Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (33 page)

In February 1968, Hopper and Fonda began work on
Easy Rider.
The film is an elegy to the counterculture, which tells the story of two bikers who on the proceeds from a cocaine deal set out on a voyage of discovery across America.

Spector was invited to play the part of the drug dealer. “We wanted Phil because we knew we'd get his Rolls-Royce and Mac for free,” Fonda jokes. “But he also had a great look for the part.”

The brief scene required Spector to meet with the two biker heroes, Captain America and Billy (played by Fonda and Hopper respectively), test the cocaine with a single snort and complete the transaction. Hopper had scouted a suitably desolate location, a slip road at the end of a runway at Los Angeles International Airport, and the shoot was conducted to the deafening roar of jets coming in to land. “I didn't realize that Phil didn't like loud noises, even though he was the Wall of Sound,” Fonda remembers, “and with his fear of flying as well…You see him cowering when a plane comes over; that wasn't acting. He was scared shitless.”

         

With the Ronettes no more, Ronnie had now more or less moved into the mansion on La Collina Drive. Knowing that her mother would not tolerate her “living in sin,” Ronnie told Beatrice that she was staying in hotels, busy with rehearsals and recordings. As Beatrice's suspicions mounted, Spector proposed a radical solution. According to Ronnie, he telephoned her mother in New York, wildly improvising a story that he and Ronnie had just been married by “two practicing rabbis” in “an obscure Hebraic ceremony.” When Beatrice threatened to come out and see for herself, Spector, apparently convinced that she would accept the situation once she realized the luxury in which her daughter was living, offered to pay the fare himself. Beatrice arrived a couple of days later. Furious to discover that there was no wedding ring on her daughter's finger and that she had been misled, she ordered Ronnie to pack her clothes and told her she was taking her back to New York. According to Ronnie, as the taxi pulled out of the drive to take them to the airport, Spector pulled a wad of $500 bills from his pocket and threw them on the ground, pleading, “It's all yours. Just leave my wife here!”

Back in New York, Beatrice moved her daughter from one relative to the next, in an attempt to avoid Spector's increasingly desperate phone calls. To kill the boredom of watching television soap operas all day long—and in ominous portent of things to come—Ronnie had discovered a new distraction, drinking. “After two glasses I actually started to enjoy watching
As the World Turns,
” she would write in
Be My Baby.
At the same time, according to Ronnie, the financial implications of her affair with Spector were beginning to sink in among her family. “Not once did anyone ever talk about Phil without mentioning money in the same breath.”

At length Spector himself arrived in New York, tracking down Ronnie to an aunt's house in Spanish Harlem. The following day they left for California.

In March 1968, Spector finally proposed that they should marry. Ronnie was giddy with the vista of unbroken happiness spreading before her. “First off, I'd be a star again,” she wrote in her autobiography. “Phil would be so inspired by married life that he'd climb right out of his rut and write half a dozen new songs for me…. We'd be the king and queen of rock and roll, and our life would be one never-ending party. Elvis and the Beatles and all the stars from
The Late Late Show
would drop by the mansion just to be around us.”

         

The wedding day was set for April 14. On April 4 Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. King was one of Spector's heroes, and just as he had been by the death of Lenny Bruce eighteen months earlier, he seemed to be thrown completely off balance. According to Ronnie, he retreated to his room and locked the door behind him, playing recordings of King's speeches over and over again, only emerging three days before the wedding.

The ceremony in the Beverly Hills City Hall was as subdued as Spector's first wedding had been four years earlier. Beatrice had flown out from New York. She, Mac Mashourian, his brother Serge, who acted as best man, and Serge's wife were the only guests. To celebrate, Spector took the wedding party to a Mahalia Jackson concert. Spector adored Jackson. Ronnie could not have cared less. After the concert, he told Mac to take his new wife back to the mansion, and instructed Serge to drive him to his mother's house. He had yet to tell Bertha that he was getting married. The encounter with his mother was evidently fraught; Bertha did not approve. (She would later lament to friends that her son had married “a schwarze,” and complain bitterly that the marriage was “like a thorn in my butt.”)

