Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (40 page)

Spector had developed a fondness for a new tipple, Manischewitz, a sickly sweet wine used in Jewish rituals such as Seder (the high sugar content made it potentially disastrous for Spector, a borderline diabetic). He was now drinking Manischewitz “slowly, but steadily,” Dan Kessel remembers, while Lennon was swigging vodka straight out of the bottle. “Anybody, at a certain point, you've had too much, but Phil was holding it better. The production was like this huge behemoth moving very, very slowly—John was waiting and waiting—and finally he cracked. He said, ‘When are you going to get to me, Phil?' And Phil said, ‘I'll get to you, John…' And John was like, ‘You'll get to me! You'll get to me!' taking it as an insult, as if to say, ‘You may be the great Phil Spector, but I'm the great John Lennon, don't talk to me like that.' And really there was no insult intended. It was just two people who'd been drinking a lot. So it all got a little testy.”

The argument was a portent of things to come. Over the next few weeks, the booze flowed and the mood grew increasingly sour.

         

Tony King, who as a young promo man working for Decca had been responsible for looking after Spector on his first visit to London in 1964, was now working for Apple, and arrived in Los Angeles with the unenviable job of keeping an eye on Lennon. King was shocked at the change that had come over Spector in the years since he had last seen him. The charming, funny and thoughtful man who'd led the Ronettes singing in the Strand Palace Hotel, who'd sent King sweaters as a gift of thanks, had vanished. “He'd lost that boyish, mischievous personality that I first encountered. There was this slightly wild side to him, that made you feel you had to be careful.”

King sensed that Spector was “suffering from having been big, and no longer being as big as he was, but still wanting everybody to think he was. So there was all this grandiose posturing going on—very L.A. Very Phil-insecure—a lot of challenging remarks, putdowns, which I found very uncomfortable to be around.”

King was staying with an old friend, the English songwriter and musician Mike Hazelwood, whom Lennon had invited to play guitar on some of the sessions. King made a point of keeping away from the studio, but he began to suspect something was amiss one evening when he noticed Hazelwood packing a bottle of vodka into his guitar case, like a gunman packing his piece before a showdown. “I said, ‘What's that for, Mike?' And he said, ‘These are pretty wild sessions; they get pretty out there.'”

Elton John came to town, and one night King took him to visit the studio. “We went in and Phil was running around, spieling like a madman. John was trying to keep the situation under control, because by this stage Phil was the mad one and John didn't want Elton to think there were two madmen there. Elton was looking at me, kind of ‘Is this okay?' We stayed for a respectable amount of time, and when we left Elton looked at me and said, ‘Is it always like that?' We were both glad to get out.”

In an attempt to lighten the mood, Spector took to turning up at the sessions in an assortment of fancy dress. The doctor's outfit was followed by a priest's cassock and then the dark glasses and white cane of a blind man. One evening he surprised everyone by walking into the crowded studio with an accordion strapped over his shoulders, playing a wistful and note-perfect version of Al Jolson's “The Anniversary Song”—a staple of Jewish weddings—concluding to a thunderous burst of applause.

Paulette Brandt, Spector's personal assistant, had a friend who happened to be dating Chuck Berry, one of Lennon's heroes. As a surprise treat, Paulette arranged for Berry to come to Spector's home to meet Lennon. But Spector insisted on playing his music so loudly that nobody could talk, and after a cursory exchange of pleasantries, Berry left.

The interlude did nothing to ease the mounting tension between Spector and Lennon. “Phil wanted control,” May Pang says. “That's basically what it came down to. And he kept holding John at bay—like, It's my show, not yours. It was an ego trip. Fucking with John's head. It was unbearable, because I could see the pain in John from this.” One night, Spector arranged to meet at Gold Star to do some vocal overdubs. Lennon arrived, only to pass the evening with Gold Star's boss Stan Ross, waiting in vain for Spector to turn up. “We kept phoning saying, ‘Where are you?'” Ross remembers. “And Phil'd say, ‘I'll be there in ten minutes.' And an hour later it'd be the same thing—‘I'll be there in ten minutes.' At the end of the evening I said to John, ‘It's been a pleasure and I'm sorry we couldn't do anything.' He said, ‘He's a prick.' Next day I called Phil and asked him, ‘What happened?' He said, ‘Oh, I had problems and couldn't leave.' So tell us! But that would be too simple for Phil.”

