He's a Rebel (46 page)

Although Phil was freed of the divorce albatross, the torment of 1974 levied a toll on him, and his work fared no better through the next three years. Disappointed by the failure of “A Woman's Story,” a record he put a lot of thought into, he seemed to give up trying to influence popular tastes. The idea that he would have to compete with people making inane disco pulp no doubt made Phil shudder more than anyone who thought about that numbing anomaly. Riding out the era as a detached spectator, he proceeded to fulfill his contractual obligations by signing two acts he cared nothing about. The first was a disco group called Calhoon and the other a singer/guitarist named Danny Potter. “With those,” David Kessel remembered, “Phil threw up a couple of mikes and said, ‘Go,' then we left the studio. He didn't produce them but he made sure they were recorded, in order to justify the label.” In between unsuccessful singles by these acts, Phil did commit to an act he thought might please him and the mass market, singer Jerri Bo Keno, a white girl from New York who had sung in disco clubs. Thinking she could be a Vickie Sue Robinson-style diva of dance music (Robinson had a smash disco hit), he cut the closest thing the Wall of Sound ever deigned come to the shamelessly syncopated disco beat. Spector announced her to be his comeback vehicle, but when a single he had written called “Here It Comes (and Here I Go)” failed in the fall of 1975, “it was sort of like vaporization,” said Dan Kessel. “He said hello and good-bye to her.” And to disco, none too soon.

The Warner/Spector label was closed out almost as a Phil Spector rock postscript. In July 1976 two old tracks by Ronnie, “Paradise”/“When I Saw You,” were issued with no other purpose but as an exercise in Spector mockery. This was followed in February 1977
by a new track cut with Darlene Love, “Lord, If You're a Woman,” backed with her unreleased Poncia/Andreoli track “Stumble and Fall.” To fulfill his album commitment, Phil released a Lenny Bruce retrospective, a two-record greatest hits compilation, and a reissue of the Christmas album.

The sessions Phil ran during his Warners playout were a far cry from the studio spectacles of the past. Kim Fowley, who had gone on to produce Johnny Winter and Warren Zevon and had songs recorded by the Byrds, Cat Stevens, and many others, had never sung lead in his life when he got to make a record for Phil during this time. “I had used the Kessel brothers on an album called
Vampires from Outer Space
,” said Fowley, “and these guys are like the sons Phil never had. Wonderful guys. They dress in black, they know karate, they carry guns. I suppose if Phil Spector and Sly Stallone had twins, it would be the Kessels. So they said they were recording and I should bring my songs and some beer. I said, ‘Who's producing?' and they said Phil was. I said, ‘Phil Spector producing Kim Fowley the vocalist! Now I can die and go to heaven.'

“So we went to this shitty studio across from the Chinese Theater which was horrible, a toilet. Guys were sitting around in urine-stained underwear and it looked like a junkie shooting gallery. I go in this dirty room and Phil appears—God, I'm in there the same way Bobby Sheen and all those poor bastards were, and he thanks me for coming and says, ‘I wanna make sure you guys get into this and make a great record. No matter what, just keep singing.' So I begin and you know what he does? He sets off the fire alarm and seals the doors and leaves with the Kessels. Every fire truck in Hollywood came, guys with axes to rescue us. I didn't know if there was a fire or not, and while they're crashin' the doors down I'm singin' my ass off, man. So that was Phil Spector letting all the noise and hysteria make a vocal better. One of my tracks came out on a Spector album in England and I never got a royalty from him. Phil, if you're reading this, you owe me something.”

Soon after the Darlene Love record, with the early fanfare forgotten, Warner/Spector quietly folded. It left Phil with no reason to record. He closed up the Sunset office—the succeeding occupant was David Geffen—and Phil Spector Enterprises became no more than a Hollywood box number. Rather than look for acts, Phil stayed in the house, the windows covered with tarpaulin, his music activity
limited to playing an album of Johnny Cash's greatest hits. “He loved the old Sun Records' sound, the tape delay, the ominous-sounding deep voice,” Dan Kessel said. “It soothed him.” The only way Phil would get back in the studio was if the right person talked him back. The first who qualified was Marty Machat, his manager. Machat also managèd Leonard Cohen, the Canadian poet/novelist/singer whose existentialist, often suicidal reflections of sorrow set to sparse music had begat a cult following. Machat, whose wife Ariel promoted Cohen, believed that with strong musical arrangements Cohen could find a broad audience. As a favor to Machat, and because he was lost in his own melancholia, Phil agreed to produce Cohen's debut Warners album.

