Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (37 page)

Lennon had never written songs more revelatory, nor more corrosively powerful—and nor would he ever again—about personal abandonment, the hypocrisies of the British class system, the opiates of religion, wealth and fame: “God is a concept by which we measure our pain…” he sang in the magnificent “God,” offering a renunciation of all the things he did not believe in—Jesus, Elvis, Beatles. “I just believe in me.”

Spector listened carefully. Putting aside whatever thoughts he might have had of rebuilding the Wall of Sound, as he had for George Harrison, he instead fashioned a stark and spare production that perfectly matched the tenor of Lennon's songs, from the brittle, snapping anguish of “Mother” (heralded by the tolling of a funereal bell) to the gossamer delicacy of “Love,” employing only a piano (played by Spector himself), bass and a gently strummed acoustic guitar.

“I think Phil himself had strong ideas about how the record should sound, and he and John talked about it,” Klaus Voormann remembers. “It certainly wasn't just a case of Phil saying ‘I do what John wants me to do' it was more that Phil knew what was the best approach for this particular album. But that's where he's so brilliant. He didn't have to do his big sound; he could do something very fine, delicate and sensitive, whatever was appropriate for the song and the moment.

“He was very calm, very concentrated, very reliable; a really, really good producer. And he was incredible when he was just sitting at the piano, playing songs, whether it was one of John's he was working on before recording, or one of his own. I remember one day he did a version of ‘River Deep—Mountain High' as a ballad, just him on the piano, with his funny, squeaky voice, and it was so beautiful. You knew then, this man is a genius. But he wouldn't let it be captured on tape. He was always hyper-aware of what was going on around him. You sensed he would know if a tape machine was running three rooms down the corridor. He's a tough cookie from New York; nobody can cheat him…that sort of attitude.”

Recording the
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
album had the effect of forging the bonds between Spector and Lennon. They had much in common. Musically speaking, both shared a love of early rock and roll—the Sun recordings and Chuck Berry—and each had enormous respect for the other's work. But the ties went to a deeper, more symbiotic level than that. For both men, the wellspring of their creativity was an anger at the world, born of a deep unhappiness. Both had been nine years old when they lost their fathers—Lennon's deserting him, Spector's taking his own life (one can only imagine Spector's feelings listening in the studio as Lennon performed the song “Mother,” addressing his absent father with undisguised fury—“Father, you left me, but I never left you…”). Spector could identify with Lennon's view that “talented people must always be in great pain—their sensitivity is what makes them great artists.” Spector had always found it hard to forge deep and abiding friendships. He did not readily give of himself to other people. His guard was always up. But in John Lennon, he believed he had found a kindred spirit, someone who had suffered as he had, and who was just as vulnerable. He would come to describe Lennon as “like the brother I'd never had.”

Spector had never before deferred to anybody in the studio, but he had no hesitation in subordinating himself to Lennon as “co-producer.” “John knew how to shut Phil up,” one friend remembers. “He was one of the few people who'd let Phil know if he was out of line. Other people didn't have the courage.”

Nor did Spector raise any objection when it became apparent that Yoko had equal say in all matters. Spector's attitude toward women could be haughtily dismissive, but he indulged Yoko, listening attentively to her suggestions (even if he seldom acted on them), all too aware that, without Yoko on his side, Lennon would be lost to him. “Actually, it wasn't difficult to work that out,” Peter Brown says. “John deferred to Yoko in everything and put her on this pedestal. But it was perfect for Phil and for Yoko. It gave him something to work on, and she was desperate to make music that would be recognized. She was a very single-minded person. She saw Phil as a tool; somebody who was very powerful in the business, who clearly could be used because he wasn't a Beatle person. Their agendas coincided.”

