Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (17 page)

Theoretically, there were two ways to achieve the sound that Spector wanted. One was through overdubs—an option that the available technology of the day hardly allowed. The other was through using multiples of instruments in unison. Why stop at one or two guitars when you could have three, or even four? Why one piano when you could have two or three? Instead of a trio or quartet of backing singers, why not a choir? Instead of a rock and roll band, why not a rock and roll orchestra?

“I was looking for a sound that could produce fifteen hit records and more,” Spector once explained. “I imagined a sound so strong that if the material was not the greatest, the sound would carry the record. It was a case of augmenting, augmenting. It all fitted like a jigsaw.” Thus were laid the foundations for what would become the Wall of Sound.

This was an evolutionary process rather than an overnight decision. But in the six or so months that elapsed between “He's a Rebel” and “(Today I Met) The Boy I'm Gonna Marry” you can hear how the Wall of Sound was beginning to take shape, and to grow.

         

Spector preferred to work at night, usually beginning his sessions around eight p.m. The musicians he used were frequently in demand elsewhere, and he liked to have them available at the end of the day, so he could run into overtime if he felt like it. It was in these long sessions, often stretching into the early hours of the morning, the studio crowded to bursting point with musicians, littered with coffee cups, soda cans and cigarette butts, that the Wall of Sound was incubated and born.

The standard approach to producing was to begin with the nucleus of the rhythm section—drum and bass—establishing a firm rhythmic foundation around which the other instruments would be built. But for Spector the first building block was always the guitars—three, four or sometimes more, playing the same eighth chords over and over again to create an insistent wash of sound. In the long warmup sessions before recording actually began, as Larry Levine positioned microphones and checked recording levels, Spector would walk along the ranks of guitarists, whispering into their ears “Keep it dumb. Keep it dumb.”

Virtuosi musicians playing eighths interminably! It was like calling in Picasso to paint a door! But Spector didn't want displays of virtuosity, nor was he interested in the individual sound of the instrument, only its integral value to the sound as a whole.

Nino Tempo, whose first instrument was sax and who readily admitted that he was a distinctly average guitarist, sometimes found himself enlisted to join the “chorus” of guitarists four or five strong. “I could be sitting next to Barney Kessel and you couldn't tell which one of us was Barney Kessel and which one of us was the bad guitar player. But this was what Phil did. And he did that because, of course, he wanted the prestige of Barney, but he also knew that if he needed someone to stand up and do something great, then Barney would do it. So he always got the best guys because he respected the musicians.” Some couldn't take it. Howard Roberts, Spector's old guitar teacher, played on “He's a Rebel” and never came back, complaining that the regime made his fingers bleed and the music was too stupid for words.

“Start with the guitars, then blend everything into the guitars; that was the basis of the whole rhythm section, the guitars. Phil was unique in that,” says Levine.

“He'd have them play and play and play—those poor guys. And then he'd hear something and he'd have them try something else and they'd play and play, and when it became a viable sound he'd bring in the pianos—which made it unviable again. And so then you knock out the piano and try again with the guitars, and then pianos again. And then, when they're in, you bring in the basses, the horns. Phil never wanted to hear horns as horns, which I thought was so great because all it would do was modulate the chords; you'd hear the chords changing, but there weren't any instruments to say ‘I'm changing,' so it would be in the mind of the listener that these moving parts were moving.”

Nailing the whole edifice to the ground like metal tent spikes in a storm were the drums. A clean, hard backbeat was the cement in the Wall of Sound, and Spector was obsessive in his search for the perfect drum sound. Sometimes he would arrive at the studio before anyone else, and experiment on modifying the sound by stuffing blankets, pieces of wood or stones into the bass drum, stomping on the pedal until he had it the way he wanted it. It was a ritual that he would repeat incessantly over the years, as if searching for some perfect timbre that would remain forever just out of reach.

