The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

by Tom Wolfe

  “I get a little angry when people say it’s bad music,” Spector tells the man with the brown hat. “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.”

  And Susskind sits there on his show reading one of Spector’s songs out loud, no music, just reading the words, from the Top Sixty or whatever it is, “Fine Fine Boy,” to show how banal rock and roll is. The song just keeps repeating “He’s a fine fine boy.” So Spector starts drumming on the big coffee table there with the flat of his hands in time to Susskind’s voice and says, “What you’re missing is the beat.” Blam blam.

  Everybody is getting a little sore with Susskind reading these simple lyrics and Spector blamming away on the coffee table. Finally, Spector says the hell with it and, being more … hip … than Susskind or William B. Williams, starts cutting them up. He starts asking Williams how many times he plays Verdi on his show—Monteverdi?—D. Scarlatti?—A. Scarlatti?—that’s good music, why don’t you play that, you keep saying you play only good music, I don’t hear you playing that. Williams doesn’t know what to say. Spector tells Susskind he didn’t come on the show to listen to somebody tell him he was corrupting the Youth of America—he could be home making money. Susskind—well, ah, all right, Phil. Everybody is testy.

  Making money. Yes! At the age of seventeen Spector wrote a rock and roll song called “To Know Him Is To Love Him.” He took the title off his father’s tombstone. That was what his mother had had engraved on his father’s tombstone out in Beth David cemetery in Elmont, L.I. He doesn’t say much about his father, just that he was “average lower middle class.” Spector wrote the song, sang it and played the guitar in the recording with a group called the Teddy Bears. He made $20,000 on that record, but somebody ran off with $17,000 of it, and, well, no use going into that. Then he was going to UCLA, but he couldn’t afford it and became a court reporter, one of the people who sit at the shorthand machine, taking down testimony. He decided to come to New York and get a job as an interpreter at the UN. His mother had taught him French. But he got to New York, and the night before the interview, he fell in with some musicians and never got there. The hell with stenography. He wrote another hit that year, “Spanish Harlem.” There is a rose in Spanish Ha-a-a-a-a-ar-a-lem. And then—only nineteen—he became head of A & R, artists and repertoire, for Atlantic Records. By 1961 he was a free-lance producer, producing records for the companies, working with Connie Francis, Elvis Presley, Ray Peterson, the Paris Sisters. All this time, Spector would write a song and run all phases of making records: get the artists, direct the recording sessions, everything. Spector could work with these hairy goslin kids who make these records because he was a kid himself, in one sense. God knows what the music business biggies thought of Phil Spector—he already wore his hair like Salvador Dalí did at that age or like an old mezzotint of Mozart at the Academy or something. And he was somehow one of them, the natives, the kids who sang and responded to this … music. Phil Spector could get in one of those studios with the heron microphones, a representative of the adult world that makes money from records, and it became all one thing—the kids comprehended him.

  Spector had an ideal, Archie Bleyer. Bleyer was a band leader who founded a record company, Cadence Records. Spector formed a partnership with two other people in 1961, then bought them out and went on his own as Philles Records in October of 1962. His first big hit was “He’s a Rebel,” by the Crystals. Spector had a system. The big record companies put out records like buckshot, 10, maybe 15 rock and roll records a month, and if one of them catches on, they can make money. Spector’s system is to put them out one at a time and pour everything into each one. Spector does the whole thing. He writes the words and the music, scouts and signs up the talent. He takes them out to a recording studio in Los Angeles and runs the recording session himself. He puts them through hours and days of recording to get the two or three minutes he wants. Two or three minutes out of the whole struggle. He handles the control dials like an electronic maestro, tuning various instruments or sounds up, down, out, every which way, using things like two pianos, a harpsichord and three guitars on one record; then re-recording the whole thing with esoteric dubbing and over-dubbing effects—reinforcing instruments or voices—coming out with what is known throughout the industry as “the Spector sound.”

  The only thing he doesn’t keep control of is the actual manufacture, the pressing, of the records and the distribution. The only people around to give him any trouble all this time are the distributors—cigar-chewing fatties … and—well, to be honest, there is a lot that gives Phil Spector trouble, and not so much any kind of or any group of people as much as his … status. A Teen-age Tycoon! It is too wacked out. He is betwixt and between. He identifies with the teen-age netherworld, he defends it, but he is already too mature for it. As a millionaire, a business genius, living in a penthouse 22 stories up over the East River, with his wife, Annette, who is twenty, a student at Hunter College, and with a four-room suite downstairs on the ground floor as his office, and a limousine, and a chauffeur, and a bodyguard, and a staff, Danny and Joah Berg and everybody, and a doorman who directs people to Mr. Spector’s office—well, that makes Phil Spector one of them, the universe of arteriosclerotic, hypocritical, cigar-chewing, hopeless, larded adults, infarcted vultures, one meets in the music business. And so here in the dark is a twenty-three-year-old man with a Shelley visage, a suede shirt, a kind of pageboy bob and winkle-picker boots, the symbol of the one, sitting in the dark in this great beige office, the symbol of the other, in the middle of the day, in the dark, tamping his frontal lobes with his fingers in the gloom.