“Everybody talks about Phil as this crazy man, out of control,” Klaus Voormann says. “But behind all that he was actually this very quiet, intelligent man who had a great sense of humor. And he got on with Yoko particularly well. He could talk to her, make jokes with her—and it must have been hard for him, because she said lots of things to him that, for a professional, were unbelievable. She wouldn't know technically what was going on, and she would say something that didn't hit the spot at all, that was completely wrong, but he would find a way to explain it to her, or overlook it. He was very diplomatic.”

Spector himself would talk later of Yoko being “quiet and helpful, and good to have around. And I gave her credit on the label. I had no choice. John was a brother and he loved her, so I had to figure out a way to use Yoko for my benefit. And the way I used Yoko was that I worked with John twenty-four hours a day, or sixteen hours a day, and when it became sleep time and crazy time for us, I sent him off to Yoko. She could see the value of me, like Ike Turner could see the value of me. Ike was dominating Tina until I came along, and he said, ‘Go to it.' He let me rehearse with her, take her along, do anything I wanted, because it was in Ike's best interest. And for Yoko, it was in her best interest, because she was along for the ride. And she was getting more famous. But my ego is so in control and I'm so confident in my ego and talent and ability that I didn't mind giving her a credit on the label.”

         

With Spector preoccupied with his work with Lennon and Harrison, Ronnie had been languishing in New York, convinced that her career was now all but over. But in February 1971 Spector gave her news that lifted her spirits. George Harrison, always a fan, had written a song especially for her—a stately ballad called “Try Some, Buy Some.” Ronnie, astonished and delighted at the prospect of recording a Harrison composition, flew to London in high optimism and gave interviews to the British music press, talking enthusiastically of resurrecting her career. But when it came to the recording at Abbey Road, she was completely baffled by the song. “Try Some, Buy Some” was a long way from “Be My Baby.” Harrison had written a hymn about rejecting materialism and embracing Krishna that Ronnie could not even understand, let alone invest with any meaning.

Spector dressed the song in a richly textured arrangement of strings and mandolins, which seemed more the point of focus than Ronnie's voice. Ronnie herself would describe it as “like a movie where the star only appears now and then” and would candidly admit she thought the record “stunk.” The record flopped. Her comeback over before it had begun, Ronnie packed her bags and returned to New York.

         

Spector, by comparison, was working at a rate to rival his furious energy of the early '60s. In June, he joined the Lennons at their home recording studio at Tittenhurst Park, to begin work on yet another album,
Imagine.

The anguished catharsis of
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
had proved strong meat for Beatles fans, and the album had been only an equivocal success, reaching number 6 in America and number 8 in the U.K., its sales a drop in the ocean compared to those of Harrison's
All Things Must Pass.
Stung perhaps by the success of the man he had always regarded as very much a junior partner, Lennon had now come up with a collection of songs rich in hooks and melodies that equaled, in some cases surpassed, anything he had written for the Beatles.

Throughout the three-week sessions, Spector once again subordinated his role, attending principally to faithfully rendering all the nuances of Lennon's songs, infusing them with a rare warmth and intimacy, and encouraging him to sing more movingly than at any time in his career.

During the recording of the title track, Lennon's hymn to utopian peace and brotherhood, proceedings were enlivened by the arrival of Spector's friend Dennis Hopper, who had flown over from Cannes. In the years since
Easy Rider,
Hopper had been vigorously pursuing a regime of mind-altering drugs and alcohol and he presented a querulous and quixotic figure. “At one point,” Hopper recalls, “Phil came up to me and said, ‘John just took me aside and told me “your friend Hopper has a gun hanging out of his pocket. Maybe he should do something about that.” ' So guess I had a pistol in my pocket. Well, I
did
have a pistol in my pocket. But the truth is, I didn't know too much about anything at that point.”