According to Ronnie, when Spector returned to the house two hours later, there was a furious fight during which he accused his new bride of only marrying him for his money. She spent her wedding night with her mother, locked in the bathroom with Spector pounding on the door. It was an unhappy omen.

“Phil and Ronnie getting married was an ego merger,” one friend says. “Phil loved the fact that other men were attracted to her but he was the one who had her. He loved her voice. She was his passion. ‘She's mine.' But he didn't really want to spend time with her. And Ronnie wanted him so he would produce her and only her, so she would be the star, and also to be lavished with his money. They married for all the right reasons in the Gospel of Rock and Roll, and all the wrong ones in terms of having a reasonable relationship, or any kind of relationship at all.”

Marrying Spector, Ronnie had boasted to friends that she was “the only girl who ever married the boss in the music business. Not even Diana Ross married Berry Gordy.” But whatever dreams of happiness—and self-advancement—she had entertained about being Mrs. Phil Spector quickly began to evaporate.

Spector now spent most of his time brooding in his study. He seldom left the house, and when he did, it was never with Ronnie. Elvis and the Beatles didn't come to call. Whatever independence she had once enjoyed quickly faded away. She had no bank account of her own, no cash; if she wanted money, she had to ask Phil. According to Ronnie, he installed intercoms to monitor her movements throughout the house. It was his way of showing he cared.

He filled the house with symbols of togetherness that mocked the emptiness of the marriage, and the fast-receding memory of her career: napkins, towels and notepaper monogrammed with “The Spectors” photographs of them in the studio together. But Ronnie had not been near a studio in more than two years. Spector appeared to have forgotten that she had once had a career. With no distractions, and no friends, there was nothing for her to do all day but mope around the mansion. As one friend observed, there was “no sign of ‘the little woman' in a bone of her body. Ronnie was incapable of boiling an egg.” Not that Spector would have allowed her to. He insisted that staff take care of all the household duties. She read movie magazines, watched television soap operas and took up painting-by-numbers.

At night Spector would sit in darkness, endlessly playing old Hollywood movies. Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, the slapstick heroes Laurel and Hardy and Harold Lloyd. But his favorite film was
Citizen Kane.
How could he fail to identify with Orson Welles's parable of ambition, hubris and spiritual desolation? And how could he fail to identify with its creator? Like Spector, Welles was a prodigy—he had made
Citizen Kane
when he was just twenty-six—a genius who refused to compromise and bent the world to his vision. And as much as
Citizen Kane
was a study of power and the isolation it brings—the plutocrat locked in his mansion of Xanadu, surrounded with everything money can buy but unable to find the one thing that would bring him happiness—so it was also a prophecy of Welles's own future, the inexorable decline of early promise and brilliance. According to Ronnie, Spector would play the film endlessly, weeping at the final scene, in which Rosebud—the sled—the symbol of childhood joy and innocence, is incinerated.

What on earth did they talk about? Spector with his feelings of betrayal and martyrdom, his collection of vintage Hollywood films, his Lenny Bruce recordings and Martin Luther King speeches; Ronnie with her thwarted ambition, her collection of nail polishes and hair preparations, her painting-by-number sets. In Spector's own Xanadu, time passed as if in purgatory.

For Ronnie's twenty-fifth birthday on August 10, 1968, he presented her with a Camaro sports car, gift-wrapped in white silk ribbon. According to Ronnie, however, her delight was short-lived, when he then presented her with an inflatable life-sized mannequin, dressed in a shirt and pants, to keep on the passenger seat beside her. “Don't you get it?” he told her. “Now nobody will fuck with you when you're driving alone.”

The gift seemed to do little to pour oil on the troubled waters of the marriage. Shortly afterward—and barely four months after their wedding—Ronnie hired a Los Angeles attorney, P. F. Caruso, to begin divorce proceedings. Caruso's petition claimed that Ronnie and Phil had separated on August 20—just ten days after Spector had presented her with the Camaro and the mannequin.

