He's a Rebel (29 page)

Still, he was comfortable with Poncia and Andreoli. Both were big, animated Italians; Poncia was doughy-cheeked and snidely sarcastic, while Andreoli's rock-jawed features and squinty eyes could scare dogs and small children. They could drink people under the table and they could use their fists—real men, from where Spector sat. Phil, in his new mind-set of vicarious masculinity, liked the idea of working with two men he could bounce around town with and do some manly damage. He even gave them staff jobs at Philles—buying half of their contracts from Paul Case and sharing them with Hill and Range, which would have a half cut of their songs. Poncia and Andreoli had written songs for Don and Juan and other acts, but now did almost all their work for Phil. Holed up in the office at Sixty-second Street, Phil would work with them on the two elements he thought made a song—the opening and the first verse—and then leave and let them do the second verse. “It was a very fair distribution of work,” Poncia said. “Who gives a fuck about the second verse? He didn't want to deal with that.”

But, again, Phil seemed to need them as much for companionship—and protection. “Peter and I doubled as his bodyguards, 'cause he was always getting into arguments with people. In a restaurant he'd say to someone at the next table, ‘Who the fuck are you lookin' at, shithead?' He was studying karate and he'd always think he was a tough guy but he couldn't break an egg. I'd just politely escort him out of there.

“I was different than the bodyguards he had in L.A., who'd beat up people for him. I cared about Phil. Those guys didn't give a fuck about him. He was payin' them as bodyguards, they couldn't care less about Phil. They would beat up someone and figure maybe they'd get a raise. Also, he couldn't get away with that shit in New York. The places you went were music business places. It wasn't like you were goin' down to Pink's for hot dogs. He wouldn't dare pull that shit with a Paul Case or Jerry Leiber sitting two tables away.”

The second Spector-Poncia-Andreoli song was the Ronettes' “Do I Love You?” Like “Breakin' Up,” it bucked and jerked in separate but connected blocks of funky, brassy rhythm linked by a double-bass line. Ronnie, singing in a lower, more mature key, had no “whoa-ho-hos” or “ooh-wee babys.” Rather than filling every spare moment with instrumentation, Jack
Nitzsche's arrangement left holes when no one played and Larry Levine's echo chamber filled the gaps with the previous strain of notes and voices, striking a mood of hushed contemplation.

“Phil was trying to move out, not stay confined,” Vinnie Poncia said. “With ‘Do I Love You?' we also started going with the Motown horns. The man was growing up.”

All over rock, pimple music and girl groups were still dominant. Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry would turn Red Bird into a spurting geyser of juvenile hits with the Dixie Cups, Jelly Beans, and Butterflys—and they collaborated on the Shangri-Las' “Leader of the Pack,” which made the girl group sound a grease monkey's paradise.

Meanwhile, twenty-three-year old Phil Spector was going adult.

Spector had received many offers to sell Philles, or have it distributed by a large label. Invariably he refused. Phil was into the one-man trip all the way now. Early in 1964 he no longer wanted to pay Universal Distributing to oversee his national distribution web, and he pulled a no-lose squeeze play on his onetime ally Harold Lipsius. “He wanted to limit the amount of money we could earn,” Lipsius recalled. “He didn't want us working on a percentage but on a fixed fee, which would have been much less for us. We didn't feel it made economic sense, and so he took it over himself.” That was really what Phil wanted all along: to sell directly to distributors and bill and collect from them himself. Local distributors craved his product, and Phil, who knew his sales figures inside out, used that leverage to demand every cent he had owed. Distributors got no guarantees, because Phil knew they could rip him off by buying cheaply from other distributors and then returning much of his shipments. They had to work only on his terms, and hard. “I remember a conversation he had with one of his distributors,” Annette Merar said. “He said, ‘Look, if you don't pay me on this stuff you won't get my next record.' He was so confident at that time. He could threaten everybody just by the mention of his next record.”

Unfortunately, Phil did not bother with paperwork, leaving it to Chuck Kaye. Phil had named Chuck general manager and moved him to New York, and he ran the office with a secretary named Joan Berg. But when Chuck would try to check on details with Phil, he could only
chase a shadow. Worse still, just being in Phil's employ during the winter of 1964 was a burlesque of misery.