In July, Spector took the completed tracks to New York, to add string arrangements. Lennon would later point out that while many of the songs shared similar themes to those explored on the
John Lennon/ Plastic Ono Band
album,
Imagine
had “chocolate on it for public consumption.” But Spector did much more than simply sweeten. Rather, he crafted a series of perfect settings and caught a mood that would make
Imagine
the most perfectly realized and most commercially successful album that Lennon would ever record, and in the title track provide a song that would endure as a globally acknowledged anthem for peace. If a work is to be measured by its enduring impact, the hearts it touches, the hope it inspires, then, in a sense,
Imagine
was Spector's finest accomplishment as a producer. Even if his name was only in small type.

         

In search of new stimulation, and in a bid to escape the constant sniping at Yoko by the British media, the Lennons had now decamped to New York, taking up residence in a suite at the St. Regis Hotel. Exalting that New York was “the modern Rome,” Lennon threw himself into a new life—indulging every avant-garde and radical diversion the city had to offer. He posed for the obligatory portrait by Andy Warhol, jammed with Frank Zappa at the Fillmore East, and found himself being courted by the self-proclaimed revolutionaries Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, eager to recruit Lennon to their sundry causes. Putting his own career to one side, Lennon threw his energies into supporting and promoting Yoko in her calling as avant-garde filmmaker and artist, bankrolling her films
Up Your Legs Forever
and
Fly.
In October 1971, an extensive exhibition of Yoko's work,
This Is Not Here,
opened at Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, upstate New York. Spector, now an inseparable part of the Lennon circus, flew up from New York with a group of friends including Klaus Voormann. Drinking to anesthetize his fear of flying, Spector passed the flight in a state of inebriated agitation, shouting across the crowded seats to Voormann, who was sitting at the rear of the plane, “Klaus Voormann! We know you're the son of Martin Bormann”—“so that was nice,” Voormann notes wryly. At the press conference that opened the exhibition, Spector—still somewhat worse for wear—spotted a journalist who had written an article about Lenny Bruce that Spector had taken exception to, and harangued him from the stage. “The journalist just wanted to die,” Voormann remembers.

The opening of the exhibition coincided with Lennon's thirty-first birthday, and a group of friends, including Ringo Starr and Allen Ginsberg, celebrated in the Lennons' hotel room. As Ginsberg sang William Blake's “Nurse's Song,” Spector insisted on holding his hand, while Ringo beat out percussion on an upturned wastepaper basket. Then a raucous Spector drowned out everybody else on sing-alongs of “Yellow Submarine,” “Twist and Shout” and “My Sweet Lord.”

The caravan moved back to New York, where at the end of October Spector produced Lennon's peace anthem “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” As a gesture of proletarian solidarity, the Lennons now quit the St. Regis and moved into a dank basement flat in Bank Street in Greenwich Village that had previously been occupied by Joe Butler of the Lovin' Spoonful, and took up every passing revolutionary cause, appearing at a benefit for John Sinclair, the Yippie leader who had been imprisoned for possession of a single joint of marijuana, speaking out on behalf of the Attica Prison rioters and against the jailing of the black radical Angela Davis. By January 1972, the FBI had opened a file on Lennon with the expressed intention of finding grounds to deport him.

Lennon recruited a local band, Elephant's Memory, and with Spector as co-producer began work on another album,
Some Time in New York City—
a collection of agitprop songs including “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “Attica State.” Spector's role was purely as a facilitator. Sympathetic as he was to the Lennons' plight, writing letters to the media and congressmen on their behalf, he was less animated by the fate of John Sinclair or the cause of the IRA. The album was a perfunctory favor. Nor did it capture the imagination of Lennon's audience when it was released in June 1972, rising only as far as number 48 in the charts before sinking from view. Devastated by its commercial failure, Lennon would not record any music for almost a year. Phil Spector's Beatle sojourn was over.

19

“These Are Pretty Wild Sessions, They Get Pretty Out There”

L
ate in 1971 Spector returned to Los Angeles. He had spent most of the previous two years away in London and New York, at a safe remove from Ronnie and the unhappiness of his marriage. But any expectations that matters might have improved were to be quickly dashed.