At one stage in the evening, Lennon had a heated telephone exchange with Yoko back in New York and smashed the receiver against the mixing board, causing some minor damage. Spector later offered to pay Ross for the repair, but Ross decided to keep the desk in its damaged state, “as a souvenir.”

On another night, Lennon became so drunk that Spector was obliged to abandon the session altogether. With George Brand's help, he bundled Lennon into a car to take him back to Lou Adler's house.

“They got John upstairs into the bedroom,” May remembers. “John was going, ‘Come on, Phil, I love you'—in a drunken, melancholy way. And George was sitting on top of him. In John's mind, I think he thought he was getting into some kind of three-way sex situation. He couldn't tell what was happening. So he freaked out. They brought me upstairs and I was in shock to see that they'd tied John up. He was screaming at me. ‘This is it!' I said. ‘What did you guys do?' They said, ‘Don't worry, he'll be okay, just let him sleep it off.'

“Phil and George left, with John upstairs screaming every awful thing you could imagine. Everything he wanted to say about Yoko was just coming out. It was just anger at everybody, Phil, Yoko, everybody.”

In desperation, May summoned Tony King to help. By the time King arrived, Lennon had broken free of his ties and was standing at the front door, bellowing, King remembers, “like a mad bull. I got him in the house and he was a mess, sobbing, saying, ‘Why did they do it, how could they do that?' Then all of a sudden he started fighting me. We were rolling around on the floor. Finally I got him where I was laying on top of him with his arms pushed out to the side, my face six inches away from his, and he was in some kind of blackout. He looked up and saw my face, and he said, ‘I didn't know you were that strong, dear…' We both ended up laughing. And that broke it. The house was just a wreck; windows broken, Carole King's gold records were all over the floor, bent out of shape; Lou's collection of silver-handled walking sticks were scattered everywhere. The next day we went off to breakfast, and John just kind of laughed it off. He said, ‘Well, that was a funny night, wasn't it.' I thought, All right for you to say—I've got to repair the bloody house.”

That night, Spector arrived at the studio wearing makeup, to cover the black eye Lennon had given him in the struggle.

In November, the sessions were evicted from AM after Jerry Moss, the head of the company, received reports that Spector had been waving a pistol around. The circus moved to another studio, the Record Plant.

It was there that Spector discharged a gun into the ceiling. “We were doing ‘You Can't Catch Me,'” May Pang remembers. “Mal Evans [the Beatles' former roadie] was around, and I remember Phil's mother was in the control room. A very nice, well-dressed lady. And suddenly there was this pop! Everybody went, ‘What's that?' and crouched down—including his mother. I went for the door, and in the anteroom outside, Phil was holding a gun and Mal was reaching over saying ‘Give me that.' John was cowering with his hands over his ears. He was saying, ‘Phil, if you're going to shoot me, shoot me; but don't fuck with me ears, I need them to listen with.' They'd been playing around and Phil kept hitting Mal with his hand, and he'd hurt his nose. Mal had complained, and Phil being Phil—‘Oh yeah? I'm going to show you'—had pulled out the gun, and as he pulled it out, it went off. My thought was, Did he always have the safety off? The next day John and I were having dinner and Mal came by and said, ‘Here's the bullet from last night.' What bullet? Because all this time John and I thought they were blanks…”

         

In December, Ronnie returned from New York for a court appearance as part of her ongoing divorce proceedings from Spector. In a display of solidarity, Lennon and May accompanied Spector to court, along with Spector's old friend and bodyguard Emil Farkas. Farkas had not seen Spector in more than four years. “He called me out of the blue,” Farkas remembers. “He was frantic. He had to go to court and he wanted someone to be with him, so I went. I felt sorry for him. He ranted and raved. He was so crazy, the judge said, ‘Mr. Spector, if you don't shut up, you're going to jail.' Phil had this big-time lawyer with him. He went up to the judge and said, ‘You have to understand Mr. Spector is a genius in his own way, and you sometimes have to overlook things because of that.' The judge said, ‘Well, tell your genius to cool it.'” Embarrassed, Lennon and May walked out. It was the death knell for the rock and roll album.

