He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  Phil Spector

  Later, on December 1, Phil released the Righteous Brothers’ album, titled Back to Back, and “Ebb Tide” as a single. To fill out the album, Phil had foraged through tapes of Medley-produced songs and slapped six of them onto the record. When Medley and Hatfield saw and heard it, they wanted to kill. Among the tracks that Spector chose was one song Medley had cut in September as a demo with only four musicians, “Without a Doubt.” This, Medley said in court papers, was made for his “private use . . . as a first step in the production of recordings.” In addition, Medley claimed that the tapes had been “pirated” after he left them stored in the studio. Of the remaining tracks, sung by Hatfield, one, “Hot Tamales,” had been released in 1962. The other two, “Late Late Night” and “She’s Mine All Mine,” were incomplete.

  In liner notes on Back to Back, Phil chose to subtly disassociate himself from the album as a whole beyond the separate producer’s credits. While calling “Late Late Night” a “polished, skillful performance of a complete musical arrangement,” he trenchantly added that “The Righteous Brothers thought you would like to hear it.” If Phil thought this would also somehow placate the pair, he was wrong. Outraged that the release was kept from them, and believing Spector was trying to make fools of them, Medley said the album was “a disparagement of my talents as a producer.” The Righteous Brothers demanded that the album be removed. They lost the motion, but the point was moot. Spector and Van Hoogten’s battle now was to stop MGM from signing Medley and Hatfield. On December 5 Phil’s attorney, Jay Cooper, wrote a stern letter to MGM’s Jesse Kay, reading: “Please be advised that the sole and exclusive right to record the Righteous Brothers at this time is with Philles Records. Our client intends to, and will, use all available legal remedies for the protection of his rights.” Four days later Van Hoogten’s attorney, Jack Weinstein, called MGM lawyer Alfred Schlesinger and tried to strike a deal giving MGM permission to record the Righteous Brothers if it would agree to put sales money in escrow pending the court case. Schlesinger replied tersely: “No.”

  On January 3, 1966, Van Hoogten picked up Billboard and read that the Righteous Brothers had signed with MGM and would soon release a single and an album on its Verve sublabel, with a “super promotion.” Both Spector and Van Hoogten bolted to their attorneys to try to void the deal. Phil could not mask his contempt for this treason. Bitterness dripping like battery acid, his court papers called the signing a “free ride” at his expense, as he had made the act what it was. The Righteous Brothers had done over $3 million in sales with him, he pointed out. As much as the pair disclaimed Back to Back, the LP had sold 200,000 copies in two weeks. The swirling, sonorous “Ebb Tide” was on its way to No. 5. By implication, they owed him.

  But within Spector’s papers was a hint of a self-recrimination too, the confession of a man who knew he fooled himself into a sense of eternal security. Danny Davis’s warnings about investing too much in the Righteous Brothers was prophetic when Phil protested that “disc jockeys throughout the country associate Philles Records with the Righteous Brothers.” Losing the duo, he said, “would mean losing the confidence of the disc jockeys at major stations . . . and destroying the goodwill and reputation of Philles Records with distributors. This will surely cause Philles to lose the business of many distributors, the loss of which cannot adequately be compensated in damages.”

  In late January, with the case still pending before the court, the Righteous Brothers went in to cut their first Verve single. For Phil, this was a two-handed slap in the face—the record was going to be a Mann-Weil song, “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration.” Although it had been bare months since Phil went back on his word to give Barry and Cynthia the “Lovin’ Feelin’ ” follow-up, he now wanted them to rescind the song—in the name of loyalty to him. The hypersensitive couple was torn, but they went ahead with the song, resenting Phil for manipulating their emotions. “There were a lot of hard feelings over that song,” Vinnie Poncia recalled. “Phil would’ve preferred that you just let them die, don’t give ’em that song. If you’re my friend, you’ll let them die. But it was strictly a question of music with Barry. Hey, you don’t want to do the song, I’m gonna go elsewhere with it. It was no mystery to Barry or Bill Medley: we’ll make a Phil Spector record without Phil Spector. That really blew Phil’s mind.”

  If he could not stop the signing, Phil hoped he could at least stop the recording.

