No one here at Pencil Storm felt qualified to honor Ronnie Spector on her passing, and we couldn’t do any better than Serge Bielanko of the band Marah, so we borrowed this piece from his Facebook page. If you would like to read more click here for the link to his Substack page.

Ronnie Spector was the queen of everything as far as I'm concerned. Years ago, when our band was young and fierce and unstoppable in our own hazy eyes, I remember hanging out every single day of a long cold winter. There in my brother's tiny trinity on Salter Street in South Philly, we would listen to the Ronettes nonstop. Smoking cigarettes, sitting there holding our weak-ass pens with barely any ink, the fucking house freezing because he couldn't afford any heating oil: we would play Ronnie's voice over and over and over again and in it we would hear all of the things we were dying to sound like.

The city. The buses. The cop sirens and the ambulances cutting through the long lonely middle of the night. The switchblade punks and the gorgeous tough girls in the shadows. The glint of neon in the puddles in the gutters.

Hers was a life lived a thousand times through and through and she suffered bad at times and never got her due. But still, I found her. Me and Dave found her. And she moved us and she shaped us and she lifted us higher than she ever could have imagined or probably cared.

I don't ever feel sad when the very rarest of the legends of my time move on. I just feel lucky that they existed. Now she is stardust. But I knew that all along.

Thank you, Ronnie.