Ronnie Spector
This is a reprint of the music essay from Issue #83 of Exploits, our collaborative cultural diary in magazine form. If you like what you see, buy it now for $2, or subscribe to never miss an issue (note: Exploits is always free for subscribers of Unwinnable Monthly).
———
Since January of 2013, most of my Friday nights have been spent playing board games with a group of friends, including Unwinnable’s own Stu Horvath, who hosts our board game club in his converted garage/club house. Over the years, some of the regular participants have changed and there is a constant churn of the games we play, but there has been one constant: players taking turns spinning records while we play.
The regulars are mostly dudes in the same age group, so we share a lot of musical taste, but everyone’s vinyl collection is like a fingerprint or a snowflake, or a snowflake’s fingerprint: a totally unique-to-the-individual reflection of the random live shows, record stores and flea markets visited. Aging and having children have increasingly made Friday night games my main social outlet and the best way for me to discover new (and old) musical obsessions. Recently, the whole of board game club experienced this sort of obsession – a mass hysteria over an album released nearly 45 years ago.
Longtime Unwinnable contributor, Ian Gonzales, who holds the distinction of being one of board game club’s founding members, showed up one Friday just before Christmas with an album none of us were familiar with: Ronnie Spector’s first solo record, Siren. Spector is, undeniably, a legend. From her numerous hits throughout the ’60s with The Ronnettes, to her iconic vocal in the chorus of Eddie Money’s “Take Me Home Tonight” from 1986, Ronnie Spector’s raw, utterly distinct voice is foundational to American music.
By the time Siren was released in 1980, Spector had already suffered through a horribly abusive marriage to super-producer and super-murderer, Phil Spector. As Ronnie wrote in her autobiography, the producer decimated her career by refusing to allow her to perform for years, surrounding their house with barbed wire and guard dogs to prevent her from leaving. The few times she was able to leave the house on her own, she had to drive with a life-sized dummy of Phil in the passenger seat. Seriously! He even lobbied the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame attempting to prevent The Ronnettes from being inducted, arguing they were not important enough to music to be honored. Anyway, the possibility of Phil Spector burning in torment for all eternity is as good a reason as any for Hell to be a real thing that exists.
Siren was not a hit album. It didn’t chart at all, wasn’t released on CD until 2008 and isn’t available on Spotify. The album doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page! It’s as close to a lost album as you can get these days. Nevertheless, when it was played at board game club, the group was enthralled. The first track is a cover of “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow” by The Ramones. The original recording, featuring an uncharacteristically clean guitar tone for the band, is slower and more mellow than typical Ramones songs. Spector’s version, starting off with a simple but killer guitar riff not found in the original and Ronnie’s crackling voice singing, “Woah, oh, oh / Woah, oh, oh / I love you,” is practically menacing.
The choice of a Ramones cover is a fitting start, as many of the songs have an almost post-punk feel. And the musicians backing Spector are a who’s-who lineup of CBGB regulars of the era. Members of the Mink Deville Band and Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers form the main backing band. The guitars on the album, by the likes of Cheetah Chrome of Dead Boys, buzz with chaotic energy. Ronnie Spector would go on to have Joey Ramone produce her solo EP, She Talks to Rainbows, in 1999. She even provided backing vocals for two tracks on Project 1950, an album of covers released by The Misfits in 2003, when bassist Jerry Only was the band’s lead singer. Basically, Ronnie Spector was punk as fuck.
For all the stripped-down grit of Siren, though, Spector’s ’60s era roots are still present. The second track, “Darlin’,” features a shuffling beat, standard rock chord progression and pop-R&B style backing vocals. But even here, a sloppy, distorted guitar solo comes along to remind the listener that this isn’t quite like the polished girl-group songs of Spector’s youth. The song “Tonight” showcases the album’s genre straddling, with a dirty, dissonant guitar riff that leads into a poppy, familiar feeling vocal melody.
The production may reach its quirky height with “Boys Will Be Boys.” The song features a piano intro into a dark guitar riff, into an energetic but muted guitar chugging along under the verses. Synth stings let you know something weird is going on, despite the conventional R&B backing vocals. After the bridge, the song practically falls apart with a mini solo featuring a laser gun guitar tone. It’s weird and fun as hell.
Fittingly, the album ends with a swaying love-letter to ’60s pop rock, “Happy Birthday Rock ‘N’ Roll.” The underproduced feel of the whole album shines through here. What would otherwise be a standard tune winds up feeling like a great drunken karaoke party, as the song ends with a medley of ’60s hits including The Ronnettes’ biggest hit, “Be My Baby” which reached #2 in 1963.
Unfortunately, the only song on the album I could not find a way to stream is a total banger, “Any Way That You Want Me.” Written by Chip Taylor (who is, bizarrely, the younger brother of actor and right-wing nutjob Jon Voight), the song’s chorus nearly copies the chord progression of the songwriter’s biggest hit, “Wild Thing,” made famous by The Troggs. That band also had a hit with “Any Way That You Want Me,” but The Troggs’ version is boring garbage compared with Spector’s. The track is slower than most of the other tracks on Sirens, picking up in the chorus with great call and response vocals between Spector and the backup singers.
My favorite part of the album comes halfway through “Any Way That You Want Me,” when the song breaks down and Ronnie sings over a simple hi-hat and the guttural chug of a guitar, while echoey backing vocals provide some “Doo doo doo doo doo’s” straight out of The Ronettes biggest hits.
It was at that moment on that fateful game night, with those haunting backing vocals peppered into the break down section of the track, that I picked my head up from whatever game we were playing to declare, “This album is fucking badass.” The group, marveling at the album’s greatness, started discussing our collective desire to also own this LP. Stu did a quick search and discovered the album could be purchased on Discogs for just $5. He was going to grab a copy. The rest of us wanted copies too. It being Christmas time and all, Stu generously offered to buy everyone their own copy, mostly because it would be funny to purchase 5 copies of a decades old album that barely made a blip when it was released.
A week later, we all got our copies of this hidden gem, and I’ve been listening to it regularly ever since. Hopefully, it will be released to stream again at some point, but I think the funniest possible outcome would be if all of you, dear readers, went out and got your own copies of Siren. You won’t be disappointed.