Listing Ronnie's net worth as “nothing” and estimating Spector's fortune at “5 million,” the petition asserted that everything Spector owned was community property and requested the court to authorize the hiring of a certified public accountant to provide an inventory of all his business records so that Ronnie could see exactly what she was entitled to.

“Since the marriage of the plaintiff and defendant,” the complaint read, “the defendant has treated plaintiff in an extremely cruel manner and has inflicted upon her great and grievous mental and physical suffering, and said conduct on the part of the defendant has defeated the object of matrimony.

“The defendant has a mean and ungovernable temper and has grabbed plaintiff violently and has threatened to stick his fingers in her eyes and he has stated to her that he could not permit her to get a divorce from him.”

Ronnie, the complaint went on, was “currently under a doctor's care for nerves,” and it requested that Spector be enjoined from “annoying, molesting, or harming [her] in any way whatsoever.”

Spector responded to his wife's petition by promptly filing one of his own. In answer to Caruso's claim that all of Spector's assets were community property, Spector's lawyer Jay Cooper asserted that “there exists no community property of the parties herein.” Cooper's complaint also charged Ronnie with “extreme cruelty” against her husband, but without specifying its exact nature.

Evidently, the dispute was quickly put to rest, however. Ronnie continued to live at the mansion, and by April 1969 both suits had been dismissed by the lawyers who filed them.

Bored and frustrated, Ronnie now started to drink more heavily, smuggling the booze into the house on her occasional expeditions to the outside world. In desperate need of a life for herself, her thoughts began to turn toward motherhood. “I knew I'd make a great mom,” she wrote in
Be My Baby.
“All I needed was a kid.” It seems appropriate that the solution should have been suggested to her by her most constant companion: the television. Watching a program about unwanted babies, she was immediately struck by the idea that she should adopt a child. That same afternoon, she drove to an adoption agency and selected a mixed-race baby boy, named Donte. Within four weeks, Donte was hers. As odd as this spontaneous gesture may have been, Spector's response was odder still. Apparently delighted at the prospect of fatherhood, he immediately set about preparing cards announcing the happy event—“Presenting the smash-hit production of Donte Phillip Spector”—that cast Donte's arrival as a three-act play, in which Ronnie appeared to be playing the part of the child's natural mother.

When Ronnie expressed her doubts about the implication that she'd given birth to Donte herself, Spector replied, “If I say you were pregnant, who's going to say any different?” Ronnie, he suggested, should stick a pillow under her shirt when anybody visited the house. She apparently went along with the plan without demur.

Nedra Talley had recently given birth to her first child, a daughter Christina, and when she learned that Ronnie too had “given birth,” her first reaction was one of incredulity. “It was so confusing. I'd only been with her like a couple of months before, and suddenly—‘We just had a baby!' I was trying to figure it out. She said it was premature; I said, ‘Well, maybe you were two or three months pregnant and you didn't know it.'” When Nedra discovered that Donte was actually adopted she began to think it was just another, albeit extreme, example of Ronnie's old competitive instincts. “Ronnie had always had this thing that if I did something, she had to do it, too; if I was getting married, she had to be married; if I had a baby, she had to have a baby. It just couldn't be that I was beating her.”

When Donte first arrived in the house, Spector played the role of doting parent, suspending his customary nocturnal hours to help to feed and bathe him. But the novelty quickly palled. Not quite trusting Ronnie to do the job herself, he appointed a nurse to look after Donte and turned his thoughts back to his career.

16

“Out There, but in a Beautiful Way”

T
he two years he had been away from the music business had left Phil Spector feeling estranged, bitter and afraid. The possibility that his career was over, that the world had already written him off as a spent force, exercised him endlessly. Just twenty-nine, he was terrified that his best years were already behind him.