  “I came in that morning and he has me calling anyone in the country who could possibly stop that session, the musicians union, everybody,” Danny Davis said. “The session was at noon and I’m tryin’ at four o’clock to stop it. By then it’s obvious we don’t have a prayer, so now Phil is absolutely . . . I mean he’s out of his mind, berserk.”

  Saying nothing, his eyeballs glassy, Phil locked up for the day. He walked around the office blankly, turning off every light. Then he pulled a chair to an open window high over Sunset Boulevard.

  “I was freakin’ out because Dr. Kaplan had already told me that Phil was suicidal and capable of taking his life,” Davis went on. “There was no question in my mind he was gonna jump.”

  His fingers frantically dialing, Danny placed a long-distance call to Dr. Harold Kaplan.

  “I explained to him what had happened, that we’d lost the Righteous Brothers, and I said, ‘Can you talk with him?’ He said, ‘No, he’s got that kind of thing that if I talk to him, he’ll reject what I say. If he calls me on his own, I may be able to help him.’ He told me to stay with Phil, not to let him be alone, and I took him home and stayed with him the whole weekend.

  “Finally, like about Sunday, I said to him, ‘You know, Philly, this is not right. You should really call Dr. Kaplan,’ and he rejected it at the outset but we had some breakfast and then he went into another room and called Kaplan and I guess the crisis passed.”

  Eventually, when MGM realized that the impetuous signing of the Righteous Brothers was legally indefensible, Phil got a $600,000 settlement from the company. It was a comforting, but empty, victory. The whole nasty business knocked the wind out of him. Losing his appetite to risk failure with the Modern Folk Quartet, he turned his back on the group, never releasing a single record by them; forsaken, the quartet disbanded and it was ten years before they reunited.

  Medley and Hatfield suffered as well, though. “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration”—a dead-on copy of the Wall of Sound that many thought was a Spector record—was a juggernaut itself, a No. 1 hit for three weeks in May of 1966 and a gold record. But it was the Righteous Brothers’ denouement. Without Spector, they soon receded back into the background of the new rock and roll; they charted only once more for MGM, and by 1968 they were working as a casino act before they broke up. Medley had a modest solo career, and Hatfield recorded with a different partner under the Righteous Brothers name and performed in cocktail lounges.

  Phil would take his vindication in their failure. To Rolling Stone he poured sanctity on the adage—advanced by him—that an act does not kiss off Phil Spector and stay anywhere near his level. “I mean it was really dumb,” Spector said in 1969. “It doesn’t matter leaving me; fuck that, that don’t mean nothin. The dumb thing was to leave and suck MGM into that stupid deal, and then die as an act!” Although Phil had made it easy for them to believe they were Philles Records, he insisted: “The Righteous Brothers were not Phil Spector [but] something happens to people’s minds, and they start thinkin’ maybe you are the cause of everybody’s financial success. . . . I think the Righteous Brothers would admit it today . . . that they were wrong. The very fact that they settled meant that they did not want to go to court. I think Bill Medley, in an honest moment, which he has said since, would say, ‘We really shouldn’t have left Phil, and also we had no right to.’ . . . I even ran into Bobby Hatfield one night about a year ago, and he had every reason to be apologetic, you know, he’s really a strugglin’ cat now.

  “It’s a shame, I really feel funny. I didn’t get hur
t, I really came out smellin’ like a rose . . . but I was very upset that they blew their talent. I was selling more records in the colored market than I was in the white market, and yet they had a tremendous fan club of white teenie boppers. I mean they had it made. They could have been around for three or four more years solid with big records. [But] they only had three or four hits and then good-bye. They weren’t around long enough to sustain with junk . . . because they themselves were not extraordinary talents. They were just commercial talents.

  “They blew it because they tried, I think, to copy and emulate and use whatever it was that I did, and they did not know how—not that they should have known how, but they shouldn’t have even tried.”

  In his gloating, Phil did not see the irony in his dig at the Righteous Brothers as “a strange group in that they really were non-intellectual and unable to comprehend success. They couldn’t understand it and couldn’t live with it, and accept it for what it really was—they thought it was something that could be obtained very easily, and once it was attained, be consistently obtained.”*

  For in early 1966, it was precisely that assumption that had brought him to the edge of giving up. Left with no bankable act, thrown off-rail and consumed by months of legal warfare, Phil lay in ennui for the first two months of 1966. Then he decided he had to draw at least one more big breath.

