Veronica Yvette Greenfield (née Bennett; August 10, 1943 – January 12, 2022)

“Amy Winehouse was so great for me, because she made me feel like what I did mattered. The hair, the eye makeup. I recorded ‘Back to Black’ three years before she died.    

“I used to sort of make fun of her saying, ‘She has a beehive, but it’s sort of tilted like the Eiffel Tower,’ but I don’t say that anymore since she passed because her and I became very close – even if it was through magazines. I’d read where she’d say, ‘I loved all-girl groups but my specialty was the Ronettes and Ronnie Spector with the way she wore her hair.’       

“I got messages through her interviews. And now her mother comes to every show I do in the U.K. She wrote a book about Amy and gave me a copy. She wrote an inscription that was so sweet and personal about how I was her daughter’s inspiration. It just made me feel so great.    

“And it makes me continue to want to sing, ’cause what I did back then mattered: the hair, the makeup.” 

All of the proceeds of Spector’s “Back to Black” cover went to the Daytop Village treatment center for drug addiction.

Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness, or My Life As a Fabulous Ronette

Ronnie Spector's memoir is being re-released this spring. The story of her rise as a singer and her marriage to the increasingly controlling and abusive music producer Phil Spector, who forced her to live in isolation and threatened to kill her and keep her body in a glass coffin, was written long before Spector faced trial for the murder of Lana Clarkson. 

Ronnie Spector saved herself, going on  to tour with Bruce Springsteen, and become a darling of the New York punk scene. 

“If you’re looking for self-pity, you’ll be disappointed, because her book, like her voice, is full of cocky, smart, self-aware humor. And, yes, in case you were wondering, it totally sucked to be married to Phil Spector.”

—Rob Sheffield, 

Rolling Stone

Pre-order Be My Baby at Bookshop.org and support local bookstores.