  One of the beige phones rings and Danny answers. Then he presses the “hold” button and tells Phil Spector, “It’s the Rolling Stones, they just got in.”

  Spector comes alive with that. He gets up on his ginger toes and goes to the telephone. He is lively and he spins on the balls of his feet a little as he stands by the phone.

  “Hello, Andrew,” he says. He is talking with Andrew Oldham, the manager of the Rolling Stones. And then he puts on a Cockney accent. “Are you all in?” he says.

  The Rolling Stones; all right. The Rolling Stones, English group, and Andrew Oldham, are like him. They grew up in the teen-age netherworld and made it, and they all want to have it all, too, the kids’ style of life and the adult’s … money … and not cop out on one side or the other, larded and arteriosclerotic. God! Phil Spector’s British trip! That was where suddenly he had it all.

  Phil Spector is here! The British have the ability to look at all sorts of rebel baddies and alienated thin young fellows and say coo and absorb them like a great soggy lukewarm, mother’s poultice. The Beatles, Beatlemania, rock and roll, suddenly it is all absorbed into the center of things as if it could have been there all along if it only asked. Phil Spector arrives at London Airport and, Santa Barranza, there are photographers all over the place, for him, Phil Spector, and the next morning he is all over the center fold of the London Daily Mirror, the biggest newspaper in the Western World, five million circulation: “The 23-year-old American rock and roll magnate.” He is in the magazines as the “U.S. Recording Tycoon.” Invitations go out to come to the receptions to meet “America’s outstanding hit maker, Phil Spector.” And then he lands back at Idlewild and waiting are, yes, the same bunch of cheese-breath cabbies, and he takes a cab on back to 440 E. 62nd St. and goes into his beige world, the phones are ringing and it is all the same, the same—

  “Cigar-smoking sharpies,” sa
ys Phil Spector. He is in a livelier mood after the talk with Andrew Oldham. “They’re a bunch of cigar-smoking sharpies in record distribution. They’ve all been in the business for years and they resent you if you’re young. That’s one reason so many kids go broke in this business. They’re always starting new record companies, or they used to, the business is very soft right now, they start a company and pour all their money into a record, and it can be successful and they’re still broke, because these characters don’t even pay you until you’ve had three or four hit records in a row. They order the records and sell them and don’t pay you. They don’t pay you because they know they don’t have to. You start yelling for the money and they tell you, ‘Whattya mean, I have all these records coming back from the retailers and what about my right to return records, and blah-blah.’ What are you going to do? Sue twenty guys in twenty different courts in the United States?

  “They look at everything as a product. They don’t care about the work and sweat you put into a record. They respect me now because I keep turning out hits, and after that they become sort of honest … in their own decayed way.”

  Where does a man find friends, comrades, anything, in a world like that? They resent his youth. They resent his success. But it is no better with the kids. He is so much more mature and more … eminent … they all want to form “the father thing” with him. Or else they want to fawn over him, cousin him, cajole, fall down before him, whistle, shout, stomp, bang him on the head, anything to get his attention and get “the break,” just one chance. Or one more chance. Spector can’t go near the Brill Building, the center of the music business, because the place is crawling with kids with winkle-picker shoes cracking in the folds, who made one hit record five years ago and still can’t realize that they are now, forever, in oblivion. They crawl all over the place the way the small-time balding fatty promoters and managers used to in the days when A. J. Liebling wrote about the place as the Jollity Building. Phil Spector steps onto an elevator in the Brill Building, the elevator is packed, and suddenly he feels this arm hooking through his in the most hideously cozy way and a mouth is closing in on his ear and saying, “Phil, baby, wait’ll you hear this one: ‘Ooh-oom-bah-ay,’ ” and Phil Spector is imprisoned there with the elevator inching up, “vah ump nooby poon fang ooh-ooh ayub bah-ay—you dig that, Phil? You dig that, don’t you, Phil? Phil, babes!” He walks down the hall and kids sneak up behind him and slip songs, music, lyrics into his coat pocket. He finds the stuff in there, all this ratty paper, when he gets home. Or he is leaving the Brill Building and he feels a great whack on the back of his head and wheels around and there are four kids in the singing stance, their heads angled in together, saying, “Just one bar, Phil—Say wohna love boo-uh ayyay bubby—” while the guy on the end sings bass with his chin mashed into a pulpy squash down over his collar bone, beh-ungggh, beh-ungggh.

  STATUS! WHAT IS his status? He produces “rock and roll,” and, therefore, he is not a serious person, and he won’t join the Young Presidents or whatever the hell kind of organization jaycee geniuses would join for their own good.

  “Phil,” says the man with the hat, “why don’t you hire a press agent, a P.R. man—”

  Phil is tamping his frontal lobes in the gloom. Danny Davis is hunched up in the little pool of light on his desk. Danny is doing his level best for Phil.

