Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (42 page)

People were drawn into Spector's circle—the singer Ronee Blakely, the basketball player Magic Johnson, the actor Harry Dean Stanton—and just as suddenly vanished. “And you were never sure whether it was because Phil had grown tired of them or because they'd got tired of him—because he was nuts and it was all a big game that was fun for a while, but then, Jeez, I don't want to be around this anymore…”

Sometimes Devra would be summoned when Spector had gatherings at the house, “trotted out like a little ballerina,” and he would ask her to perform. “‘Ooh, you should hear how good Devra is…,' and he'd sit me at the piano, and I'd find myself playing Bach and Beethoven for all these luminaries. And after I'd played my little thing, he'd smile and say, ‘Isn't she great?' and put me away again, stick me back in the corner and I'd have to be quiet.”

         

Devra's first major job as Spector's “administrative director” was organizing the sessions for a new project—an album with the rock and roll singer Dion DiMucci. Spector felt a particular affinity with Dion. They were of the same generation, and had grown up within just a few miles of each other in the South Bronx. In the late '50s, while Spector was enjoying his first success with the Teddy Bears, Dion and his group the Belmonts were on the charts with the doo-wop hits “I Wonder Why” and “Teenager in Love.” As a solo artist, Dion had gone on to make tough rock and roll records like “Ruby Baby” before losing his way with drugs. In 1968 he enjoyed a comeback hit with “Abraham, Martin and John.” Reinventing himself as a folksy singer-songwriter, he began performing in concert halls and coffeehouses, recording the memorable “Your Own Backyard,” about his struggle with heroin addiction. Signed to Warner Bros., he had made four albums, which moved Bruce Springsteen to describe him as “the real link between Frank Sinatra and rock and roll,” but his career was in the doldrums when Spector told Mo Ostin that he wanted to produce him. “Mo was astonished,” Dion's manager Zach Glickman remembers. “Warner were about to write Dion off.”

Mindful of Spector's reputation, Dion was bemused when Spector instructed him to come to the mansion alone for their first meeting, specifying that the singer should wait at the corner of Sunset and Doheny, where a car would collect him. “Dion thought it was because Phil didn't want him to know where he lived,” says Glickman. “I think it was just Phil being considerate. He didn't want Dion to get lost.”

Over the course of a couple of weeks, Spector did his customary prepping at La Collina Drive, choosing and rehearsing songs. And at the end of August 1975 he assembled his troops in Gold Star.

Spector would arrive at the studio each night armed with his supplies—a caseload of Manischewitz, a sixteen-ounce plastic tumbler with a bendy straw—and drink methodically through the session. People talked of there being “two Phils”: the “private Phil” who could be sweet and intelligent, considerate and thoughtful, and the “public Phil,” who could be arrogant, mean and confrontational. And the difference between them was usually drink. Being drunk gave Spector the license to act out the role of the rock and roll eccentric people expected him to be—or, at least, that he thought they expected him to be.

He would drink in jags. Long periods would pass without him drinking at all; followed by intense bursts, usually when he was recording, when it seemed he was seldom sober. Dan Kessel thought that for Spector drinking served as “an insular cushion during grueling hours of hard work”—a way to cope with the pressures and responsibilities of creativity, of being Phil Spector; a way of keeping things “groovy and under control,” as Kessel puts it. “Being in perpetual Alexander the Great mode can be very taxing, physically, emotionally and otherwise, and drinking can help you to stay the course. And making records you can get away with it up to a point where you couldn't if you're a surgeon or an airline pilot.”

In the old days, Spector would never tolerate drinking or drugs in the studio; drug-taking among his musicians was still something he abhorred. Dan Kessel would remember him calling time on a session and sending everyone home when he discovered a couple of musicians trading cocaine in the studio. But drinking was another matter, at least for Spector himself. There had barely been a recording session in the past five years when he hadn't ended up loaded, even if he didn't start that way.

Drinking brought out the best and worst in him. One or two drinks and he would be dazzling, the riffs, skits and wisecracks crackling like lightning, the ideas and enthusiasm flying like sparks off a generator. Three or four and he could be foul. “Phil could be a lovable drunk,” remembers Devra Robitaille, “but he was more often an ugly and hateful one.”

