He's a Rebel (40 page)

“Phil had a habit of locking people in his house,” Gerry Goffin
said. “It was like a dumb little game. If he couldn't control the outside world, he had to control the inside one. So, to say the least, the marriage was a little strange.”

Phil may have assumed he could manipulate Ronnie into seeing his methods of repression as the fruit of Beverly Hills elitism; if Ronnie was sensitive that her background and intellect made her unfit for the social graces, it would be a giddy head trip for her that—as a lady of leisure—she need never touch the concrete beyond the front gate and have her every need filled. Ronnie, however, grew increasingly despondent.

“Ronnie would write me or call me and say, 1 can't go out of the house' and stuff like that, and I'd go out to her so she wouldn't feel shut off,” Nedra said. “It wasn't like she felt she was a prisoner then. She would be trying to be happy, trying to make her marriage work. She wasn't miserable all the time. It was just certain sides of it she knew were not normal, like that she wasn't allowed to go out. The chauffeur was there not because he was a chauffeur. He was ‘The Eye.'

“It was a whole lot of nonsense, but that was Phil. I really think the reason Phil didn't do any work then was because, with the marriage, it was more important to him to control her than it was to work. For Ronnie to even be in the studio all the time meant that she would be meeting people. So that was taken out of their lives. Ronnie was a singer and now it was like she was told to just forget that. That was the hardest part.”

Along with the Stalin overkill, Phil tried to erase rock and roll as a reality inside 1200 La Collina Drive. Instead of rock, Wagnerian operas were the music of the house. Ronnie, it was said, was not even permitted to read
Billboard
or
Variety
, so as not to be distracted by the industry bustle.

“I think Ronnie felt a little stupid,” Gerry Goffin said, “because as soon as Phil married her he stopped producing records with her.”

Timid as Ronnie was, it was only months before she cracked. Phil's regular tirades and verbal threats scared her and she became so nervous and fearful of him and his shoulder-holstered bodyguards that she had to be given sedatives by doctors. Ronnie managed to slip past The Eye and to get a lawyer. On August 1, just three and a half months after the marriage, divorce papers were filed in her name which read:

Since the marriage, defendant has been nagging plaintiff about everything including going out of the house. He has been acting too jealous towards plaintiff and has stated that he would not permit her to get a divorce. He has stated to her that if she seeks a divorce he will make sure she never smiles again. He has grabbed plaintiff by the arms and has threatened to stick his fingers in her eyes. He has used profanity to the plaintiff and her mother. He has stated to her that she would not be able to get a job in the entertainment world as long as he can help it. Plaintiff fears irreparable harm unless defendant is legally restrained from annoying and molesting her. Plaintiff is currently under a doctors care for nerves
.

In asking for $1,500 a month for expenses, Ronnie listed her net worth as “nothing,” while estimating Phil's as “5 million.” Phil quickly answered with a counteraction against her, charging Ronnie with “extreme cruelty,” and on September 20 court papers were filed that said they were separated. However, Ronnie never moved out of the house, and days later Phil talked her into reconciling, mixing his avowals of love with fresh promises to record her.

Ronnie—whom Phil could convince of anything if he had her face to face—dropped her suit and went on, comforting herself with her doctors' medications and a new relief from the elegant rigor mortis of the house—alcohol.

To Phil, having a child was the key to keeping the marriage together. When Ronnie still did not conceive by early 1969, they adopted an infant boy. As Phil wanted it to appear as though his firstborn was of his own seed, he carefully found a newborn baby with mixed blood. Born on March 29, 1969, and named Don'té Phillip Spector, he unveiled the birth of his son in announcement cards sent to friends. The announcement recited a heartwarming scenario of premature birth and uncertain incubation in the form of a three-act play. Act Three read: “Baby going home with mom and pop. Baby's weight 11 pounds. Parents believe it!
Ordeal over
 . . . 
Happy Ending
.” The bottom of the card bore the inscription: “The above is a Veronica and Phil Spector Production.”

