He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  Then the phone rang. Cher picked it up. “Sonny,” she said, “it’s Phillip.” “Phillip!” he repeated. “He’s supposed to be in the air an hour already.”

  Sonny took the phone and heard Phil mumble, “I didn’t take the plane, man.”

  “What happened?”

  “I made ’em turn the plane around on the runway and come back.”

  Bono recalled: “As the plane had taxied to get in position for takeoff, Phil freaked out. He was screaming, I’m not flyin’ on this plane! These people are losers and the plane’s not gonna make it!’ Phil always thought the people he thought were losers were cursed. So they came back to the gate, which is against all regulations, threw him off, and banned him from flyin’ American Airlines ever again. They took his credit cards and took down all his identification, everything. They hated him, and I think they fired the pilot for bringin’ the plane back.”

  Unable to pull himself out of bed, Sonny sent Cher to the airport to get Phil onto another flight on a different airline. She found him out cold, on a lounge seat at the same gate. Calling Sonny, she said, “He’s asleep and a crowd of people are lookin’ at him.” Rousing him, Cher found the only way she could get Phil on another plane was to give him the St. Christopher medal she wore on a chain around her neck. “Phil, put it on,” she told him. “It’s blessed.” Phil, the medal dangling down on his thighs during the flight, prayed to a Christian God all the way to New York.

  Having been around Phil for many months, Sonny believed he had outgrown his toady’s role. By early 1964 he felt he could confide a criticism about the music Phil was making. Over the past year Phil had invariably asked Sonny the same question at almost every session. “Sonny, is it dumb enough?” he would ask—hoping that he had preserved the teen innocence in his ever-growing sound but not really caring about what Sonny had to say. Now Sonny felt that the question was irrelevant. Dumb or otherwise, he feared that the music was stuck on a treadmill and losing its edge.

  “It was dynamite for a while,” Bono said, “then it kept coming, and as promotion man I couldn’t get the records played as much any more, because the jockeys got tired of that sound. What used to be automatic airplay got tough, and records started bombing. So I called him when he sent me a new release one day and I said, ‘Phillip, maybe we should change our sound.’ And there was a long pause and he didn’t say anything; Phil never reacted to anything, you never knew where you stood with him. But I sensed some kind of break in communication from then on. Things were different between us.”

  In mid-1964 Sonny wrote a song called “Baby Don’t Go” and produced a master of it with him and Cher singing. Looking to sell it, he played it for Spector. Phil listened to the record and said he couldn’t use it. But he did offer to pay Sonny for half of the publishing rights. “Phil’s not always an encouraging guy, but the way I tested him was to see if he’d give you money for something. If he would, you knew he liked it. So when he gave me $500, at that time that was a big chunk of money to get all at once, it was a big validation of my work, as far as I was concerned.”

  With that impetus, and cash, Sonny—who had married Cher—went on to produce records for the Vault and then Reprise labels. Although he had no immediate success, Phil became decidedly cool to him. “Phil was very weird,” Bono said. “You’d know that if you did something on your own, he would be weird to you. He didn’t want to be that way, but he was. He was the same with Nino too.”

  Not coincidentally, Tempo and April Stevens had cut a song called “Deep Purple,” which went to No. 1 in December of 1963. As Nino’s attention to Phil became divided as he worked on more of his songs, he was invited to fewer Spector sessions. Amazingly, both flunkies had succeeded in becoming creative rivals to Phil Spector. In Phil’s system of rewards and punishment, Sonny was at greater fault. By late 1964 his minutes were numbered.

  In 1964 a good number of record producers did not share Bono’s feeling that Spector’s overstuffed sound was becoming stale. Quite to the contrary, like dogs nipping at the tires of a speeding car, they vied to duplicate it as closely as they could. Brian Wilson, a frequent visitor at Spector’s sessions, swelled the Beach Boys’ surf music with tidal waves of lush, tiered backgrounds, yet as brilliant as Brian was—and he and Phil surely were the twin leviathans of American rock and roll in the early and mid-sixties—he brooded endlessly about Phil always being one step ahead of him. Others, with not the tiniest understanding of the idiom, were miles behind.

