<\/i> began airing its final episodes, and the beehive showed up there, too, as an important narrative thread in \u201cSoprano Home Movies,\u201d which premiered in April 2007. At a summer cabin in upstate New York, Tony\u2019s sister Janice tells a story she\u2019s heard about their parents: one night in the sixties, while driving home to Jersey from an evening at the Copa in Manhattan, Johnny Boy Soprano grew so enraged at his wife Livia\u2019s complaining that he pulled out a handgun and shot through her beehive. There\u2019s a distressing undercurrent to the anecdote, but Janice and her husband, Bobby, one of Tony\u2019s mob capos, laugh at it, as does Carmela, who asks if anyone could see the gunpowder burns in Livia\u2019s hair; Janice says Livia cut her hair into a bob the next day. Tony, meanwhile, looks very shaken, and soon starts a fight with the other man. On the surface, he\u2019s upset about how dysfunctional the story makes their family look, but you sense that he\u2019s also feeling sympathy for his mother, from whom he seems to have inherited his tendency toward depression.<\/p>\n

A consistent theme of The Sopranos<\/i> was the sense that all the good things in history had already happened and the chance to make a real impact was long past. As Tony put it<\/a>, \u201cI came in at the end. The best is over.\u201d Winehouse\u2019s vintage looks and music suggested she might have felt the same. But Ronnie, though she barely survived her torture at the hands of Phil Spector and her ensuing alcoholism, lived long enough to start over, making the kind of post-AA albums\u2014Siren<\/i> (1980), Unfinished Business<\/i> (1987), and She Talks to Rainbows<\/i> (1999)\u2014Winehouse never got the chance to record. In her autobiography, Ronnie recalls listening on the other side of the bedroom door as Phil Spector and his songwriting partners sketched out \u201cBe My Baby,\u201d imagining how she\u2019d bring the tune to life. Although she called her voice \u201cthe final brick\u201d in Spector\u2019s famed Wall of Sound, in truth, the recordings capture her voice competing with that Wall, scaling its heights. And in real life, barefoot, she escaped the actual walls of his mansion, with their barbed wire and booby traps. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t pay to try \/ All the smart girls know why,\u201d Ronnie sings on \u201cYou Can\u2019t Put Your Arms Around a Memory,\u201d but her efforts to rebuild her life belied those lyrics.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that you can\u2019t put your arms around a memory. But you can reinterpret tone, as Ronnie did with her cover songs, adorning those faded records with the smeared-lipstick kiss of her vibrato. Her signature vocal tic, the \u201coh-oh-oh-oh,\u201d which is all over The Last of the Rock Stars<\/i>, gave her mouth the shape of shock, or smoke rings, the after-image of a bullet hole through a beehive. And her sound captures that mingling of anticipation and forewarning, of things recalled in perfect detail and those blurred or corrupted in memory, of pain and wistfulness and long-ago glee. When I listen to Ronnie, I can hear it all. \u2014Niela Orr<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have a bad habit of buying gifts for people and forgetting to send them. Over the holidays, I found myself digging through my pile of books looking for something new to read\u2014or old enough to feel that way\u2014when I came across a small poetry book, A Horse with Holes in It<\/i><\/a>, by Greg Alan Brownderville. As I flipped through the pages in an attempt to place it, I realized it was a thank-you gift I meant to send to a professor some years back. Selfishly, I\u2019m glad this book never made it to the post office.<\/p>\n

Most of the poems take place somewhere deep in the Delta, where Brownderville experiments with themes of religion, love, death, and desire. It\u2019s decidedly Southern Gothic, yet the poet manages to be soulful without being overly serious, \u201cthey wept, and said some mystery words \/ like shahn-die, seconding my gibberish with God\u2019s \/ because they know. They know honest gospel singing when they hear it.\u201d Like the poet, I spent much of my childhood in Arkansas (and in church) and found myself wide-eyed, wincing, and giggling the whole way through. The fifteenth poem, \u201cA Message for the King,\u201d was my favorite of the collection, and ends: \u201cTell the king \/ we cheer him, we love him for these nights. \/ But before you kiss his face and go, \/ urge him \/ not to be too proud not to be too proud not to be too proud.\u201d \u2014Lauren Williams<\/b><\/p>\n

This past week I had one of the most extraordinary TV viewing experiences of my life: my family sat down to watch an Apple TV+ adaptation<\/a> of my daughter\u2019s favorite graphic memoir, El Deafo<\/i><\/a>, by Cece Bell. El Deafo<\/em> tells the true story (true except that in the book and show, all the people are humanoid bunnies) of Bell\u2019s grade school years, during which a brain infection causes her to lose most of her hearing. Little Cece is precocious and profoundly alive, and deeply sensitive to others\u2019 perceptions of her newly acquired disability. It\u2019s a story of how to find friendship, of learning whom to trust and how to trust them. What makes the show so extraordinary is that its producers made the decision to design all the sound in the show as Bell would have heard it through her hearing aids. Our ears need to reach for the sound, which is muffled, distant, and well worth pursuing. This is the first instance I can think of\u2014though I\u2019m sure there are others\u2014in which the medium of television has been used to grant access to the charged space of another person\u2019s disability, and in so doing takes us deeper than we could have imagined into Cece\u2019s perspective, to know her, at least a little, as she knows herself. As a bonus, the soundtrack was written and recorded by indie singer\/songwriter Waxahatchee<\/a>. The show affords an unprecedented chance at empathy, making the world simultaneously bigger and much more intimate. \u2014Craig Morgan Teicher<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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