He's a Rebel (42 page)

A year before, as this situation began to presage the group's undoing, Paul convinced the other three Beatles to record what was intended as a musical
rapprochement:
a documentary movie and soundtrack album of their recording sessions and final public concert. Paul believed the Beatles had to set aside their separate music directions, which had soured the
White Album
, and “get back to their roots.” When the sessions went on in January 1969, the project was given the working title
Get Back
. But the whole episode sank the Beatles further into a morass. Over three weeks they cut a number of disjointed tracks, some new, some covers of oldies, in a malaise of bitter feelings and raw nerve endings during which George Harrison briefly quit in a huff. For the grand finale, the farewell concert, they climbed to the roof at 3 Savile Row and on an icy-cold day reflective of their spirit of frozen loathing sang several songs
before 16-mm cameras and a few puzzled spectators on the street below. Without looking at or relating to each other, the Beatles were eternally captured on film disintegrating in open fratricide. The wonderful single of “Get Back,” produced by George Martin, came out of the sessions, but the film and the album—eventually retitled
Let It Be
—were nothing more than ungainly reels of tape and film. No Beatle cared enough to go back and complete songs or choose any for inclusion on the album, and for that reason Martin refused to even begin mixing the tapes, which sat on a shelf at Apple. “Nobody could look at it,” John Lennon later said of the stomach-turning project. “I really couldn't stand it.”

John himself was much more concerned with his solo work. Although the Beatles did put aside their differences over the summer of 1969, recording the ingenious and intimately beautiful
Abbey Road
in one last breath of unity for art's sake, John's personal and artistic feelings were reserved for his own records, such as the brutally honest “Cold Turkey.” After the turn of the new decade he wrote “Instant Karma,” a rollicking caveat to the enemies of his world that they better get themselves together or they were gonna be dead. However, he was not eager to produce the song. John was not turned on by the intricacies of record-making; getting in front of a microphone and singing rock and roll was all he ever wanted to do, which is why he could record “Give Peace a Chance” in a hotel room bed. In producing “Cold Turkey,” he became frazzled running back and forth from the studio to the booth. John did not want a repeat with “Instant Karma,” and in discussions with Allen Klein the name of Phil Spector came up.

Phil had stayed on good terms with the Beatles through the years, in the form of communiqués that felt out the possibility of Spector producing an occasional Beatles record. When Phil released the
River Deep
album on A&M the previous fall in a limited American run, he obtained a cover blurb from George Harrison that gushed in praise: “ ‘River Deep—Mountain High' is a perfect record from start to finish. You couldn't improve on it.” John also loved Spector's records. “If we ever used anybody besides George Martin,” he once said, “it would be Phil.” Now John and Klein agreed that bringing in Phil to produce “Instant Karma” was a terrific idea. Phil, who was aroused by the bid, didn't think there could be any other choice.

Ironically, Phil had publicly bad-mouthed Allen Klein only
months before as a show-biz viper. A rumpled, fast-talking New York accountant with a vast knowledge of the tax laws, Klein had wormed his way into the management of both the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. Despite the fact that he was one of the most powerful men in the entertainment industry, many in the business shared Phil's stated opinion that Klein was “not a very good cat.” “Phil could read people and he knew the guy was shady,” said Pete Bennett, the Beatles' American promotion man whose testimony later helped send Klein to prison for two months on tax evasion. “Klein may have wanted a piece of Phil too, but Phil kept away.” Beyond Klein, Phil saw a distinct parallel in Lennon's musical head and his own. These were the two most headstrong and idiosyncratic geniuses in modern music, yet despite their divergent rock paths Phil and all the Beatles were walking on the same tracks now—conservators of the prologue to rock's seventies' identity, yet unsure of where they stood in new and unpredictable territory.

From his point of view, “Phil needed that association with Lennon and the Beatles,” Vinnie Poncia said. “He acquiesced to the thing he should've acquiesced to with the Lovin' Spoonful. He thought he couldn't possibly fail if John Lennon was with him. He didn't particularly want the association, but he needed it.”