  Larry Levine, who thought he had broken permanently with Phil, found he could not get too far away from Spector or his sphere of influence. When Phil returned from England and came back out to Gold Star to record, Larry—at Phil’s personal behest—was again next to him at the Studio A mixing board. And in the interim, and for a time thereafter, producers were coming to Gold Star and asking for Levine, in order that he might apply Phil’s magical formula to them.

  “One very big-name producer came to me and I said, you know, you gotta call all of Phil’s guys, which he did. And then I’m starting to build the way Phil does, the three guitars playing and the three pianos melding in. So we’re doing this for maybe forty-five minutes and this producer says, ‘What’s that guitar playing there?’ He wanted to hear it so I brought it up. And he’d keep saying, ‘I wanna hear this and that, bring ’em up.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s not the sound, if you’re hearing each instrument.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m payin’ and I wanna hear what they’re playin’.’ He missed the whole point of it, and it was a total disaster. But when you get down to it, it wasn’t what I or anybody else could do to make that sound. My contribution to it was minor. You really did have to hear what Phil heard, and nobody could.”

  Even so, Phil’s was a much more temperamental, brittle genius now. The previous fall the Christmas album and the single of Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” had been released into the shroud of gloom following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and they sold poorly. Phil didn’t feel rejected as much as hurt that the public did not hear the grandeur of his work. He then put Darlene Love’s “A Fine, Fine Boy” in September of 1963 and the Crystals’ “Little Boy” in January of 1964. Neither record did well, but he would not blame himself, or his music, as Sonny Bono had suggested. Instead, he ignored Darlene and La La almost completely afterward.

  Peevish and very tightly wound, Phil lashed out at many things that made him feel insecure. For years, Bertha Spector, who with Shirley was being supported by Phil, had been coming by the studio to watch her son at work. But now there would be escalating arguments with her. Phil, unable to control his temper about the slightest of things, would lose focus. That, of course, was the last thing he needed in the studio, and his frustrations made him a figure of pity among those over whom he most needed to exert his authority, his artists and his musicians.

  Once a commanding presence in the studio, his almost childlike tantrums, especially under the gaze of his mother, turned into grist for gossip around the L. A. studio scene. Phil, who loved his reputation as a taskmaster, even a heartless martinet—or even crazy—curdled at the thought that some in the business regarded him as a grown man still caught in his mother’s apron strings.

  People close to Phil were getting worried about him; never a ballast of stability, Phil’s highs and lows seemed to be at polar ends. Flamboyant and garrulous when up—he had long, dawdling discussions with Larry Levine prior to recording that grew into raging, wind-blown debates about anything from politics to pastrami, and Larry indulged him because it seemed to charge Phil’s batteries—he buried himself in Hamlet-like brooding when down. “Phil had a hard time with reality, especially with present-time reality,” Sonny Bono said. “He was coming in and getting very depressed and we’d all have to wait until he’d go in another room to talk to his psychiatrist in New York for about an hour or two. That would bring him up and he’d be okay for a while.” When Phil tided one of his B sides “Dr. Kaplan’s Office,” it was an in-joke
that Sonny understood. “As he went on,” he said, “the studio was like a roadshow Dr. Kaplan’s office.”

  Phil was also growing more paranoid about his frailty, how physically vulnerable he felt in a world that hated people like him. He began to employ a bodyguard/chauffeur, a beefy Irishman known as “Big Red,” to stand by him in L. A., and he took karate lessons from a black-belt, former Hungarian freedom fighter named Emil Farkas. Phil was zealous about the martial arts, but his real aim was to have a goon with him so that he could provoke people without fear of retaliation. Several times Phil picked fights with strangers, only to have Big Red and other bouncer types finish it off while he sat in the comfort of his limousine. To Phil, that was justice.

  Phille’s output had begun to dwindle. Only one record—the Crystals’ “Little Boy”—was released through the first three months of 1964. It was not that Phil was cutting less; rather, having sold over ten million records to date, he was hesitant to release any song for fear that it would not quake the chart. “The pressure kept building on Phil,” Larry Levine said. “He’d put out hit after hit, and when the pressure becomes so enormous you lose perspective about what makes a hit a hit any more.