“One of the first things that impressed me about Phil was hearing how he just walked in and lifted all the cymbals away from Hal Blaine,” remembers the producer Denny Bruce. “Because without even thinking about it drummers will throw in a cymbal clash. It's cliché. And Phil didn't want cliché. He just wanted this strong, throbbing, pulsating backbeat.”

To this would be added the defining characteristic of the Spector sound, the final garnish of percussive effects—maracas, tambourines, chimes, bells and castanets. Jack Nitzsche would provide a pithy summary of the whole process: “Four guitars play eighth notes; four pianos hit it when he says roll; the drum is on two and four on tom-toms, no snare, two sticks—heavy sticks—at least five percussionists…”

“A Phil Spector session was a party session,” the drummer Hal Blaine remembers. “Phil would have a notice on the door of the studio, ‘Closed Session,' and anyone who stuck their head in, he'd grab them and give them a tambourine or a cowbell. There'd sometimes be more percussionists than orchestra. I used to call it the Phil-harmonic. It was an absolute ball.”

Assembling these different elements, striking the right balance between them and capturing the precise sound that Spector wanted was a long and arduous process. In a union-mandated standard session of three hours, most of the time would be spent on preparation and rehearsal—adjusting microphones, moving the musicians around the studio to get the balance right, the endless process of repetition and modulation.

“We almost never rolled tape on a session until we were two, two and a half hours into it,” Levine says. “And sessions always ran overtime; he'd always work at least three and a half to four hours on the one side doing the rhythm and horns.

“Most producers spoke in generalities. They didn't have the sense of what they wanted to hear until after it was presented to them. But Phil really knew, and he was always very specific about what he wanted. He had the sound in his head and that's what he wanted to capture. The musicians he hired were all great musicians, but in a funny way maybe their greatness was a detriment to what he wanted to achieve. It was as if he was going three hours to tire them out enough so they weren't being individualistic, and they were fitting into this mold that he wanted. But once we finally got round to making a take it was very rare that we needed to do it more than once or twice.

“Every time we'd get something he'd have to listen and then he'd listen again until he heard something that said to him, ‘This is what I want to do and this is the way I want to go.' He had to listen always. I remember it was very tiring working with Phil because I had to mix it as if it were a final record so he could hear the perspective of what was happening and it always meant being alert and I got very tired.”

No other producers worked this way—it seemed that none could work this way. On one occasion, Larry Levine was approached by another producer, wanting him to engineer a session and reproduce the Spector sound. Levine initially turned the offer down.

“I thought it would be disloyal to Phil to take what I knew and give it to somebody else. But then when I thought about it, it always comes down to the song. And the songs that Phil wrote with these other people, and Phil's creativity, made for something that nobody else could match.

“So this guy hired all the musicians, the Wrecking Crew; and I started doing it the way Phil would do it—start with the guitars then adding in the other instruments. Then the producer starts in with, ‘What's that guitar playing? I don't hear him. I'm paying him. I want to hear him.' So we ended up making something totally different. No one could achieve what Phil achieved anyway.”

By the standards of most recording studios Gold Star's Studio A was extremely small—just twenty-five feet by thirty-five feet—and its ceilings unusually low. But its peculiar dimensions, and its primitive equipment, became a crucial ingredient in Spector's sound. In a sense, the studio was his most important instrument. Because the room was so small and invariably crowded with up to twenty musicians at a time, it was impossible to achieve any kind of meaningful separation between the sounds of the different instruments.

The only baffles were around the drums. And while every instrument was miked separately, the sound of each would inevitably bleed into the next, creating a dense impasto, like a Rothko painting.

The vocals would usually be recorded at a separate session, and seldom “live” with the band. Gold Star had only a one-track monaural recorder, and a two-track recorder. The instrumental track would be recorded on the monaural recorder, and then transferred onto one track of the two-track machine. The vocals would be recorded on the second, free track. The two tracks would then be mixed together, striking the right balance between music and voices, and bounced back onto the monaural recorder—“back to mono,” as Spector's slogan would later have it.