Only an incurable romantic could have conjured the records that Spector had made with Ronnie—idealized fables of a love that was too perfect to be true. And his possessiveness too was a sort of love, a symptom not so much of how little he trusted her, but of how little he trusted himself to be able to keep her. Control was Spector's way of guarding against the thing he feared most—being abandoned. But instead of security, marriage had brought only disillusionment, bitterness and recrimination. “The whole bottom line of Phil's life was pain,” one friend says. “He had spent his whole life trying to understand that, and deal with that, and never getting it right. But Ronnie was just not sensitive enough to see that. For her the marriage was just some kind of fantasy of the big-shot producer making her a star. She didn't understand Phil at all.”

The couple quickly fell into the familiar ritual of arguments, most of them to do with Phil's possessiveness and Ronnie's continued drinking. When, after one particularly horrendous drinking binge, she had a seizure and collapsed, Spector, at his wits' end, had her admitted to a sanatorium. She was apparently so taken with the facilities—the agreeable company of fellow patients, the volleyball games—that she came to regard it as “a vacation playground.” Visiting the sanatorium “became my habit,” she wrote in
Be My Baby
. “When things got bad at home, I'd get raging drunk, pass out, and then spend ten days in rehab.”

Nedra Talley, who had come to regard Spector with a mixture of distrust and disdain, saw his eagerness to push Ronnie for treatment less as a mark of his concern than just another way of controlling her. “The way Ronnie was approaching it was like the clinic was the in-place to go,” Nedra remembers. “But I was telling her, Phil is going to use this against you; when he decides to put it to you, there's going to be a list which he'll hold against you. And it's not going to be ‘the clinic was a cool place to be' it's going to be ‘you were sick and you can't have your child.'

“Ronnie thought she was smart marrying Phil, but she had someone smarter than her, playing her. He played her in separating her from her sister and her cousin; he played her in cutting her off so that she didn't have any friends; he played her by putting her in hospital. She had a drinking issue of her own; but it was like, if you're with a crazy person for long enough and you have your own crazy side, then you'll go
really
crazy.”

Driven to distraction by her drinking, and in a desperate attempt to salvage the wreckage of their marriage, in December 1971 Spector turned to precisely the course of action that Ronnie had employed two years earlier—adoption. By Ronnie's account, the first she heard of the idea was when Spector collected her from the sanatorium after one of her drying-out bouts and drove her to a playground, where he pointed to a pair of fair-haired little boys playing on the swings and told her he was considering adopting them. By the time they had returned to the mansion, the boys and officials from the adoption agency were apparently waiting to greet them.

The adoption of six-year-old twins Gary and Louis was a measure not only of Spector's desperation, but of just how divorced he had become from the reality of his marriage. Adopting Donte two years earlier had done nothing to bring him and Ronnie closer together; the arrival of two more children could only make matters worse. To Ronnie it was merely another example of what she perceived as Spector's desire to curtail her freedom. Within just three years of marriage, she'd acquired “three kids, five dogs and twenty-three rooms,” she wrote.

While acknowledging that they were “adorable,” she wanted little to do with the twins, although at Spector's instigation she did begin to attend AA meetings in an attempt to bring her drinking under control. Spector was seemingly in no better a state to assume the duties of parenthood, and it quickly fell to the ever-obliging George Brand to assume the role of surrogate father to the children.

Spector had now begun behaving with conspicuous carelessness. At the end of January, Spector was arrested in the Daisy club in Beverly Hills, after police received an anonymous call from a woman claiming that a man wearing a “maroon jacket with a karate emblem” had pointed a gun at her. Officers arriving at the club located Spector, noticed a bulge under his jacket, searched him and found a loaded handgun in his waistband. He was charged with the misdemeanors of carrying a concealed weapon and carrying a loaded firearm in a public place, ordered to pay a $200 fine and placed on one-year summary probation, with the condition that he not possess any dangerous or deadly weapons.

