He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  But when Larry Levine heard Spector’s coup de grace, an effulgent soliloquy spoken by Phil himself over the final cut, “Silent Night,” he thought he had figured out the motive for the project. This was not only to be Phil’s message of good tidings to his record-buying public, but, as he went on and on in unrelieved vanity about his privilege to make such an album, Larry cringed. If Phil could not sing on his records, now he would at last be the presence that verified his endowment.

  “He started on this thing, and it was 1 want to say how fortunate I am at twenty-three to do this . . .’ and what he was doing was extolling his virtue, how great he was, while trying to sound humble with ‘Silent Night’ in the background,” Levine said. “I’m only sorry I didn’t save it for posterity, but I did make him cut it down because it was unbelievable. It got past funny, after five minutes it wasn’t funny at all.”

  The version that remained barely skirted bad taste. “Of course, the biggest thanks goes to you,” Spector told his public, many of whom still did not know who he was, “for giving me the opportunity to relate my feelings of Christmas through the music I love.” The album, titled with similar presumption—A Christmas Gift to You from Phil Spector—was released in November with a jacket designed by Phil; the front cover showed his four acts popping out of gift packages, and on the back were pictures of him and a longer, signed message from “Phil Spector, Producer.”

  For Levine, making the album was six weeks spent in hell. “I told him after we did the album that I didn’t want to work with him anymore. Because it was too hard for me. When you engineer for Phil you have to work every second, you’re always mixing and remixing and it’s physically excruciating. I told Phil, ‘Look, you’re great, you don’t need me’ and I walked away. He went back to New York for a long time and I thought that was it for us.”

  Starting with “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” the inner groove of each Philles record had been etched with the words “Phil & Annette.” But by fall of 1963, it was an empty love symbol. Phil’s adultery with Ronnie was now an open secret, and it was causing trouble between Ronnie and her cousin. Nedra Talley had been aware of the illicit romance for months, ever since Phil began calling her house in a snit demanding to know where Ronnie was. Nedra, who was firmly against Ronnie seeing a married man, tried to dissuade her.

  “It’s wrong,” she told Ronnie. “Weren’t we brought up to know it’s wrong?”

  As much as the marriage issue, Nedra worried about Phil himself. She warned Ronnie that he was weird, a man with problems. Ronnie thought Phil’s jealous calls were “cute,” but Nedra insisted that it was a harbinger of insanity, that later on he would be horrible to her. “If a man cheats on his wife,” Nedra said, “he’ll cheat on you.”

  But whatever Nedra said, Ronnie would not listen. “She would just say, ‘Oh, I’m not really getting involved, he’s just cute’—but let’s be real. Phil is not cute. Ronnie fell in love with power,” Nedra believed. “Phil talked funny, he looked funny, and he was married. But he was successful and he turned her head with who he was. Ronnie was young and he could give her the world.”

  All through the winter and spring of 1963, the union got hotter. Ronnie, left fatherless as a young girl when her parents divorced, clung to the security and social ladder Phil offered. Her mother, Beatrice, mindful of her daughter’s interests, did not seem to object. “I think my aunt was going along with what Ronnie was doing,” Nedra said, “and saying ‘Well, you know, she’s got a catch.’ ”

  Phil and Ronnie took their affair coast to coast. They lived together while recording in L.A., and in New York, Phil gave nerve new meaning by coupling with her in his office, eighteen floors below where his wife sat in their apartment. Phil thought he was safe there; he could carry on with Ronnie under the cover of rehearsing and other record business. And, for a long time, he was right. Annette Spector knew nothing of the romance. Then Annette visited a girlfriend of hers named Lindy Michaels, who ran in music circles.

  “Have you heard about your husband and the Ronettes?” Lindy asked.

  “What are you talking about?” Annette said.

  “He’s working with this group, the Ronettes, and there’s a rumor he’s having an affair with one of them.”

  Annette wanted to believe it was a lie, but something told her it was not. Before she’d left the apartment, Phil had told her he would be in the studio recording that night. When Annette got back, she had to know the truth. Calling Mira Sound, she asked for Phil and was told he wasn’t there, nor scheduled to be. Next she got on the intercom that connected the apartment and the office. When Phil answered, her heart sank. Saying nothing to him, she raced into the elevator and went to the office, to bang on the door. Knowing he had been caught, Phil wouldn’t open it, but when Annette got back upstairs the intercom was buzzing.