A few days later, Lennon reportedly received a call from Spector saying the sessions for the album would have to be canceled; the studio had burned down. Alarmed, Lennon phoned the studio, to be told that nothing had happened at all. A week later, Spector allegedly called again, telling Lennon, “I got the John Dean tapes!” When Lennon asked what he was talking about, Spector replied that the “house was surrounded by helicopters. They're trying to get them!” The penny dropped: what Spector was telling him, Lennon surmised, was that he had the tapes of the rock and roll sessions, and would not be handing them over.

Lennon and May Pang left for New York, leaving Harold Seider to settle the matter of the tapes.

When Seider contacted Marty Machat, Machat told him that it was Spector, not Capitol, who had paid for the recording sessions, and therefore owned the tapes. Seider suspected that Machat was attempting to broker the recordings to Warner Bros. as a sweetener for Spector's new deal with the company. “Marty told me ‘We'll be able to make a deal with EMI and Capitol,' or words to that effect,” Seider remembers. “Because that was basically how Marty operated. He didn't push the envelope—he split the envelope, he opened it up, he burst it open. He was calculating that to avoid problems most companies will do whatever the artist wants, and that if you faced them down they'd capitulate. But I said, ‘Marty, you're wasting your time, because as long as I am in the picture, I am going to tell John Lennon, and the answer is no, he is not going to allow this thing to take place.'”

In the end, it was left to Bob Mercer, the managing director of EMI in London, to recover the tapes some months later. Mercer had not been party to the original negotiations over the record, and the first he learned of a problem was when his accounts department told him they had received a bill from Warner Bros. for £90,000 for recordings with John Lennon. Spector, it seemed, had been charging the recording costs to Warner under his new contract with the company.

Mercer now took charge of retrieving the tapes, and eventually managed to track down Spector and make an arrangement for them to be collected from an office on Sunset Boulevard. Mercer contacted a colleague, Chan Daniels at the AR department at Capitol, EMI's sister label. Daniels had once been in a group called the Highwaymen, who enjoyed a hit with “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” “Chan went down to the office on Sunset,” Mercer recalls, “and about ninety minutes later I got a call from him, quite definitely hyperventilating. He had gone over and presented himself at reception. The receptionist said he was expected and Phil would be out in a minute. She buzzed Phil, and Phil came out with an axe. Chan ran down twelve flights of stairs. In the end I had to send in a U.S. marshal to get the tapes.”

The John Lennon album
Rock 'n' Roll
was eventually released in 1975, comprising five of the tracks produced by Spector and a further eight recorded by Lennon in New York. It was quickly forgotten.

At around the same time, the chapter of Spector's marriage to Ronnie was closed with a final settlement. Ronnie was awarded $50,000 in community property and $2,500 monthly spousal support for three years. In return she was obliged to disclaim any interest in any of Spector's business interests, as well as any interest in the three trusts. Spector was awarded custody of Donte, Gary and Louis.

On the back of each alimony check Spector would stamp a short expression of his enduring feelings for her, that Ronnie would be obliged to sign over or under when presenting the check to a cashier. The message was just two words: “Fuck off.”

20

“Let's Take Five”

T
he chaotic tribulations of the John Lennon sessions had the effect of bringing the Kessel brothers, Dan and David, even more into Spector's life. Before long, “Barney's kids” had become his favorite hangout buddies, the sorcerer's apprentices and protégés—the sons that Spector's own adopted children would never be.