In early 1969 Phil came to an accommodation with commercial music and his place within it. “I know people expect me to come up
with another ‘River Deep' momentous production. But that's not where it's at,” he told
Rolling Stone
later that year. “It's in pleasing yourself and making hit records. That's all that counts. That's the only reason people come to see you.”
*
But he was also uneasy, at times agonized, about whether he
could
ride the commercial carousel. Frankly puzzled by what the market was, he said:

Everybody's a helluva lot hipper today, I'll tell you that. There's 13-year-old whores walkin' the streets now. It wouldn't have happened as much five years ago. Not 13-year-old drug addicts. . . . I tell you the whole world is a drop-out. I mean, everybody's a fuck-off. Everybody's mini-skirted, everybody's hip, everybody reads
all
the books. How in the hell you gonna overcome all that?
 . . .

. . . 
I
know
I can make hit records. I don't worry about that. I'm apprehensive about certain people who don't have any standards but drug standards, really. If they're loaded at one time, my record will sound great; if they're not loaded, it may sound bad. I'm apprehensive about the kind of things that people expect. I mean, they don't really want hit records. . . . I'm apprehensive only to the extent that I don't know how to lose yet; I don't know how to say “fuck it” about my art. I get too involved
. . . .

I'm still involved with why “River Deep” wasn't a hit and what the fuck was . . . and am I that hated? Am I too paranoid? You know, you can antagonize people if they think you're not human, if you say, “Aw fuck, I ain't afraid.” A lot of people will get very angry at that, disc jockeys in particular
. . . .

People put you down for really criticizing, but I can literally tear apart nine out of ten groups. I have to tell you something is desperately wrong with most groups. I mean really bad, bad news
. . . .

But I can't communicate with a lot of these [industry] people. I can't really bullshit with them, I don't have friends in the record industry. I don't talk with them. We don't jell; we don't communicate; because I'm too bitter I think.
†

The tragedy of Phil's two years in exile was that he was returning to a wayward and listless music scene more the outsider than ever, too removed now for his nonconformism to carry any creative sanction. Most centrally, his retreat had done nothing to preserve the concept of a record as a complete work. In the pale afterlife of the age of the producer, he could do nothing to change the state of rock. Only wistfully could he tell
Rolling Stone:

I think Mick Jagger could be a lot of fun to record. It's not just the big artists; I think Janis Joplin leaves a lot to be desired recording wise.
 . . .

But the one that really would be the most satisfying probably would be Dylan because I could communicate with him and justify what he really wants to say—no matter what it is
—
musically, which is something that you don't see very often happening today
.

Many of the artists today just sing, they don't really interpret anything. I mean the Doors don't interpret. They're not interpreters of music. They sing ideas. . . . [The Rolling Stones are] just makin hit records now. There was a time when the Stones were really writing
contributions.
See that's a big word to me
—
“contributions”!
 . . .

Now I'm getting a little tired of hearing about, you know, everybody's emotional problems. I mean it's too wavy. . . . I'm getting so fed up with it. No concept of melody—just goes on and on with the lyric. . . . They're making it a fad. If it had more music it would last, but it can't last this way
. . . .

They are going to really
kill
the music if they keep it up, because they're not writing songs anymore. They are only writing ideas. . . . They don't care about a hook or melody
. . . .

You see, I don't have a sound, a Phil Spector sound—I have a style . . . as opposed to Lou Adler or any of the other record producers who follow the artist's style
. . . .

My style is that I know things about recording that other people just don't know. It's simple and clear, and it's easy for me to make hits
.
*

But if he recognized he could do little himself about the disemboweling of pop, what yanked him back in the end was the second death of black music. Acid, superbands, open-air rock masses, and black militancy had blown soul out of the pond. The seventies were about to begin with no real core of soul outside of the lazily corporate Atlantic and Motown. “I don't consider Motown black,” Phil said in the
Rolling Stone
interview. “I consider them half and half. Black people making white music. The Monotones, the Drifters, the Shirelles, Fats . . . I mean, all those artists not making it, and around anymore. That's a big debt. But maybe it's only because nobody's doing it.”
*