  “Phil would always bounce the songs off me, ask me what I thought of the records, and I always said I loved them, because I always did, they were so great. I remember the one time I didn’t say it, he didn’t put the record out. After that, I would make sure to say ‘Hey, that’s great, Phil,’ because I thought that if I didn’t say that, I really didn’t know if he’d kill all these great records. He was that insecure about it. Each new record had to be the Phil Spector record.”

  One Ronettes song that Phil would not issue was the Barry-Greenwich-Spector “Chapel of Love.” When Jeff and Ellie, with Jerry Lieber, Mike Stoller, and George Goldner, opened their own independent label, Red Bird Records, in early 1964, they were not content to let “Chapel of Love” go to waste. Jeff called Phil out of courtesy and asked if he planned to put the song out as a single, hoping Phil would say “no.”

  “He said, ‘I don’t know . . . I don’t think so . . . no, no, it’s never coming out,” Greenwich said years later. “He always wanted to have total control over everything he had anything to do with. I don’t know how happy he was that Jeff and I were going to do something on our own without him.”*

  Barry produced the song with a girl group called the Dixie Cups. When Red Bird’s first release exploded on a ride to the top of the charts, Phil was outraged. Thinking he had been betrayed, he broke with Greenwich and Barry—who, in effect had already left him by virtue of their own work at Red Bird—and refused even to speak with them. He then sought another writing team with whom he could impose a similar three-way operating order. He consulted Paul Case, a man he had never strayed from, and Case was ecstatic that he might get Hill and Range on Phil’s money wagon. Case pushed two new writers, a duo from Providence, Rhode Island, Vinnie Poncia and Peter Andreoli. They had been staff writers originally at Peer-Southern Music, and Poncia also sang in a lounge act at the Copacabana. Both lived at the Hotel Forrest—blowing all their money on room rent just to be in on the lobby scene there, where they had met Doc Pomus, who brought them to Case.

  “Paul told us, ‘Phil Spector is looking to replace Jeff and Ellie,’ ” Poncia recalled. “I’ve got to believe it was a personal thing between Phil and them and then Phil made it professional. So we went over to Phil’s place, which for us was the opportunity of a lifetime.”

  Running through some song ideas, Phil stopped Poncia when he mentioned a title he had, “(The Best Part of) Breakin’ Up Is Makin’ Up.” “With Phil, it could be just a snippet, a word, and he’d know if it was good for his acts,” Poncia said. “He didn’t care what the whole song was, because he knew he’d be changing it, break it down and make it a hit.” If Phil had little input with the tightly knit Barry-Greenwich songs, he seemed to take a stronger hand now in attacking the more freely structured, insurgent concepts of Poncia and Andreoli. He collaborated in developing “(The Best Part of) Breakin’ Up” for the Ronettes, and the structure was radical for a Spector song: a semispoken lead vocal, a choppy and uneven melody, and a false ending before the fade-out. Phil hoped Ronni’s breathless “come on, baby, ooh-wee baby” cooing would smooth and carry the record, but the song went only to No. 39 in early Arpil, just as “Chapel of Love” hit No. 1.

  Still, he was comfortable with Poncia and Andreoli. Both were big, animated Italians; Poncia was doughy-cheeked and snidely sarcastic, while Andreoli’s rock-jawed features and squinty eyes could scare dogs and small children. They could drink people under the table and they could use their fists—real men, from where Spector sat. Phil, in his new mind-set of vicarious masculinity, liked the idea of working with two men he could bounce around town with and do some manly damage. He even gave them staff jobs at Philles—buying half of their contracts from Paul Case and sharing them with Hill and Range, which would have a half cut of their songs. Poncia and Andreoli had written songs for Don and Juan and other acts, but now did almost all their work for Phil. Holed up in the office at Sixty-second Street, Phil would work with them on the two elements he thought made a song—the opening and the first verse—and then leave and let them do the second verse. “It was a very fair distribution of work,” Poncia said. “Who gives a fuck about the second verse? He didn’t want to deal with that.”