  *From the Rolling Stone interview, Jann Wenner (November 1, 1969):26.

  It was like my farewell. I was just sayin’ good-bye, and I just wanted to go crazy, you know, for a few minutes—four minutes on wax, that’s all it was. I loved it, and I enjoyed making it, but I didn’t really think there was anything for the public.

  —PHIL SPECTOR on “River Deep—Mountain High”

  What he was doing was trying to top “Lovin’ Feelin’.” He had to create something greater than “Lovin’ Feelin’,” which I always felt was the acme. He shouldn’t have had to do that. If he didn’t he could have been making records for years longer. But he had to create the image of Phil Spector going higher and higher, and he ran himself out trying to do it.

  —LARRY LEVINE

  No one who saw Phil around New Year’s 1966 could have believed he had any appetite left to wage war for rock and roll s lost soul. Plainly, Spector was tapping out on music. He had just turned twenty-five, yet daggers of pain and fatigue tore across his forehead and cut down his spine. For five years he was plasma in the veins of popular music, making it jump and twitch. Now he was winded, the angry young man still but with an aging fighter’s legs. With his label emptied—Bobby Sheen went to Capitol, the Blossoms to Screen Gems, the Crystals to United Artists—his music idled and his nights on Sunset were separated by longer retreats inside a cold, dark house that for him was a chrysalis of security.

  “He was getting a lot more reclusive,” Vinnie Poncia said. “I’d come in from New York and stay at the Sunset Marquis, and when I went to Phil’s, he’d be playing his pinball machine and not want to do anything. In New York I could always get him out. In L.A. I was losing him.”

  Part of this was due to Vinnie’s own growth. In early 1965 he and Pete Andreoli wrote and produced a moody surf-rock ballad, “New York’s a Lonely Town.” Vinnie took the song to Phil. “He said, ‘I think it’s a hit—but I don’t want to put it out.’ I was really disappointed. I said, ‘Why?’ and he didn’t answer but I think Phil wouldn’t put it out because if it was a hit, he’d have to come to grips with the fact, well, this guy can make hit records and maybe I’m losing touch. He was much more excited about the stuff I did on Phi-Dan, but none of those records did anything and I realized that the music and his tastes had nothing to do with the public’s acceptance—with those records, he could say what’s the big deal, I didn’t care anyway. That was his cover against losing touch.”

  Vinnie sold the master to Leiber and Stoller at Red Bird Records and under the name of the Tradewinds it became a Top 30 hit. Poncia and Andreoli never wrote another song for Philles. By early 1966 Andreoli was beginning a singing career and Poncia had signed with Artie Ripp to produce records at Kama Sutra. By then Phil and rock were a Grand Canyon apart. Spector and the Righteous Brothers were dual riders into the dusk of rock’s V-necked, spit-shined era. Though Phil took R&B up a mainstream notch with the Righteous Brothers, the rock of social conscience and the adult introspection of the Beatles’ Rubber Soul album was passing by him and others of the era. For this, Phil blamed radio. Openly, he scorned a new generation of deejays and program directors who demanded that he make personal appearances to plug his records—him! Phil Spector! They wanted him to go to them? Were they kidding or what! No, he would not go. And if deejays thought it was cool to speak in the forked tongue of progressive and underground rock, he wanted them to know that he thought they were stupid and knew nothing about music. In the learned opinion of Phil Spector, radio could go fuck itself.

  “He started turning off everybody in the radio end,” Poncia remembered. “And they picked up on that and turned off to him. They felt the attitude of people like Phil Spector was: I’m gonna tell you what to play. And their response was: You’re not the magic man anymore. We have this new thing, guys with long hair and stuff like that, and you can’t take us for granted.”

  “He was a recluse before that, but Phil was that kind of an ego who wanted to be presented to everybody,” Danny Davis said. “I didn’t have a lot of trouble getting him to do things with jocks. But then he really got pissed off at them. He didn’t think they held him in high regard anymore.”

