Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (23 page)

“Ronnie,” Tony Calder remembers, “was the bird that everyone wanted to shag. Everybody was salivating over this incredible little thing sitting in this chair. Then Andrew came in, flapping around all over Phil, and Phil was being ‘This is my party'—even though it wasn't. He was getting very wound up about the attention everybody was paying to Ronnie. You could feel the sexual tension, every guy in the place looking at her. Because she was exotic. And she was American!”

Two days later, on Friday, February 7, the Beatles boarded Pan Am flight 101 from Heathrow airport, with Phil Spector in tow. He had originally planned to take an earlier flight but, paranoid as ever, had changed his arrangements to travel with the group, trusting to the fates that no plane carrying the biggest pop group in the world could possibly crash.

         

Dressed in a short overcoat and a corduroy Beatle cap, Spector followed the Beatles down the gangway of the plane at John F. Kennedy International Airport into a furnace of adulation. The only problem was, it wasn't for him. Spector's visit to London had consolidated his position at the top of the music business tree. He had cemented friendships with the two biggest groups on the British music scene, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who would soon follow their British rivals to America.

Spector was thrilled at the music, the breath of fresh air it carried. But he could little have imagined that the impending British Invasion was to prove the harbinger of his decline.

A week before their arrival in America, the Beatles' “I Want to Hold Your Hand” went to number 1 on the
Billboard
charts. On February 15, their first American album,
Meet the Beatles,
also went to number 1, where it would stay for the next eleven weeks. In the last week of February, to meet the burgeoning demand of Beatlemania, half a ton of Beatles wigs were shipped to America, quickly followed by 24,000 rolls of Beatles wallpaper. The torrent had become unstoppable.

Spector's initial response to the phenomenon was to attempt to capitalize on it. Sonny Bono had been pestering him to give his girlfriend Cher a chance to record. Spector now hurried her into the studio to record a “tribute” to the Beatles' drummer, “Ringo I Love You,” hastily scratched together by Spector and two New York songwriters he had recently begun working with, Vinnie Poncia and Pete Andreoli. Rather than using Cher's name, Spector released it under the pseudonym Bonnie Jo Mason. Nor did he wish to sully the name of Philles. The record was released on a subsidiary label, named in honor of his wife Annette—a gesture, according to Vinnie Poncia, that was intended to “anesthetize the situation between them,” but which, given the abysmal quality of the record, must have seemed more like an insult. It was a relief to all parties when the record sank without trace.

In the months following his return from London, Spector made several attempts at reconciliation with Annette. His triumphant visit to Britain had reinvigorated his self-confidence, temporarily banishing his worries and self-doubts. “He was very happy about his reception there,” Annette remembers. “You could see his attitude changing with all the recognition and success.”

On his journey to London, Spector had been shadowed by a powerful and imposing presence that went by the name of Red—or “Big Red,” as Spector called him. Red would be the first in a succession of bodyguards that Spector would hire over the years, partly for protection, but mostly it seemed as a demonstration of his rising status and power. “Phil wanted to be Elvis and Frank Sinatra combined,” one friend remembers. “Those were his heroes. And he wanted that kind of persona, the cool, aloof thing, the entourage—all that protected crap.”

Spector's flamboyant appearance—the hair, the elevator shoes, the ruffled shirts—had always drawn stares, and sometimes insults, but now with bodyguards at his side, he seemed almost to relish the prospect of confrontation, safe in the knowledge that if anybody caused trouble he had muscle on hand to deal with it.

“In 1965, you walk into a Hollywood restaurant looking like Phil Spector, there would be silence,” Denny Bruce says. “Like, what the hell is that?! Which is why he'd have bodyguards. He would stand there with shades on, a P. J. Proby billowing shirt, a vest, two guys behind him. He'd walk over to somebody who'd laughed out loud, and it would be: ‘What's so funny?' He antagonized people. And he enjoyed that attention.”

