He's a Rebel (50 page)

Tom Dowd
also produced Jerry Jeff Walker, Eric Clapton, and the first three Allman Brothers albums. More recently he worked with Rod Stewart, Kenny Loggins, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Yes, and Pablo Cruise. Now semiretired, he lives in Miami.

Aaron Schroeder
also remains in the Broadway music publishing circle. His company is now called Aaron Schroeder International.

Gene Pitney
continues to record and tour. His latest album includes a cover of “He's a Rebel.”

Gerry Goffin and Carole King
wrote together briefly after King's massive success as a solo act in the early 1970s—her sensitive and powerful
Tapestry
LP had four Top 10 hits and sold over 13 million copies—burned out, and King's 1980 LP
Pearls
reprised some of the classic Goffin-King hits. Goffin also wrote with Barry Goldberg, and King with her husband Rick Evers, who died of a heroin overdose in 1978.

Jack Nitzsche
climbed out of the nadir of his drinking and emotional crises in the late seventies to score the movie
An Officer and a Gentleman
—winning an Academy Award for writing (with his wife, singer Buffy Saint-Marie) the song “Up Where We Belong”—and other films including 9½
Weeks, Breathless, Without a Trace, Starman, The Razors Edge
, and
The Seventh Sign
. He and Saint-Marie live in Kauai, Hawaii.

The Crystals
continue to perform on the nostalgia circuit, but with only Dee Dee Kennibrew from the original group. La La Brooks gave up singing for a modeling career; Mary Thomas is a housewife in Brooklyn. Kennibrew brought suit—unsuccessfully—against Spector in the 1970s to recover back royalties for the group.

Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil
endured far longer than any other of the Broadway writing teams of the early sixties. Though Mann's attempt at a singing career in the 1970s was a failure, he wrote Dan
Hill's “Sometimes When We Touch” (with Hill) and Dolly Parton's “Here You Come Again.” Weil collaborated briefly with Carole King in the eighties and Mann and Weil won a Grammy in 1988 for the Linda Ronstadt-James Ingram duet “Somewhere Out There,” from the movie
An American Tail
.

Snuff Garrett
produced six straight Top 10 hits by Gary Lewis and the Playboys in the mid-sixties and two Top 10 hits by Sonny and Cher in the early seventies. He is retired and living in Arizona.

Bobby Sheen
formed a short-lived label, Salsa Picante Records, in the mid-seventies and for over a decade has sung in a latter-day touring version of the Coasters.

Ronnie Spector
retains her identity, with Tina Turner, as one of the great rock femmes fatales, still playing on her sex kitten image on records and in shows. She appeared, singing fragments from “Be My Baby,” on the Eddie Money song and video “Take Me Home Tonight,” and signed with Columbia Records; her second solo LP,
Unfinished Business
, was released in 1987. Her primary interest is as a quivering echo of the past, performing her old Ronettes hits ad infinitum. The mother of twin sons, Austin and Jason, she has not spoken with Phil since their divorce.

Larry Levine
is chief engineer at Premore Studios in North Hollywood.

Darlene Love
sang on the Jeff Barry-written soundtrack for the movie
The Idolmaker
and tried a Las Vegas singing career, but has never gotten far from her Spector identification. She put together a club act backed by “The Wall of Sound Orchestra” and released an album,
Darlene Love Live at Hop Singh's
, which consisted mainly of her reprising her old Philles standards. She also was featured in Ellie Greenwich's 1985 Broadway musical
Leader of the Pack
, doing exactly the same thing. Recently she had a small role in the film
Hairspray
, which starred Sonny Bono, and in the Broadway flop musical
Carrie
. She also recorded an album,
Darlene Love
.

Fanita James
has sung backup for Tom Jones' stage show since the early 1970s.

Lou Adler
went on to manage Carole King and become one of the music industry's biggest power brokers.

Sonny Bono
reunited with Cher professionally in the midseventies for an unsuccessful revival of their television show. He opened a restaurant, Bono's, in Palm Springs and was recently elected that city's mayor.

Cher
had no more chart hits in the seventies, but made plenty of headlines as the chief consort of rock stars. She married, had a son by, and made an album with Gregg Allman; after their divorce she dated Kiss's Gene Simmons, Les Dudek, and most recently Rob Camilletti, twenty years her junior. While her music career waned, Cher's acting career flourished. She appeared on Broadway and in the movie version of
Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
, and then won rave reviews for supporting roles in
Silk-wood
and
Mask
. She won the Best Actress Academy Award in 1988 for
Moonstruck
. She hit the charts again in 1988 with “I Found Someone” from her Warner Brothers album
Cher
.

Ellie Greenwich
fell idle after the rise of the singer/songwriter in the late sixties. Her 1985 Broadway musical
Leader of the Pack
(written with Ann Beatts) was part autobiography and part catalogue of her old hit songs. Paul Shaffer was originally featured in the thinly veiled role of—in Greenwich's words on the playbill's acknowledgment page—“the brilliant Phil Spector.”

Jeff Barry
found his niche in bubble-gum music—he wrote the Archies' six million-selling hit “Sugar Sugar”—and television theme songs—
The Jeffersons, Family Ties
. He also co-wrote (with Peter Allen) and produced Olivia Newton-John's 1972 hit “I Honestly Love You.”

Vinnie Poncia
worked with superstar producer Richard Perry on records Perry produced with Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson, and Carly Simon. Poncia has also produced Melissa Manchester. He co-wrote the Leo Sayer hit “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing.”

Danny Davis
also worked for Motown and Casablanca Records. He now does promotion at the Gallin-Morey show-biz management firm.

Brooks Arthur
produced Janis Ian's
Between the Lines
LP and today produces music videos.

Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield
reunited briefly in 1974 and had a No. 3 hit with “Rock and Roll Heaven,” a tribute to dead rock stars. Medley cut an album in 1982,
Right Here and Now
—the title track written by Mann and Weil—and toured again with Hatfield. In 1988, Medley had a No. 12 hit, a duet with Jennifer Warnes, “The Time of My Life,” from the movie
Dirty Dancing
.

Dennis Hopper
became as much of a sixties' cliché as
Easy Rider
, but he was rediscovered in the 1980s as a middle-aged crazy. He played a cocaine-snorting leather fetishist in
Blue Velvet
and won
the 1988 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his middle-American father role in
Hoosiers
. His most recent work was directing the film
Colors
.

Irwin Levine and Toni Wine
wrote the first Tony Orlando and Dawn hit, “Candida,” in 1970. When Wine married music publisher Chips Moman, Levine teamed with Larry Brown to write Dawn's No. 1 hit “Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Ole Oak Tree” in 1971 and then collaborated on the rest of the group's follow-up hits through the mid-seventies, including “Has Anybody Seen My Sweet Gypsy Rose” and “He Don't Love You (Like I Love You).” They own a publishing company, Levine and Brown Music.

Dan and David Kessel
produce songs for their New Wave label, Martian Records, many with a distinct Phil Spector feel—such as the Wigs' cover of “To Know Him Is to Love Him” and Cheri Gage's cover of “Here It Comes (and Here I Go).” They also produced an updated Ventures and Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello Christmas song, and they perform and cut records under the name of the Martians, notching a minor hit with “Baby Hold On.”

Phil Spector
finally received due recognition by the music industry. A lifetime achievement award was presented to him by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in January of 1989.