He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  “When you’re young, you can find a Phil Spector charming. We were pals as kids and I’m glad I could learn from him. He was the most brilliant producer to ever live. He stylized record production and he created something that’s legendary. But, as a human being, I came to see it as a moral choice: How could I keep working for a guy who did what he did to my father? My dad was suing him and here I was working for him and this guy’s a lunatic, he’s untouchable and unreachable, and it was demeaning to put up with him.”

  Before the end of that bitter winter, Chuck sent a memo to Phil. “Basically it said: ‘Hey Phillip, I’m gone. Stuff it.’ ” Without waiting for Spector’s response, Kaye went back to L. A. and began working for Lou Adler at Screen Gems.

  With Chuck gone, the business was administered by an overburdened Joan Berg. “I used to call over there on business and she would be in tears,” Gean Pitney remembered. “She was just beside herself because she could never find Phil. Things would have to be done and she would never know where he was because he would never tell her.” Joan was vital to Phil. She had to keep the books, do promotion, book studio time, and make sure the records were pressed on time with the proper information on the labels. Phil knew of her thankless task and was good to her—he allowed Joan to contract musicians for some sessions, paying her per session so she could earn a few extra dollars—but when it was obvious that she had to have help, Phil wisely reached for someone who would be more than an office mule. For all his haughtiness, Phil’s antennae were picking up the hurt feelings he could cause in the industry. Accordingly, he brought in a real industry guy, Danny Davis, a promotion man who knew all the angles and all the right people.

  Phil had long known Davis. A round little man with friendly blue eyes and a cackling laugh that could rumble a room, Davis had once worked the Borscht Belt as a stand-up comedian while doing promotion for Eddie Fisher, and he carried that chattery arm-around-the-shoulder manner to rock and roll when John Bienstock hired him as national promotion manager at Big Top Records. Davis, who promoted Spector’s records for Dunes, found Phil an endearing wacko then. “I loved being involved with him,” Davis said, “because you knew he was brilliant and ahead of his time. He adopted the outragious garb and the Ben Franklin glasses before it was fashionable. They thought he was an absolute cuckoo at Big Top, and he was sleepin’ on people’s desks because no one would give him space, but they knew he was a genius.”

  Davis was a spectator as Phil fell out with Big Top over the Crystals, but even after the advent of Philles he had remained in Phil’s good graces. “He helped me out because we had a good relationship. I’d bring program directors over to meet him. I was using Phil to get my own records played, by trading on his friendship. Phil knew that you do whatever it takes to get a record played. He knew I was the best in the business. But I don’t know if Phil needed me or if he just liked me and wanted me to be around him.”

  Danny was in no position to quibble. He had left Big Top in 1963 to go to Don Kirshner’s Dimension Records as vice president. Then, only a short time later, Kirshner folded Dimension when he sold Aldon to Columbia-Screen Gems and, his eye trained on television and movie music, began using many of his nonpareil rock writers to score witless theme songs for Screen Gems sitcoms like “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Bewitched.” Kirshner, who was named president of the Screen Gems music division as part of the sale deal, retained Davis at rock-oriented Colpix Records. But then, given a limousine ride by Kirshner to Penn Station one day in 1964, Davis was stunned by what Kirshner told him. “He said he was gonna divert himself into motion pictures and close up the record division,” said Davis. “He didn’t tell me I was fired, but he literally held me like it was all gonna be through. I of course was gasping for a job because I loved my association with Columbia Pictures with him, but he didn’t give me one and I felt completely betrayed. I had given him a tremendous posture in the industry, won all the awards goin’, but Don Kirshner was an absolute megalomaniac and I was out in the cold.”

  Phil had offered Davis a job before. Now Danny called him and quickly accepted.

  Vinnie Poncia knew for a fact that Philles needed a man like Davis badly. The hits had slowed, Phil was biting into different music styles, and his industry goodwill was in danger of atrophying. “He had to hire Danny to smooth things out,” Poncia said, “because when the hits didn’t happen Phil started blaming the distributors and their promotion people. The hits and the adulation, this was supposed to go on forever in his mind. Phil would never take stock of himself, look at what was happening, and see what he had to do.” Indeed, when in the summer of 1964 Davis arrived at Sixty-second Street as Philles’ new vice president, on an $800-a-week salary, he saw that the Philles empire was really one tiny room in disarray. “I was shocked,” Davis said. “He had nobody that was fielding phone calls, nobody taking care of business at the radio level. Joan was great, but she could only do so much.”

