He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  Phil was buoyant throughout his stay in London. Assuming the role of the hip hobgoblin that the media had created for him, he brushed his hair straight out like pinecones and began to wear dark glasses wherever he went. He appeared on the television shows “Ready, Steady, Go” and “Juke Box Jury,” alternating thoughtful insight with playacting. Riding around London one night with Decca promotion man Tony Hall in a long black Rolls-Royce hired by Hall, Phil asked the driver to stop and go out to a grocery store for a container of milk. “We were somewhere in Mayfair and the driver got out and Phil jumped in the driver’s seat, did a quick U-turn, and drove off,” said Hall, “this funny little man wearing the chauffeur’s hat behind the huge wheel of this Rolls-Royce and driving on the sidewalk. I was in the backseat and I was freaking.”

  Tony Hall’s house on Greene Street in Mayfair, the site of many parties attended by members of the top rock groups in London, was right across the road from the flats of John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. Hearing that the Ronettes were in town, the three Beatles asked Tony Hall if they could meet the girls. Again, Ronnie was the Beatles’ focal point, the known commodity, and when Hall gave a party for the meeting, they had no reason to think Phil would be there. But Phil did come, with Andrew, and it was a disastrous entrance.

  “Phil was very weird that night,” Hall said, “and the atmosphere was strained to begin with because the girls weren’t exactly overflowing of personality. And Phil was never easy to get along with. Whenever you’d meet him he would be extremely moody.”

  “I remember Phil came in that night and he was talking high, like a girl,” Nedra Talley said. “He would stop and it got embarrassing.”

  “I think Andrew encouraged him, just as Phil encouraged Andrew,” Tony Calder said. “It was just a game to be . . . you see, we would call it weird now, but at the time it was not weird. They were camping it up, they were taking unlawful substances, and they were just talking nonsense and sending people up. They were havin’ a giggle.”

  Still, Andrew knew he had to get Phil out of there and get his head together. “Andrew dragged him off someplace and they returned a couple of hours later and everything was fine,” Hall said. “I think Phil was a bit stoned when he came back, he’d had some smoke. He started telling the Beatles about his records, who played on them and things that happened on the sessions, and it was a great atmosphere, everybody was getting on fine.”

  Before the evening ended, George Harrison and Estelle Bennett retired to an upstairs room. And while Phil did not have the instant affinity with the Beatles that he did with the Rolling Stones, they parted as friends. A week later, on February 7, the Beatles were about to depart on their first trip to America, to appear on the “Ed Sullivan Show” two consecutive Sundays. Before they left, apprehensive about stepping onto a strange land, they called Phil over to tell them about what they should expect in New York and how to handle it. To continue the indoctrination, they asked him to fly to New York with them.

  And so Phil Spector flew back across the Atlantic with the Beatles, on a flight crackling with anticipation, fear, and excitement about what Beatlemania would do to America. Five years later Spector would describe the flight as “a lot of fun. It was probably the only time I flew that I wasn’t afraid, because I knew that they weren’t goin’ to get killed in a plane.

  “That plane was really an awful trip. I mean there were twenty-eight or thirty minutes where that plane dropped thousands of feet over the ocean. It scared the shit out of me, but there were 149 people on board who were all press and Beatles right-hand men and left-hand men, and we just sat together and talked about the Apollo [Theater] and all that jive. Lennon was with his first wife, and he was very quiet. Paul asked a lot of questions. George was wonderful. It was a nice trip.”

  At John F. Kennedy Airport, the very nervous Beatles asked Phil a favor. “It’s really funny but they were terribly frightened to get off the plane. They were really frightened of America. They said, ‘You go first.’ ‘Cause the whole thing about Kennedy scared them very, very much. They really thought it would be possible for somebody to be there and want to kill them.”*

  As thousands of shrieking teenage girls watched the Beatles climb down from the plane and stand in front of a battery of microphones and cameras, Phil Spector, a sylph in a cap and dark glasses, lurked unnoticed and unknown just behind them, a firsthand witness to the thundering genesis of rock’s new age. He was convinced that he belonged.

  *From the Rolling Stone interview, Jann Wenner (November 1, 1969):25.