  “Jack? Danny Davis … Yeah … No, I’m with Phil Spector now … Right! It’s the best move I ever made. You know Phil … I’m in the best shape of my career … Jack, I just want to tell you we’ve got—”

  “A press agent?” Phil says to the man in the hat. “In the first place, I couldn’t stand to hear what he’d say about me.”

  “——Got two tremendous records going, Jack, ‘Walking in the Rain,’ the Ronettes, and—”

  “In the second place,” Phil says, “there’s no way my image can be bought.”

  “——And ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ ” by the Righteous Brothers,” says Danny. “…Right, Jack … I appreciate that, Jack …”

  “The only thing I could do—you know what I’d like to do? I’d like to do a recording session in the office of Life or Esquire or Time, and then they could see it. That’s the only chance I’ve got. Because I’m dealing in rock and roll, I’m, like I’m not a bona-fide human being—”

  “… Absolutely! … If there’s anything we can do for you on this end, Jack, let us know. O.K.? Great, Jack ….”

  “… and I even have trouble with people who should never say anything. I go over to Gristede’s to get a quart of milk or something and the woman at the cash register has to start in. So I tell her, ‘There’s a war in Viet Nam, they’ve fired Khrushchev, the Republican party is falling to pieces, the Ku Klux Klan is running around loose, and you’re worrying about my hair …’ ”

  America’s first teen-age tycoon, a business genius, a musical genius—and it is as if he were still on the corner on Hoffman Street in the Bronx when the big kids come by in hideous fraternity, the way these people act. What is he now? Who is he in this weird country? Danny talks in the phone in the little pool of light, Joan is typing up whatever it is, Phil is tamping his frontal lobes.

  ANOTHER AIRPLANE! IT levels off, and the man in the seat by the window, next to Phil Spector, lights a cigarette, pure as virgin snow. Phil Spector sits there with his kind of page-boy bob pressed down in back and a checked shirt and tight black pants. The man with the cigarette keeps working himself up to something. Finally, he says, “If you don’t mind me asking—have I seen you on television or something? What’s your name, I mean, if you don’t mind me asking?” Phil Spector presses back into the seat but his head won’t disappear. Then he says, “I’m Goddard Lieberson.”

  “Gottfried Lieberman?”

  Marvelous! Reassuring! Nobody ever heard of Goddard Lieberson, either. Who the hell is Goddard Lieberson! He is the president of Columbia Records, all those nice straight cookie jar “tunes” William B. Williams would go for, very big—and who the hell knows who he is?

  “I’m the president of Columbia Records.”

  The man sucks on his cigarette a moment. A skinny ash, all limp, hangs out.

  “Well—you must be kind of young.”

  Phil Spector lies back. Then he says,

  “I was only kidding. I’m Chubby Checker. That’s who I really am.”

  “Chubby Checker?”

  Who the hell is Chubby Checker? Yes! Who the hell has anybody ever heard of? It’s like the last time when he said he was Paul Desmond. Who the hell is Paul Desmond? Or Peter Sellers’ cousin. Or Monsieur Fouquet, of the de Gaulle underground. Or … who the hell is anybody? Phil Spector tamps his frontal lobes and closes his eyes and holds his breath. As long as he holds his breath, it will not rain, there will be no raindrops, no schizoid water wobbling, sideways, straight back, it will be an even, even, even, even, even, even, even world.

  Chapter 6

  The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

  THE FIRST GOOD look I had at customized cars was at an event called a “Teen Fair,” held in Burbank, a suburb of Los Angeles beyond Hollywood. This was a wild place to be taking a look at art objects—eventually, I should say, you have to reach the conclusion that these customized cars are art objects, at least if you use the standards applied in a civilized society. But I will get to that in a moment. Anyway, about noon you drive up to a place that looks like an outdoor amusement park, and there are three serious-looking kids, like the cafeteria committee in high school, taking tickets, but the scene inside is quite mad. Inside, two things hit you. The first is a huge platform a good seven feet off the ground with a hully-gully band—everything is electrified, the bass, the guitars, the saxophones—and then behind the band, on the platform, about two hundred kids are doing frantic dances called the hully-gully, the bird, and the shampoo. As I said, it’s noontime. The dances the kids are doing are very jerky. The boys and girls don’t touch, not even with their hands. They just ricoch
et around. Then you notice that all the girls are dressed exactly alike. They have bouffant hairdos—all of them—and slacks that are, well, skin-tight does not get the idea across; it’s more the conformation than how tight the slacks are. It’s as if some lecherous old tailor with a gluteus-maximus fixation designed them, striation by striation. About the time you’ve managed to focus on this, you notice that out in the middle of the park is a huge, perfectly round swimming pool; really rather enormous. And there is a Chris-Craft cabin cruiser in the pool, going around and around, sending up big waves, with more of these bouffant babies bunched in the back of it. In the water, suspended like plankton, are kids in scuba-diving outfits; others are tooling around underwater, breathing through a snorkel. And all over the place are booths, put up by shoe companies and guitar companies and God knows who else, and there are kids dancing in all of them—dancing the bird, the hully-gully, and the shampoo—with the music of the hully-gully band piped all over the park through loudspeakers.