Phil went to London in late January. He moved into a large suite at the Inn on the Park Hotel, sharing the room with the garrulous and uncomplicated Pete Bennett. Phil's menagerie of hairpieces occupied an entire closet. His longtime bodyguard, George Brand, a beefy ex-federal marshal, was one adjoining door away. The “Instant Karma” session was held at the EMI studio on Abbey Road, where the famous album was recorded. Pulling a small but mandatory Phil trip, Phil showed up late, keeping Lennon and a version of the Plastic Ono Band that included George Harrison on guitar, Klaus Voorman on bass, and Alan White on drum waiting for an hour. John began the session, then Phil came in and got a take of the song on tape. But that was just the start. He fattened up the rhythm by overdubbing John on one piano, George and White on another, Voorman on an electric keyboard. Then he overdubbed a muffled drum that sounded like hands slapping a mattress.

Expecting something like the scratchy pop funk of “Cold Turkey,” John was impressed with the broad, richly textured sound Spector created. What was accentuated in this four-man Wall of Sound
was not spare noise but the bare blues elements: the pile-driving rhythm and the authentic bite of John's hoarse and cracking voice. Many of his Beatles records had been mixed unevenly, and rarely was the rhythm toughened like this. John was delighted, but Phil was not satisfied. He told John he wanted to take the tape back to L.A. and add strings. Lennon said no and the disc was released in early February in England. Weeks later, when released in America, the record was different, cleaner and tighter. Without John knowing, Phil had remixed it again, and in an updated symbol of the Phil Spector past the disc was inscribed “Phil & Ronnie.”

John minded none of this. He had no trouble giving Phil his due. The record, his biggest solo hit so far, went to No. 3, selling over one million copies in the U.S. alone. Phil had done so well that John and Allen Klein asked him to take a crack at the dormant
Let It Be
tapes. With no restrictions on his judgment and work, Phil took to the Apple basement. Day after day in February and March, he tried to find the germ of art in all those hours of raw tape, under a vow of secrecy in case the album was unsalvageable. “I didn't even know Phil was in England,” said Tony Hall, his closest contact across the water. “It was done very hush-hush. He did a lot of the album before I heard he was here.”

The only other George Martin–produced song suitable for release before Phil arrived was the
Let It Be
title cut, Paul's gospel plea for redemption from Mother Mary. It came out in early March, but only a month later Paul issued his first solo LP,
McCartney
, with an accompanying announcement that he was done with the Beatles and that the group had ceased to exist. Against this noxious backdrop, Phil rushed to complete
Let It Be
, which was now beyond any question going to close the Beatles' legacy. Amassing strings and choirs, he coated the urchin tapes with aristocratic heavy cream. Most of the songs in the tapes were blues-flavored rockers and Phil could have gone with the taut rhythm of “Instant Karma.” Instead, he felt obligated to send the group off with great sentimental joy and sorrow. If the Beatles were averse to that, none of them made it known. George, who was soon to begin his own solo LP, attended some of the overdubbing sessions and thought that Spector's tumbling, dreamlike educements would perfectly suit the eastern mystic motif of his own music; right away George got a commitment from him to produce the album.

Phil did not want
Let It Be
separated from the chain of Beatles progression. There had been gossip in the music papers that this album was going to be an aggregation of “lost” Beatles tracks, a novelty rather than an important new work. Shunning any novelty interpretation, Phil avoided oldie covers like “Save the Last Dance for Me” and stuck with original Beatles tunes. To sustain the Beatles' musical versatility he let stand some of the raw tracks, in leathery, trenchant contrast to the rest. One of these was the original “Get Back,” which had funkier Billy Preston keyboard riffs and John's immortal spoken closing: “I hope we passed the audition.” When the album was ready, Phil sent an acetate to each Beatle, and each sent him a telegram of approval.