  He had a funny sense of drama, and he was always shocked that people took him seriously. His whole thing was: let me see if I can create a drama about myself, throw a few bombs, and look around and see if I can get a response out of all these people. Maybe because he was a lonely little boy and didn’t look like Erik the Norwegian.

  —BEVERLY ROSS

  He was insecure and it was a weakness across the board.

  —NEDRA TALLEY

  Phil’s single use of La La Brooks in the studio, recording songs the Crystals knew nothing about, finally caused the original Crystals to rebel. After the Christmas album—which displayed the entire group on the jacket but only La La’s voice—Barbara Alston and Mary Thomas were sick of the charade and quit, leaving only Dee Dee Kennibrew from the unit that recorded “There’s No Other (Like My Baby).” “See, we were young, wide-eyed, we didn’t know that things that come out of people’s mouths were going to be lies,” Mary said. “You believe everything they say, that you’re gonna do this and that. All Phil Spector did was record us and then left us on our own out in the cold.”

  Phil, picking his teeth clean of the Crystals’ remains, seemed sorry that Kennibrew did not grind under the heel of his boot. “The one girl that Phil did not like was Dee Dee, out of all of them,” La La Brooks said, “because she was a die-hard, she was a pusher. She didn’t have any talent but she had the guts to keep on and keep on.”

  Thus proving that he could scatter a group to the wind even as he was making hits with their name, Phil next played similar games with Darlene Love. Having snubbed Darlene on “Da Doo Ron Ron,” he put her through the same charade almost every time she sang. Darlene, who did not like being used as a front for the Crystals, was happy to be doing songs under her own name. But only a fraction of the records she cut made it past the acetate stage. “Or he would use Darlene but he wouldn’t let her know if he was gonna really use her or go to La La,” Bobby Sheen said. “I don’t know why he did that. It was his strategy. You’d have to study generals to be able to figure out that type of mind, like maybe Napoleon.”

  Phil apparently did have some hard reasons of his own to undercut Darlene. For one, Phil never lost sight of the locus of his own fame vis-à-vis his artists. “He didn’t want to build up Darlene too much, he didn’t want her to be too big,” Lester Sill believed all along. For another, Phil was not happy with Darlene’s independent streak. As soon as he began using her, Phil disregarded the Blossoms as an entity of their own; they, and especially Darlene, were his property, as he saw it. The Blossoms, however, had a rich pipeline of session work, from Doris Day to Buck Owens, and Darlene never considered leaving it. In 1964 she, Fanita James, and Blossom Jean King took a regular gig on the weekly rock-and-roll television show “Shindig,” which further irritated Phil. He gave her several ultimatums, but Darlene—who never let Phil bully her—called his bluff and would not budge.

  “Darlene was the only one who stood up to Phil,” Sonny Bono said. “Phil would just back everybody down, but Darlene didn’t give a shit. She was tough. She would say, ‘No way, Phil.’ ”

  Jerking Darlene around on the records, Bobby Sheen thought, could have been the result of Phil’s vindictive attitude.

  Darlene was also unbending about money, of which she was seeing little. Since Darlene was a Philles employee, Phil did not have to pay her anything close to what he had on “He’s a Rebel,” merely a standard session fee, and her royalt
ies were scotched by session costs that were contractually paid by the artists—precisely the technique that Lester Sill utilized to explain the loss of Phil’s revenue on the Paris Sisters’ album. On August 15, 1963, Darlene and Fanita James received the same royalty statement covering “Not Too Young to Get Married” and “Wait ’Til My Bobby Gets Home.” The total was $2,948.47, but the balance due was only $1,015.27. It was then that a disgusted Fanita ended the 50–50 pay arrangement with Darlene, giving her almost everything. “I was trying to be fair to her,” Fanita said, “but also I didn’t want to be part of the Darlene Love thing any more. It was all very unpleasant.”

  For Darlene, the ensuing rewards were little better; thimble-sized, she reckoned, by comparison to what she was really owed. And yet she was reluctant to move away from Phil’s cruel kingdom. “For a long, long time,” Fanita recalled, “Darlene didn’t think anyone else in the world could record her but Phil Spector. He had led her to believe that. Ahmet Ertegun came after us and Darlene wouldn’t go. Oh, what a mistake. I think that stopped us from really being superstars, that little move right there. I wanted to go, but Darlene was afraid of leaving Phil.”