“Phil thrived on being different,” Nedra Talley says. “He didn't want to just be a little Jewish boy. So he developed a look, but with that look he got a lot of harassment. People would be calling him faggot and all kinds of things, and he'd just have to swallow it. But when he had his bodyguards with him, it got to be that he would pick fights. We'd be in a restaurant and he'd walk out first, and it would be just like a magnet where people would be drawn to say something to him. Then Phil would say something back to them, and just when it was getting ugly he would step back and his two guys would step out from behind and handle the situation. It was like a trap.”

Like LaLa Brooks, Nedra sensed that Spector's braggadocio was actually compensation for a much deeper underlying insecurity. Spector, she thought, was “a tortured soul.” He had told the Ronettes the story of how when touring with the Teddy Bears he had been set upon in a lavatory and pissed on.

“When he told us that, something inside of me went out to him. I loved that song, ‘To Know Him,' and the thought of this little guy who was too small to defend himself getting pissed on for just trying to do his thing, it broke my heart. So I always thought that, with the bodyguards, Phil was just getting his own back.”

But, to others, it seemed that Spector never quite knew when to stop. On one occasion, he even instructed his bodyguards to beat up Larry Levine, after an argument at Gold Star. “I walked out of the studio,” Levine remembers, “and he sent these guys out to hit me—a couple of young gorillas. They didn't know what to do; they obviously weren't going to hit me. It was just another way of exhibiting power.”

         

After the run of successes they had provided for the Crystals and the Ronettes, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry had fallen out with Spector. The cause was a song called “Chapel of Love,” which the three partners had written together in the autumn of 1963. It was a song that returned to one of Barry and Greenwich's perennial themes—marriage and happy-ever-after—with an infectious, sing-along melody that seemed to lodge in the brain and wouldn't let go. Spector recorded the song with both the Ronettes and LaLa Brooks, but apparently unconvinced, decided not to release either version.

Barry and Greenwich, meanwhile, had been in discussions with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller about joining forces in a new label that Leiber and Stoller had set up called Red Bird. Their first signing was a trio of girls from New Orleans called the Dixie Cups—the perfect vehicle, Greenwich and Barry reasoned, for “Chapel of Love.” “We always believed in that song,” Ellie Greenwich would later tell Alan Betrock, “and we called Phil and asked him, ‘Are you putting it out?' He said, ‘I don't know…I don't think so…no, no, never coming out…' So we said, ‘We're thinking of doing it,' and he said, ‘No, no, you can't do that.' He always wanted to have total control over everything he had to do with. I don't know how happy he was that Jeff and I were going to do something on our own on the production level without him. He wasn't totally thrilled, but he didn't stop it.”

Released in April 1964, “Chapel of Love” quickly went to the top of the American charts, replacing the Beatles' “Love Me Do” and remaining there for six weeks.

With Barry and Greenwich out of the picture, Spector started casting his net for other songwriters. He contacted his old friend Paul Case at Hill at Range, who introduced him to Vinnie Poncia and Peter Andreoli. At a meeting at Spector's office, Poncia and Andreoli ran through a number of song ideas. When they mentioned a title they were working on “(The Best Part of ) Breakin' Up,” Spector stopped them and told them they had a deal.

The song became the next Ronettes single. But while Barry and Greenwich's compositions flowed, this one stuttered, reaching only number 39 in the charts. (The throwaway instrumental on the B-side, “Big Red”—named in honor of Spector's bodyguard—seemed to be part of Spector's ongoing attempts at conciliation with Annette: she was credited as writer and therefore entitled to royalties.) In short order, Spector released two more singles sung by Ronnie under the name of Veronica, “So Young” and “Why Don't They Let Us Fall in Love?”—the first song the Ronettes had recorded at Gold Star a year earlier—but neither troubled the charts.

Spector seemed to have one obsession, and one obsession only. During the recording sessions he now insisted that Ronnie should sit with him in the control room, rather than fraternizing with the other singers and musicians. When they lunched with the producer Herb Alpert, Ronnie noticed that Spector put himself between her and Alpert, leaning in front of her whenever she spoke, apparently to prevent Alpert looking at her. In
Be My Baby
she recounts that when one evening during recording she and Nedra ducked out from the studio with Sonny Bono to pick up some hamburgers without telling Spector where she was going, he threw a fit, knocking over mike stands and strewing spools of tape over the studio. On another occasion, when she and Cher went dancing at the Purple Onion on the Strip, Spector tracked her down to the club and dragged her off the dance floor.