“I'm living in the office because he wanted me to,” Kaye said, looking back, “and there are no shades, an army cot, and a rented black-and-white TV. And he's in his apartment taking private French lessons and eating pâté. I mean, the guy was the worst. I'm starving to death, man. The winter hawk is blowin' off the East River and I went outside to go to the store for something to eat and I couldn't get half a block. And I'm dyin'. I'm on a $20,000 salary and it was like I was livin' like an animal. So I went to his place and pounded on the door and I'm yelling, ‘You gotta feed me, Phil.' And he wouldn't open the door, he was bolted inside. I wouldn't go away and finally he had to open up and feed me.

“When you're young, you can find a Phil Spector charming. We were pals as kids and I'm glad I could learn from him. He was the most brilliant producer to ever live. He stylized record production and he created something that's legendary. But, as a human being, I came to see it as a moral choice: How could I keep working for a guy who did what he did to my father? My dad was suing him and here I was working for him and this guy's a lunatic, he's untouchable and unreachable, and it was demeaning to put up with him.”

Before the end of that bitter winter, Chuck sent a memo to Phil. “Basically it said: ‘Hey Phillip, I'm gone. Stuff it.' ” Without waiting for Spector's response, Kaye went back to L. A. and began working for Lou Adler at Screen Gems.

With Chuck gone, the business was administered by an overburdened Joan Berg. “I used to call over there on business and she would be in tears,” Gean Pitney remembered. “She was just beside herself because she could never find Phil. Things would have to be done and she would never know where he was because he would never tell her.” Joan was vital to Phil. She had to keep the books, do promotion, book studio time, and make sure the records were pressed on time with the proper information on the labels. Phil knew of her thankless task and was good to her—he allowed Joan to contract musicians for some sessions, paying her per session so she could earn a few extra dollars—but when it was obvious that she had to have help, Phil wisely reached for someone who would be more than an office mule. For all his haughtiness, Phil's antennae were picking
up the hurt feelings he could cause in the industry. Accordingly, he brought in a real industry guy, Danny Davis, a promotion man who knew all the angles and all the right people.

Phil had long known Davis. A round little man with friendly blue eyes and a cackling laugh that could rumble a room, Davis had once worked the Borscht Belt as a stand-up comedian while doing promotion for Eddie Fisher, and he carried that chattery arm-around-the-shoulder manner to rock and roll when John Bienstock hired him as national promotion manager at Big Top Records. Davis, who promoted Spector's records for Dunes, found Phil an endearing wacko then. “I loved being involved with him,” Davis said, “because you knew he was brilliant and ahead of his time. He adopted the outragious garb and the Ben Franklin glasses before it was fashionable. They thought he was an absolute cuckoo at Big Top, and he was sleepin' on people's desks because no one would give him space, but they knew he was a genius.”

Davis was a spectator as Phil fell out with Big Top over the Crystals, but even after the advent of Philles he had remained in Phil's good graces. “He helped me out because we had a good relationship. I'd bring program directors over to meet him. I was using Phil to get my own records played, by trading on his friendship. Phil knew that you do whatever it takes to get a record played. He knew I was the best in the business. But I don't know if Phil needed me or if he just liked me and wanted me to be around him.”

Danny was in no position to quibble. He had left Big Top in 1963 to go to Don Kirshner's Dimension Records as vice president. Then, only a short time later, Kirshner folded Dimension when he sold Aldon to Columbia-Screen Gems and, his eye trained on television and movie music, began using many of his nonpareil rock writers to score witless theme songs for Screen Gems sitcoms like “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Bewitched.” Kirshner, who was named president of the Screen Gems music division as part of the sale deal, retained Davis at rock-oriented Colpix Records. But then, given a limousine ride by Kirshner to Penn Station one day in 1964, Davis was stunned by what Kirshner told him. “He said he was gonna divert himself into motion pictures and close up the record division,” said Davis. “He didn't tell me I was fired, but he literally held me like it was all gonna be through. I of course was gasping for a job because I loved my association with Columbia Pictures with
him, but he didn't give me one and I felt completely betrayed. I had given him a tremendous posture in the industry, won all the awards goin', but Don Kirshner was an absolute megalomaniac and I was out in the cold.”