Doc Pomus, the great old songwriter, happened to be in L.A. on business when Phil began working with Cohen. Phil, Doc's onetime Hotel Forrest protégé, may have loved Pomus more than any other person in the business; when Doc, who was now confined to a wheelchair, was down and out a few years earlier, Phil sent him a blank check (Pomus made it out for $3,000). Now Phil was the one who appeared to need help. Doc spent a month hanging out at the house, wincing as he watched Spector drink and act erratically. “He would change clothes four times a day,” Pomus recalled, “and each time he'd have a different gun on, to match the outfit.”

In this Fellini-esque cuckoo's nest, Spector and Cohen wrote songs, planned the album, and wallowed in booze. “They were really gettin' loaded,” Pomus remembered. “They were like two drunks staggerin' around.” So pained at seeing Phil this way, Doc practically dragged him out of that demented house each night. “He hadn't been out for so long, they told me it was like a year, year and a half, and he was pale as a sheet. I got him to start goin' out, but his drinking made it impossible. My driver and I never carried guns in New York but we did in L.A. because we were nervous about goin' out with Phil. 'Cause he would walk over to the biggest guy at the bar and say, ‘You're a faggot.' He'd start with everybody and we'd have to save his life a few times, and then he'd go to the bathroom and throw up. He'd pull out sixty credit cards at the table and order whole lobsters and he'd eat none of it, 'cause he was drinkin' and he didn't know what he was doin'. God, it was so sad.

“See, he gets a kick out of it too, because he likes to play parts. But I knew he was unhappy. He made me spend every night at the
place because he's lonely, he doesn't see anybody. When I had to go home he said if I left he never was gonna talk to me again.”

The Leonard Cohen sessions were typically unpleasant. Cohen, like John Lennon, was pushed aside and ignored. Phil was so paranoid about the tapes that he took them home each night with an armed guard. And there was yet another violent scene in the studio when violinist Bobby Bruce began to joke with Phil by speaking with an affected, faggoty lisp. Phil, who was always sensitive about his own lisp, thought Bruce was mimicking him and ordered it to stop. “Yeth, Phil,” Bruce replied, whereupon a maniacal Spector tore out his gun, aimed it in Bruce's direction, and ordered him out of the studio. Larry Levine, who had left A&M and engineered the Cohen sessions at Gold Star, was shaken by the incident, and he and the rest of the musicians could not go on with the date.

“It scared the shit out of me,” Levine said. “Phil was crocked and I was trying to talk to him, because you hear about accidents, and it was the scariest thing when he got like that. It was the booze. When Phil started drinking, he was out of his head. That was not Phil. That's not the Phil I knew.”

Released in early 1978, the album,
Death of a Ladies' Man
, bombed, heard by few ears except those of the rock critics it offended—the lone dissenter being Robert Hilburn, the
Los Angeles Times
music writer, who called it the year's best album. In fact, the lyrics—a primer of a hopeless romantic caught in the warp of modern feminism—may have been the poet's most trenchant to date. But Cohen himself led the attack on the record, which disastrously set fey lyricism, backed on some tracks by Bob Dylan, against the Spector sound machine. Despite their shared depression, Phil's hyperbolic bombast clobbered Cohen; and when Cohen heard the mix he publicly renounced the album even before it was out.
Ladies' Man
, Cohen told
Rolling Stone
, was “the collaboration of an Olympian and crippled nature.” Spector, he said, had “taken the guts out of the record. . . . I think that in the final moment, Phil couldn't resist annihilating me. I don't think he can tolerate any other shadows in his own darkness.

“I say these things not to hurt him,” Cohen concluded. “Incidentally, beyond all this, I liked him. Just man-to-man he's delightful and with children he's very kind. But I would also like him to know . . . that he was urged to reconsider his approach to recording
by a man who knows him well and who has suffered because of his failure to allow things to breathe.”