  Davis set out right away on a cross-country mission seeing the Philles distributors, but his first assignment was something Phil considered just as pressing.

  Danny had to fire Sonny Bono.

  “Get rid of him,” Phil ordered.

  “Jeez, Phil, I didn’t hire him,” Danny protested.

  “Well, you fire him.”

  “Phil said we just didn’t need Sonny,” Davis recalled. “Phil was a little disenchanted at what Sonny was doing. He didn’t think Sonny was worth the money, or that he was doing much of anything. But Phil didn’t want to face him. I’d never fired anyone before and I had a terrible aversion to being fired myself. I didn’t want to do it and I asked Phil two or three times to do it. He told me, ‘Don’t be a wimp.’ ”

  His throat tight and his mouth dry, Danny placed the call to L.A. Getting Bono on the line, he said, “Sonny, we’re gonna let you go.” Despite feeling Phil’s cold shoulder for months, Sonny did not take it well. “He started to get very testy,” Davis said. “He said he did an awful lot for Phil and this isn’t fair. He didn’t calm down the whole call, and it was highly embarrassing for me. In the end I just left it like I was the bad guy, the guy who fired Sonny Bono.”*

  Sonny would get back on his feet soon enough. Signing with Atlantic in 1965, he and Cher had a No. 1 hit, “I Got You Babe.” The follow-up was “Baby Don’t Go,” and it went to No. 8. Both songs had a familiar ring. Using many of Phil’s session men, the sound was “inspired and influenced by Phil,” Sonny said. “I definitely ripped off his style of recording.” Sonny and Cher would notch five more Top 20 hits through 1967 and perform as a major nightclub act.

  “Phil and I were really amazed when he had those hits,” said Davis. “Sonny was not a good songwriter, not a good musician or singer, and the act was certainly all Cher. But he had fed off Phil Spector. That made it all possible.”

  Before Sonny and Cher were gone, Phil used Cher, under the applepie pseudonym of Bonnie Jo Mason, singing a novelty song he wrote with Poncia and Andreoli as a play on Beatlemania called “I Love You Ringo.” Because it was not material he could have issued on the Philles label, he released it on an off-label he named Annette Records—a bow to his wife’s pain that was intended to “anesthetize the situation between them,” according to Poncia. Although record sales were minuscule, Phil had use for the idea of offshoot Philles labels. He issued two more inane discs on Annette Records in 1964, one of which, “Oh Baby,” he sang with Doc Pomus and released under the name of Harvey and Doc with the Dwellers. He also put out a cover of the Lennon-McCartney “Hold Me Tight,” sung by Vinnie and Peter—as the Treasures—on a label called Shirley Records. More important were two solo records by Ronnie singing under the name of Veronica, “I’m So Young” and “Why Don’t They Let Us Fall in Love?” He released these on a specialty label called Phil Spector Records, an emblem he trusted would have instant sales appeal.

  While some of these records were made at full-blown Spector sessions, he saw none as fit for Philles—a label he viewed now with uneasy ambival
ence, his personal dominion but also the germ of searing pressure and discontent. “He really wanted to disassociate himself totally with the Lester Sill thing and all that stuff with the Philles label—but he knew he couldn’t,” Poncia believed. “So what he did with these records was . . . he just wanted a whole expanded set up which he could offer to other distributors and start fresh.”

  Stepping back from Philles, Phil used the other labels both as a haven and a cudgel, trying to find a new path without pressure while at the same time smiting the industry and even his trail of hits. “At this time, Phil had grown tired a little bit of his sound,” Poncia said. “He was getting turned off with the teenybopper stuff. The Jeff and Ellie thing, that wasn’t his music. Phil would never have written a song like ‘Da Doo Ron Ron.’ With something like that, he would tap the source for whatever it was and when it ran out it was ‘next.’ We were starting to get into some different kinds of songs, we’d come in with different angles, and he was happy with that.