Phil wanted to at least have a crack at paying back that collective white debt. Months before, even while still in his holding pattern, he signed his first new act in over two years. Steering clear of the torn denim and glazed eyeballs of the mainstream, he went with an integrated cocktail-lounge soul group, the Checkmates Ltd., a composite of refined Drifterish R&B and the self-contained backbeat of both rock bands and soul revues. The Checkmates, a guitar-bass-drum unit fronted by black singers Bobby Stevens and Sonny Charles, avoided the urge to fuse their emotive Motown-style blues with acid rock in the manner of Sly Stone. As a result, they had not climbed out of the narrow strobe light of Las Vegas stages. Although they were popular along the vestigial jazz and casino in–crowd, two Checkmates singles and an album released by Capitol did not do well. In a curious way, the Checkmates—Stevens and Charles, beyond whom Phil did not see—were an evolved form of the Righteous Brothers without the sawdust. They played well to black and white audiences, and Phil—who at twenty-eight was now the picture of Nehru-jacketed, aging hip—believed rock could still be embroidered with honest, decorous soul. Eventually Phil opened discussions with A&M Records, one of many labels that had been courting him since the Philles dim-out, about cutting a record with the Checkmates as the means of his return. Herb Alpert was one of the very few producers in the business with whom Phil did not erect a rivalry of the mind—Alpert's Tijuana Brass records were so extraneous to Phil's music that when Larry Levine had played them for him Phil thought Larry was pulling his leg. Through the years, the
two Fairfax High alumni were respectful of each other. A&M won high marks from Phil for bucking the trend of failed independent labels to challenge the majors by the late sixties. Of inestimable value, Herb also had Larry Levine at Sunset and La Brea, in a studio Larry set out to build in the acoustical image of Gold Star.

The A&M deal Phil made in late 1968 was a provisional one, and though the spoils of his past brought Phil a custom logo for his records—the label would read “A&M” and “Phil Spector Productions,” the latter marked by a fiendish little man in a black cape and high hat—the fact that Phil would not be reactivating his own label meant the certain death of an era and an uncertain promise for the future. Phil himself raised no great expectations; disinviting any comparisons with his old hits, he told
Rolling Stone:
“I live off what I've done and my reputation is there, and it's unspoiled. I keep it that way.” When word of the A&M deal was out, Lester Sill, from personal experience, did not believe Phil could ever be committed or dependable aiding someone else's empire. “My reaction was that he was just roaming and using,” Sill said.

Phil's immediate concern with the Checkmates was finding new songs for them to record. Rock was now dominated by performers and bands who generated their own songs, and this trend had mandated the end of the great early sixties song combines. Out of that whole incredible confluence of music and hustling along Broadway, only Don Kirshner was left intact, but only because the boob tube had insulated him against rock reality. Kirshner made millions withstanding musical truth and honesty; his bubble-gum-music groups, the Monkees and then the Archies, were money-making machines of deceit (the Archies did not even exist outside of the studio) churning out songs by the likes of Jeff Barry, Goffin-King, Tommy Boyce, and Neil Diamond. For Kirshner, it was a satisfying if short-lived mirage of the old pecking order, and his lingering influence in that context brought Phil to New York for the first time in years. When he arrived, though, he found a Kirshner with little influence and few useful writers. But Spector still had charmed luck. While he was in Kirshner's office two writers, Irwin Levine and Toni Wine, walked in to pitch their material.

Levine, the son of prizefighter Benny Levine, had been around for a while, a lyricist without success, and he now was back with
melodies composed by Wine, a top commercial jingle singer. Both thought they had walked in on a comedy act. “It was quite a scene,” Levine recalled. “Kirshner was totally perplexed and embarrassed because there was Phil Spector calling him all kinds of names and jumping on top of the furniture like a crazy person.” Phil, as he loved to do, was goofing on Kirshner, testing his slow-burn placidity; Kirshner, not having seen Spector for a while, had forgotten how far Phil could go. “He was calling Kirshner ‘Golden Ears,' because they used to say Kirshner had golden ears for music, and Phil was makin' fun of that, sort of half joking, but Kirshner was very sensitive and was totally embarrassed. Toni and I were standing there hysterical and Kirshner was saying, ‘You'll have to excuse me. This is a strange person.' I knew Donnie a long time and I never saw him in that position before. Phil could just unnerve him.”