In his 1969 interview with Jann Wenner, Spector would admit how he felt he could no longer communicate with anybody in the record business. “I can't really bullshit with them; I don't have friends in the record industry. I don't talk with them. We don't jell; we don't communicate; because I'm too bitter I think. I'm still involved with why ‘River Deep' wasn't a hit and what the fuck was…and am I that hated? Am I too paranoid? You know, you can antagonize people if they think you're not human, if you say, ‘Aw fuck, I ain't afraid.' A lot of people will get very angry at that, disc jockeys in particular…”

Talking with Wenner, Spector sounded as sour and reactionary as the “straights” who had mocked his music four or five years earlier—in his own words, “an old-timer wishin' for the groovy young days.” Nothing was as good as it used to be. Black music had gone, the “group on the corner” turned into “a white psychedelic or a guitar group.” The charts were full of acts that are “going to bore everybody to death.” Artists of today, he lamented, “just sing. They don't really interpret anything.” Even the Stones were “just makin' hit records now. There was a time when the Stones were really writing
contributions.
See, that's a big word to me—‘contributions!'” He talked of how he felt he could bring something to Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin and Dylan. “I'd do a Dylan opera with him…You see, he's never been produced. He's always gone into the studio on the strength of his lyrics, and they have sold enough records to cover up everything—all the honesty of his records. But he's never really made a production. He doesn't really have to.”

Then there were the Beatles. “I would like to record them a certain way because, again, other than what they do themselves—there's nobody. I don't know how influential their producer is, and I am sure they have a great deal of respect for him and he's the fifth Beatle and all that, but I don't think he thinks the way I would think…”

But then nobody, in Spector's opinion, thought the way he did, no producer could hold a candle to what he'd done. “I'm not interested in knocking everybody's brain 'cause I'll
always
make a good record, and it'll be better than all that shit out there today. 'Cause
they
really don't know how to record. They don't know anything about depth, about sound, about technique, about slowing down.”

But Jagger, Dylan, the Beatles…none of them had called.

Retirement bored him. The studio was Spector's home, his world, the milieu where he was most in command of everything, including himself. Adrift in the echoing rooms of the La Collina mansion, he was nothing but a ghost. Philles was dead, and Spector did not have the appetite either to revive it or to start afresh. But in the summer of 1968 an opportunity presented itself through a flourishing independent Los Angeles label, AM. The initials stood for the labels' owners, the trumpet player Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss. Alpert was a former student at Fairfax High, who had gone on to work as an AR man at Dore Records, around the time when the Teddy Bears recorded “To Know Him Is to Love Him” for the label. Moss was an independent promotions man who had prowled the corridors of the Brill Building before moving to Los Angeles in 1960. In 1962, Alpert and Moss formed their own label, releasing “The Lonely Bull”—a mournful trumpet instrumental by Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, inspired by a visit to a bullfight in Tijuana, and recorded in the studio he had built in his garage. The record became a Top 10 hit. This early success was consolidated with middle-of-the-road acts like Sergio Mendes, the Sandpipers and Chris Montez. But by 1968 the label had broadened its roster, licensing releases by British acts such as Procol Harum, Joe Cocker and Free.

Spector was acquainted with both Alpert and Moss, but it was Larry Levine who was most instrumental in bringing him to AM. Levine had left Gold Star in 1967, when Alpert (whose records Levine had engineered at Gold Star) offered him the job of chief engineer at AM's new recording studios in the old Charlie Chaplin film studio on La Brea Avenue. In the five years they had spent together working shoulder-to-shoulder at Gold Star, Levine had come to develop an almost filial affection for Spector, regarding himself as something of an elder brother figure. But even Levine had never quite come to terms with the contradictions in Spector's behavior.