Still, Phil had no delusions about
Let It Be
. He knew he could not win, that no matter how well he did with the album there would be those Beatle wprshippers who would look at an outsider—an American outsider, and one with a legendary ego—and see only desecration. In England Spector's vast popularity was confined to his own music. If Phil needed the ego trip, he was sure he would not need the approaching storm of dissent—a dark omen of which came mere days before the album's release when Paul suddenly changed his mind, disquieted because of what Phil did to his song “The Long and Winding Road.” The album's first single, this languid and mawkish ballad was originally cut only with an acoustic guitar, and now Paul hardly recognized it in a Spectorian slew of swelling strings, harps, and background singers. Repulsed by what he heard as shlock, Paul vehemently told Phil and Allen Klein that he wanted the song pared down to size. But by then the album was already in the pressing shop. When Paul sued Klein and the other three Beatles months later, he cited “The Long and Winding Road” in his court papers, claiming it was evidence that the group had conspired to “ruin my career artistically.”

Paul's ire was a prelude. When
Let It Be
was released on May 5 and the extent of Spector's influence was known, the critical inquisition was “River Deep” revisited; Phil was punished just as universally. Spector, wrote
Rolling Stone
's John Mendelsohn in a typically mean-spirited review, “whipped out his orchestra and choir and proceeded to turn several of the rough gems of the best Beatle album in ages into costume jewelry. . . . One can't help but wonder . . . how he came to the conclusion that lavish decoration of
several of the tracks would enhance the straightforwardness of the album. . . . To Phil Spector, stinging slaps on both wrists.” Mendelsohn judged “The Long and Winding Road” to be “virtually un-listenable” and “an extravaganza of oppressive mush.”
*

As difficult as his job had been, and given the fact that he had no part in the original recordings, Phil felt no reason to be anybody's whipping boy. With the carping at a fever pitch—including some stinging criticism by George Martin—Phil angrily told British journalist Richard Williams: “It was no favor to me to give me George Martin's job because I don't consider [him] in [my] league. . . . He's an arranger, that's all. As far as
Let It Be
, he had left it in deplorable condition, and it was not satisfactory to any of them, they did not want it out as it was. So John said, ‘Let Phil do it' and I said, ‘Fine.' Then I said, ‘Would anybody like to get involved in it, work on it with me?' ‘No.' . . . They didn't care. But they did have the right to say, ‘We don't want it out,' and they didn't say that. In five years from now maybe people will understand how good the material was.”
^†

Looking back through the tunnel of time, it is preposterous that so many people could have believed Spector “ruined”
Let It Be
. In a moving victory of the proletariat, the album sold over two million copies in its first two weeks, setting an American sales record for an album at that time. It stayed at the top of the album chart for five weeks and was on the chart for fifty-four weeks. With sales of over four million worldwide,
Let It Be
outsold the Beatles'
Revolver
and
Yesterday . . . and Today
LPs. Though it was obviously a Phil Spector production—it simply could not have sounded like anything else—the character and essence of the Beatles was present in every groove. Indeed, the reviled “Long and Winding Road” became a letter-perfect parable of the Beatles' adieu, a sentimental journey through an epoch now run out of time, and a No. 1 song. When
Let It Be
won a Grammy for best original score in a motion picture, the award was accepted by none other than Paul McCartney, apparently aware that his career was not ruined after all.

Phil went into the studio with George Harrison in late May. Off and on for the next six months they recorded an ambitious twenty-three-song,
three-record boxed set album philosophically titled
All Things Must Pass
. It was a converging of two studio fanatics; George rearranged and Phil overdubbed so many times that Allen Klein gave up trying to set a release date. However, Spector and Harrison could not have been better tailored to each other.

Harrison's material was essentially a profusion of mantras that swayed in much the same anesthetizing manner as “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” Taken on its face, Harrison's preachy Krishna litany seemed a stupefyingly unappealing concept. But George's ideas, his nasal twang, weeping guitar, and humility were sharpened by Spector, who also deepened the metaphysical feel. Phil's rhythmically pounding basses and drum feels sutured George's sentimentality with cheerful energy and made Indian asceticism into dance music. As with John's “Instant Karma,” Phil worked with a small but powerful rhythm section that included superstar musicians Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Dave Mason on guitar, Ringo Starr on drum, the American keyboardist Billy Preston, and Rolling Stones horn player Bobby Keys. Polished as they were, these top sidemen—whose monster jam session formed the third record of the LP—had never played the way they did under Spector's direction.