Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (26 page)

Spector, on the other hand, worked in sudden and intense spurts of enthusiasm that would be quickly exhausted before he was on to the next thing. While he respected talent, he often acted as if his artists were disposable. Today's hot act was tomorrow's has-been. Only the sound was constant, and the only career he was really interested in building was his own. While Gordy had sublimated his energies and his ego into developing Motown as a corporate brand (most record buyers didn't even know, much less care, who Berry Gordy was), for Spector, his name was the brand. In his mind, they weren't Philles records, or even Crystals, Ronettes or Righteous Brothers records; they were Phil Spector records.

“The thing about Phil with all his artists is that he'd get them to a place of greatness and then get tired of them, and go on to the next one,” Don Randi says. “And there were a lot of good producers around he could have passed them on to. I would have loved to have a chance; Jack, Sonny…But it just wasn't in Phil's nature to do that. As big as Philles was, it could have been one hundred times bigger. But with Phil there was always this attitude of this is mine and this is what I choose to do, and if I can't do it, nobody else can.”

Spector did attempt to tear one leaf from Gordy's playbook. As Motown grew, realizing that DJs would be unlikely to include more than one or two new records from one label on their weekly playlists, Gordy set up a series of subsidiary labels to spread his new releases.

In 1965, Spector set up his own subsidiary label, Phi-Dan—partly to give an increasingly restless and underemployed Danny Davis something to do. Phi-Dan released a handful of records by artists including Betty Willis, the Lovelites, and Spector's regular pianist Al DeLory performing a version of the Beatles' “Yesterday,” none produced by Spector himself, and all of which quickly vanished without trace.

This changing order in music was manifest in another way—the rise of the 33 rpm long-playing record, or album, as the foremost creative medium—and the dominant commercial currency in pop music.

Like everybody else in the pop music business in the late '50s and early '60s, Spector had always regarded albums as little more than an excuse to milk the success of a single, padding out one or two hits with the addition of highly disposable filler—throwaway B-sides, cover versions of current hits, or songs hastily composed with a mind to the publishing royalties rather than quality control: “two hits and ten pieces of junk,” as Spector himself once put it. Albums were largely the domain of jazz, classical music and show tunes.

But now artists began to explore their potential as an extended vehicle for self-expression. The Beatles'
Rubber Soul,
released in June 1965, was to prove a significant bellwether; rather than a disparate grab bag of hits and misses, here was a coherent suite of songs, each as carefully crafted, and as brilliant, as the last. The decision by the group's American label Capitol not to release a single or two as calling cards before releasing the album itself reinforced the perception that
Rubber Soul
should be regarded as a complete and indivisible entity.

But it would be Spector's most devoted disciple and apprentice who would bring the medium to its most glorious fruition.

Brian Wilson, the leader of the Beach Boys, had idolized Phil Spector since the moment in 1962 when he first heard Darlene Love singing “He's Sure the Boy I Love.” Years later, Wilson would explain how that record “opened up a door of creativity for me like you wouldn't believe. Some people say drugs can open that door. But Phil Spector opened it for me.”

The early songs that Wilson wrote for the Beach Boys—blissfully innocent celebrations of the teenage California holy trinity of sun, sea and surfing—had been bolted together from two basic elements; the guitar riffs of Chuck Berry and the keening harmonies of the Lettermen. But Spector's magisterial productions were to imbue Wilson with a grander sense of vision. “I was unable to really think as a producer until the time I really got familiar with Phil Spector's work,” Wilson would later explain. “That was when I started to design the experience to be a record rather than just a song.” To Wilson, Spector represented the summit of the producer's art; not only was his music epic, moving, “so large and emotional,” as Wilson put it; it was also hugely successful—a fact that Wilson, who always hungered for commercial success, regarded as a critical measure of a record's true worth.