The Kessels were chalk and cheese: Dan was quiet, measured, pensive; David, three years younger, was a fiery extrovert and a martial arts enthusiast. The brothers had enjoyed the benefit of an eventful Hollywood upbringing. Barney Kessel and the boys' artist mother Gail had divorced when the boys were young, and for a while Gail went out with the Hollywood actor Lawrence Tierney, “a two-fisted, macho kind of guy,” Dan remembers, who would occasionally take the boys on his lunchtime drinking excursions around Irish bars, often culminating in a brawl in which Tierney would see off all-comers. Barney's second wife, B. J. Baker, was one of Los Angeles's premier session singers (Hal Blaine called her “Diamond Lil”), and the brothers would often sit in on her sessions for the likes of Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, and Spector.

The first time Spector invited the brothers up to his house he greeted them wearing a .38-caliber pistol in a shoulder holster. “He asked David and I if we wanted to wear guns, too,” Dan remembers. “I said, ‘Well, I can wear a gun or not, it doesn't matter.' So then he asked if we wanted to do some target practice. We said ‘Sure,' so we went into the backyard, and he had some old 45s that he'd set up on a tree off in the distance—they were records he didn't like—and we shot them to smithereens. He was as impressed with our marksmanship as we were with his.”

Spector was a huge fan of
The Godfather
(Al Pacino was one of his favorite actors: “Don't you think he's handsome?” he'd ask friends), and that night he entertained the Kessels for dinner, ordering in Italian food and, shoulder holster in place, putting on his Marlon Brando routine—“Come…eat at my table.” The evening passed trading scenes from the film—the fish wrapped in newspaper, the horse's head in the bed…

The Kessels were unfazed by Spector's enthusiasm for guns. For Dan Kessel it was “completely understandable” why Spector would wear a gun. “It's for protection. It's an insurance policy. But I never saw Phil do anything unsafe with a gun.”

But for Spector, wearing a gun seemed to be more than just “an insurance policy.” A gun gave him swagger, authority, machismo. It assuaged his insecurities, and made him feel he was somebody. Sometimes he would put in a call to Mo Ostin or Joe Smith at Warner, and turn on the speakerphone so the Kessels could listen in. To Dan Kessel it was “exhilarating to see him packing heat and talking to these top record executives, like he was Jimmy Cagney or Humphrey Bogart. He was tough with these guys and they were being nice to him. I was impressed.”

To David, Spector was “the epitome of the American pop-music hero; the epitome of achievement in the United States; the epitome of coming from humble beginnings, delivering the goods and becoming great.” Phil, David thought, “is a self-made man of the highest order.”

The Kessels were trying to make their own way as artists and producers, and they regarded Spector as a model and a mentor. David had studied law with a view to being a music business attorney, “but plugging back in with Phil on this level it was like, Forget all that stuff; this is what I want to do.” Spector would tell them, “I'm all the industry you need.” And for the two brothers just being around him was like a master class in music history and the record business.

Spector had a jukebox loaded with vintage rock and roll and RB—“My True Love” by Jack Scott; the Fireflies' “You Were Mine” the Drifters, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Jessie Hill, the Olympics—and he would sit for hours with the Kessels, pointing out the finer parts of the songs, telling stories about where and how they were made.

“We'd discuss things like, what's your favorite Johnny Cash song,” David remembers, “or the difference between Roy Orbison's recordings on Sun and Monument. You talk about rock and roll, R and B, classical or jazz—all of it—and Phil was totally there. We'd try to out-encyclopedia each other: who was conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1932? Is there such a word as ‘irregardless' in the English language? We only went home to sleep five hours a day.”

Dan Kessel remembers an occasion when the brothers tagged along with Spector to visit a woman friend at the Hotel Bel-Air. “David, Phil and I started getting into ‘Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby?' When Phil was in a good mood, he loved to do Ahmet Ertegun and Wolfman Jack imitations. He was spoofing on Wolfman Jack, ‘
And that was Buster Brown…We havin' us a good time; ain't we havin' us a good time?
' And the girl said, ‘Yeah, we're having a good time!' And Phil spun round, and gestured to David and me and said, ‘No,
we're
havin' a good time.' He wasn't being cruel, but it was funny.”