  Bobby Sheen hung around too, as a favored background singer now that Phil had decided to dispose of Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans. And for Sheen, it could be profitable. “Phil was good with me about money—but in his own way. He’d rather take it out of his own pocket than put it in a statement. If I told him I needed $5,000 right away, he gave it to me. I would’ve liked it on a statement, but he wasn’t really the greatest businessman in the world.” Sheen laughed. “Either that or he was the greatest. But most of his interest was creative, and if I’d come in for a date he would give me triple scale. That was his way of payin’ without his accountants getting in the way.”

  When Arnold Goland went to United Artists as an A&R man in 1964, Phil took on as his New York arranger a young man out of the Leiber and Stoller fold, Artie Butler, who had produced, arranged, and played every instrument but guitar on the Jaynetts’ hit “Sally Go Round the Roses.”

  “I remember Phil saying one day that he discovered a formula for making hit records and he couldn’t miss,” Butler said. “He said it in front of a bunch of people in the control room. And he wasn’t wrong. Phil Spector had the ability to capture innocence, even when he had forty guys pounding and scratchin’ and blowin’ their brains out.”

  The New York sessions were important to Phil because he sometimes took tracks cut on a whim at Mira Sound out to Gold Star to be embellished. Yet it was becoming harder for Phil to work out of New York. Artie Butler often hired musicians for the sessions through Artie Kaplan, a top saxophone player and part-time writer for Don Kirshner, and Kaplan was also awed by Spector. “He was the leader of the pack, the guy who started it all, the image of being young and brash and strange,” he said. “He took the idiom another step.” However, the men Kaplan booked were icily indifferent to Phil. Unlike the Gold Star brigade of musicians, the New York sidemen had little reason to identify with him or to consider living in his studio bunker a point of honor and virtue. At that time, many of these men did not believe rock and roll was a legitimate musical form, and to sit through Spector’s long and bristly dates filled the air with tension.

  “He was not alone, but he was one of those guys who came around then who seemed to have great authority and we didn’t know why,” recalled Dick Hyman, the popular jazz pianist.

  “I never could understand what he was doing,” agreed pianist Mo Wexler. “All I did was play triplets for him, ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba. I never played a melodic line.”

  “We had a big session at Mira one time and he started badgering everybody, pickin’ our brains,” drummer Buddy Salzman said. “It was four hours and he still couldn’t get what he wanted, so he’d badger us, like ‘Do something, play something.’ We said, ‘Hey, Mr. Genius, you’re the genius. We’re only musicians.’ Then he got all upset and Jeff Barry came in and said, ‘Fellas, the session is canceled. Phil doesn’t feel well.’ He was very unsure of himself, very insecure.”

  The worst incident involved Charlie Macey, a veteran guitarist who had played with the Jimmy Dorsey and Glenn Miller bands and who had insulted Phil’s guitar work during a Leiber and Stoller session a few years before. From the booth, Phil said, “Let me hear the guitar.” Macey began playing, but was interrupted by Phil yelling “Wait!” Macey asked what was wrong. “You can’t play wrong chords for me,” Phil said. “What chords? You said to just play,” Macey told him angrily. When Phil repeated his critique, Macey put his guitar down and bounded into the booth. “If you open your mouth one more time I’ll put your head through that window!” he screamed into Spector’s face. “Don’t you ever tell me how to play!” Badly shaken, and physically afraid of Macey, Phil could not go on with the session. Then, weeks later, at another session, he saw that Macey was again in the band and asked, “Who hired that guy?” “I did,” Artie Butler said. “Charlie is the best around.” “No, he’s not gonna play for me,” Phil decreed. Again, the date was aborted.

  “He was scared to death,” Macey recalled. “He was scared if he opened his mouth, I would bury him in front of all those people who he wanted to respect him. See, that’s what he was doing with me. He was trying to show his authority, but he didn’t. Nobody liked him. He was a kook.”