Wilson would occasionally visit Gold Star to watch Spector at work. While recording the Christmas album, Spector invited him to sit in on piano, but a flustered and nervous Wilson was unable to read the lead sheets and backed down. As much as he was in awe of Spector, he was also intimidated by him. “I studied Spector at work in the studio, noticing that like me he was one hundred percent hung up on creating a perfect song,” Wilson would later be quoted as saying in his autobiography,
Wouldn't It Be Nice.
“The other similarity, which I failed to notice and didn't recognize until many years later, was that his aberrant personality was perhaps his best tool in making records, allowing him to manipulate people into doing exactly what he wanted. He didn't bend to the world; it bent for him.”

Spector, for his part, treated Wilson with a paternalistic indulgence, happy to have him around in the studio, accepting Wilson's hero worship as his due, acknowledging his talent, but not for a moment considering him as a serious rival. It was not in Phil Spector's makeup to consider anyone as a serious rival.

Wilson was particularly smitten with “Be My Baby,” which he regarded as the greatest pop record ever made. “Brian must have played ‘Be My Baby' ten million times,” says Bruce Johnston, who joined the Beach Boys in 1964. “He never seemed to get tired of it.” Inspired by the song, Wilson wrote “Don't Worry Baby,” intending to offer it to Spector for the Ronettes to record. But, fearing rejection, he changed his mind and recorded the song with the Beach Boys instead. It reached number 24 in June 1964.

As fragile as he was gifted, in the same year Wilson suffered his first nervous breakdown. While the Beach Boys continued touring, he retreated into the studio. Eager to replicate the magic of Spector's recordings, he began to use musicians from the Wrecking Crew on Beach Boys records. The songs about surfing and hot rods gave way to more subtle reflections on love and self-identity. But it was hearing the Beatles'
Rubber Soul
that would provide his Damascene moment. “When I first heard it, I flipped,” he would later recall. “
Rubber Soul
was a collection of songs…that somehow went together like no album ever made before, and I was very impressed. I said, I want to make an album like that…a whole album with all good stuff.”

In the summer of 1965 Wilson started writing songs in collaboration with a lyricist named Tony Asher, and at the beginning of 1966, he went into the studio to begin work on the album that would become
Pet Sounds.
A cycle of songs about adolescent yearning and lost innocence, the elegiac melodies framed in arrangements of a startling sophistication,
Pet Sounds
would raise pop music to a new gold standard. Wilson would explain that “it wasn't really a song concept album, or lyrically a concept album…It was really a production concept album.” The Beatles might have set the yardstick in terms of songcraft, but it was Spector's genius in the studio that Wilson was trying to emulate. He would later claim that even the album's title was an act of homage, bearing the same initials as his hero (although, given the fact that the title was supposedly dreamed up by fellow Beach Boy Mike Love, this seems unlikely).

But
Pet Sounds
was to be Wilson's Waterloo. Driven to surpass his own masterwork, and increasingly enmeshed in drugs, Wilson slowly became unhinged. His obsession with Spector had always had a darker side. As much as he idolized Spector, he also feared him. Now he began to believe that Spector was “a mind-gangster” who was monitoring his brain. Watching the Rock Hudson movie
Seconds,
he “heard” Spector talking to him from the cinema screen. “Just thinking about Spector activated a switch in my head,” he would write later. “I felt intimidated, fearful. I kept thinking about the perfection and greatness I was striving for and the likelihood that I might never reach it.”

Over the next twenty years, Wilson would spiral downwards through drug abuse, psychosis and chronic obesity, until finally recovering his footing in the 1990s. Yet he would continue to regard Spector with a mixture of awe and fear. When I met Wilson in November 2001 he would describe Spector as “a very scary person. He was egotistical and self-centered. A very scary kind of talking style. A very scary person.”

“Brian was just mesmerized by Phil and his work,” Bruce Johnston says. “I remember going with him to a session for the Righteous Brothers; Phil was totally in command, and Brian just sat there, having a fan-adulation meltdown. He thought Phil was a genius. But to me, while the brilliance belongs to Phil, the genius belongs to Brian.