He would sometimes drink to a point of insensibility, and awake feeling so full of shame and remorse that he would be unable to face anybody for days.

Gold Star's co-owner, Stan Ross, who had known Spector longer than anyone and who was engineering the Dion sessions, was alarmed at his old friend's escalating rate of consumption and the effect it had on him. “Drinking changed Phil, and I didn't like that. I can't handle anybody with alcohol, and he'd get stinko. Not only would Phil drink a lot, but he wasn't sociable. He'd sit there with his Manischewitz, the worst wine you could drink, drinking it by the bottle. You'd say, ‘Don't you offer anybody else anything?' But no. It was his own thing. And his skin would stink from the smell of it—that smell people get when they drink a lot and perspire. One night, I said to him, ‘Phil, you stink.' He said, ‘Nobody told me that before.' Maybe nobody had dared to tell him, but it was the truth.”

Dion had trouble accustoming himself to Spector's mercurial mood changes, his imperious manner and his way of ordering people around in the studio. Dion considered himself an artist, and felt that Spector was not showing him the proper respect. When he confided his worries to his manager Zach Glickman, Glickman suggested he should talk to Spector's friend Nino Tempo, who was working as arranger on the sessions. “Nino told him, ‘Just tell Phil how you feel. Say you're here to make a record, you're a respected artist and you want to be treated as such,'” Glickman remembers. “So Phil listened to what Dion had to say, and after that it would be ‘Okay, you cocksucking motherfuckers…and Mr. DiMucci.'”

One night, Roy Carr, a journalist from the
New Musical Express
who had traveled from Britain to meet Spector, arrived at the studio with Bruce Springsteen, who was in Los Angeles promoting his new album
Born to Run—
a bravura work whose panoramic, wide-screen production paid explicit homage to the Wall of Sound, and which had seen Springsteen hailed as the new messiah of rock.

Spector was working on the track “Baby, Let's Stick Together,” and Springsteen, Carr remembers, “was in awe. It was the full Phil Spector experience, with the bells and chimes and Dion! Phil turned round jokingly at one point and said, ‘Hey, doesn't that make
Born to Run
suck?' And Bruce just laughed and put his arms round him. He was in heaven.”

But to Carr “most of the session seemed to be Phil just pissing around—being Phil Spector. ‘Hey guys…Gene, Gene give me more attention—oh great, he's just taken his cock out…' That kind of thing. He was just entertaining everybody. Then he did a couple of run-throughs. And five minutes before the scheduled end of the session, just when all the musicians were thinking, Great, we're going into overtime, he did two takes, and said, ‘That's it.'”

To Nino Tempo, it seemed that Spector wasn't taking the sessions, or the arrangements he was providing, seriously at all. “He didn't seem to have the concentration, and he didn't want to spend the time necessary to go through each part. He'd say ‘Oh we'll get it in the session' or ‘You write something; I'm sure it'll be fine.' He didn't seem to have the patience that he used to have. And the frivolity, the party-animal kind of mentality—that had never happened in the old days; there'd be no partying around—it was work. But now it was almost like he cared more about entertaining everybody in the booth than about what he was recording. Always talking and laughing, telling jokes. And this is time that musicians were getting paid.

“Things were going into golden time—that's double, double time. In one overnight session I must have made a couple of thousand dollars on two short arrangements and a couple of thousand dollars just being the bandleader. You would think that I didn't care what happened. But I had a certain sense of pride in my work. We started on a midnight session and by four in the morning we hadn't recorded anything. Finally I got pissed off, I told every musician to shut the fuck up. And I said to Phil, ‘What are we going to do? Are we finally going to record something?' And do you know what he said? ‘Let's take five…' I was so pissed that I just packed up and went home. And then the next day I got a telegram, apologizing and asking me to come back tomorrow night, there's another session. He said, ‘Just make the money,' and then it was a party all over again.”

Spector had always been a perfectionist in the studio, always worked to his own coordinates, indifferent to the opinion or needs of others. In the past that perfectionism had been directed toward a specific end, which Spector could see, even if nobody else could. But increasingly it seemed that his coordinates were shot.