Dan and David Kessel were the next to divert Phil from what Leonard Cohen called a “Medici pose” of living death inside the cold and dark house. Dan and Dave were hanging around with the New York punk rockers and the Ramones when the group was on tour in L.A. With disco now dead and the new wave mudpie of British and Lower East Side assault rock seeping into the mainstream, there was a clear rationale for suggesting that Phil get involved with a punk band. The leather jacketed and dour-faced Ramones, fronted by the endomorphic six-foot-nine-inch lead singer Joey Ramone (the same surname was used by the four nonrelated band members, which also included guitarist Johnny, bassist Dee Dee, and drummer Marky), the Ramones were probably the most talented of all the bands out to subvert a rock world gone soft around the middle. Playing in the punk idiom of feverish rapid-fire guitar chords broken into two-minute bursts, they also fused many rock influences, including Phil Spector's records, and the satiric humor of mock shock song titles like “Blitzkrieg Bop” and “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.” One of the first and few punk acts to land a recording contract, they self-produced three modest-selling albums for Sire Records, a Warners subsidiary label, but the frantic excitement of their hugely popular live shows was lost on vinyl and they had not yet broken through to the masses.

Dan and David took Phil to a Ramones show at the Whisky-a-Go-Go, and his interest in the band was indicated not by his words but by the fact that he went backstage later. The first thing he said to them was “My bodyguards wanna fight your bodyguards.” Then, announcing his availability, he said, “You wanna make a good album by yourselves or a great album with me?” Phil's main interest in the Ramones was really Joey, whose melodically sharp, New York-sounding inflections was nearly a male version of Ronnie's voice. Phil wanted to record Joey solo. “He said he was gonna make me the next Buddy Holly,” Joey recalled. Informed that the group was the act, they both committed to an album and Marty Machat made a deal with Sire president Seymour Stein. A song-plugger along the old Broadway, Stein went way back with Phil and knew what it would require to get an album out of him to benefit the Ramones: he gave
Phil carte blanche and then left him alone, knowing no one would see an album for long months. In return, Phil agreed to produce one of Stein s pet acts, the Paley Brothers. Spector immediately cut a handful of tracks with Andy and Jonathan Paley before, through no fault of his own, they split up as an act.

Turning to the Ramones, pulling the Phil trips and control games on a ripened and off-the-wall band set in its own ways, his manic presence at once divided the group and obscured the rock-and-roll bond they shared. At an early idea meeting Phil insulted drummer Marky Ramone s girlfriend. As they drove to Phil's house for the first time, they thought they were entering a compound. “You drive in there,” Joey said, “and you see all the signs about dogs and electrified fences . . . the barbed wire, the mine fields. I'm sure a good portion of it's a put-on, part of the persona, the psychosis, but it can be intimidating. It's like when you went there, you were there; you can't get out until he's ready to let you out, and he's never ready, 'cause I guess he didn't have company too often and I guess he likes to keep you around. You'd say, ‘Well, Phil, it's time for us to go now,' and he'd disappear. Then he'd come back and he'd want to show you his terrarium or some of the hideous-looking things he had in there. The night had to belong to Phil, just like the studio does. . . . It was just too weird. One time I opened a closet door in his kitchen and this St. Bernard dog jumped out of the dark. It was locked in, just hangin' out in there.”

While the other three Ramones had misgivings, Joey held them in line. “I mean, I was excited about it, because Phil Spector was a major inspiration to me and because we were both pioneers. When the Spector sound came around there was a void, there was Pat Boone and then there was Phil Spector. He was a reaction to all that superficial whitebread crap. When we came out there was a gap too; it was the beginning of disco, of the corporate sound, Journey, Foreigner. There was no exciting rock as we knew it, the music we grew up on. I think Phil liked that aspect of us and I think it was important to him in a lot of ways to get involved with us.

“But there was a lot of shit in the beginning. Phil obviously had a real bad drinking problem and he made it difficult. John was pretty okay about it. Dee Dee was . . . well, Dee Dee was goin' through his own period, he had his demons. And L.A. is the kind of place you can get into trouble, especially if there's a lot of waiting around.
We were based in L.A. already at that point for about two months 'cause we had just finished the movie
Rock 'n' Roll High School
. And then we were doin' the album with Phil and it's like Phil would run down the songs like a couple of hundred times before he'd even do one take; he was listening for something. We were used to goin' in and knockin' 'em out in one take. We like it to be spontaneous, you like to capture that. It takes us like a month to record an album. But with Phil, this album took forever. It was like a crazy Chinese water torture and Dee Dee started crackin' up.”