Whoa-oh-oh-oh

Estelle Bennett died just the other day.

Some of you aren’t going to know who that is. Heck, most of you won’t. She wasn’t any grand dame of the publishing biz. She wasn’t some obscure Welsh writer known for talking animal stories. She wasn’t the stoic wife of a famously drunken crime writer. Estelle Bennett was a member of The Ronettes.

You know, The Ronettes: Be My Baby, Wall of Sound, beehive hairdos, all that good stuff? Now, I love me some girl group music. The Marvelettes, The Shirelles, The Crystals, The Supremes – I dig it all. Give me some harmonies and complicated backup vocals over a cheap sound system down at the local watering hole, and I’m happy as the proverbial clam.

You may rightly be wondering, Gothic Shoppers, what difference it could possibly make that I’m a Ronettes fan. This is a blog about books and bookselling, after all. But the thing is, (and you did know I’d make this work, didn’t you?) there’s a Ronettes book connection.

Let’s flash back to the Mesozoic Era: I’m fresh out of college, living in Texas, attempting (and failing) to turn a literary bookstore into a raging success, and inhabiting a rundown house with three other guys. We’re all broke, all the time, so all we ever do is read and talk. And listen to rock and roll. We pass books around and stay up late into the night discussing them as though they constitute Holy Scripture. There are rambling discussions of Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges, Gertrude Stein, and (god help me) Derrida. But by far the most discussed book of that stretch of time is, hands-down, Be My Baby: How I survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness or My Life as a Fabulous Ronette by Ronnie Spector with Vince Waldron.

We were obsessed with this book. This is no exaggeration. During the month or so that we took turns reading this now criminally out of print masterpiece, the house was flooded with the thundering, lush sound of the Ronettes’ music. We memorized passages from the book. We debated what the creepiest aspect of Ronnie’s relationship with the great (and twisted) producer Phil Spector was. We lived and breathed Ronnie Spector, her sister Estelle Bennett, and their cousin Nedra Talley.

I still love to read books on music, and there are plenty of killer titles out there. Geoff Dyer’s book on jazz, But Beautiful, is as elegant a piece of writing as you’re likely to find on any subject. In England’s Dreaming, Jon Savage drags punk rock history snarling and spitting through pre- and post- Thatcher Britain, forcing the reader to wonder who gave birth to whom. Durham’s own John Darnielle wrote a nifty little masterpiece for the 33&1/3 series, a novel about one troubled young man’s obsession with Black Sabbath. For that matter, George Pelecanos’ A Firing Offense and Sean Stewart’s Perfect Circle are as much about rock and roll as they are about crime and clairvoyance, respectively.

I could go on and on (and you’ll be surprised, I know, when I don’t) with such a list. But while each of these books is in its own way amazing, it’s been about a couple of decades since those Be My Baby days. I’m skeptical of hitting that level of fandom that I had back then. When you’re in your twenties, music matters in that particular, intense way that tends to mellow across the years. These days I’m more likely to enjoy a book on music for the skill of the writer rather than the appeal of his subject. Heck, I’ll even read about Randy Newman, if Greil Marcus is writing about him.

Still, whenever I hear the opening drumbeats of a good Ronettes song, I’m back in that crappy old house, sitting across a table from my best friends. One of us has the book open and is reading aloud from it. We’re all laughing.

It’s a good memory. Many thanks to the Ronettes. And rest in peace, Estelle.