  “Phil knew what the power of Philles was, but he always had the idea . . . See, this is when he felt rejected by a business that he thought he gave so much to. So he did this other thing for a while and said, ‘Fuck everybody.’ And then too, in order to bring in Danny Davis and make it a viable working situation, he wanted to offer Danny a situation too.” This would come about months later, when Phil opened yet another off-label, Phi-Dan Records; co-owned by Spector and Davis, it was a minor vehicle designed to feed off the reputations of both men, though Phil would have little to do with any product on the label.

  However, Phil gave up the safe harbor of releasing inadequate material on cheesecloth labels when all of the records he made failed and a priority was to deliver a record with the appeal of “Be My Baby.” Clearly, the timing of the Philles retreat could not have been worse. As Spector receded, the Beatles captured the imagination of the restless baby-boom generation, flooding the charts with as many as six Top 10 hits at once. The Merseybeat was in full bloom across the United States, on a rising tide with the rhythmic, pounding hooks of Motown. Spector had little voice in this important period of change. As the hot summer of 1964 was called to arms by Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street,” the Ronettes, “Do I Love You” rose to only No. 34. The one new Philles release was the Crystals’ “All Grown Up”—and this record may have appeared more out of spite than art. Phil had cut the Spector-Barry-Greenwich tune a full year before. Then, when Jeff and Ellie recorded it with the Exciters, Phil—still smarting over “Chapel of Love”—put out his record, leading Jeff and Ellie to kill theirs. And while he won the round, the ploy was harmful to him. The Crystals’ song, a mediocre Spector artifact, was gone in an eye blink, a whisper at No. 98.

  The cool breeze of autumn rejuvenated Phil. He returned to the reliable lodestone of meretricious emotion, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. For this, his timing was perfect. Fairly drifting in Don Kirshner’s television jingle world, their biggest recent hit was Eydie Gorme’s “Blame It on the Bossa Nova.” Kirshner wanted to keep his writers content and in the rock-and-roll elite, and that “Philly” was coming back to him made Kirshner believe in the prodigal son. Spector was so serious about his revival that he earned his one-third interest. For days, three titanic composing talents sat with each other around a piano, soldering viscous, romantic chords into a Ronettes ballad called “Walking in the Rain.”

  Phil cut the song in a minimal style, smothered in soft, salacious echoes and only horns and a triangle bell sticking out of the quietly massed arrangement. Given the literal imagery of the lyric, Larry Levine suggested using sound bites of thunder and rainfall, which he had in the special effects drawer in the Gold Star office. Normally, Phil would have gone for such effects only if he could create them musically, but Larry blended the taped clangor as he would have an instrument, not obliterating any other sound. Thunder booming and drops falling around her, Ronnie’s gauzy, quavering plea for someone with whom to share the rain was every bit an operetta.

  “With ‘Walking in the Rain,’ ” Vinnie Poncia said, “he went back to goin’ for the jugular again.”

  Phil had been going to release a Darlene Love song written by Poncia and Andreoli, “Stumble and Fall,” and had already assigned it the catalogue number Philles 123. But he was so eager to unveil “Walking in the Rain” that he gave it that number. Released within days in early October, it climbed rapidly and blanketed the airwaves but, oddly, it stopped at No. 23, surely the lowest chart ranking for a song everyone assumed was a monster hit.

  Phil was certain that the song would serve him well, and he did not wait for the chart’s verdict. He was moving again now, pushing with the old confident swagger, and he was working on a record he wanted to hit people across the eyebrows. Satisfied that he had taken the Ronettes to a higher level, but fearful that the girl-group thing was dying, he had already cast his fate in a whole new direction.

  *Alan Betrock, The Girl Groups (New York: Delilah Books, 1982), 90.

  *Bono’s explanation of his parting with Spector skirted any mention of being fired as well as any other specifics. “When ‘I Got You Babe’ came along, that was the end of my and Cher’s connection with Phil,” he said.

  I get a little angry when people say it’s bad music. This music has a spontaneity that doesn’t exist in any other kind of music, and it’s what is here now. It’s unfair to classify it as rock and roll and condemn it. It has limited chord changes, and people are always saying the words are banal and why doesn’t anybody write lyrics like Cole Porter anymore, but we don’t have any presidents like Lincoln anymore, either. You know? Actually, it’s more like the blues. It’s pop blues. I feel it’s very American. It’s very today. It’s what people respond to today. It’s not just the kids. I hear cab drivers, everybody, listening to it.

