Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (22 page)

More disconcerting still for Spector was the way that Bertha would frequently arrive unannounced at Gold Star during sessions. “She was a funny woman,” Stan Ross recalls. “She used to walk into the studio and touch the walls, like she was going to fall down, like a security thing. And she wasn't that old.”

LaLa Brooks would find her sitting in the studio's small lounge, sometimes for hours on end—“a short lady with a perm and a pleasant smile; a typical Jewish mom”—clutching a sandwich or a carton of soup, waiting patiently to see her son.

“And it would be: ‘LaLa, would you please tell Harvey that I am still out here waiting…Would you please tell Harvey I have a sandwich out here if he wants it…' And he would never let her in. I could never figure that out—because your mother is your mother, right? She would say, ‘LaLa, would you please go in there one more time and ask Harvey if I can come in.' And Phil would say, ‘Leave her out there. Leave her.' Sometimes I would bring the sandwich through, but he wouldn't eat it. He'd just push it to one side. And he'd scratch his head or pull his ear…one of those little tics he had. And I would think, Oh dear, both of them are crazy.”

LaLa fancied that she could sense “a softness in Phil that could not get out. You could see it in his eyes, his body language. I always thought that if his childhood had been better as far as nurturing went, he could have been the softest, the most kindest person that anyone could have imagined. But there was this coldness there whenever his mother was around. I never once saw him open the door for her to the studio welcomingly, unless she pushed herself in when I wasn't there.”

Jack Nitzsche enjoyed telling the story of the day Bertha did exactly that, walking into the control room unannounced, in the middle of a session. Hearing his mother's voice—“Hello, Harvey”—Spector exploded, “Get the fuck out of here!” Bertha simply crossed her arms and turned to Hal Blaine, who was also standing there. “Hal,” she said, shaking her head, “do you talk to your mother like this?”

         

In the grip of his deepening obsession with Ronnie, Spector began to push the other artists on Philles to the back of his mind. Darlene Love was arguably the greatest female singer that Spector had ever worked with. Full of grit, passion and fervor, hers was one of the great soul voices of the era, and she should have been a much bigger star than she was. Love's second solo single, “Wait 'til My Bobby Gets Home” reached number 26 in September 1963, thirteen places higher than “(Today I Met) The Boy I'm Gonna Marry.” Her third single, “A Fine, Fine Boy,” written by Spector, Greenwich and Barry, was her best performance yet, a thunderous gospel-style song, which combined the galloping beat of “Da Doo Ron Ron” with a soaring get-happy chorus. But according to Love, Spector seemed to lose interest in the song as soon as he'd recorded it, and it stalled at number 53. Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans had also been forgotten—“Not Too Young to Get Married” would be their last single. Affable and easygoing, Sheen was a particular favorite of Spector's. They would sometimes socialize together, which Spector rarely did with his other performers, and Spector would occasionally give the singer money for his traveling and hotel expenses. Sheen had worked uncomplainingly as Bob B. Soxx and singing backup on virtually every Philles recording, but whenever he broached the possibility of being given a shot as a solo performer, Spector would change the subject.

“Bobby felt that Phil never made the most of the acts he had,” remembers Sheen's widow, Frances. “He said there were certain songs and things he wanted to do, but Phil would never let him do it. He didn't want Bobby to be a star. Bobby figured it was because he was a man, and Phil didn't want to have any male stars, only females. I think Bobby always felt that Phil really wanted to be the star, but Phil couldn't sing. He was living his life through the singers, but he kept them under his thumb. But I don't think Bobby felt hard done by. I think he was grateful to be out there singing—that was enough for him.”

LaLa Brooks too felt that Spector “lived through his artists. Phil didn't have what it took to be a singer, but he wanted so bad to be that star, and he certainly didn't want anybody around him to be bigger than him. With Phil it was: ‘I made you and I can break you.' He would rather kick your ass, destroy you and put you out on the street because that way he has the control. Because when you're ditched and gone, he's still Phil Spector, the genius. He was never going to let you out of the cage.”

From the moment she first met Ronnie Bennett, LaLa Brooks had noted her sexual precocity, her seductive, come-hither manner.