  Answering it, Annette screamed, “Who are you with down there? Get your whore out of my building!”

  At this point, Annette suspected that he was cheating with Nedra. “She’s the one who bothered me most, Nedra was the prettiest,” Annette recalled. “I said to him, ‘Which one is it, Nedra?’ and he said, ‘I’m rehearsing, and I’m not with Nedra’—he thought that was his out. He made me come down so he could show me it wasn’t Nedra.”

  When Annette went down and the elevator doors opened, she saw Phil and Ronnie, in dark silhouette, standing in the rear of the lobby face to face, their noses almost touching. Annette let the doors close and rode back up. “I just about died,” she said. “I was too young to accept that kind of thing.” When Phil got in later that night, he flew into a rage.

  “What the hell are you doing to me, what is this bullshit?” he screamed at her. “What are you doing spying on me? Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “Goddammit, Phil,” she said through tears. “If you’re having an affair, I wanna know!”

  Phil’s response was to storm out the door. “You know something? He never admitted it—and he never to this day has admitted it,” Annette related. When he was gone, Annette slumped on the living-room sofa. On a table next to her was a picture of Phil. “I looked at it and it seemed as if he was shaking his head back and forth. I kind of hallucinated and it freaked me out. I called a girlfriend who came and took care of me.” Much later that night, Phil came home, and for a week they went through the motions of living together. Then, nothing resolved, Annette told him to move out, and he found an apartment two blocks away at York Avenue and E. 64th Street.

  “I just couldn’t take it anymore,” she said. “I was in the middle of finals when that happened and I could not sleep or eat or work. I think I had a walking nervous breakdown. Even today, I still can’t take it at age forty-four. I’m very much a moral person. I never cheated on him.”

  Some weeks later, Phil asked her if they could reconcile. “I’ll drop the Ronettes from their contract, I’ll just forget about ’em,” he insisted—a promise Annette did not believe.

  “I can’t, Phil,” she told him. “It’s too devastating to me. You tore me in half.”

  For the next several months they remained apart, with Phil speaking civilly with Annette and never writing off the marriage. “I believe—no, I know—that I was the only real love of his life,” Annette said years later. “Phil dug Ronnie physically, and he dug controlling her and creating an image of a Svengali with her singing. When Phil talked about Ronnie, it was as a slut, a whore, and he thought she was illiterate and ignorant. With me, he had something he could not find with anyone else.”

  And yet, by late 1963, Phil was deliriously hung up on Ronnie. “Be My Baby” had gone to No. 2, and Dick Clark invited the Ronettes to appear on a barnstorming tour of the East and Midwest called the Dick Clark Cavalcade of Stars. Worried about Ronnie seeing other men once she was away from him, Phil forbade her to go.

  “Phil wants me to stay in New York with him,” Ronnie told Nedra.

  “He’s playing one of his stunts,” Nedra said. “He’s playing emotional games with y
ou, and you know who’s gonna win in the end.”

  The Ronettes went on the tour with another cousin, Elaine, as the third member and with Nedra taking over Ronnie’s lead vocals. Then, with the tour almost over, Phil relented and allowed Ronnie to go on.

  But now the Ronettes were hot. In early 1964, the follow-up record, “Baby, I Love You,” hit No. 24, and another invitation came in—this time from England, where the Ronettes’ records were selling heavily. Promoters wanted the group to co-headline a tour with the Rolling Stones, who were in the vanguard of the exploding British rock scene but thus far known mainly as an unwashed, uncouth answer to the skyrocketing Beatles. Phil reluctantly gave Ronnie the go-ahead, but only because he would be there with her. The fact was, Phil had wanted to go to England in any case. His records sold well there, all the way back to “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” and in recent months he had negotiated a historic deal with England’s Decca label, which had been distributing the Philles line on its London Records sublabel. Though Spector was given the largest known advance from a foreign record company, he recouped the entire advance for London with his first new record, “Be My Baby.” Even as the Beatles and the British band scene was sparking tremendous worldwide attention, establishing England’s first real rock identity and crowding American pop music off the charts there like never before, Spector’s girl-group sound was highly popular. Thus, with the Rolling Stones—who recorded for Decca—geared up for their second national tour, importing the Ronettes was wise planning. In addition, Andrew Loog Oldham, the twenty-year-old Carnaby Street industry bumblebee who was co-managing and producing the Rolling Stones’ hard-bitten records, was doing publicity work, gratis, for Phil out of his promotion company. Oldham idolized Spector at a transatlantic distance, and linking up with the Ronettes had been his suggestion.

