Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (25 page)

In Britain, an unlikely rival challenged the record's progress. Cilla Black had been spotted by Brian Epstein while working as the hat-check girl at the Cavern Club, and added to his roster of Liverpool artists. Earlier in 1964 she had enjoyed a number 1 record in Britain with a cover version of Dionne Warwick's “Anyone Who Had a Heart.” Even before the Righteous Brothers' song had been released in Britain, Epstein had Black's own, distinctly insipid, version on the market.

Fearing that the Righteous Brothers' version would vanish without trace, Tony Hall, the promotions director of Decca, hastily contacted Spector and begged him to put Medley and Hatfield on a plane to London for a round of promotional appearances. At the same time, Spector's greatest champion, Andrew Loog Oldham, took up the challenge on his behalf, buying up advertising space at his own expense in the British music weeklies to issue an indignant clarion call.

YOU'VE LOST THAT LOVIN' FEELIN' THE RIGHTEOUS BROTHERS

This advertisement is not for commercial gain, it is taken as something that must be said about the great new PHIL SPECTOR record, THE RIGHTEOUS BROTHERS singing YOU'VE LOST THAT LOVIN' FEELIN'. Already in the American Top Ten, this is Spector's greatest production, the Last Word in Tomorrow's Sound Today, exposing the overall mediocrity of the Music Industry.

Signed

Andrew Oldham

P.S. See them on this week's
Ready Steady Go!

“We had a mad week of promotion,” Tony Hall remembers, “and eventually through all the TV I managed to force the airplay. Cilla was at number three and the Righteous Brothers got to number eight. I had a party at my flat in Green Street, and Cilla was there with Eppy. He said, ‘We'll be number one next week. You haven't a hope in hell.' I said, ‘Give me a week, and I'll prove you wrong.' And the next week, the Righteous Brothers leapfrogged to number one.”

Cilla Black, it was reported, graciously cabled her congratulations to the Righteous Brothers.

Many years later, Spector would reflect that “Lovin' Feelin'” was the summit of his achievements with Philles.

“You know, you don't make anything in the record business that lasts very long,” he told the writer Richard Williams, “and when a record like that lasts a long time, it's really startling, because you don't have any Academy Awards for it. It's just nice to know that some people think that out of all the records ever made, it might be the very best. We wrote a very good song at that time.”

13

“A Giant Stands
5'7"
”

B
y 1964 Phil Spector was beginning to gain recognition far beyond the confines of the music industry and to become a figure of national curiosity. Despite Beatlemania, pop music was still regarded largely as cultural detritus, seldom dignified with coverage in the mainstream American media, its language and customs apparently still a mystery, and an outrage, to the arbiters of culture and taste. But with his prodigious success, his wiggy outfits and his outspoken opinions, Spector was a story, and he increasingly found himself in demand from newspapers and television shows, to talk about the “teenage” movement, how it expressed a new kind of freedom—and how he, more than anyone, had his finger on the pulse of the times.

Invited to appear on a special edition of David Susskind's
Open End
show, dedicated to exploring “Rock 'n' Roll: The New Loud Sound from Tin Pan Alley,” Spector found himself facing a combined assault from Susskind and the disc jockey William B. Williams, whose program
Make-Believe Ballroom
on the New York radio station WNEW was a redoubt of the swing jazz and crooners that rock and roll was rudely elbowing aside. (Williams, who gave Frank Sinatra his moniker “the Chairman of the Board,” had a legendary loathing of the new music. WNEW once ran a newspaper advertisement with the caption “We asked William B. Williams what he thought of rock 'n' roll” over a large photo of the disc jockey holding his nose.) When Susskind started reciting the lyrics of “A Fine, Fine Boy” in a bored monotone, intended to demonstrate their banality, Spector responded by banging on the table in time to Susskind's voice—“What you're missing is the beat”—then rounded on Williams, asking how many times he played Monteverdi and Scarlatti on his radio show—“That's good music, why don't you play that? I don't hear you play that”—before delivering his parting shot: “I didn't come on this show to listen to somebody telling me I'm corrupting the youth of America. I could be home making money.”

To Larry Levine, Spector's posturing on television was all part of a calculated attempt to build a public persona, and a measure of how much he was coming to believe it himself. “He really began believing in his own image, and I think it really affected him because whenever he had contact with the press or TV people, he'd live out the whole image with the dark glasses and the garbled manner. All the time he knew what was going on and he knew what to say and what not to say to sustain the image, and he was really always very together but he liked to give the opposite impression.”

