SIR PAUL MCCARTNEY IS A FOOL

Here's a shamelessly immodest excerpt from Ron Rosenbaum's current OBSERVER column, which also wins LEAD OF THE MONTH:

...Anyway, all of this was running through my mind before the delayed murder charges. (The death occurred last February; Spector later told an Esquire writer, Scott Raab, that Clarkson shot herself while toying with the gun. Now the D.A. says Spector murdered her.) Shortly before the charges were filed, a third Phil Spector development ensued: There arrived in the mail a galley of the new book from Tim Riley, Fever: How Rock & Roll Transformed Gender in America. Mr. Riley is the author of Tell Me Why, which I think is the best book yet written about Beatles songs.

In this new book, he goes beyond his unique fusion of technical musical knowledge and stunningly perceptive emotional exegesis of lyrics to a wider-angled social vision that focuses in good part on the glorious complexities—societal as well as musical—of the "girl-group" sound, from the Chantels and the Exciters to Chrissie Hynde.

Mr. Riley is at his very best when he comes to what Spector and Veronica Bennett (later Veronica Spector) achieved with the Ronettes. Indeed, he writes one of the best single passages I’ve ever read about one of the ultimate girl-group songs: a passage that focuses on the breathtaking wordless opening of "Be My Baby," with its dangerous heart-arrhythmia of cathartic beats: the ones Mr. Riley transliterates as "Boom! … boom-boom BLAM!"

I’ll just quote a few words of his ecstatic exegesis of that one percussive sequence: "The defining beat, held aloft at the opening like a rhythmic magnet pulling the rest of the song along behind, is spacious and beatific—it maps out a cosmic space, and it’s one of the few imperious statements of rhythm alone … in rock that cannot be copied without referencing the original …. But although the beat alone is vast, suggesting realms of feeling for the song to explore, what the rhythm is holding back is what gives it its power. It’s the pauses between beats that give it its candid flirtatiousness, and when Ronnie Spector’s voice unfurls in the opening verse, its promise is fulfilled … trumpeting a woman’s desire just as confidently as any man ever had."

--You can't buy that kind of plug, just be sure and remember it when the book comes out next June...