By NOEL MURPHY
“Well, he walked up to me
“And he asked me if I wanted to dance
“He looked kinda nice
“And so I said, ‘I might take a chance’ …..
…………….
EVEN 50 years later, these lyrics are immediately identifiable to millions of people around the world. They might not remember the band but most will also readily remember the chorus: “And then he kissed me.”
The band was The Crystals, a New York girl band which exploded onto the early sixties hit parade in tandem with one of rock’s greatest producers, Phil Spector. They belted out a string of hits, the best known of them including He’s a Rebel and Da Do Ron Ron before various members parted ways to family and other considerations.
Not Dee Dee Kenniebrew, though. Half a century later, she’s still there, fronting a legendary band that’s still thrilling audiences around the globe.
Unlike contemporaries such as the unkindly-tagged Strolling Bones, she’s no craggy-faced crooner but rather a mature, smooth-faced and energetic performer who still whips up and down her home’s stairs non-stop every day. It’s fair to say she’s proud of the fact, too.
“I haven’t been in the gym for almost a year which is awful, it’s terrible, but I’ve been so busy in the last year,” she told the Independent from New York.
“I live in a house that’s three levels and I’m up and down all time. My cleaning lady said the other day, ‘I admire you, I can’t believe you’ but I don’t even think about it, it doesn’t faze me.”
Kenniebrew’s been singing since she was a tot, and she’s not about to stop.
“What else am I going to do?” she laughs.
Had music not raised its head when she was young, she might have been a psychiatrist or somesuch, she says.
“But it drew me to it. Fate. It was nothing I intended on doing but the opportunity become available and I was there.
“As a young girl, my mom and my mom’s sister sang on the radio, not all the time but occasionally, and so I did, as little girls do. At times I’d be singing around my mom but I was shy of singing to others.
“She recommended me to a guy who was asking around for girls who were singer. She said ‘I have a daughter who sings’ and that was that.”
The Crystals were picked up by Spector and an immediate success. Oddly enough, Spector has drawn more official plaudits than the girls he recorded.
“He started his label with us, his first record was ours and it was a hit,” says Kenniebrew, who says his famed ‘wall of sound’ technique was born of necessity recording on eight-track systems.
“But after all that, they didn’t put us in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s very, very political, the guys in New York run it that way.
“They wanted Phil in there and they got Phil in there. But how the heck when he recorded us — but not us?”
Kenniebrew said Spector — sentenced to 19 years to life in prison in 2009 for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson – was a victim to his own excesses.
“They say money corrupts and corrupts totally, it really wasn’t good for him,” she says.
“When we first met him, he didn’t have a lot of money. He was kind of kooky but he wasn’t mean or hateful. But the more money he got, the worse it got for him as a person. It was just terrible.”
Survival in the music industry might sound tough – you can see so many come and go –but Kenniebrew says it’s not really that hard.
“You pay attention to those people and do the opposite. Nine times out of 10, if it didn’t work for them, it won’t work for you.”
The Crystals will perform at GPAC on Friday 7 August.
