There's generosity in a glance, just as there's generosity -- a willingness to lay yourself bare -- in the first line Ronnie sings: "The night we met I knew I needed you so." It's both pleading and brazenly confident, a declarative sentence with a question mark built in. (The pause she inserts between "I" and "needed" represents the terrifying but essential gulf she needs to cross even just to get started.) Ronnie was a woman, not a girl, when she cut the record; like a method actress, she's playing a character that isn't herself, but must certainly contain elements of herself. Her voice is girlishly direct -- when she sings, "For every kiss you give me, I'll give you three," she betrays a youthful innocence, as if it hasn't occurred to her that the bargains of love just can't be struck that way. But, like an adolescent boy whose voice deepens practically overnight, the luster of Ronnie's voice shimmers and changes during the course of the song, sometimes within the space of a line. Her voice is girlish, yes, but it's also already honeyed with desire, warm and soft and welcoming. For anyone who's ever been a teenage girl, her desire to please, with all its inherent dangers, is throbbingly familiar. She'll do anything for this boy.

Or will she?

In "Be My Baby," Ronnie knows what she wants. Male critics have sometimes written about the song as the ultimate male teenage fantasy, that of hearing a beautiful woman (Ronnie Spector not only is and was beautiful, but she sounded beautiful) state unequivocally that she wants only him. What male, beckoned by such a voice, could resist? She seduces, he accepts gladly, and everybody wins.

That's if you picture yourself the object of the song. But if you put yourself in the singer's shoes, the outcome isn't so certain. What's most adult about "Be My Baby" as a vocal performance, and what's so moving, is the way Ronnie strides so confidently through every bar, with the other Ronettes echoing her assertions less like cheerleaders than a cautious Greek chorus. The risk is obvious: What if she lays her heart bare for this boy, only to discover that he's laughing at her? There's an edge of pleading in her voice that makes that possibility all too real. But the key is that Ronnie sings as if the honor and bravery in speaking up were all -- in fact, she sings as if she knows that the boy's returning her love is secondary to her own assuredness. She's jumping off a cliff, and she's got your hand -- wherever she goes, you're going, too -- which is maybe why so many people feel so passionately about "Be My Baby." Every time I hear it, I'm almost painfully aware of the leap this girl takes. And when it's over, part of the thrill is knowing with absolute certainty that she has landed on her feet.

Ronnie's voice -- you can talk about its technical limitations all you want, but they're as inconsequential as Bob Dylan's -- is the key to "Be My Baby," its soul and its center. So what about the short guy with the big sunglasses?

Everyone knows about Phil Spector's personal quirks and unhealthy reclusiveness. When, not long after marrying Ronnie in 1968, he was crushed by the fact that his record with Ike and Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High," failed to chart in the United States, instead of going to bed for a week (as your garden-variety neurotic-obsessive record producer would do), he retreated to his Bel Air mansion, virtually imprisoning Ronnie with him. She broke free (in a manner of speaking -- her legal battles with her ex-husband have only recently been resolved) when the couple divorced in 1973. "It was like being in the dark all the time," Ronnie has said. "I lived in 23 rooms. Phil went out annually, so that meant I didn't go out either ... And it was like my whole world for five and a half years."