  “The thing was, they thought he was, maybe he was losing it, starting to slide,” Poncia said. “And yet, even so, even with all his arrogance, I don’t think they could publicly dislike him until he failed.”

  For now, Spector merely bobbed in these unfriendly waters, almost as if he were waiting for the tide to wash him out. To some of those who knew him, he already had.

  “Even before sixty-six, Phil felt that it was starting to come to a close,” Jack Nitzsche related. “I remember we were in the studio with the Ronettes cutting ‘Born to Be Together,’ and during the playback Phil stood next to me and said, ‘It’s all over. It’s over. It’s just not there anymore.’ The enthusiasm was gone. We had done it so many times. And now the musicians were changing, they didn’t want to work overtime for him. It just wasn’t the same spirit, the spirit of cooperation started to change.”

  “It really was over for Phil by sixty-five, really,” Sonny Bono insisted. “Music left him in sixty-five. He was out of it then.”

  There were times when the once-impregnable Spector ego sounded like parody. Annette, who after the divorce would hear from Phil at times when he needed comfort, received phone calls all the time now in which Phil’s self-doubt brought them both down. Routinely Phil would ask her, “Am I as big as Dylan?” “Yes, Phil. You sure are,” she would assure him. “Am I as big as the Beatles?” “You sure are! There’s always been the Beatles and Dylan and Phil Spector!”

  “It would be like a pep talk,” Annette recalled. “But after a while, I don’t think he believed it.”

  But if this was a broken man, sometime during those first weeks of 1966 he clambered from the sludge. He decided to record again, and with no halfway impact. He would either go all the way up or all the way down, but he would go with his own way, against the prevailing winds of rock. For many months Phil had thought about recording Ike and Tina Turner—actually just Tina, whose powerful, stinging voice cut through him like a drill. But while he put the act on The Big TNT Show, he could not find a rock context for her hardcore R&B sound. The Ike and Tina Revue was essentially an inner-city nightclub act. Much like James Brown’s revue, its idiom was gritty, gospel-style funk, jumping and shouting in spasms of rhythm. Ike Turner, however, understood rock and roll. Born in Mississippi, Turner produced “Rocket 88,” an important No. 1 R&B hit in 1951 for Sam Phillips’s Sun label. Through the fifties he was a top studio guitarist and produced sessions with Johnny Ace, B. B. King, Howlin’ Wo
lf, and other soul giants, selling his records to Chess and Modern/RPM Records. In 1956 Ike’s band, the Kings of Rhythm, was playing at a club in St. Louis when an eighteen-year-old girl jumped from the audience, grabbed a microphone, and began vamping with the Kings. Named Annie Mae Bullock, she had an electric glow. Ike soon hired her to front the band—high honor indeed for a woman then—and in 1958 he married her. In the early sixties he changed her name to Tina and put together a revue around her with nine musicians and three background singers called the Ikettes. Clad in hip-hugging short skirts, long wigs, and high heels, Tina and the Ikettes sang and did intricate dance routines, never pausing for a breath. At the TNT Show, they made the mainly white crowd hysterical with their volcanic renditions of the soul classics “Think It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” and James Brown’s “Please, Please, Please.”

  That performance told Phil Tina might have strong cross-over appeal, but it would be a risk. The Turners’ sixties’ records had dotted the R&B chart but Ike had only scattered pop hits. At first this scared Phil, as did Ike’s baleful image. Long and lean as a two-by-four, with glaring eyes and a drawn face that fought every smile, Ike was a mercurial man who fired Ikettes on a whim and took out his inner rage on Tina with his fists; because he drank, used cocaine, and carried a gun, he was genuinely threatening to be around. But in summoning up a last big push, Phil became convinced that Tina’s voice was the only soul venue left with which he could make his ultimate music statement. This would not be with drippy folk rock or a four-man band of long-haired, whining adenoidals. It would be with the music he loved—R&B, with the shameless excess of Wall of Sound, damn it. No pair of ears would fail to know that, and in the end he hoped it would blow away all the new proponents of rock. And if it didn’t, well, he was going to go out his way. No compromise, no equivocation.