  —PHIL SPECTOR, from “The First Tycoon of Teen,”

  Tom Wolfe, New York Herald Tribune, January 3, 1965,

  New York magazine section.

  The concept of true “pop blues” was a promise that rock and roll had forsaken in the great rush to move the most vinyl. Phil himself believed he had gone back on his implicit blues genesis; in the seven years since “To Know Him Is to Love Him” made the Billboard R&B chart, he returned there with only one record—“Be My Baby”—and not since “He’s a Rebel” had he turned loose the jazzmen in Studio A without care for any formulizing. Spector’s vocalists sang blacker than Berry Gordy tolerated from his Motown artists, but in truth neither idiom was R&B in its brokenhearted and wailing sense.

  Contemplating pop music after the initial wave of Beatlemania, Phil thought that as marketable as Motown and the Merseybeat were, they were still teenage idioms and that there really was nowhere for rock and roll to go but back to the heart of R&B, because that would close the circle of its evolution. The pity for Phil was that rock had virtually bludgeoned and whitewashed great black soul singers out of the business; in a mid-sixties that was riffling by like pages from a Greek tragedy, Sam Cooke was shot dead, and Ben E. King, the Drifters, and the Coasters had to work in supper clubs.

  When Phil found a soul act with which he thought he could right the world, it was ironically a white act, but one that no set of ears would ever hear as anything but black. Indeed, when Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield began vocalizing together, they took their performing name from the reaction of a mostly all-black audience who greeted their music with cries of “righteous”—black slang for that which is truthful and honest. Signed to the small L.A. label Moonglow Records in 1962, the Righteous Brothers were a local word-of-mouth sensation. They had a middling hit, “Little Latin Lupe Lu,” in 1963 and cut songs written by, among others, Sonny Bono and Jack Nitzsche. But their hard gospel blues were their calling card. It kept them on the L.A. club circuit and landed them a regular gig on “Shindig.”

  Phil wanted Medley and Hatfield so much that he was willing to deal with Moonglow to lease their services, a sharing of the riches that usually was anathema to him. I
n early October of 1964, he signed papers with Moonglow’s R.J. Van Hoogten that granted him an exclusive four-year license to record and release the Righteous Brothers on the Philles label in the U.S., Britain, and Canada. Van Hoogten, who was eager to make this step into the rock elite, retained the right to sell the records anywhere outside those three countries. Spector’s cut of publishing royalties would be divided between Mother Bertha and the publishing company of Moonglow’s owner, Ray Maxwell Music. Medley and Hatfield, eager for a national hit, met with Spector and forwarded their approval in a signed letter on October 1, 1964.

  Slim, dark-haired, and narrow-faced, Bill Medley, born in Santa Ana, California, was the Righteous Brothers’ soul fulcrum. His voice was a bold and edgy basso that sounded like a Bing Crosby croon powered by a diesel engine. The turnip-nosed and blond Bobby Hatfield, from Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, was Medley’s physical and vocal counterpoint, with a honeyed soprano that trilled with heated Jackie Wilson-style shrieks. Together, their tight harmonies soared in every direction, each note wildly exuberant and at times almost angrily emotional.

  As such they were tailored to the Mann-Weil meat grinder of passion. They and Phil collaborated in a harvest of love’s shameless irrationality called “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.” The lyric of this song indicted, derided, and then ultimately pleaded for reunion, and it would be Bill Medley, solo and almost a capella for a Spector song, who would carry the record into its raging currents by crooning the damning intro of eyes unclosed during kissing and fingertips bereft of tenderness.

  Phil took the purgatory nature of the song literally. This record was to be a rebirth; far more so than “Walking in the Rain,” this was a holy conversion of his music. To go with his new act, Gold Star’s Studio A was fertilized with the seeds of new life. There were a number of new musicians in the room. Jack Nitzsche, busy elsewhere, was replaced with an arranger named Gene Page. Hal Blaine, who had mildly irritated Phil by refusing to cancel other gigs and stay on hold for him, was out and Earl Palmer back in. And, most significantly for Phil, an invitation was sent out to Barney Kessel, the great jazz guitarist who helped steer Phil to pump the fortunes of rock.