  For Phil, the trip gave him the chance to present himself amid the clangy guitars and high nasal harmonies of the Merseybeat sound as the biggest force in pop music since Elvis, immune to a change of the rock guard but born out of the same rebellious spirit as the English rockers.

  On January 24, 1964, a limousine came to his apartment to take him to the airport. As the car pulled out of the driveway, Annette Spector happened to be on the terrace of her apartment. “I watched his limousine roll down York Avenue and suddenly I thought, I’m nineteen years old and my husband’s going to England,’ and I freaked out. I realized I was all alone.”

  Phil—clad in a scarlet-lined suit and vest, pin-tucked mustard shirt and matching handkerchief, gold watch fob dangling from his vest pocket, a pearl stickpin and pointy brown shoes with spats—landed in London to find that Andrew Oldham, and his business partner Tony Calder, had stirred the interest of the English press about his arrival. Newspaper reporters clamored for interviews with the American Mozart. “It was pure manipulation,” Calder said. “We told them, ‘Phil Spector’s coming but you can’t talk to him.’ And of course then everybody wanted to talk to him.” The first interview, by Maureen Cleave of the London Evening Standard, took place in the back of the limousine that carried Spector from Heathrow Airport to his hotel. Phil, who had not encountered this kind of media notoriety at home, reveled in it. “I’ve been told I’m a genius,” he said to Cleave. “What do you think?” Cleave wrote of him as a mercurial homunculus—“He walks like Chaplin, for every three steps forward he takes one back or to the side”—and a loner. “I’m the least quoted man in the industry,” Spector said. “I stick to my little bourgeois haunts and I don’t bother with the masses.”

  The Ronettes had preceded Phil to England by two weeks. They appeared on the television variety show “Sunday Night at the Palladium,” and their month-long tour with the Rolling Stones was proceeding excellently. The Stones were received wildly by big, enthusiastic crowds, yet the band itself seemed to be more interested in the Ronettes. As both groups spent days together, and went to local clubs and parties, the real prize of the tour for the Stones seemed to be if any of them could get a Ronette into bed—although Ronnie was deemed off-limits. “She was always a no-go area,” Tony Calder remembered, “but I’ve got to tell you, I think everybody in the band was in love with Ronnie. She didn’t play around, and everybody presumed it was because of Phil. But we were all madly in love with all of them, because they were the Ronettes. I mean, the Stones were in awe of them. To them they were the stars, not Phil, because not everybody knew who Phil was yet. The Ronettes had a special magic right from the start, and everybody was after them.”

  Yet so good were the vibes that by the tour’s end it was of minor importance that none of the Stones could bag a Ronette. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards tried with Estelle, Brian Jones with Nedra, but the girls thought the Stones were grimy and foul-smelling, their hair too long. Nondrinkers, they reeled from the band’s hard drinking and pill-popping, and they did not care for the Stones’ music. Still, they loved being in the spotlight so far from home, and for them the tour was lit with a neon glow.

  Phil was lit up too in London. After a few days with Andrew Oldham, he was orbiting the earth, kept in the ionosphere by a nonstop ingestion of marijuana and pills from Oldham’s pockets. “Andrew used to have a pill box with every different color under the sun,” Calder said. “I’m quite sure he gave Phil something to take him up a little bit and something to calm you down a little bit, and something not to make you overanxious, and after a half dozen of those there’s another pill to make sure you don’t black out.”