“I had a strange experience with Phil that kind of illustrates that. The first year I was at AM, I got a really nice Christmas bonus. I was already getting a good salary, plus profit-sharing. And when I got the bonus I said to my engineers and the people working for me, ‘The drinks are on me—I just realized that if things stay like this until I'm eighty, I'm going to be worth eighty million dollars!' And Phil happened to be there, and he really wasn't happy about that. It was a ridiculous thing. I got the sense that he didn't want me to be independent of him, or be on a par with him money-wise or any other way. It was as if it was threatening to him. It wasn't a question of me being happy. He saw this eighty million dollars as a realistic attainment. I'd meant it as a joke. Everybody laughed except Phil. But Phil needs to be in charge.

“But at the same time there could be this enormous generosity, too. I remember another time at AM when something went awry somewhere and I got a note from someone berating me. Phil read the note, and he ended up writing three pages to this guy, giving him hell for having the effrontery to do that to me. I mean, three pages! And it was beautifully phrased. Phil would do that kind of thing.”

For Jerry Moss, the fact that Spector had not been in a studio in more than a year, and had not had a hit record in more than three years, was an irrelevance. “Our view was that Herb and I just wanted to work with great people,” Moss remembers. “It didn't matter to us if somebody was in fashion or out of fashion—as far as we were concerned, this guy was the tops and he made great records. He was intriguing and wouldn't it be fun.” Learning of the new partnership, Spector's old partner Lester Sill could not disguise his skepticism. Phil, he told friends, was “roaming and using,” just as he always had.

Given carte blanche by AM to record anyone he liked, Spector returned to first principles, choosing a relatively unknown act that embodied the medium he understood best and loved most—the black voice. He had found a group that were neither “a white psychedelic or a guitar group.” Checkmates Ltd. were a mixed-race soul group featuring two strong black singers, Bobby Stevens and Sonny Charles, who alternated on lead vocals in a manner reminiscent of David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks of the Temptations. “Discovered” by Nancy Wilson, they had been working the circuit of nightclubs and Las Vegas lounges for a number of years; signed to Capitol, they had released a series of singles and an album,
Live at Caesar's Palace,
which included a showstopping version of “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin,'” with Stevens and Charles trading the Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield lines. Spector could hardly have failed to notice the similarity when he saw the group perform, and he was excited with the prospect of working with a soul vocal group that he could fashion in his preferred image.

In search of material, in the last months of 1968 he traveled to New York. The old contacts he had relied on in earlier days had scattered to the winds. Don Kirshner had gone on to enjoy great success as executive producer for the Monkees and was now occupied with the TV cartoon group the Archies; the songwriting teams of Goffin and King and Greenwich and Barry were no more (Barry was working for Kirshner on the Archies). But in a Chinese restaurant on Broadway Spector happened to run into Toni Wine, an acquaintance from the Brill Building days. Wine had signed to Kirshner's Aldon Music when she was just fifteen, writing songs and sometimes recording demos for Goffin and King and Mann and Weil. From time to time Kirshner had even suggested that she and Spector should write together. “But at that time,” Wine says, “I wasn't even allowed out at night.” She had gone on to pursue a career that combined singing and writing, recording a handful of singles for Kirshner's Colpix label, enjoying a huge hit in 1966 with her composition “Groovy Kind of Love,” recorded by the British group Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, and composing advertising jingles. At the time she met Spector she was working with a songwriting partner, Irwin Levine.

Within a few days of their meeting, Spector joined the pair at Wine's apartment on Eighth Avenue to begin writing together. Their first collaboration was a song called “Black Pearl,” a sweet, plaintive soul ballad inspired by the Sidney Poitier film,
For Love of Ivy,
about a black maid who decides to leave the white family she has served for many years to return to school. The lyric contained a deliciously double-edged trope—the black pearl, it ran, might never have been pretty enough to win a beauty show, “But you're my Miss America, and I love you.”

“The original lyric was ‘you're my Miss America, from Lenox Avenue'—Lenox Avenue being
the
street in Harlem,” Wine recalls. “We all thought, That's so real, so perfect, so wonderful. But then Phillip made the ‘executive decision' to change it, because how many people are going to know where Lenox Avenue is? But even to this day, when I sing it, I sing it with the original line.”