Phil had offered Davis a job before. Now Danny called him and quickly accepted.

Vinnie Poncia knew for a fact that Philles needed a man like Davis badly. The hits had slowed, Phil was biting into different music styles, and his industry goodwill was in danger of atrophying. “He had to hire Danny to smooth things out,” Poncia said, “because when the hits didn't happen Phil started blaming the distributors and their promotion people. The hits and the adulation, this was supposed to go on forever in his mind. Phil would never take stock of himself, look at what was happening, and see what he had to do.” Indeed, when in the summer of 1964 Davis arrived at Sixty-second Street as Philles' new vice president, on an $800-a-week salary, he saw that the Philles empire was really one tiny room in disarray. “I was shocked,” Davis said. “He had nobody that was fielding phone calls, nobody taking care of business at the radio level. Joan was great, but she could only do so much.”

Davis set out right away on a cross-country mission seeing the Philles distributors, but his first assignment was something Phil considered just as pressing.

Danny had to fire Sonny Bono.

“Get rid of him,” Phil ordered.

“Jeez, Phil, I didn't hire him,” Danny protested.

“Well, you fire him.”

“Phil said we just didn't need Sonny,” Davis recalled. “Phil was a little disenchanted at what Sonny was doing. He didn't think Sonny was worth the money, or that he was doing much of anything. But Phil didn't want to face him. I'd never fired anyone before and I had a terrible aversion to being fired myself. I didn't want to do it and I asked Phil two or three times to do it. He told me, ‘Don't be a wimp.' ”

His throat tight and his mouth dry, Danny placed the call to L.A. Getting Bono on the line, he said, “Sonny, we're gonna let you go.” Despite feeling Phil's cold shoulder for months, Sonny did not take it well. “He started to get very testy,” Davis said. “He said he did an awful lot for Phil and this isn't fair. He didn't calm down the whole call, and
it was highly embarrassing for me. In the end I just left it like I was the bad guy, the guy who fired Sonny Bono.”
*

Sonny would get back on his feet soon enough. Signing with Atlantic in 1965, he and Cher had a No. 1 hit, “I Got You Babe.” The follow-up was “Baby Don't Go,” and it went to No. 8. Both songs had a familiar ring. Using many of Phil's session men, the sound was “inspired and influenced by Phil,” Sonny said. “I definitely ripped off his style of recording.” Sonny and Cher would notch five more Top 20 hits through 1967 and perform as a major nightclub act.

“Phil and I were really amazed when he had those hits,” said Davis. “Sonny was not a good songwriter, not a good musician or singer, and the act was certainly all Cher. But he had fed off Phil Spector. That made it all possible.”

Before Sonny and Cher were gone, Phil used Cher, under the applepie pseudonym of Bonnie Jo Mason, singing a novelty song he wrote with Poncia and Andreoli as a play on Beatlemania called “I Love You Ringo.” Because it was not material he could have issued on the Philles label, he released it on an off-label he named Annette Records—a bow to his wife's pain that was intended to “anesthetize the situation between them,” according to Poncia. Although record sales were minuscule, Phil had use for the idea of offshoot Philles labels. He issued two more inane discs on Annette Records in 1964, one of which, “Oh Baby,” he sang with Doc Pomus and released under the name of Harvey and Doc with the Dwellers. He also put out a cover of the Lennon-McCartney “Hold Me Tight,” sung by Vinnie and Peter—as the Treasures—on a label called Shirley Records. More important were two solo records by Ronnie singing under the name of Veronica, “I'm So Young” and “Why Don't They Let Us Fall in Love?” He released these on a specialty label called Phil Spector Records, an emblem he trusted would have instant sales appeal.

While some of these records were made at full-blown Spector sessions, he saw none as fit for Philles—a label he viewed now with uneasy
ambivalence, his personal dominion but also the germ of searing pressure and discontent. “He really wanted to disassociate himself totally with the Lester Sill thing and all that stuff with the Philles label—but he knew he couldn't,” Poncia believed. “So what he did with these records was . . . he just wanted a whole expanded set up which he could offer to other distributors and start fresh.”