“I can see her now with her minidress, her hair up and a drink in her hand…woo! She look
grown
! Ronnie was just down-to-earth, sleazy—but on a nice level. She would say, ‘Girl, how the fuck are you?' Ha, ha, ha. ‘Girl, you are so fucking pretty…' That was how she spoke. She was always open and she was always a goodhearted person from the day that I met her.

“We'd be in the studio, and she'd have these nice, sexy little outfits on—I think all the musicians would be thinking, Voom, voom, voom! She carried herself sexy with everyone in the studio, so you wouldn't necessarily think of her as just Phil's—even though she was. She'd have that body language of getting up close to him, but Phil would be trying to play it cool. He'd say, ‘Go back on the mike and do that note over again.' You wouldn't see that feeling on him as much as you would see it on her. But you knew it was there.”

In the autumn of 1963, the Ronettes were invited on tour with Dick Clark's Cavalcade of Stars. But Spector told Ronnie he needed her in the studio to record a follow-up to “Be My Baby,” a new song he had written with Greenwich and Barry. Nedra and Estelle were superfluous; anybody could provide the backing vocals. Ronnie's cousin Elaine took her place on tour.

If writing “Be My Baby” had been Spector's love call to Ronnie, her performance on “Baby, I Love You” was her answer. The whoa-ohs that open the record sounded not only like a heart-clutching sigh, but also a premonition of something dangerous—a love affair that was gathering in intensity as inexorably as Spector's production, carried along on a titanic choir and a drift of strings, the sound both spacious and dense.

From the earliest days of Philles, each new release would be stamped with a small, barely perceptible testament to Spector's love for his wife—the words “Phil + Annette” inscribed on the run-out grooves. With “Baby, I Love You,” the practice ceased. By now Spector and Ronnie had started an affair, meeting surreptitiously in hotels and, under the guise of “rehearsals,” at his office on Sixty-second Street. For Nedra Talley, the growing intimacy between Ronnie and Spector was evidence not only of how intent he now was on separating Ronnie from the rest of the group, but also of her cousin's growing ambition.

“We'd started out as a trio, and that's what it was supposed to be. So there was a side where I could see where Phil's motives were to control Ronnie—promise her that she would be a star on her own. And when Ronnie began showing an interest in Phil, I knew. This was not the romantic thing with the wind blowing in the hair. There was no wind blowing. Ronnie and I had grown up so close, our lives were completely intertwined, that I knew her personal taste in men. And I said this to Ronnie—‘Oh, here's Phil Spector and he's this gorgeous guy that you just can't stop looking at? That is not Phil Spector.' Phil was this little guy that was weak of chin and drooled a little bit, so let's get real. My cousin knew what she wanted. She wanted to be a star.”

In her autobiography, Ronnie Bennett claims that when she began her affair with Spector she had no idea that he was married. The women's clothes that she once saw in his apartment, Spector explained away as belonging to his sister Shirley. It was not until Darlene Love took her to one side in Gold Star that she learned the truth. She evidently took it with a commendable mixture of sangfroid and pragmatism. “I felt terrible for a few days, like somebody had died,” she writes, but “for a girl singer in the sixties, your producer was your lifeline…The way I saw it, my choice was simple. I could keep my mouth shut and hold on to my career, my relationship, and my family. Or I could confront Phil now and throw it all away.”

She kept her mouth shut.

The first Annette knew of the affair was when a friend told her. Spector had told Annette that he was going to the studio for a rehearsal, and she paid a visit to a friend, Lindy Foreman, who had recently moved to New York and who was well connected in the music business. As they talked, Lindy mentioned the rumors that Phil was getting rather close to Ronnie. “I had had complete trust and faith in him up to that point,” Annette remembers. “My heart kind of clutched.” Through the window, she and Lindy could see into a neighboring apartment; a man had pulled up his shade and was masturbating in full view of them. “The two of us sat there, thinking men are dogs, and you know that's true.”

Annette hurried home and telephoned the studio. Spector wasn't there.

