He's a Rebel (28 page)

Despite her hits, Beverly found it hard to write. “I remember going into a suicidal depression for about a year.” She did not renew her contract at Hill and Range, and she turned down Mike Stoller when he offered her a staff job at Trio Music. “I would have been in the machinery of all the production. But they were so involved with Phil and I didn't want to be anywhere near him because I didn't want to walk into a snake's den. I felt my trust had been completely dismissed and violated.”

Phil, on the other hand, seemed to have a built-in barrier against feeling guilt. “His morality was that if you violated what
he
decided were the rules, he would penalize you, because you deserved to be penalized,” Beverly said.

“Phil once came up with a line in one of our songs that went:
‘If you hear them talkin' just walk away.' And that was indicative of how he felt about things. If anybody in the slightest offended or hurt him, he wouldn't give him a second chance. He would just walk away. That was his defense mechanism; he didn't want to be hurt by anyone so if he got to know you really well he'd wind up hating you.”

For many months it was Sonny Bono's job to ease Phil's fear of flying and deliver him to the airplane. During these sallies, Phil would sometimes rant and rave at the mosaic tile on the airport wall, yelling that the money should have gone into the plane's radar equipment. Often the only way he could make it onto a plane was by stuffing enough sleeping pills down his throat to knock him out on his feet. One night, as Sonny was escorting him down the long corridor to the American Airlines gate, Phil collapsed. “He was holding a big suit bag chin-high, and he's shorter than me so it's like you couldn't even see him,” Bono said. “All of a sudden I'm walkin' along and wham, Phil is down, he just flopped forward because of the bag and the pills. And you can't laugh at Phil, so I pick him up and somehow get him on the plane and I go home and got in bed with Cher. And it's like, oh man, finally he's gone, I can rest for a while.”

Then the phone rang. Cher picked it up. “Sonny,” she said, “it's Phillip.” “Phillip!” he repeated. “He's supposed to be in the air an hour already.”

Sonny took the phone and heard Phil mumble, “I didn't take the plane, man.”

“What happened?”

“I made 'em turn the plane around on the runway and come back.”

Bono recalled: “As the plane had taxied to get in position for takeoff, Phil freaked out. He was screaming, I'm not flyin' on this plane! These people are losers and the plane's not gonna make it!' Phil always thought the people he thought were losers were cursed. So they came back to the gate, which is against all regulations, threw him off, and banned him from flyin' American Airlines ever again. They took his credit cards and took down all his identification, everything. They hated him, and I think they fired the pilot for bringin' the plane back.”

Unable to pull himself out of bed, Sonny sent Cher to the airport to get Phil onto another flight on a different airline. She found him out cold, on a lounge seat at the same gate. Calling Sonny, she said, “He's asleep and a crowd of people are lookin' at him.” Rousing him, Cher found the only way she could get Phil on another plane was to give him the St. Christopher medal she wore on a chain around her neck. “Phil, put it on,” she told him. “It's blessed.” Phil, the medal dangling down on his thighs during the flight, prayed to a Christian God all the way to New York.

Having been around Phil for many months, Sonny believed he had outgrown his toady's role. By early 1964 he felt he could confide a criticism about the music Phil was making. Over the past year Phil had invariably asked Sonny the same question at almost every session. “Sonny, is it dumb enough?” he would ask—hoping that he had preserved the teen innocence in his ever-growing sound but not really caring about what Sonny had to say. Now Sonny felt that the question was irrelevant. Dumb or otherwise, he feared that the music was stuck on a treadmill and losing its edge.

“It was dynamite for a while,” Bono said, “then it kept coming, and as promotion man I couldn't get the records played as much any more, because the jockeys got tired of that sound. What used to be automatic airplay got tough, and records started bombing. So I called him when he sent me a new release one day and I said, ‘Phillip, maybe we should change our sound.' And there was a long pause and he didn't say anything; Phil never reacted to anything, you never knew where you stood with him. But I sensed some kind of break in communication from then on. Things were different between us.”

In mid-1964 Sonny wrote a song called “Baby Don't Go” and produced a master of it with him and Cher singing. Looking to sell it, he played it for Spector. Phil listened to the record and said he couldn't use it. But he did offer to pay Sonny for half of the publishing rights. “Phil's not always an encouraging guy, but the way I tested him was to see if he'd give you money for something. If he would, you knew he liked it. So when he gave me $500, at that time that was a big chunk of money to get all at once, it was a big validation of my work, as far as I was concerned.”