  But, again, Phil seemed to need them as much for companionship—and protection. “Peter and I doubled as his bodyguards, ’cause he was always getting into arguments with people. In a restaurant he’d say to someone at the next table, ‘Who the fuck are you lookin’ at, shithead?’ He was studying karate and he’d always think he was a tough guy but he couldn’t break an egg. I’d just politely escort him out of there.

  “I was different than the bodyguards he had in L.A., who’d beat up people for him. I cared about Phil. Those guys didn’t give a fuck about him. He was payin’ them as bodyguards, they couldn’t care less about Phil. They would beat up someone and figure maybe they’d get a raise. Also, he couldn’t get away with that shit in New York. The places you went were music business places. It wasn’t like you were goin’ down to Pink’s for hot dogs. He wouldn’t dare pull that shit with a Paul Case or Jerry Leiber sitting two tables away.”

  The second Spector-Poncia-Andreoli song was the Ronettes’ “Do I Love You?” Like “Breakin’ Up,” it bucked and jerked in separate but connected blocks of funky, brassy rhythm linked by a double-bass line. Ronnie, singing in a lower, more mature key, had no “whoa-ho-hos” or “ooh-wee babys.” Rather than filling every spare moment with instrumentation, Jack Nitzsche’s arrangement left holes when no one played and Larry Levine’s echo chamber filled the gaps with the previous strain of notes and voices, striking a mood of hushed contemplation.

  “Phil was trying to move out, not stay confined,” Vinnie Poncia said. “With ‘Do I Love You?’ we also started going with the Motown horns. The man was growing up.”

  All over rock, pimple music and girl groups were still dominant. Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry would turn Red Bird into a spurting geyser of juvenile hits with the Dixie Cups, Jelly Beans, and Butterflys—and they collaborated on the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack,” which made the girl group sound a grease monkey’s paradise.

  Meanwhile, twenty-three-year old Phil Spector was going adult.

  Spector had received many offers to sell Philles, or have it distributed by a large label. Invariably he refused. Phil was into the one-man trip all the way now. Early in 1964 he no longer wanted to pay Universal Distributing to oversee his national distribution web, and he pulled a no-lose squeeze play on his onetime ally Harold Lipsius. “He wanted to limit the amount of money we could earn,” Lipsius recalled. “He didn’t want us working on a percentage but on a fixed fee, which would have been much less for us. We didn’t feel it made economic sense, and so he took it over himself.” That was really what Phil wanted all along: to sell directly to distribut
ors and bill and collect from them himself. Local distributors craved his product, and Phil, who knew his sales figures inside out, used that leverage to demand every cent he had owed. Distributors got no guarantees, because Phil knew they could rip him off by buying cheaply from other distributors and then returning much of his shipments. They had to work only on his terms, and hard. “I remember a conversation he had with one of his distributors,” Annette Merar said. “He said, ‘Look, if you don’t pay me on this stuff you won’t get my next record.’ He was so confident at that time. He could threaten everybody just by the mention of his next record.”

  Unfortunately, Phil did not bother with paperwork, leaving it to Chuck Kaye. Phil had named Chuck general manager and moved him to New York, and he ran the office with a secretary named Joan Berg. But when Chuck would try to check on details with Phil, he could only chase a shadow. Worse still, just being in Phil’s employ during the winter of 1964 was a burlesque of misery.

  “I’m living in the office because he wanted me to,” Kaye said, looking back, “and there are no shades, an army cot, and a rented black-and-white TV. And he’s in his apartment taking private French lessons and eating pâté. I mean, the guy was the worst. I’m starving to death, man. The winter hawk is blowin’ off the East River and I went outside to go to the store for something to eat and I couldn’t get half a block. And I’m dyin’. I’m on a $20,000 salary and it was like I was livin’ like an animal. So I went to his place and pounded on the door and I’m yelling, ‘You gotta feed me, Phil.’ And he wouldn’t open the door, he was bolted inside. I wouldn’t go away and finally he had to open up and feed me.