         

In his constant progress back and forth between New York and Los Angeles, Spector had neglected his business affairs. In the autumn of 1964, Chuck Kaye resigned, complaining that his salary wasn't enough to afford even a square meal. To replace him, Spector turned to a man named Danny Davis. Short, stocky and a spieler, Davis had once worked the Borscht Belt as a comedian before going into the record business as a promotions man. He worked for Big Top Records, where Spector first met him, promoting the Ray Peterson records that Spector produced for Dunes.

In 1963, Davis went to work for Don Kirshner, as vice president of Kirshner's Dimension Records. He had been there only a few months when Kirshner and his partner Al Nevins made a deal to sell Aldon Music to Screen Gems, the recording and publishing subsidiary of Columbia Pictures. Kirshner and Nevins were reported to have received some $2 million for the company. Nevins became a consultant to Columbia Pictures, while Kirshner was named executive vice president, responsible for all Columbia Pictures–Screen Gems publishing and recording activities. His team of Aldon writers dutifully followed him out of 1650 Broadway to new offices on Fifth Avenue, next door to Tiffany. Kirshner promptly folded Dimension Records, and Danny Davis found himself out of a job.

The situation Davis inherited at Philles was growing increasingly parlous. Not only had Spector's constant absences made his day-to-day business dealings more difficult; more significantly it was clear that he was losing his grip on the marketplace. The Ronettes' first single, “Be My Baby,” had been an enormous hit, but successive releases had proved disappointing. While “Baby, I Love You” reached number 24, both “(The Best Part of ) Breakin' Up” and “Do I Love You?” had barely scraped into the Top 40. Both singles by Veronica had vanished without trace, as had a single by Darlene Love, “Stumble and Fall.” It was to be her last for Philles.

In desperate need of inspiration, Spector turned back to the reliable mother lode of Don Kirshner. It had been almost two years since he had worked with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and like other writers of the Aldon (now Screen Gems) family, the pair had struggled to find a place in the new musical order being shaped by the British Invasion, despite contributing “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” to the Animals. They jumped at the chance to work again with Spector, and over two weeks in the autumn of 1964 the three writers convened in Spector's New York office, bent on fashioning a song that would restore the Ronettes to the charts.

In October, Spector called Ronnie and his musicians into Gold Star to record “Walking in the Rain.” Barry Mann would later try to distance himself from the song, dismissing it merely as an imitation of the girl group style that came so easily to Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich—“I was just trying to sound adolescent.” But he was wrong. “Walking in the Rain” was the most gorgeous Ronettes song yet.

Beginning with a thunderclap (from a sound-effects tape unearthed by Larry Levine), the song struck a perfect note of wistful longing. Spector's production—the gently resounding chimes, a discreet horn figure, the celestial choir, and the way the sound effects of distant thunder joined seamlessly with the percussion—seemed to create a vast, echoing backdrop for Ronnie's yearning vocal. She had never sung better, and would never sing better again.

Spector was exultant and convinced it would be an enormous hit. He was crushed when it reached only number 23. Nor was Larry Levine consoled when he found himself nominated at that year's Grammy Awards for Best Sound Effect for “Walking in the Rain.” “It was just a sound-effects tape! Can you imagine the dearth of nominees they had in order to make that a nomination? It was great to be nominated, but I felt so stupid.”

For Spector, the failure of the record seemed only to vindicate his growing sense that the industry was turning against him. In January 1964 he gave an interview to the British music paper
Melody Maker
in which he prophesied that his sound would “die because of the natural animosity in the record industry on the part of DJs. I guess they get a bit resentful of a guy all on his own doing so well. But more than anything, I feel they're jealous because I'm so young to have made so much money in a business they thought they knew everything about. They never seemed to believe what I always thought—that every record can be a hit if you concentrate on it enough.”