         

In January 1965, the
New York Herald Tribune
published Tom Wolfe's profile, lionizing Spector as the “first tycoon of teen.” Beginning with the story of Spector turning round the airplane at Los Angeles, Wolfe went on to paint a portrait of the inexorable rise of the young, imperious, Cuban-heel-booted impresario, from what Spector described as “average lower middle class” origins, to become the most powerful man in American pop music.

Reading Wolfe's account one can detect evidence of Spector's gift for storytelling, and laying the foundations for myths that would endure for years to come. Wolfe describes how following the success of “To Know Him Is to Love Him” Spector had “decided to come to New York and get a job as an interpreter at the UN” but the “night before the interview he fell in with some musicians and never got there” (no mention of Lester Sill's call to Leiber and Stoller); how Phil had written “Spanish Harlem” (no mention of Jerry Leiber); how he had worked with Elvis Presley; how Phil “does the whole thing. He writes the words and the music” (no mention of his other writers or collaborators). Here was Phil, “a millionaire, a business genius,” living in his penthouse twenty-two storeys up, with a limousine and a chauffeur and a bodyguard and staff. Here was Phil, “a twenty-three-year-old man [
sic
], with a Shelley visage, with a kind of page-boy bob and winkle picker boots,” sitting in his beige office, taking a call from Andrew Oldham—“It's the Rolling Stones. They just got in!”—tearing into the short-arm fatties of the record industry, the “animals” who point and stare and abuse him when he's on the street or in a discotheque, the uncomprehending numbskulls who put down his music. “I feel it's very American. It's very today. It's what people respond to today. It's not just the kids. I hear cab drivers, everybody listening to it.”

“Every baroque period has a flowering genius who rises up as the most glorified expression of its style of life,” wrote Wolfe, switching gear into hyperbolic overdrive. “In latter-day Rome, the Emperor Commodus; in Renaissance Italy, Benvenuto Cellini; in late Augustan England, the Earl of Chesterfield; in the sal volatile Victorian age, Dante Gabriel Rossetti; in late-fancy neo-Greek Federal America, Thomas Jefferson; and in Teen America, Phil Spector is the bona fide genius of teen.”

Spector, needless to say, was thrilled by the piece and gave copies to all his friends.

A month after the publication of Wolfe's article, a more sober appraisal of Spector's accomplishments appeared in
Time
magazine. Describing Spector as “personifying the bizarre, make-believe world he dominates,” the piece shrewdly pointed out how his policy of releasing only a handful of records that he was convinced would be surefire hits differed from the approach employed by most in the record business, and analyzed the different components of the Wall of Sound and Spector's preference for using singers that expressed what he described as “a soulful yearning that every teenager understands.”

Taking note of his “$600 a month” psychoanalyst, Spector, the piece declared, appeared to be suffering a “maladjustment stemming from a feeling of non-acceptance by the adult world.”

“We're the only ones communicating with the teenagers,” he said. “They are so prone to anxiety and destruction, and they can't intellectualize their wounds…. Our music helps them to understand.”

His next project, the piece continued, would be a documentary, starring himself, to be called
A Giant Stands 5 ft. 7 in.
For some reason, it was never made.

         

The irony was that Spector was being fêted at precisely the time when his supremacy was most under threat. The music business that he had once dominated so assuredly was changing at a phenomenal pace, driven by the two great avatars of the age, the Beatles and Bob Dylan. The arrival of the Beatles had not only heralded the British Invasion of the American charts; they had inspired a legion of American imitators—young musicians who wrote their own songs and were less reliant on the producers and songwriters who had traditionally governed the pop music machine. The Brill Building writers who had furnished Spector with his string of hits were among the first to feel the wind of change; with performers expressing themselves, who needed tunesmiths in cubicles?

The Righteous Brothers might have recently given Spector the biggest hit of his career. But, one by one, other acts on Philles had been allowed to fade away. Only two singles were released under the name of the Crystals in 1964—“Little Boy” and “All Grown Up,” which even Larry Levine thought were “messy,” and neither of which troubled the Top 40. Cast aside, the group eventually bought out their contract from Philles and signed with United Artists. Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, a studio construct in the first place, had long since ceased to exist. Tired of being neglected, Darlene Love went back to session work and with Fanita Barrett took a weekly gig as a backing singer on the TV show
Shindig!
In 1965, only five singles would appear under the Philles imprint, two by the Ronettes and three by the Righteous Brothers (compared to ten Philles singles in 1963, and seven in 1964). And the Ronettes, the jewel in Philles's crown, were beginning to look distinctly tarnished. A song written by Spector, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Is This What I Get for Loving You?” reached only number 75 in May 1965.