“The big thing Brian did was hire the band. By hiring the Wrecking Crew—this rhythm section, horn section and string section—it gave Brian more tools as his music was growing, he was able to grow the tracks—but from bar one he leapt past Phil. You could say the Beach Boys' ‘Surfin' was on the same plane as ‘To Know Him.' ‘California Girls' compares to ‘Be My Baby.' But Phil never got past that into the stratosphere that Brian went into with
Pet Sounds.
There was a limitation for Phil on how far he could go with his Wall of Sound. He was like a little boy who does something really cute and gets applauded for that, and so he starts figuring out how to get the applause back, but then it's not quite as cute again. I think Phil started believing his own legend and press. I don't think Brian ever did that, and to this day Brian never knew how good he was. He was like Cary Grant growing up without a mirror.”

         

By 1965 Spector could hardly have failed to be aware of how dramatically the music scene had changed. It was there every time he turned on the radio; and every time he landed in Los Angeles after the grueling, nerve-jangling flight from New York. The major power brokers in the record business may still have been located on the East Coast, but the energy and the creativity had moved west.

Los Angeles was now spawning its own vibrant music scene, centered around the string of clubs blossoming along the Sunset Strip—the Trip, the Whisky a Go Go, and Ciro's, where Los Angeles's “own Beatles,” the Byrds, reigned supreme. On Friday and Saturday nights the scene on the Strip resembled a circus parade, thronged with longhairs and freaks in shaggy Beatle haircuts, girls in miniskirts and go-go boots. The Byrds' dreamy, jingle-jangle version of Bob Dylan's “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the harbinger of the fashionable new genre of folk rock, was one of the songs dominating the airwaves in the summer of 1965. Dylan's own “Like a Rolling Stone”—the gunshot, according to myth, that would change rock music forever—was another. A third, Sonny and Cher's “I Got You Babe,” must have been particularly galling for Spector. Being fired by Spector had turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to Sonny Bono, or “Sonny Bozo,” as Spector had taken to calling him. After releasing singles with Cher under the name Caesar and Cleo, Bono had finally struck the mother lode, producing a song that managed to combine the folk rock sound of the Byrds, Dylan's nasal drawl and the shimmering, spacious sound of a Spector production. The obliging gofer and the honking backing singer now affected matching furry vests and bellbottom pants and were installed in the number 1 position on the charts as America's favorite hippie sweethearts. As if to rub salt into Spector's wounds, the follow-up to “I Got You Babe” was “Baby Don't Go”—the song that Bono had offered Spector, and that he had turned down, a year earlier. It reached number 8.

Spector had spent the past four years commuting between the coasts, retaining his apartment and office in New York, and latterly leasing a modest, Spanish-style house—Brynmar—in the Hollywood Hills. But now he made the decision to relocate permanently to Los Angeles. For all that he had grown up there, Spector never felt comfortable in Los Angeles; he hated the heat—California didn't have weather, he complained, it had climate—and the absence of street life. But Los Angeles was where Gold Star, and the action, was. And the constant flying was killing him. Dr. Kaplan advised against the move. But Spector reasoned he could maintain his equilibrium by calling long-distance whenever he needed instant therapy—just as he had when things got too much in the studio.

In the summer of 1965 he took possession of a new property that he felt more properly befitted his Olympian status in the music business—a rambling, twenty-one-room Spanish-style mansion at 1200 La Collina Drive, a gated private road a short walk from the Sunset Strip. Built in 1910, the property had once been the main residence of a substantial estate, with a series of cottages and carriage houses scattered throughout the grounds. But over the years, most of the land had been parceled off and sold for new developments. Spector's new home sat in two acres. At the front of the house was a paved courtyard set with an ornamental fountain; at the rear, gardens and the inevitable swimming pool. The singer Eartha Kitt was a near neighbor. She and Spector would never get on.

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