With that impetus, and cash, Sonny—who had married Cher—went on to produce records for the Vault and then Reprise labels. Although he had no immediate success, Phil became decidedly cool
to him. “Phil was very weird,” Bono said. “You'd know that if you did something on your own, he would be weird to you. He didn't want to be that way, but he was. He was the same with Nino too.”

Not coincidentally, Tempo and April Stevens had cut a song called “Deep Purple,” which went to No. 1 in December of 1963. As Nino's attention to Phil became divided as he worked on more of his songs, he was invited to fewer Spector sessions. Amazingly, both flunkies had succeeded in becoming creative rivals to Phil Spector. In Phil's system of rewards and punishment, Sonny was at greater fault. By late 1964 his minutes were numbered.

In 1964 a good number of record producers did not share Bono's feeling that Spector's overstuffed sound was becoming stale. Quite to the contrary, like dogs nipping at the tires of a speeding car, they vied to duplicate it as closely as they could. Brian Wilson, a frequent visitor at Spector's sessions, swelled the Beach Boys' surf music with tidal waves of lush, tiered backgrounds, yet as brilliant as Brian was—and he and Phil surely were the twin leviathans of American rock and roll in the early and mid-sixties—he brooded endlessly about Phil always being one step ahead of him. Others, with not the tiniest understanding of the idiom, were miles behind.

Larry Levine, who thought he had broken permanently with Phil, found he could not get too far away from Spector or his sphere of influence. When Phil returned from England and came back out to Gold Star to record, Larry—at Phil's personal behest—was again next to him at the Studio A mixing board. And in the interim, and for a time thereafter, producers were coming to Gold Star and asking for Levine, in order that he might apply Phil's magical formula to them.

“One very big-name producer came to me and I said, you know, you gotta call all of Phil's guys, which he did. And then I'm starting to build the way Phil does, the three guitars playing and the three pianos melding in. So we're doing this for maybe forty-five minutes and this producer says, ‘What's that guitar playing there?' He wanted to hear it so I brought it up. And he'd keep saying, ‘I wanna hear this and that, bring 'em up.' I said, ‘Well, that's not the sound, if you're hearing each instrument.' And he said, ‘Well, I'm payin' and I wanna hear what they're playin'.' He missed the whole point of it, and it was a total disaster. But when you get down to it, it wasn't
what I or anybody else could do to make that sound. My contribution to it was minor. You really did have to hear what Phil heard, and nobody could.”

Even so, Phil's was a much more temperamental, brittle genius now. The previous fall the Christmas album and the single of Darlene Love's “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” had been released into the shroud of gloom following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and they sold poorly. Phil didn't feel rejected as much as hurt that the public did not hear the grandeur of his work. He then put Darlene Love's “A Fine, Fine Boy” in September of 1963 and the Crystals' “Little Boy” in January of 1964. Neither record did well, but he would not blame himself, or his music, as Sonny Bono had suggested. Instead, he ignored Darlene and La La almost completely afterward.

Peevish and very tightly wound, Phil lashed out at many things that made him feel insecure. For years, Bertha Spector, who with Shirley was being supported by Phil, had been coming by the studio to watch her son at work. But now there would be escalating arguments with her. Phil, unable to control his temper about the slightest of things, would lose focus. That, of course, was the last thing he needed in the studio, and his frustrations made him a figure of pity among those over whom he most needed to exert his authority, his artists and his musicians.

Once a commanding presence in the studio, his almost childlike tantrums, especially under the gaze of his mother, turned into grist for gossip around the L. A. studio scene. Phil, who loved his reputation as a taskmaster, even a heartless martinet—or even crazy—curdled at the thought that some in the business regarded him as a grown man still caught in his mother's apron strings.

People close to Phil were getting worried about him; never a ballast of stability, Phil's highs and lows seemed to be at polar ends. Flamboyant and garrulous when up—he had long, dawdling discussions with Larry Levine prior to recording that grew into raging, wind-blown debates about anything from politics to pastrami, and Larry indulged him because it seemed to charge Phil's batteries—he buried himself in Hamlet-like brooding when down. “Phil had a hard time with reality, especially with present-time reality,” Sonny Bono said. “He was coming in and getting very depressed and we'd all have to wait until he'd go in another room to talk to his psychiatrist in New York for about an hour
or two. That would bring him up and he'd be okay for a while.” When Phil tided one of his B sides “Dr. Kaplan's Office,” it was an in-joke that Sonny understood. “As he went on,” he said, “the studio was like a roadshow Dr. Kaplan's office.”

