Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (11 page)

In fact, Spector had grievously overplayed his hand. Contrary to what he had told Terry Phillips, the conflict of interest between Hill and Range and Leiber and Stoller over the offer to write songs for
Blue Hawaii
had not been “taken care of.” When Leiber and Stoller got wind of the deal they were furious. Elvis Presley was one of their best clients: Leiber and Stoller demanded half of the publishing rights from Hill and Range on any songs written by Spector and Phillips. Hill and Range refused, and no songs by Spector and Phillips were ever submitted to Elvis. As if that weren't bad enough, Spector was now rubbing salt into the wound by signing on for Atlantic as well. “[Leiber and Stoller] were angry,” Lester Sill recalled, “because they groomed him, helped him, honed his craft. They took Phil in, they took care of him, and they were gonna make deals with him, and the minute he got hot, he walked.”

But there was little Leiber and Stoller could do—particularly when Spector pointed out that the contract he had signed with them was actually null and void because he had been underage when he signed it.

Shortly after the news of Spector's appointment to Atlantic was published in the trade magazine
Billboard,
Spector and Ertegun both happened to be in Los Angeles.

“Phil was driving this hot Thunderbird, it was souped-up to make a lot of noise, and he had a record player fitted in the front,” Ertegun remembered. “So these music publishers were talking, ‘Oh my God, Ahmet and Phil Spector are going to be producing a lot of hits; we've got to give them songs.' And most of these were older guys. So Phil said, ‘Listen, we'll only listen in our car, because we like to hear how it sounds through car speakers. You want to play the demos, come down and we'll play them in the car.' So we get this poor old guy who's come down with a couple of demos, and we put him in the backseat. And Phil takes off, going through the middle of Hollywood at ninety miles per hour, and the guy's screaming, ‘I don't care if you never record any of my songs! Lemme out of the car!' It was just a big hoot and howl.”

On the same trip, Ertegun took Spector to a meeting with Atlantic's “great white hope” Bobby Darin, at the home in the Hollywood Hills he shared with his starlet wife Sandra Dee. Darin was eager for Ertegun to hear some new songs he'd written. Darin's musical ideas were often brilliant, but not always. He was also extremely temperamental, and Ertegun had learned to indulge him.

“Good,” said Ertegun after Darin had run through the first song. “Good,” he repeated after the second. “Fine,” he commented after the third. “Interesting,” he remarked after the fourth.

“What?!” Spector broke in. “Are you fuckin' crazy or am I? He can't record these songs. These songs are pure shit!”

“Who is this guy?” Darin demanded. “Get him the fuck out of here.”

Ertegun's colleagues at Atlantic apparently thought much the same thing. Jerry Wexler would later come to regard Spector as “a one-off genius” and a close friend, but his first impressions were unfavorable. “Phil had come out of California and he was so brash and full of piss and vinegar with his guitar and his one little hit. You would have a meeting with him and he would just lay it down. He didn't care who he was talking to or how much experience he was up against, it was ‘Now, this is what I think.' He had one mantra in the studio; if I made a suggestion or wanted to pursue an avenue he didn't agree with, his answer would always be ‘Hey, man—I came from California to make hits.'”

Wexler and Spector collaborated on recordings for Billy Storm and, most disastrously, the Top Notes, working on a song called “Twist and Shout,” which borrowed heavily from the Cuban wedding song “La Bamba,” and which had been brought to Atlantic by its writer Bert Berns. The song had all the makings of a hit, and in the studio, Wexler remembers, he and Spector went at it with “unrestrained ferocity” but succeeded only in “butchering” it, while Berns sat watching in pained silence. Wexler was left to reflect that it would have been better to let Berns produce the song himself, which is exactly what he did the following year with the Isley Brothers, turning it into a major hit.

“Phil and I created negative synergy,” Wexler says. “I liked him, but we could not collaborate. But I don't think Phil's a collaborator.”