The Kessels, remembers one friend, “were like Phil's kids.” He called them “Danny” and “Davey.” He liked them to dress uniformly in dark suits and black shirts. When they went out they flanked him “like bookends.” Along with George Brand, he would take them to restaurants, parties and boxing matches. Spector was a big fight fan, and would often attend live bouts at the Forum and big-screen live broadcasts. Dan Kessel remembers he and his brother joining Spector to watch the “Rumble in the Jungle” fight in 1974 between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, which was shown at a theater in Beverly Hills. Spector had placed a substantial bet on Ali with a bookmaker in Nevada. Shortly after the fight, he took receipt of two suitcases loaded with $2 million in cash. When Kessel remarked, “That's a nice chunk of change,” Spector replied, “Now I can afford everything on my chili dog at Pink's.” Sometimes Spector would boost his entourage with his friend and sometime bodyguard Mike Stone, a martial arts expert who had been a pupil of Bruce Lee, and who himself worked as instructor to many Hollywood celebrities. Stone's most famous client was Elvis Presley, and he would later become the karate instructor to Presley's wife, Priscilla. Their affair would be one of the factors in the Presleys' divorce. Spector took the Kessels to Las Vegas to see Elvis Presley performing at the Hilton International, calling on him in his dressing room after the show. (Stone wisely declined to join them on the trip.) “There was just Dave, me, George and Phil,” Dan remembers. “Elvis had the full Memphis mafia. It was very intense—the full Phil trip, and the full Elvis trip. They knew who each other were. They were like two panthers checking each other out. You could tell—mutual respect. It was definitely one of those moments.”

To Dan Kessel, Spector was “fundamentally just too rock and roll for some people, including most so-called rock and rollers. Some people just don't get Phil. They don't know when he's being funny, or being playful. They can't keep up with his energy, his mind, his personality. So they say, ‘Oh, this guy's crazy.' I never once thought that.”

Behavior that others might have regarded as crazy, reckless, irresponsible, the Kessels simply regarded as “Phil pushing the envelope.” “He liked that we were pretty fearless,” says Dan. “Whether it involved the possibility of violence with armed gangs in different ethnic neighborhoods, or being able to drive over one hundred miles an hour around the Hollywood Ranch Market and on through the narrow alley behind Gold Star at four a.m. We never lost our cool, regardless of what was happening. To David and me it was all a giggle.” Over the next seven years they would play on all of Spector's sessions, help him with preproduction, be privy to his business deals and be his most constant companions. Spector dubbed them “the Three Musketeers.”

         

On April 11, 1974,
Rolling Stone
magazine ran a story headlined “Phil Spector in Mystery Mishap,” stating that Spector had been involved in a serious car accident “on or about February 10, somewhere between Los Angeles and Phoenix.” Spector, it was reported, had suffered multiple head and body injuries and burns and had undergone surgery. No other details were available. “The complete shroud of mystery—rare in the music business but common with Spector—has prompted some cynical speculation that there may not have been an accident after all, that Spector merely wanted to get away from it all, or that he's having cosmetic surgery, possibly a hair transplant.” A “friend” of Spector, Pauline Elliot [actually his former personal assistant], was quoted as rejecting that suggestion as “silly. He has plenty of hair, all his own.”

The report was an intriguing compound of fact and myth. Spector had not been involved in a car crash driving between Los Angeles and Phoenix. Nor was he having cosmetic surgery or a hair transplant.

Speculation raged that Spector, seemingly apprehensive about his new deal with Warner Bros., and the farrago over the John Lennon tapes, had spread the story of the accident to buy himself some time.

