Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (36 page)

A month before the release of the album, now entitled
Let It Be,
in May 1970 McCartney released his own solo album and formally announced his departure from the Beatles. When, in January of the following year, he began court proceedings against his fellow Beatles he would cite Spector's remodeling of “The Long and Winding Road” as an example of Klein's “intolerable interference” and one of his reasons for seeking the dissolution of the group.

The critics would prove no kinder to Spector's revision than McCartney had been. “They just panned the shit out of me,” Spector later told the writer Richard Williams. “It was fun to see people getting into it…‘how Spector ruined the Beatles'…There was also the fact that most of the reviews were written by English people, picked up by the American press, and the English were: an American, I don't care who it was, an American coming in, taking over.”

While it may not have pleased the critics, the mood of plangent sentimentality that Spector invested in the song captured the imagination of the public as the perfect epitaph to the Beatles' career. Released in America as the group's last single in May 1970, it sold 1.2 million copies in the first two days, and on June 13 it became the Beatles' twentieth and final number 1 single in America. When, later that year,
Let It Be
won a Grammy, Paul McCartney had no hesitation in going to collect the award.

         

Much as he had come to loathe everything about the Beatles, and much as he wished to cut himself free of all that being a Beatle entailed, the bitter and rancorous disintegration of the group drove a final nail into the fragile psyche of John Lennon. For years, the group had been the instrument of transformation and catharsis for all of Lennon's frustration, anger and pain; the childhood wounds inflicted by the desertion of his father Fred when Lennon was just nine years old, his abandonment by his mother Julia, and her early death; his conviction in his own genius; his deep, underlying insecurities. Drugs, sex, Transcendental Meditation, fame, money—even Yoko and evangelizing for world peace—all had failed to exorcize Lennon's demons. By March 1970 he had taken to his bed in his Georgian manor house, Tittenhurst Park, apparently in the grip of a minor nervous breakdown. It was then that salvation arrived, in the form of a bulky package from America, containing a book
The Primal Scream,
written by a Los Angeles psychologist named Arthur Janov.

Janov had devised a process, which he called Primal Therapy, that involved regressing a patient back to the moment of his birth, and replicating the “primal scream” of infant anguish, when all wants and needs demanded to be fulfilled. In the re-creation of this moment, the theory went, all of the neurotic defense mechanisms that the patient had built up through his life would be demolished, and the patient would be reborn in a condition of prelapsarian purity and innocence. Janov claimed his treatment was a panacea that could cure not only neurosis but also “homosexuality, drug addiction, alcoholism, psychosis, as well as endocrine disorders, headaches, stomach ulcers and asthma.”

Lennon, who had been silently screaming all his life, was galvanized. At Yoko's instigation, Janov traveled to England to lead the couple through their first sessions at Tittenhurst Park. Janov would later recount that Lennon “had the kind of pain that would knock a patient off the floor it was so catastrophic.” For his part, Lennon would greet Primal Therapy as “the most important thing that happened to me besides meeting Yoko and being born.” Duly converted, at the end of April the Lennons returned to Los Angeles with Janov, where they would spend the next four months in therapy. Spector, who remained in London, magnanimously put his home, his staff and his refrigerator at their disposal. Lennon was bemused some months later to find that Spector had billed Apple for food and accommodation costs.

         

With the Lennons in America, Spector now turned his attention to another Beatle. George Harrison had been so delighted with Spector's work on
Let It Be
that he had no hesitation in inviting him to produce his first post-Beatles solo album. Nor did Harrison have any shortage of songs to bring to the project. Having long been frustrated by being fobbed off with the inclusion of only one or two of his compositions on Beatles albums, Harrison had accumulated a formidable catalogue of work—the ensuing album,
All Things Must Pass,
would comprise twenty-three of his songs.