Nor did Spector's idiosyncrasies endear him to others on the Atlantic staff. He would infuriate Miriam Abramson, the label's office manager, by booking rehearsal time, and then turning up late, or not at all. “We'd have artists sitting there in the office, waiting for him. He wouldn't call, and they'd sit there an hour or two and leave, then come back the next day, and finally he'd show up. He was really very autocratic for somebody who was just starting out. You'd think, who does he think
he
is. Phil took advantage of people, because to some extent he was lazy. He knew that Ahmet liked him, that Jerry Wexler would support him. He was absolutely always convinced about his own creativity and talents. He never doubted himself, ever.”

The records that Spector produced in the few months he was associated with Atlantic, while all competent productions in the standard RB mold of the day, hardly bore out his conviction in his own genius, nor did they trouble the charts. But Ertegun did not seem overly bothered by that. He just enjoyed having Spector around. “Jerry in particular got frustrated with Phil. He was waiting for him to deliver as a producer, which never really happened at Atlantic. But Phil understood what people loved. He could play it and sing it and do it, boom boom. I knew it was going to come. In the meantime, he and I were going out to clubs and this and that and having a terrific time.”

         

In March, Michael Spencer left Los Angeles for New York, determined to follow a career in music. In the wake of the debacle over
Blue Hawaii,
Spector's friendship with Terry Phillips had cooled, and when he moved out of Spector's apartment, Spencer moved in. Spector was moving faster than any job description could contain, combining his role at Atlantic with other freelance producing jobs. One of Spencer's first jobs in New York was contracting the musicians and playing piano on another Spector production—“Pretty Little Angel Eyes,” sung by a discovery of Ray Peterson's named Curtis Lee. “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” was a mediocre song redeemed only by Spector's use of a black quartet called the Halos providing an infectious doo-wop backing. Like the majority of his recordings at the time, it was a proficient record but hardly a memorable one, and could have been the work of any one of a dozen producers working around Broadway. But for Spector these records were an important step in learning to “play” the studio like an instrument, experimenting with the placement of microphones and the use of echo, learning how one studio differed from the next, and the importance of establishing relationships with engineers and arrangers he could trust.

Jimmy Reed, a blues singer much admired by Spector and Spencer, now deeply in his cups, was performing at Carnegie Hall, and they made a pilgrimage to see him. But it was a saddening experience. “We came in a few minutes late,” Spencer remembers. “And Jimmy Reed came out and he faced the rear of the stage and he started singing ‘Got me running…' and someone walked onstage, and as he was singing turned him around to face the audience. At that point Phillip and I left. It was too desperate.”

On another occasion, Spector took Spencer uptown to the Apollo to see Ray Charles. Like Reed, Charles was wrestling with an addiction—in his case, to heroin. “We went backstage, and Ray was walking around with blood dribbling down his arm. And nobody had had the courtesy to clean him up.”

Spector regaled Spencer with stories of his accomplishments, and his new network of friends and allies, treating him to his note-perfect impersonations of Ertegun and Doc Pomus. Spencer noticed how he seemed to be making their mannerisms his own, “as if he was reassembling himself by borrowing this and that. Phil was always looking for the father figure, and Doc played that role to an extent.” Spector joked to Spencer how he would tell everybody that he met that he was a genius, “and they all agree with me.” Spencer fancied that he could see his friend's burgeoning success “feeding into his ego, and all the forces that were inside of him could manifest because now he had power.” But he could also discern more unsettling currents below the cocksure, braggadocio veneer.

Spector had begun to see a Park Avenue psychoanalyst, Dr. Harold Kaplan, on a regular basis. In later years, he would explain that this was a ruse to “avoid the [military] draft.” He had a deep anxiety about being drafted, even though he had reached draft-eligible age at a time when the United States was not at war. He told Spencer (who had received his Selective Service card) that he had learned of a scam whereby you could buy your way out for $3,000, although it seemed he never took that option. But while avoiding the draft was a happy consequence of the visits to Dr. Kaplan, it was not the only reason. Spector was plagued by unspecified anxieties and inexplicable feelings of unease. He fretted about his appearance, the impression he made on others and what they might really think of him.