  Phil had not used drugs before he came to England, fearing they would strip him of his self-control and leave him at the mercy of his neuroses. But the English scene, with its self-aware notion of being different and happening, made easy demands, and Oldham made a convincing Brahman of the new order. Hollow-cheeked and urchinlike, with long strands of blond hair and a mouthful of hip jargon, he was actually a latter-day, if less uptight, analogue of the early Spector. At the time they met, the Rolling Stones had released only two songs, and they were only on the outer edge of stardom. Oldham’s publicity work for the Beatles and Freddie and the Dreamers was mostly volunteered, a willingly uncompensated hustle for attention and favor. As Oldham began to wrest control of the Stones from the band’s other manager, Eric Easton, he and Tony Calder rented a two-apartment office in a row house at Ivor Court in London’s Gloucester Place section, eating up every cent they had. Oldham had to bum tea and biscuits from friends, but he was known far and wide on the British rock scene.

  There were not many people Phil could have taken cues from, but he did from Oldham. “Andrew and Phil considered each other to be oddballs,” Tony Calder suggested. “I think Phil admired in Andrew the fact that he really did break the rules, and knew how to deal with people. And for Andrew it was near to the point of worship in respect to Phil’s ability to produce a good record.”

  Taking an almost paternal interest in Andrew and the Stones, Phil decided he wanted to distribute the band’s records in America on the Philles label. He and Andrew worked out a deal that would have Decca license the Stones’ catalogue to Philles, and then went to see Sir Edward Lewis, the aging head of Decca Records. They presented the plan to him, and for forty-five minutes Lewis, who spoke in a pinched old-world British tongue, prattled on by way of saying no. Phil did not understand a word Lewis said, but it was clear the Stones were forbidden to go through any other channel but London Records and its usual outlets. Phil and Andrew left, mad.

  That night the Stones had a session at their studio, a small and musty place called Regent Sound on London’s Denmark Street. Andrew brought Phil and also Gene Pitney, who was in England during a foreign tour of his own. Since “He’s a Rebel,” Pitney had fallen out with Aaron Schroeder and gone on to have a number of hits. Cultivating the British market, he turned to Oldham to do promotion, and Oldham later produced Pitney singing a Mick Jagger-Keith Richards song, “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday,” which became a hit in England. Two other rockers filtered into Regent Sound that night, Graham Nash and Alan Clarke, wh
o were the core of the Hollies. But at first it was difficult to get anything done.

  “It was one of those days where the Stones all hated each other,” Pitney recalled. “Later on I realized why Andrew was the best thing they ever had goin’ for them. He had a nice ability with them in the studio to get them to put things out. Left on their own egos, they always had a problem with each other.

  “So that night, I had just come in from Paris with five fifths of duty-free cognac, and I had a fifth with me at the studio. It was my birthday that day and I told everybody they had to drink to me. And it did the trick. Everybody got a little mellow and started jammin’ around a little bit.”

  Half wasted, all of them sang a musical piss-off to Sir Edward Lewis in which everybody shouted “Fuck you, Sir Edward” and other obscenities. Oldham recorded it, gave it the title “Andrew’s Blues,” and pressed copies to give to his friends as an inside joke. The real work that night, though, was cutting the Jagger-Richards song “Not Fade Away,” which Oldham produced in what must have seemed a dreamscape, working with America’s top producer.

  “Phil really produced that one,” Tony Calder said. “It was just one of those magical nights when all kinds of forces came together. Phil actually sat there in the booth and said, ‘Hey, Andrew, let’s do it like this’ and ‘Hey, Mick, let’s put the maracas in here,’ and he went outside and he was playin’ the maracas with Mick and showin’ him how to play ’em. It was one of those scenes you never forget. And on the record you can actually hear Phil tapping a coin on the cognac bottle and Brian Jones sayin’, ‘Drink some more cognac to change the note on the bottle.’ It was that ridiculous, and that wonderful.”

  Released as the Stones’ next single, “Not Fade Away” would become their first big hit in America, going Top 5. Phil would be credited with co-writing the British B side, “Little by Little,” although this was just a few riffs jammed on the spot, and that song would draw royalties for him by its inclusion on the Stones’ first album. Also on that album was an instrumental version of Marvin Gaye’s “Can I Get a Witness”—which Oldham retitled “Now I’ve Got a Witness (Like Uncle Phil and Uncle Gene).”