“It was about midnight now. Then I thought, Oh God, he's downstairs in the office and he's not alone. We had an intercom between our apartment and the office. I thought, okay, he's busted. So I buzzed. He picked up the phone, and I said, ‘Okay, what's happening?' And he fumbled out, ‘I'm here rehearsing.' And I got very upset. I didn't say anything. I just went downstairs and started banging on the door. And he wouldn't answer.

“I went back up to the apartment in tears, and he called me back on the intercom, and I said something about ‘your whore.' I'm not saying I handled it well, but it was difficult. I was pretty hysterical.

“Then he came up and proceeded to start yelling at me—the argument side of him. He said, ‘Look, I'm with Ronnie and it's not what you think. Come downstairs and we'll be standing there and you can see; don't come out of the elevator.' So I went downstairs, the door was open and I could see them face-to-face. And I literally thought I was going to puke.”

That same night, Annette moved out of the apartment into a hotel. Within a couple of weeks, however, Spector had taken a new apartment around the corner on York Avenue and Annette moved back into their old home.

She was, she says, in a state of total shock. “I had never expected anything like that would happen with Phil. I had the idealism of youth. I had no perspective, no clue. And he never admitted it. He never said he was sorry. That night we argued and he was just screaming. I'd seen him screaming before, but not at me. But Phil's like a boxer on the ropes. He would just come back flailing and swinging. When he's faced with an adversary, he's a fighter to the end.”

Looking back, Annette began to wonder whether Spector had ever really loved her at all.

“I think I represented a challenge, someone with a mind. I think he saw me as a combination of somebody he looked up to, and like a trophy—a pretty woman. But his actions did not show he loved me, ever.

“I don't think Phil knows how to love. I don't think he has equal relationships. He doesn't see the value in another person. It's: ‘Where do you fit into my puzzle, what piece can I put you in?'

“He was funny, charming, charismatic and talented. He had a great personality and a wonderful sense of humor. But he was totally unconnectable. He needed his yes men and his bodyguards and people around him, but he would never let anybody get close to him emotionally. He said to me once, ‘I don't need love, I don't like love. I don't want love.' But to me that was a defense mechanism of a man who needed and wanted love desperately. It was deeper than being afraid of love. It was
cannot.
I even thought at times, God this guy is stunted.

“It was as if all his emotional life went into his music. That became his modus operandi and his survival mechanism. And it was such a huge gift that he could make his entire identity from that. He identified only as the music maker, the genius, the manipulator, the Svengali. All those things that drove him and drove him. It was his way of saying, ‘This is me. I'm the greatest. Number One.' I think if Phil hadn't had that and was just a regular guy, he would have killed himself.”

         

In the first week of November, “Baby, I Love You” entered the American Top 40, eventually rising to number 24. At the same time, copies of
A Christmas Gift to You
were being shipped out to distributors, ready to deluge the Christmas market. On November 22, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

The Ronettes were on tour and happened to be in the city on the day that Kennedy died. “We heard the president was coming, so we stayed up all night to see him,” Nedra remembers. “We were looking out of the window, waiting, and the TV was on in the room and all of a sudden he was shot. We were completely blown out of the water. Of course, we didn't perform. And then we were checking out of the hotel, just sitting there in the bar, waiting for the bus, and it came on TV when Ruby shot Oswald. Everybody was devastated.”

In the mood of national shock and mourning, Spector immediately withdrew the Christmas album from release. “A president died and the public changed,” he would later explain. “How would you like to put out a fifty-five-thousand-dollar album the same week as something like the president being assassinated took place?”

Spector too went into mourning, for Kennedy and the record.

11

“The Wall of Sound, It Kinda Sounds Tired”

I
n January 1964, Phil Spector traveled to Britain for the first time. He had negotiated a deal to release Philles records in Britain on the London-American label, a subsidiary of Decca, one of the three major companies (the others were EMI and Pye) that effectively controlled the British music industry. The Crystals, Bob B. Soxx, and the Ronettes had all enjoyed massive hits, and Spector was now being trumpeted as American pop's new wunderkind.