In fact, Spector had been involved in a car crash, which almost killed him. Driving his Rolls-Royce along Melrose Avenue in Hollywood late one night, he was involved in a head-on collision with another vehicle. Spector was catapulted through the windshield. He was rushed to the hospital and required extensive plastic surgery for facial injuries. He would be picking tiny shards of glass out of his face for years to come.

When finally he re-emerged in public he was sporting a collar-length shock of gray frizzy hair. “I said, ‘What's with the gray hair?'” David Kessel remembers. “And he said, ‘I want people to think I aged ten years in the accident.' A few days later, he dyed it gold. He had the gold hair and he'd started wearing a cape. Then he started wearing a cross. He said, ‘I need it to protect myself.' I guess he felt bad after the accident. But he was just doing it to be ridiculous.

“He also told people he'd lost his hearing in one ear—which he hadn't. He said, ‘If you really want to have fun, get on this side of me which everybody thinks is deaf now and listen to what they say about me. And if you hear anything interesting, let me know.'”

By the spring, Spector was finally ready to begin fulfilling his contractual obligations to Warner Bros. It was indicative of his state of mind, and his uncertainty, that for his first production he should turn to the past. Cher had come a long way since the days when Larry Levine would move her to the back of the crowd of session singers gathered around the mikes at Gold Star to prevent her voice drowning out everybody else. After “I Got You Babe,” she had enjoyed hit records under her own name, and she and Sonny Bono had gone on to become America's favorite television couple with their own variety show
The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.
But now the couple was mired in an acrimonious divorce, and Cher had signed a solo contract with Warner Bros.

The first song to come from her sessions with Spector was “A Woman's Story,” a song written by Spector with his friend Nino Tempo and Tempo's sister April Stevens; a dark lamentation in which a prostitute looks back over a life in which she's “seen every room with a bed inside it.” Spector filled Gold Star with a cast of musicians that exceeded even the heydays of the '60s—no fewer than nine guitarists and four keyboard players, along with brass and half a dozen percussionists, marshalling them to produce a funereal backbeat over which Cher intoned with a lugubrious fatalism.

The next song, a reworking of the Ronettes' “Baby, I Love You,” was an even more telling indication of Spector's mood. That he should have chosen to revisit one of his greatest hits was a sure sign of how much he was now looking over his shoulder; that he should have stripped the song of all its original joyfulness and exuberance, rendering it as a plodding dirge, seemed almost willfully perverse.

But to David Kessel, that seemed to be precisely the point. “Phil loves the fact that he'd achieved, but what he always hated was everyone's waiting for him to slip on a record. It was as if he'd trapped himself by being so brilliant. He wasn't allowed to just go in the studio and make a record. He'd say, ‘Why can't I just make a record like anybody else, and you either like it or you don't?' And I think at the Cher point he'd kind of given that up and decided he was just going to make the records he wanted to make.”

Toward the end of the sessions, proceedings were enlivened by the arrival in the studio of David Geffen. The callow teenager who had once loitered around Gold Star, watching Spector in awe and amazement and dreaming of one day following in his footsteps, was now a major player in his own right. Geffen had swiftly progressed up the ladder from being an agent at William Morris, to managing artists—Crosby, Stills and Nash and Joni Mitchell among them—to founding his own record label, Asylum, in the process shaping the “soft-rock,” singer-songwriter genre that now dominated the American charts. In the course of Cher's traumatic breakup with Sonny Bono, Geffen had become her lover, confidant and de facto manager. Spector had always regarded him as an irritant, believing that Geffen's early hero worship was just a way of getting close, to see what he could learn. Geffen, for his part, had never forgotten the slight of being told to “sit with the chauffeur” all those years ago. His first client as a manager was the rarefied Laura Nyro, whose music combined a deep affection for '60s girl group RB with performances of operatic intensity. Spector was much taken by Nyro and approached Geffen, wanting to produce her, but Geffen turned him down. When Geffen moved into the old Philles offices on the Sunset Strip it reaffirmed Spector's feeling that Geffen was trying to walk in his shoes. And as Geffen's power and standing in the record industry grew, and Spector's waned, so the old animosity grew more intense.