The number of musicians that Spector assembled for the sessions, which took place between May and August at Abbey Road, almost equaled the size of the team that had once filled Gold Star. There were the drummers Ringo Starr, Jim Gordon and Alan White; Klaus Voormann and Carl Radle on bass; the keyboard players Gary Wright, Gary Brooker and Billy Preston; the horn players Bobby Keys and Jim Price; guitarists Dave Mason, Eric Clapton, Pete Drake and Harrison himself, along with members of the Apple group Badfinger. Voormann, who had played on the “Instant Karma” session, was fascinated and impressed to see Spector now working with a much larger ensemble of musicians, reassembling his old Wall of Sound on the foundations of a massed battalion of guitarists and keyboard players.

“When you analyze what Phil did, it was just amazing,” Voormann remembers. “He took away all the baffles between the instruments, because he wanted the sound of each to meld into the other. And he was very particular about where he positioned the acoustic guitars, sitting them right in front of the drums so he got this live drum sound from the room sound. He somehow managed to get the sound so it sounded like glass on top. And then he would have a completely ‘dry' bass drum, and a completely ‘dry' bass and a completely ‘dry' voice, against this whole thing. It sounded just incredible.”

The sessions quickly fell into an established pattern. Spector would arrive at Abbey Road each afternoon, habitually dressed in neatly pressed jeans and wearing outsized aviator shades that were forever sliding down his nose. He would complain noisily about the antiquated air-conditioning and lighting, setting the temperature as close to “arctic” as possible, and plunging the studio into a state of near darkness. Saffron-robed Hare Krishna followers drifted in and out delivering vegetarian food. At the end of each session, Spector would depart with George Brand to be chauffeured back to his hotel, leaving the musicians to unwind in a series of prolonged jam sessions that would be boiled down to the “fourth side” of the eventual album.

For the first few weeks things went well, then Spector began to grow impatient. Harrison—as much a perfectionist as Spector, and now particularly anxious that his first solo project should be as perfect as possible—constantly fretted over his vocals and his guitar playing. Usually, it was Spector who kept people waiting. Now the boot was on the other foot.

The more Harrison belabored his performance, the more irritated Spector became—at Harrison, and everything around him. He couldn't sleep in his hotel. England was dank and drafty. He hated the food. He felt perpetually homesick. He hated television: he phoned a friend in California and complained that he'd been “watching someone painting a wall for six hours.” His growing boredom and unhappiness now began to manifest in another way. He started drinking.

Spector had always been abstemious in his habits. Drugs exaggerated his perpetual fear of being out of control. He would occasionally smoke a cigarette, or more likely a cigarillo, but it was not a habit. When he drank, it was sparingly. If musicians turned up at his sessions drunk or stoned he would become apoplectic. It offended his perfectionism.

But now he started drinking in earnest himself, gulping down Courvoisier in the long hours as the sessions ground on. He would later explain to the
Los Angeles Times
journalist Robert Hilburn that he was “letting his hair down” after all the hard work of the '60s.

“I ran a company all that time. I didn't even think about drugs and I never had any alcohol, to any extent, until 1972 [
sic
] when I went to England to work with George Harrison and I started getting bored.”

But that was only part of the problem. As much as anything else, Spector was drinking to ease his nerves. More than anyone, he respected the Beatles' place at the pinnacle of the musical hierarchy, revered them. For all his outward displays of arrogance and bravado, Spector was thrilled to have been acknowledged and, finally, accepted by them; at the same time he was terrified of the possibility of failure and rejection. He particularly idolized Lennon, who by this time had begun to drink heavily. Anxious and insecure, Spector followed suit. Spector would quickly go from being a garrulous drunk to an unpleasant one. Alcohol, according to one friend, was “poison to his system. Phil would have two drinks and he'd become Mr. Hyde. It was like he'd taken some kind of potion. He would turn on people and be horrible.”