The Ronettes had arrived in England shortly before him, topping the bill on a tour of provincial cinemas and theaters. Their support act was a coming English rhythm and blues band called the Rolling Stones. In their slinky, figure-hugging dresses and teased hair, the Ronettes were catnip, and Ronnie was puzzled why the Stones seemed singularly immune to the girls' charms, merely nodding to them before and after shows. It was only when she asked the group's manager Andrew Loog Oldham why “the boys” were being so unfriendly that the reason became clear. Spector had telegrammed Oldham with a terse instruction: “Keep the Stones away from my girls.”

Oldham and Spector had history. In the early '60s, Oldham was the nearest equivalent to Phil Spector the British music scene had to offer—a cocky, precocious brat, who combined nerve and style in equal measure, who threw tantrums and made demands. Before Oldham, the English record business was run largely by hangovers from Tin Pan Alley, cautious men in bad suits who tended to view pop music as an aberrant and short-lived branch of the light-entertainment industry, and liked to play things by the book. Oldham, who saw pop music as a higher calling, tore the book up.

A war baby, the illegitimate son of an American airman, he demonstrated an early infatuation with glamour. As a student at Wellingborough he affected a hearing aid in honor of the “Prince of Wails,” Johnnie Ray, and did a piano act à la Liberace. Leaving school at sixteen, he quickly moved on to the Chelsea scene, working as a window-dresser for the fashion designer Mary Quant by day, and by night waiting on tables at Ronnie Scott's jazz club. His true gift was for insinuating himself into the affections of movers and shakers. By the age of nineteen he had sidestepped into the pop business, working for the Beatles' press agent Tony Barrow, until a tip from a music journalist led him to a dingy pub in south London where he discovered his Holy Grail—an unknown group called the Rolling Stones. Oldham was transfixed, less by the Stones' rough-and-ready versions of black rhythm and blues songs, than by the palpable wave of sexual energy coursing through the young girls hugging the front of the narrow stage as the group performed. Oldham could recognize his destiny when it was staring him in the face.

Within a matter of days, he had proposed himself as the group's manager, and quickly set about shaping them in his preferred image by a series of adroit maneuvers. He fired the hapless pianist Ian Stewart, because he was “ugly.” (“Stars,” Oldham would later write in his autobiography,
Stoned,
“must be killers, always striking first and last.” Stewart obligingly stayed on as the group's road manager.) He finessed their first single, a reworking of Chuck Berry's “Come On,” into the charts by rigging sales at chart-return shops. And he shrewdly encouraged Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to start writing their own songs, by locking them in a bedroom and refusing to feed them until they had produced the goods. More tellingly, he fostered a dishabille “bad boy” image that would guarantee newspaper column inches. Ironically, it was the popularity of the Stones' rivals the Beatles that made this ploy possible. The Beatles were working-class boys whose rough edges had been blunted by their more conservatively minded manager Brian Epstein. The triumph of the neatly suited, parent-friendly mop-tops left a yawning gap for a group that would appeal to more rebellious teenage spirits. In 1963, when Oldham engineered the newspaper headline “Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Rolling Stone?” the shudders of revulsion across middle England were palpable.

With his partner, Tony Calder, Oldham set up his own management and music publishing company. He went on to discover Marianne Faithfull (“in another century you'd set sail for her, in 1964 you'd record her”) and to found one of Britain's first independent labels, Immediate Records.

Spector was Oldham's model, his hero, his inspiration. Like Spector, Oldham affected the dandified clothes, the twenty-four-hour shades, the air of cocky, sardonic languor. He rode around town in a Cadillac; his driver carried a gun, not only illegal in Britain but virtually unheard of. As Spector had taken on “the short-armed fatties” of the American music business, so Oldham determined to wage a similar war of attrition against the plutocrats and Denmark Street spivs who ran the British industry.