In May, he wrote to Jerry Wexler. During Spector's brief sojourn at Atlantic in the early '60s, the two men had regarded each other with mutual suspicion, but both shared an enormous affection for Lenny Bruce, and the death of the comedian had served to bring them closer together, mourning his loss. Albert Goldman's biography of Lenny Bruce,
Ladies and Gentlemen—Lenny Bruce!,
had just been published. Goldman had approached Spector to talk about his friendship with Bruce, but when it came to Lenny, Spector explained to Wexler, he claimed the right to remain silent. Lenny, he wrote, had told his own story brilliantly and eloquently in his autobiography and his recordings, and Spector would not read or see a single book, movie or play about his old friend, much less contribute to one. As for himself, he wrote, he was “up to my pippin” in the fight against John and Yoko being deported and the primary campaign for Democratic candidate George McGovern. “Roughly translated, that means I'm living in frenzied despair, which is a little hamlet on the outskirts of Desolation Row.” He urged Wexler to come visit sometime. “We can pick up some sandwiches and tiptoe through the tar pits together.”

         

On June 16, 1972, at approximately 11:00 a.m., William Valantine, an employee of the Speedy Attorney Service, arrived at the house on La Collina to serve divorce papers on Phil Spector. According to an affidavit filed to the Superior Court, County of Los Angeles, Valantine approached the front-gate entrance of the property, where he was confronted with “numerous signs warning all persons not to enter the property, that there were guard dogs and armed guards on duty. There was approximately a three to four-paragraph sign posted adjacent to the front gate warning any person entering beyond that point would be in violation of certain sections of California Penal Code (I did not write down the sections), and that there were sentry dogs and armed guards on duty and that if I entered I would be risking my life and I should leave immediately.”

Undaunted, the intrepid Mr. Valantine drove through the open gate. In the courtyard he noted “several chain-link fences blocking all entrance way to the front door or access. Also, barbed wire was strung loosely around the courtyard with warning signs indicating that the wire was electrified and high voltage, I also noticed several more signs warning against the sentry dogs, no trespassing et cetera. I also observed large floodlights mounted in several upstairs windows of the residence aimed into the courtyard area which, obviously, would be turned on at night if anyone entered. I saw absolutely no sign of life on the property.”

After sounding his car horn for five to ten minutes and receiving no response, Valantine left the property. When he telephoned the house a few minutes later, a “female voice” answered, asking him to state his name and business and telling him to call back in five minutes. When he did so the same female answered the telephone, this time identifying herself as Veronica Spector.

According to Valantine, “Mrs. Spector stated that she did not want her husband served today.” It would be another couple of days before the papers were actually served.

The four-year marriage between Spector and Ronnie had finally reached a climactic end four days before Valantine's visit, on June 12. In her autobiography, Ronnie offered a graphically lurid account of the events of that evening, recounting how she had returned from an AA meeting to find the door of the mansion locked. Eventually, Beatrice, who was staying at the house, let Ronnie in through the servants' entrance. According to Ronnie, a drunken Spector confronted her in the hall, accusing her of having a boyfriend at the AA group. He then wrestled her to the floor, snatching her shoes, and shouted, “Don't even dream about divorcing me.” After a further scuffle, Ronnie spent the night in her mother's room, and they both left the next morning. Ronnie's book suggests that she never returned to the mansion again. However, affidavits sworn for the ensuing court proceedings tell a slightly different story.

In an affidavit sworn on June 23 Ronnie stated that on the night of June 12 Spector “came to my mother's room, told me I should get a lawyer to get a divorce, and he hit me in the face while I was sitting down, my cigarette falling to the floor”—an account that appears to contradict her later claim that he had warned her “Don't even dream about divorcing me.”

According to her affidavit, Ronnie ran downstairs, pursued by Spector, who “then pushed me out of the house through the kitchen door. When I left the house, I had no funds or assets of any kind.”