  “Phil was not a guy who could take charge effectively,” Artie Butler said, “because he was all emotional and his ego was hurt easily. Phil’s really a little boy.”

  After constant arguments, by early 1964 Bill MacMeekin, the engineer who worked most of Phil’s sessions since “Pretty Little Angel Eyes,” had had enough. He gave the assignment to a bright, antsy twenty-year-old named Brooks Arthur, who was nicely suited to the difficult job. Arthur didn’t hesitate to ride the meters into the red zone and was a whiz rigging tape-speed tricks to add echo. He made mistakes other engineers would not, but soon Phil would not work a New York session without him. “Brooks was a creative,” Artie Butler said. “He let his ear control his heart instead of his brain—just like Phil.”

  What Arthur would remember most about the job was how much he had to sweat. “Phil was so intense that it carried over to me,” he said. “I’d be just wringing wet.” After one long and damp session, Phil and Brooks came out of Mira Sound bedraggled and wrung out and were refused admission to a restaurant. “They thought we were bums off the street,” Arthur recalled. “Phil went into his ‘I can buy this place!’ routine. And the funny thing was, at that point he could have.”

  Phil’s odyssey of success and power was a bitter pill for Beverly Ross to swallow. Beverly had a big year herself in 1963, writing two massive hits, Lesley Gore’s “Judy’s Turn to Cry” and (with Tony Powers) the Earls’ “Remember Then.” But as her career had progressed, she could push aside the hurtful memories of Phil pulling away from her trust and affection and then breaking the bank without once including her. Traversing the same Broadway acres, they continued to bump into each other, and at those times Phil would almost hurt himself trying to be gracious.

  “I think he really did like me very much, and I think he felt a little guilty about what he had done to me,” she believed. One time Phil asked her to write a song for Darlene Love. Spector cut the song, “Mr. Love,” at Mira Sound, but he never used it. “I guess recording it was some sort of mercy,” Ross said. Another time, Phil invited her to his penthouse and cooked her an omelette. “That was how he dealt with guilt. He had no conscience so he could only show remorse by making me an omelette. Besides, I think he just wanted to tout his superiority. His apartment was very plush in a kind of show-off way, just like he was.” When “Remember Then” went to No. 1, Phil called her. “He said, ‘Hey, you got a smash,’ and my attitude was, Why are you telling me that? Are you amazed that I survived? I said, ‘Don’t pat me on the back, Phil, after you tried to demolish me.’ ”

  Despite her hits, Beverly found it hard to write. “I remember going into a suicidal depressi
on for about a year.” She did not renew her contract at Hill and Range, and she turned down Mike Stoller when he offered her a staff job at Trio Music. “I would have been in the machinery of all the production. But they were so involved with Phil and I didn’t want to be anywhere near him because I didn’t want to walk into a snake’s den. I felt my trust had been completely dismissed and violated.”

  Phil, on the other hand, seemed to have a built-in barrier against feeling guilt. “His morality was that if you violated what he decided were the rules, he would penalize you, because you deserved to be penalized,” Beverly said.

  “Phil once came up with a line in one of our songs that went: ‘If you hear them talkin’ just walk away.’ And that was indicative of how he felt about things. If anybody in the slightest offended or hurt him, he wouldn’t give him a second chance. He would just walk away. That was his defense mechanism; he didn’t want to be hurt by anyone so if he got to know you really well he’d wind up hating you.”

  For many months it was Sonny Bono’s job to ease Phil’s fear of flying and deliver him to the airplane. During these sallies, Phil would sometimes rant and rave at the mosaic tile on the airport wall, yelling that the money should have gone into the plane’s radar equipment. Often the only way he could make it onto a plane was by stuffing enough sleeping pills down his throat to knock him out on his feet. One night, as Sonny was escorting him down the long corridor to the American Airlines gate, Phil collapsed. “He was holding a big suit bag chin-high, and he’s shorter than me so it’s like you couldn’t even see him,” Bono said. “All of a sudden I’m walkin’ along and wham, Phil is down, he just flopped forward because of the bag and the pills. And you can’t laugh at Phil, so I pick him up and somehow get him on the plane and I go home and got in bed with Cher. And it’s like, oh man, finally he’s gone, I can rest for a while.”