In 1963 when Oldham and Calder traveled to America, to make connections, Oldham's first priority was to pay homage to Spector. “Andrew was in awe,” remembers Calder. “First of all, Phil was American! We hadn't seen Americans before. Americans were exotic! And it was all there: the hair, the arrogance—he was very arrogant, and rightfully so because he was so successful—the high-pitched Ahmet Ertegun voice. Ahmet was Phil's hero. You'd say, ‘We saw Ahmet last week.' And it would be: ‘That cocksucking douche bag.' If you didn't know Phil you'd think he was being insulting. But it was actually total respect. And that was the only way he knew how to express it.”

Recognizing something of himself in Oldham, and flattered by his attention, Spector obligingly played the role of mentor. “He gave us the rundown on everything,” says Calder. “Distribution, how you get records on the radio, how you put them in the right places, where you put the stock. It was a master class. For Andrew, it was a case of being wrapped up in the game. Idolizing, respecting—and getting some fucking great ideas off him, because we always worked on the basis that whatever we nicked and adapted we always took the best. And at that time Phil Spector was the best. He'd shown the bravado, the bullshit. These are the enemy—all the straights—we'll beat them. And it was like a Panzer division coming toward you. He blew open doors just by walking up to them. ‘Hi Phil, how are you?' ‘Fuck off.' And that bullshit works. It really works.”

At the end of their stay, to cement the friendship, Spector presented Oldham and Calder with a gold watch apiece from Sy Devore. Calder wore his for years, “until my wrist went green…”

         

When Spector landed at London's Heathrow airport, Oldham was waiting to greet him. He was accompanied by Maureen Cleave, a journalist for the London
Evening Standard.
A clever girl of impeccable breeding, with a Mary Quant bob and a cut-glass accent, Cleave was one of the first journalists in Britain to write seriously about pop music, and her columns were hugely influential. It was to Cleave, two years later, that John Lennon would confide his belief that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.”

Spector, Cleave noted, had traveled from New York dressed in “a dark suit, lined in scarlet, a black brocade waistcoat with the pattern standing a quarter-of-an-inch off the surface, a pin-tucked mustard shirt, and mustard silk handkerchief. At the end of the tight trousers were long, pointed, brown shoes with spats to match. In his tie was a pearl stickpin; looped across his stomach a gold watch chain. And he carried a small briefcase with the word ‘Phillip' tooled in gold in one corner.” He walked “a little like Charlie Chaplin, i.e., for every three steps forwards he takes one backwards or to the side. He is a man you can't take your eyes off.”

“I've been told I'm a genius,” Spector informed Cleave, en route from the airport. “What do you think?” Cleave took note of his prodigious accomplishments—“fifteen hits in a row,” the musical breakthrough of the Wall of Sound. His records, he told her, were “built up like a Wagner opera. They start simply and they end with dynamic force, meaning and purpose. It's in the mind. I dreamed it up. It's like art movies. I aimed to get the record industry forward a little bit, make a sound that was universal.”

“He has a Cadillac limousine,” Cleave wrote, “and a tendency suddenly to give everybody presents. He originally meant to be a lawyer and can stenotype 300 words a minute. He admires Abraham Lincoln and Lenny Bruce.” “I am the least quoted man in the industry,” Spector told her. “I stick to my little bourgeois haunts and I don't bother with the masses.”

Arriving at their destination, Spector stepped out of the car. There was a stiff wind, Cleave now remembers, and she noticed that he involuntarily put his hand up to clutch at his head. After years of fussing and fretting over his thinning hair, Spector, it seemed, had finally surrendered to the inevitable and was now wearing a toupee.

         

Decca had arranged for Spector to be installed in an efficiency in Dolphin Square, close by the Thames Embankment, and a young assistant from the promotions department named Tony King was assigned to look after him. On his first day in town, Spector announced that he wanted to go shopping. King took him to a West End department store, where Spector embarked on a hurricane spending spree. When it came to settling the bill, King was dismayed when Spector announced that he had no money, and that he expected Decca to pay for his purchases out of his royalties. An anxious King was obliged to telephone his office for authorization. “I was shocked, but Phillip was deeply satisfied at the outcome. I think he was trying it on. He was very funny—tiny, tiny with that strange high-pitched voice—and kind of sweet-natured really. But a bit like a naughty schoolboy, not helped by the fact that Andrew was tagging along with him most of the time. Andrew was obsessed with Phil and obviously modeled himself on him. They were getting into all sorts of mischief.”