Phil was also growing more paranoid about his frailty, how physically vulnerable he felt in a world that hated people like him. He began to employ a bodyguard/chauffeur, a beefy Irishman known as “Big Red,” to stand by him in L. A., and he took karate lessons from a black-belt, former Hungarian freedom fighter named Emil Farkas. Phil was zealous about the martial arts, but his real aim was to have a goon with him so that he could provoke people without fear of retaliation. Several times Phil picked fights with strangers, only to have Big Red and other bouncer types finish it off while he sat in the comfort of his limousine. To Phil, that was justice.

Phille's output had begun to dwindle. Only one record—the Crystals' “Little Boy”—was released through the first three months of 1964. It was not that Phil was cutting less; rather, having sold over ten million records to date, he was hesitant to release any song for fear that it would not quake the chart. “The pressure kept building on Phil,” Larry Levine said. “He'd put out hit after hit, and when the pressure becomes so enormous you lose perspective about what makes a hit a hit any more.

“Phil would always bounce the songs off me, ask me what I thought of the records, and I always said I loved them, because I always did, they were so great. I remember the one time I didn't say it, he didn't put the record out. After that, I would make sure to say ‘Hey, that's great, Phil,' because I thought that if I didn't say that, I really didn't know if he'd kill all these great records. He was that insecure about it. Each new record had to be
the
Phil Spector record.”

One Ronettes song that Phil would not issue was the Barry-Greenwich-Spector “Chapel of Love.” When Jeff and Ellie, with Jerry Lieber, Mike Stoller, and George Goldner, opened their own independent label, Red Bird Records, in early 1964, they were not content to let “Chapel of Love” go to waste. Jeff called Phil out of courtesy and asked if he planned to put the song out as a single, hoping Phil would say “no.”

“He said, ‘I don't know . . . I don't think so . . . no, no, it's never
coming out,” Greenwich said years later. “He always wanted to have total control over everything he had anything to do with. I don't know how happy he was that Jeff and I were going to do something on our own without him.”
*

Barry produced the song with a girl group called the Dixie Cups. When Red Bird's first release exploded on a ride to the top of the charts, Phil was outraged. Thinking he had been betrayed, he broke with Greenwich and Barry—who, in effect had already left him by virtue of their own work at Red Bird—and refused even to speak with them. He then sought another writing team with whom he could impose a similar three-way operating order. He consulted Paul Case, a man he had never strayed from, and Case was ecstatic that he might get Hill and Range on Phil's money wagon. Case pushed two new writers, a duo from Providence, Rhode Island, Vinnie Poncia and Peter Andreoli. They had been staff writers originally at Peer-Southern Music, and Poncia also sang in a lounge act at the Copacabana. Both lived at the Hotel Forrest—blowing all their money on room rent just to be in on the lobby scene there, where they had met Doc Pomus, who brought them to Case.

“Paul told us, ‘Phil Spector is looking to replace Jeff and Ellie,' ” Poncia recalled. “I've got to believe it was a personal thing between Phil and them and then Phil made it professional. So we went over to Phil's place, which for us was the opportunity of a lifetime.”

Running through some song ideas, Phil stopped Poncia when he mentioned a title he had, “(The Best Part of) Breakin' Up Is Makin' Up.” “With Phil, it could be just a snippet, a word, and he'd know if it was good for his acts,” Poncia said. “He didn't care what the whole song was, because he knew he'd be changing it, break it down and make it a hit.” If Phil had little input with the tightly knit Barry-Greenwich songs, he seemed to take a stronger hand now in attacking the more freely structured, insurgent concepts of Poncia and Andreoli. He collaborated in developing “(The Best Part of) Breakin' Up” for the Ronettes, and the structure was radical for a Spector song: a semispoken lead vocal, a choppy and uneven melody, and a false ending before the fade-out. Phil hoped Ronni's breathless “come on, baby, ooh-wee baby” cooing would smooth and carry the record, but the song went only to No. 39 in early Arpil, just as “Chapel of Love” hit No. 1.