Recording the title track, “Born to Be with You,” Spector asked Dion to perform a “guide” vocal for the backing track, and then declared it was the only take he needed. Dion knew he could do better, but Spector didn't seem to care.

Yet seemingly good performances would be passed over, with Spector calling for endless retakes. “Whatever he did, it never seemed to be good enough,” Devra remembers. “Something would be great, but he would want to redo it, remix and remix, over and over again. It drove everybody mad.”

The finished album contained just seven tracks produced by Spector (with two earlier songs, including “Your Own Backyard”), and the results were as distracted as the mood in which it was created. It wasn't that Spector was short of ideas: the album brimmed with sonic wonders—chiming guitars, zithers, bells. The extraordinary “He's Got the Whole World in His Hands” in particular, which had an echoing Dion battling against a titanic string arrangement and what sounded like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, attained a weird, transcendent beauty. But if anything, there were too many ideas; what was lacking was coherence and fire. Much as he had with the Cher sessions, Spector had elected to render one song after another as a monolithic plod. Where once the Wall of Sound had conjured an irrepressible optimism and joy, it now sounded burdened with the worries of the world. Where once there had been blue skies, now there were dark, brooding clouds.

So ponderous were the final mixes that when Zach Glickman heard them he was convinced that Spector had slowed the tapes down even more, so that what should have been playing at 33 rpm now sounded as if it were playing at 25. Dion, appalled at the results, fulminated to Glickman that it sounded like “funeral music” and effectively disowned the project. He would later offer a more considered, and astute, appraisal, reflecting that working with Spector could be “exciting, frustrating, even a little sad at times. He's a real artist and one who liked to surround himself with spectacle, but it seemed to me that he was afraid of failure. He's got the image of a genius and that puts a lot of pressure on himself, always trying to outdo his last masterpiece.”

The executives at Warner Bros. were no more enthusiastic about the album. Where was the energy? Where was the life? David Kessel remembers that Spector was furious with the response. “It was: What's wrong with these fucking people? But Phil Spector does not make records for record executives; he
is
the record executive. You have to be the biggest idiot in the world to make a deal with Phil Spector and not expect to get a Phil Spector record.”

For Devra, Spector's insistence that the record was a work of genius, that the record company were the fools, not him, could barely conceal the pain he felt at its rejection. “You know how people somehow manifest defensiveness in a bullying way? When they feel picked on, their dukes come up? That's how Phil was. But I think it must have really messed with him to have that kind of criticism. It's one thing to be a mad genius, but when people start saying you're finished musically, that must have really done his head in. I'm sure that was why there was all the
angst
and the drinking and the craziness. He was like a drowning man, desperately floundering for some sort of retrieval.”

Chagrined at the response, Spector withdrew the record altogether. It would be another twelve months before
Born to Be with You
was eventually released, and then only in Britain, under a new deal that Spector and Machat had negotiated with Polydor to release Spector material under the banner of Phil Spector International Records. It would be a further twenty years before a new generation of critics and musicians would start hailing
Born to Be with You
as Spector's “forgotten masterpiece.”

         

Marty Machat had invited Roy Carr to Los Angeles with a view to writing a treatment for a film about Spector's life. The working title was
To Know Him Is to Love Him: The Phil Spector Story.
It should be a celebration of his life, his struggles and his triumphant accomplishments, Spector explained. He had already decided that Al Pacino would play the leading role.

But the more time Carr spent with Spector, the more it seemed that what he was seeking was not only approbation but reassurance. “He liked to impress you, with his music, his accomplishments, whatever. There was a bit of a Napoleonic complex there. But I think at the back of his mind was the fear that he was yesterday's man. People would pay lip service to him—Brian Wilson, John Lennon, whoever—but it wasn't being translated into record sales. And there was Bruce Springsteen with
Born to Run,
Roy Wood, Meat Loaf, all these people paying homage to his style, and having massive success. And Phil wasn't making records—or if he was, he was not releasing them, or he was screwing them up. He'd been a great American success story, an icon. And then it was all taken away from him. And that was very hard for him to accept. All the time his catchphrase was, nobody makes better records than I do—all the time. And he wanted you to reply, ‘That's right, Phil, that's right.' I think deep down inside he just wanted to be loved by everybody.”