The satisfactory outcome of this small demonstration of his power appeared to reassure Spector that he was in good hands.

Over the following week, Spector made all the mandatory stops on his Grand Tour of the English pop scene, feted as if he were a greater star than any of the artists he produced (he was), and luxuriating in the attention and acclaim. He dined with George Harrison of the Beatles, enjoying Harrison's tale of how the group had included their version of “To Know Him Is to Love Him” on their demo recording for Decca—and been turned down. He appeared as a guest on
Juke Box Jury,
a television show in which a panel of celebrities would adjudicate on the new releases, voting them a hit or a miss, and put in the obligatory appearance at the studios of Britain's most influential pop music television program,
Ready Steady Go!
The Ronettes were in London, having concluded their tour, and one night in their room at the Strand Palace Hotel Spector rehearsed them on a new song, “(The Best Part of ) Breakin' Up.” “Sitting there listening to them, my scalp tingled,” Tony King remembers. “But the funny thing was, we got a phone call from the front desk complaining about the noise. I thought Phil would flip, but he just laughed it off and we all went off for dinner. It was pretty obvious there was this thing between Phil and Ronnie; you could just feel the connection.”

On another occasion, during a dinner at Mirabelle, apparently beside himself with excitement, Spector dashed out of the restaurant, commandeered the Rolls and drove off alone into the night, returning with the news that he'd almost crashed the car driving on the wrong side of the road.

At Oldham's instigation, Spector tried to arrange a meeting with the eccentric English producer Joe Meek, who worked out of a home recording studio above a leather-goods shop in a run-down area of north London. Meek was one of the first producers to experiment with reverb and electronic effects, and his instrumental “Telstar,” by the Tornadoes, had been a number 1 hit on both sides of the Atlantic. But when Spector got through to him on the telephone, Meek railed against him, accusing him of stealing his ideas, and slammed the phone down with such venom that he broke the receiver.

Spector loved the Stones and wanted to release the group's records in America on Philles. Oldham was thrilled at the offer and together they went to meet the chairman of Decca, Sir Edward Lewis—a man who wore the chalk-stripe suits and mannered air of a merchant banker. But Lewis refused to release the Stones from their contract. “He was the first person to say no to Phil Spector,” Tony Calder says. “Phil was extremely pissed off.”

That same evening, Spector attended a Stones recording session on Denmark Street. As the evening wore on, they were joined by Graham Nash and Allan Clarke from the Hollies, and by Gene Pitney, who had arrived straight from the airport, carrying a cache of duty-free brandy. The session quickly degenerated into a drunken jam session, culminating in an improvised tribute to Oldham, “Andrew's Blues,” sung by Spector and Mick Jagger in a parody of Sir Edward Lewis's pukka English accent.

Yes, now Andrew Oldham sittin' on a hill with Jack and Jill

Fucked all night and sucked all night and taste that pussy till it taste just right…

Come and get it, little Andrew, before Sir Edward takes it away from you.

Tony Hall, Decca's head of promotions, was a ubiquitous and popular figure on the London music scene, and his gatherings were legendary. Hall lived on Green Street in Mayfair, directly opposite an apartment where George Harrison and Ringo Starr were staying at the time. “Any time they wanted to come over, because there were always kids hanging around outside their door, they'd have to order a taxi, leap into it, drive round the block and come back on my side of the road, where I'd be waiting with my door open.”

The Beatles were preparing to leave for their first visit to America, and Hall threw a farewell party for them and the Ronettes.

“It was a very sweet evening,” remembers Tony King, “because the Beatles, as big as they were at that time, had no idea what was about to hit them when they went to America, so they were very apprehensive. And Estelle and George had started to be interested in each other. Everybody was drinking Scotch and Coke and getting a bit pissed. We were all dancing along to Martha and the Vandellas' “Heat Wave,” and Ronnie suddenly let rip, joining in with that great vibrato of hers. And I can remember John Lennon's face, looking at her and registering ‘oh, you're the real article.'”