After spending the night of June 12 in a hotel, Ronnie returned to the mansion, where she spent the next three nights in her mother's room. On June 16—the day Mr. Valantine called—Ronnie's Beverly Hills lawyers, Jay Stein and Daniel Jaffe, informed Spector that an action for dissolution of the marriage had been filed. Ronnie apparently left the mansion that same day. “Thereafter,” she stated, “I was afraid to return to my home for fear my husband would harm me, and my mother and I have since been living in a hotel. In a telephone conversation with me Friday evening, June 16, 1972, my husband told me that he had thrown all my clothes in a garbage can on La Cienega Boulevard.”

Ronnie and Beatrice were to continue living in the Beverly Crest Hotel for the remainder of the summer, as the affidavits and the insults flew back and forth. Donte and the twins Gary and Louis continued to live with Spector in the mansion. On July 6 Ronnie filed a motion to obtain sole custody of Donte (she appeared to have no interest in the twins), designed to demonstrate Spector's unsuitability as a parent. Stating that “my husband has a very suspicious nature,” she elaborated on the security arrangements that had been described by Mr. Valantine, adding that there were “on the premises, more or less continuously, five dogs, including two German shepherd dogs, which are trained to attack on command, and one Irish wolfhound…One George Brand is employed by my husband (or one of his companies); he resides on the premises and acts as a bodyguard.” (In a later motion she would add that “moreover, respondent [Spector] keeps and displays a number of weapons.”) Ronnie requested that Spector should be ordered to pay sufficient support for her to rent a house or apartment in Beverly Hills, “comparable in furnishings, decor and comfort to the family residence,” and adequate for the children (together with their governess) to be able to stay. She also suggested that she was willing to have a court-ordered psychiatric examination of all concerned to press her case.

In late July, Spector's lawyer Godfrey Isaac retaliated by filing an opposition to the proposed psychiatric examination, arguing that everyone involved, including Gary and Louis, had already been seen by psychiatrists before the divorce proceedings began. Moreover, Isaac maintained, he had evidence that Ronnie had had “repeated commitments to psychiatric wards,” and that while Spector had been commuting between New York and London, she had “sustained an emotional breakdown.” Spector, Isaac added, was willing to pay for Ronnie's lawyers to go to New York to interview the psychiatrists who had treated her if the court needed any more evidence. Ronnie's lawyers fired back, alleging that Spector had been swamping the switchboard at the Beverly Crest Hotel with calls, and “verbally abusing, threatening, harassing and intimidating staff,” when Ronnie instructed them not to put the calls through.

At the end of July, the court ordered Spector to start paying Ronnie's hotel bills, and to allow her visitation rights to see Donte. Before long, Ronnie was filing another deposition accusing Spector of refusing to pay in full the bill for her stay, refusing to absent himself from the house when she exercised visitation rights to see the children and of refusing to return her “full-length mink coat, wallet and driver's license.”

In August both sides began taking depositions from each other at the Santa Monica courthouse. When Spector's lawyers belabored Ronnie for her drinking, she responded that she had “partaken of alcohol” only since her marriage, “usually only with her husband,” and that she drank to “shut out the continuous stream of shrieking by the respondent.” At his own deposition, on August 21, Spector arrived with a stenographer's machine, which sat unused on the desk beside him as the deposition progressed. When Ronnie's lawyer Stein asked him why he was not taking anything down, Spector supposedly replied, “I'm waiting for you to say something important.”

Stein and Jaffe would later attest that, leaving the courtroom, they were “made the objects of a ten-minute string of vehemence, obscene epithets and screaming” by Spector, “who was literally foaming at the mouth.”

When the court ordered Spector to pay his wife interim support payments, he wrote out a check for the first $1,250 in court. A month later, three employees of Brink's—“two being armed guards and one holding a shotgun”—arrived at Jay Stein's offices to deliver the second payment of $1,250—in nickels.