Spector liked to record and to mix at a deafening volume. Most producers, says Levine, preferred to capture the sound of music as it was heard in the studio. At Gold Star, the huge speakers in the control room, and the lashings of echo applied to each song, would transform the music into something that seemed to have a life of its own. “The control room at Gold Star was the greatest listening environment imaginable. It just consumed you, enveloped you—all of the sound coming out of these three speakers. It was more than being in the record. See, it was not truthful at all. What everybody strives for in studio speakers is truth; this didn't in any way duplicate what you heard in the studio; it was just exciting and thrilling and full-bodied. The musicians would come into the control room for the playback and just be blown away,” he remembers. “They simply couldn't believe that what they were hearing was what they'd been playing, and it made them excited.”

As the coup de grâce, Spector would then play the finished track through a speaker the size of a car or transistor radio—the way the kids would hear it. Only if the song passed this most crude and rudimentary test would he allow the recording to be mastered and pressed.

From “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah” onward, Spector followed the practice of releasing his singles with deliberately redundant B-sides, usually an instrumental track that had been hastily improvised at the end of a session. There was little point, he reasoned, in wasting a good song, and putting a piece of disposable junk on the B-side ensured that disc jockeys would not turn the record over and dissipate airplay. The titles were in-jokes: “Brother Julius” was the man who ran the shoeshine stall outside Gold Star, “Bebe and Susu” were the names of the mothers of the Ronettes, “Tedesco Pitman,” two members of the Wrecking Crew.

Sometimes Spector would not even bother to supervise the sessions himself, assigning the task of composing and producing them to musicians such as Don Randi. “Phil would call me up and say I want you to go in and do a B-side,” Randi says. “And if it starts sounding good, stop. It's a little sore point with me, because I feel I wrote some of those songs, and I never got credit for that. I'd go in and do it and Phil would figure them out at the end. And then put his name on them.”

While the musicians in New York had tended to view Spector with a mixture of superior disdain and grudging respect, the team he built at Gold Star came to regard him with unbridled affection.

“Musicians respected him because he could play himself and understood the trials and tribulations of making music,” says Don Randi. “All the guitar players in particular loved to work for him because he understood the guitar better than any other producer, and he could play it so well. If Phil had decided not to be a record producer and become a jazz guitarist, he could have done that, no question.”

“Phil would push the musicians to the limit, but you never saw them get upset,” remembers the Crystals singer LaLa Brooks. “Some musicians in New York, they'd say, ‘Listen, man, I've had enough, I'm going home, stick it up your ass…' I've seen them do that. Fifteen takes! They wouldn't even go to five takes! They'd be collecting their instruments and ‘We're outta here! Because he's a nut!' But at Gold Star it was a family. They had positive and they had negative, but everybody chipped in, and they would stay there hours to produce that sound. If Phil said he wanted a kettle drum, then somebody would go and find a kettle drum, and everybody else would just sit there and wait.”

Spector could be imperious, dogmatic, demanding, but he knew how to create an atmosphere in the studio that would encourage the musicians to give of their best. Gifts would be sprinkled like confetti. When Leon Russell played a piano part that Spector particularly loved, he stopped the session and wrote out a $50 check on the spot.

He would frequently leaven the sessions with bouts of joking and horseplay. “The bane of my recording career is that I didn't have a tape recorder running during those sessions,” Levine says. “When things were going well—and that was most of the time—Phil would do stand-up comedy. He'd get on the talkback microphone into the studio and he'd do twenty-five minutes of one-liners, just throwing them out there. And then the guys would come back at him; Barney Kessel in particular had a really wry sense of humor. It was Phil's stage. And he loved it, and we all loved it. Even I loved it, and I was the brunt of the jokes that Phil would crack, which was okay with me because it was never meant other than in humor, and I knew that.”