Satisfied with the outcome, at the beginning of 1969 Spector invited Wine and Levine out to California to work on more songs. Enthused at the fact of working again, Spector was at his most charming and endearing, in “a wonderful frame of mind,” Wine remembers, a solicitous and generous host, who plied his guests with deli brought in from Green-blatt's and kept them amused with a stream of practical jokes. The two enormous wolfhounds that roamed the grounds, he warned them, were trained to “kill on command” (“lick you to death, maybe,” says Wine). On one occasion he called Doc Pomus in New York, spoofing Pomus by conducting the entire conversation in an uncanny impersonation of Pomus's own rasping hipster-speak—“What's up, babe?” On another, he casually handed Wine a packet of chewing gum, then watched in mounting amusement as she worked through the pack, discovering that Spector had removed every stick of gum and carefully rewrapped the empty package.

“We'd sit at the piano, walk around the room, sing, write, talk about our mothers…” Wine remembers. “Phil has incredible pitch, and I do too, and sometimes he and I would sit at the piano and sing purposely off-key. It drove Irwin nuts. And Phil would just burst out laughing and say, ‘What's wrong, Irwin?' People would say, ‘Oh, Phil's crazy, he's nuts,' but I saw no side of that other than he was just hilarious. He was eccentric and pixilated. He was out there, but in a beautiful way, not in a scary way.”

In the two weeks they worked at Spector's house they saw nobody other than Spector and his bodyguard. If Ronnie was there, they never saw her. “Years later, when all this came out, Irwin and I would say, ‘Jesus, maybe she was locked in a room upstairs…'”

With “Black Pearl” in his pocket for the Checkmates, Spector now decided to hold fire with the group. Instead, to raise the curtain on the AM deal, he turned back to a long-running project, one that had already brought him success, failure and no little heartache—his wife. Was it a residual belief in the talismanic properties of the group's name? A gesture of love and appeasement to Ronnie? Or did he genuinely believe it was an inspired idea? Whatever his reasoning, in February 1969 Spector took Ronnie back into the studio for the first time in almost three years, recording another of the songs from his collaboration with Wine and Irwin—“You Came, You Saw, You Conquered”—and releasing it a month later under the name of “The Ronettes, Featuring the Voice of Veronica.” Ronnie was exultant at the prospect of being back in the studio and resurrecting her career. But her hopes were quickly dashed. Uncomfortable in AM's spanking new studios, Spector struggled to replicate faithfully the old Gold Star Wall of Sound with massed strings and choirs, but the effect fell curiously flat, and the record sounded merely dated. Whatever cachet the Ronettes name once had had long since evaporated, and “You Came, You Saw, You Conquered” vanished without trace.

Spector now turned his attention to the Checkmates, recording their first single, “Love Is All I Have to Give,” a melodramatic throwback to the mid-'60s testifying soul ballad, written by Spector and Bobby Stevens, and showcasing Stevens's gruff, rasping, preachy style. But not even Spector appeared confident about the record's prospects; within a matter of weeks he was rushing out a second single, the first song he had written with Wine and Levine in New York, “Black Pearl.” Beautifully sung by Sonny Charles, wrapped in a lavish and irresistibly warm production, and with a string arrangement that might have been borrowed from a Temptations record (even Irwin Levine would describe it as “a Detroit record”), it was Spector's most affecting piece of work since “Walking in the Rain.”

Released under the name of Sonny Charles and the Checkmates, the record gave Spector his first Top 40 hit in more than three years. He now turned his thoughts to an album. But he quickly seemed to grow bored with the project. Irwin Levine would remember him whiling away the time in the studio on the pinball machine. Nor were matters helped by the growing rivalry between Bobby Stevens and Sonny Charles over the solo billing that Charles had received on “Black Pearl.” Envisaging a reprise of the problems that had undermined the Righteous Brothers, Spector withdrew from the project, leaving the arranger Perry Botkin Jr. to complete the album, which would eventually be released under the title
Love Is All We Have to Give.