The longer the sessions wore on, and the more he drank, the more his mood began to sour. “Phil started getting pretty obnoxious,” Voormann remembers. Now it was Spector who began wasting time, performing in the control room with a stream of ad libbing and teasing. He took particular delight in making fun of the tape operator, Eddie Klein, who was endowed with a prominent nose. “Phil was on him all the time,” Voormann says. “If Eddie did anything wrong, there'd be half an hour of jokes and laughing at his expense. Cruel for Eddie perhaps, but great fun for everybody else. You could have a great time with Phil making you laugh and all that. But then it got to the point where you realized, My God, he's fucking up the whole session, so can he please go home so we can get some work done.”

On one occasion, Spector was so drunk he fell off his chair, injuring his arm badly enough that he was obliged to absent himself from the studio for a few days.

In August, with the basic tracks completed, and his patience and enthusiasm apparently exhausted, Spector flew back to America, leaving Harrison to handle a number of guitar and vocal overdubs himself. On August 19 he dispatched Harrison a five-page memo outlining the work he felt was still required to bring the album up to scratch, written in the temper of a weary schoolmaster marking the homework of a particularly recalcitrant pupil.

“Awaiting on You All”: The mixes I heard had the voice too buried, in my opinion, I'm sure we could do better…“All Things Must Pass”: I'm not sure if the performance is good or not. Even the first mix you did which had the “original” voice, I'm sure is not the best you can do…“My Sweet Lord”: An acoustic guitar, perhaps playing some frills, should be overdubbed or a solo put in…“Behind That Locked Door”: The voice seems a little down…I think you should spend whatever time you are going to on performances so that they are the very best you can do and that will make the remixing of the album that much easier. I really feel that your voice has got to be heard throughout the album so that the greatness of the songs can really come through…Much love. Regards to everyone. Hare Krishna, Phil Spector.

Harrison would later protest that Spector had paid insufficient attention to the project. But Spector was unmoved by what he described to friends as Harrison's “complaining. There's a real problem if I have to be there to tell a Beatle how to sing.”

“I know George said that he would have liked Phil to be present more,” Dan Kessel says. “But Phil's view was: Hey, I did what I needed to do and I was there as much as I needed to be. I'm sure it wasn't necessary for Phil to hold George's hand while he was doing the twelfth overdub track of the third harmony part on the slide guitar for the last cut on side Z. In the film business, they have second units and second-unit directors for that kind of thing. And George received producer's credit for his second-unit work.”

Released in November 1970,
All Things Must Pass
was universally greeted as a masterpiece. Rather than engulfing Harrison, Spector's densely textured production served to brilliantly illuminate and complement the strength of his songs and performances. The album went to number 4 in Britain, but spent seven weeks at number 1 in America, while the exultant “My Sweet Lord” reached number 1 in both countries—the first single by an ex-Beatle to top the charts. Thirty years later, Harrison would reissue a remixed version of the album on a CD box set, explaining in his sleeve notes his feeling that some songs required “liberating” from a production that “seemed appropriate at the time but now seems a bit over the top with the reverb in the wall of the sound.” Harrison also paid credit to Spector. “In his company I came to realize the true value of the Hare Krishna mantra.” Whether as an expression of universal love or personal forbearance in the face of trying circumstance, he did not specify.

         

John Lennon returned from America galvanized by his sessions with Arthur Janov and inspired to write a series of songs, bitter and cathartic, spewing out all his venom, anger and frustration—against life, the Beatles and everything. In September 1970, Lennon, Yoko and Spector assembled at Abbey Road, to begin work on what would become
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.
Klaus Voormann, who again played bass, remembers that the album was recorded in an adrenaline rush, with little time expended on discussion or rehearsal. “John had written down the lyrics and underneath he wrote C, F, G or whatever the chords were—that was our guide. And the words were written bigger than normal. He wanted us to really listen, to understand them and play something that fitted the lyrics.”

Lennon would later describe Primal Therapy and the album that resulted from it as like being given a mirror to look into his soul—“and I wasn't looking in it from a sort of mystical perspective which tended to color things, or a psychedelic perspective or being-the-famous Beatle perspective or making-a-Beatle-record perspective, all those things gave a color to what I did.”