"Be My Baby" is nothing so much as the sound of a man setting out to meet a woman halfway and, somewhere along the path, discovering that he's lost half his mind over her and all of his heart, and his only goal in life is to dress her up as a goddess. You could argue that no Phil Spector song ever left the house underdressed (Spector certainly lavished lots of aural attention on Darlene Love as well). Even so, "Be My Baby" is still one of the best examples of Spector's knowing just what becomes a woman most. He whips up a whirl of color around Ronnie; it just happens to be masquerading as sound.

You hear it in those orchestral interludes that feel like caresses; in the assertive clacking of those castanets, a symbol of every exotic danger this exquisite woman poses; in the stark drumbeat that opens the song, like a heartbeat isolated from all the other sounds (breathing, hiccups, grunts) that a human body makes in the course of a lifetime, and held up high as the greatest one. The sound Phil Spector gave Ronnie and the Ronettes is lush but not heavy; a queen's mantle made with something that must have been like love, by one cat who sure knew how to sew.

Most of us are told growing up that an excessive ego is a bad thing. But one of the things I love best about "Be My Baby" is the way Ronnie the singer and Phil the producer mesh egos instead of crashing them together. Ronnie, of course, is the much less flamboyant of the pair. And yet neither is above a little vanity, or, more accurately, a lot. "So won't you say you love me?/ I'll make you so proud of me/ We'll make them turn their heads everyplace we go," she sings, matched by Phil's grand swaths of sound, and it's a tantalizing proposition: She's certain that if she and her beloved hook up, their private sexuality will be so grand that it will radiate off them even in public. In the world of "Be My Baby," Ronnie's soothingly assertive voice and Phil's swirling colors of sound make them twin peacocks (in the Spector fairytale I've concocted, the female is just as gaudy and beautiful as the male) strutting their stuff for all the world to see.

For all its bravado, "Be My Baby" is ultimately a very intimate song. It is also a favorite song of presidents and kings. After a concert at a G8 summit in 1997, in which a number of artists, Ronnie Spector among them, performed for a gathering of world leaders, then President Bill Clinton asked to meet her. He and Hillary welcomed her in their private quarters. "So when I walked in there, he just opened his arms and gave me the biggest grin and he started singing 'Be My Baby' to me," Spector told "Goldmine" in a 1999 interview. "And it was so amazing, because he's so tall -- but so fucking nice."

And as for kings: Rock royalty is full of them, and the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson is right up there with Phil Spector. Wilson fell in love with "Be My Baby" the first time he heard it. "That's my all-time favorite song," Wilson told Rolling Stone. "When I first heard ['Be My Baby'] in my car, I had to pull over to the side of the street to listen to it. It blew my mind."

Wilson wrote "Don't Worry Baby" in the hope that the Ronettes would record it as a follow-up. Phil Spector rejected it; he preferred the group to record only songs of his choosing. So Wilson went on to record "Don't Worry Baby" with his own group, and in so doing, made a masterpiece of his own. It seems harsh that Phil Spector wouldn't let the Ronettes record "Don't Worry Baby," but it's just as well. As it is, Wilson's song is the sound of a boy reaching out to reassure a girl, to let her know that she doesn't have to beg. It's the sound of a boy who knows what a risk she took for him. They go off that cliff together, or not at all.