While Spector seemed to have exhausted all the possibilities of the girl group sound that he had pioneered, others had picked up the baton. Following “Chapel of Love,” Red Bird went on to have other hits by the Dixie Cups and the Jelly Beans, produced by Greenwich and Barry. Even more successful were the Shangri-Las, whose trashed-out “bad-girl” looks and theatrically melodramatic songs about death and heartache, written and produced by the enigmatic George “Shadow” Morton, brought a whole new, mordant aesthetic to the girl group genre.

More aggravating still to Spector was the way in which Berry Gordy, his old adversary at Motown Records, was going from strength to strength. Spector habitually affected an attitude of Olympian disdain to his rivals, dismissing them as also-rans, amateurs and schlock merchants. But he held Gordy in singularly high regard. He would scan the
Billboard
charts, anxiously following the progress of Motown Records, and often call on his circle of DJ and radio-programmer friends to give him advance intelligence on Motown releases.

Nineteen sixty-three had been Spector's annus mirabilis, when he had enjoyed an unparalleled run of Top 40 hits, and could rightfully claim to be the most successful record man in America. But by 1964 Gordy had usurped him with female performers such as Mary Wells, the Marvelettes, the Supremes, and Martha and the Vandellas, and their male counterparts Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, the Four Tops, and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.

Working out of a converted house on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit, which he dubbed Hitsville USA, Gordy had assembled around him a supremely talented team of writers, producers and artists, fashioning a distinctive signature sound that combined the driving backbeat and testifying vocals of gospel and RB with the whipped-cream melodicism of pop. More than any other American record man, Gordy had managed to withstand the inroads of the British Invasion, creating a sound that, uniquely, appealed to both black and white audiences, and which Gordy felt emboldened enough to declare “The Sound of Young America.”

“Phil was very competitive with Berry Gordy,” Annette Merar remembers. “‘He's got the Supremes, but I've got the Ronettes. He's made
x
amount of dollars with this, but I made
y
dollars with that.' Very competitive. But at the same time he never considered Berry Gordy to really be in his category, because he was not a producer and musician to the degree that Phil was. But then Phil thought he was superior to everybody in the entire universe, including God.”

Notwithstanding the obvious difference, that Spector was white and Gordy black, the two men shared many similarities. Both were small men with Napoleonic egos, self-centered, highly driven and ruthlessly competitive.

Both had built their fortunes from nothing—Gordy had been a professional boxer and worked on the production line at General Motors before breaking into the music business as a songwriter. Both recognized that a good song was the most important factor in the business of making hits—and both could smell one at a hundred yards.

But as similar as they might have been in all these respects, they could hardly have been more different in others. While Spector was generous in his praise of Motown, and obsessively monitored their new releases, Gordy seemed hardly even to acknowledge Spector's existence. “Berry never mentioned the Ronettes or the Crystals or Phil Spector,” Diana Ross remembers. “He never talked about the opposition at all. He was so individual in his approach to his groups, his people and how he ran things.”

Realizing the limitations of his own production and writing talents, Gordy had quickly learned the value of delegation, building a team of in-house producers, writers and musicians, on call virtually twenty-four hours a day, who would fashion an endless stream of hits, like newly polished cars rolling off the production line. Spector was too stubbornly independent to delegate, and would never have considered spending the money to hire a full-time team. Instead, he recruited musicians as and when he needed them, and continued to draw on the well of New York writers, even at a time when the old Brill Building formula was beginning to pall.

Both men were highly selective in what they released, disdainful of the “shit on the wall” approach of so many companies, which would throw any number of records on the market in the hope that something might stick. For both men, flops were anathema. Yet their methods were radically different. Gordy would evaluate Motown's recordings at weekly “quality control” meetings, where his team of producers were encouraged to be unsparingly critical of each other's work before Gordy himself made the final ruling on which songs were the strongest and therefore worthy of release.

Spector tended to keep things closer to his chest, only occasionally soliciting the opinions of those around him. “You might say something ten times and then two months down the line Phil would act on it,” remembers one friend, “but he would never give you the benefit of thinking it was your opinion he was following.” And he was always racked with uncertainty, agonizing over whether to release a record or not and shelving huge amounts of material, often songs that others were convinced were surefire hits.

“These could be the greatest records in the world,” Larry Levine says, “and Phil wouldn't put them out. He would just have a feeling about it. But I always thought that had a lot to do with Phil's fear of failure. You have one hit after the other, and it puts a fear in you whether you can top that.”

But perhaps the major difference between Spector and Gordy was that Gordy thought in the long term. He was concerned to build his artists' careers, to the point of setting up his own Motown “charm school,” where his young charges would be tutored not only in singing and choreography but also in matters of style and deportment—how to dress, hold a cigarette or decant elegantly from a limousine—with a view to taking their place in the more refined echelons of show business.