Spencer sensed that he was “emotionally disturbed. Not mentally. Mentally is the processing of data, the processing of factual stuff—reality. It wasn't that. Phil didn't have cognitive problems; he was shrewd and sharp. He could think through things; he was very observant, very astute. It was more the emotional area. There were contradictions. It was as if Phil was wired differently, and not all the circuits came into play in the early stages, but as his environment changed these wirings manifested.”

Living at close quarters with Spector, Spencer began to notice the personal idiosyncrasies that had not been apparent when they were together in Los Angeles. Sometimes Spector would return from a nearby grocery store and pull out cans of tuna or beans which he had hidden in his pockets, “things he could easily afford to pay for. I don't know why.” If Spector was going on a date he would ask Spencer to buy his contraceptives because he was too shy to buy them himself. The smallest thing could rattle him. Spencer had the knack of shaving in a matter of seconds, a few quick strokes with the razor and a rinse. Spector would watch aghast, “terrified” that Spencer would slash his own throat. Spector would spend an age in front of the mirror, carefully scratching away his stubble, endlessly experimenting with new creams and unctions to find the perfect preparation, before finally dousing himself in copious quantities of cologne.

Spector, his friend noticed, was constantly “buggy,” constantly on edge. He was uncomfortable in unfamiliar situations, as if he felt physically threatened. Yet at the same time he would provoke confrontations, as if to confirm that his fears were justified, snapping at strangers who stared a moment too long at his hair or his clothes. “There was a chip on his shoulder. It was the chip that would appear sometimes when we played those frat parties. It wouldn't take much to throw Phil over the top.”

On one occasion Spencer took Spector on a nocturnal ramble around Forty-second Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, at that time a notoriously seedy area lined with peep shows, third-run cinemas and twenty-four-hour automats, frequented by hustlers, junkies and prostitutes. Spencer liked to catch a movie and then sit in Hector's Cafeteria watching the carnival of humanity parade by. But Spector, he says, was “terrified. Phil came from a conservative background and I would say he was basically conservative.”

In the apartment they shared Spencer noticed that Spector would stare out of the window or sometimes vanish onto the fire escape. “I never paid it much mind. Then one night I said, ‘What's out there?' And he was looking in the window of an adjacent apartment and there were two lesbians in there. And he was just fascinated to watch them. After that, in the park, if he saw two lesbians walking together, or perhaps holding hands, he would just stand and stare. Phillip could get obsessed with things. It was part of his personality.”

For a while, his obsession was learning French. “I think Dr. Kaplan told Phil that if he could master something it would help him get a handle on himself,” Spencer says. A French tutor would visit the apartment several times a week, and Spector started to use the word “bourgeois” at any and every opportunity. But he quickly tired of the new enthusiasm, and the lessons soon stopped.

         

Lester Sill was in search of another hit for the Paris Sisters, and as May turned to June he called Spector back to Los Angeles. For his first single with the group, Spector had been able to fall back on one of his own songs, “Be My Boy.” But he realized he needed something stronger to follow it. Over the years, one of his principal maxims as a producer would be that “it's all about the right song.” A good song could transcend a mediocre performance or a lackluster production and endure forever. But no amount of studio sweat or polish could turn a lackluster song to gold.

Spector revered the great tunesmiths of the '30s and '40s—George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Irving Berlin—had an encyclopedic knowledge of their songs and could sing many by heart. Berlin was a particular favorite, and the felicitous irony of a fellow Jew writing the best-selling Christmas song of all time, “White Christmas,” would be a major inspiration behind Spector later recording his own Christmas album.

More than anything, Spector would have loved to be a great songwriter himself, but he had a realistic view of his own limitations. “To Know Him Is to Love Him” had appeared fully formed, almost in the shape of a gift from his father. But he would struggle ever to write a song as memorable again. He had a limited palette for writing melodies—they were sweet but never quite strong enough, and as a lyricist he could never transcend the platitude. Spector knew that if he were to progress as a force in music he needed a reliable source of strong material. And in New York there was no source more reliable than Don Kirshner at Aldon Music—the man whom
Time
magazine would dub “The Man with the Golden Ear.”