Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (44 page)

In June 1977 recording began at the Whitney Studios in Glendale. Larry Levine was now back in the fold, engineering the sessions. The studio had a pipe organ that Spector wanted to use on a couple of songs, but on the playbacks Spector had the volume so loud that he blew out the studio's speakers. The recording moved to Gold Star.

After eighteen months, Spector's sporadic love affair with Devra Robitaille had finally come to an end in an abrupt fashion, but she continued to work as his personal assistant. “There was never a discussion. We just were lovers, and then we weren't. But I think he still trusted me, still relied on me, and we still had a rapport. And I was still very loyal, always did what I was supposed to do with his best interests at heart.”

But the Cohen sessions were trying even Devra's patience and loyalty. Going into the studio with Spector was “like a crapshoot. He could be in a great mood, or he could be a raving lunatic. He could go and make magic, or he'd be throwing things around and it would just be this debacle. A lot of it was the drinking. Someone would say something, or he'd just get in a mood and stalk off. Everybody would be hanging around, and then tempers would start to build, and I'd be the pivot point; people would be coming up saying, ‘What's going on with Phil? Jesus Christ, when are we going to get out of here, when are we going to get a take?' And Phil would be joking around, getting drunk, walking up and down in the hall, disappearing into the bathroom for hours at a time, fixing his hair. Just prevarication. And it's five o'clock in the morning and everyone's exhausted and our prospective wives and husbands are furious with us, and he hasn't gotten a take yet. And you'd just want to shake him. ‘Get on with it!' There were a couple of times when he'd pass out drunk, and Larry and I would have to haul him back into his chair and revive him. And sometimes he'd somehow rally and that would be the brilliant take, the moment of genius.”

The boozy camaraderie between Spector and Cohen had quickly degenerated into fractious arguments—about song tempos, structures, arrangements, everything. “They didn't see eye-to-eye at all,” Devra says, “and there were a lot of creative differences. It was always very tense, very uncomfortable.”

Effectively relegated to the role of sideman, Cohen was doing his best to keep an even temper in the midst of the growing chaos. “Phil was pretty wacky on those sessions—animated,” David Kessel remembers. “But what I dug about that was that you had Phil with all of his stuff going on, and then Leonard being like Dean Martin—just cool. It gave Leonard a chance to perfect his Shaolin priesthood stuff and become one with the universe.”

Cohen recognized what Spector himself, and few around him, were prepared to acknowledge or admit—that Spector was not simply
eccentric
but seriously disturbed. “In the state that he found himself, which was post-Wagnerian, I would say Hitlerian, the atmosphere was one of guns,” Cohen would later reflect. “I mean, that's what was really going on, guns. The music was subsidiary, an enterprise. People were armed to the teeth, [and] everybody was drunk, or intoxicated on other items, so you were slipping over bullets, and you were biting into revolvers in your hamburger. There were guns everywhere.”

Cohen would later recall how on one occasion in the studio Spector approached him with a bottle of Manischewitz in one hand and a pistol in the other, placed his arm around Cohen's shoulder, shoved the gun in his neck and said, “Leonard, I love you.” Cohen, with admirable aplomb, simply moved the barrel away, saying, “I hope you do, Phil.”

On another evening Spector pulled a gun on the violin player Bobby Bruce and held it to his head, after Bruce had made some remarks to which Spector took exception. Larry Levine quickly stepped in to quiet things down. “Phil wasn't angry at Bobby; he was just showing off. But Bobby's gotta be scared shitless. And I said, ‘Phil, I know you don't mean anything, but accidents happen. Put it down.' And he wasn't willing to do that. It was like ‘Hey, I can handle my life.' So finally I said, ‘I'm turning off the equipment and going home unless you put that down right now.' And that's when he finally realized I was serious and put the gun away. I loved Phil, and when you love somebody, you do what you can do to bring it back to the rational. I'd seen him both ways, so I knew that wasn't the real Phil.”

The sessions finally ground to a conclusion in a bitter mood, with Spector refusing to allow Cohen to be present for the mixes, or to hear the finished album. Cohen would later claim Spector did not even properly complete his vocals, instead using ‘guide vocals' which Cohen had intended to redo later.

Spector was equivocal about the result, scribbling a note to Larry Levine on the master tapes: “I'll tell you something, Larry—we've done worse with better, and better with worse!” For Devra Robitaille, the album was to prove the last straw. Spector would thank her on the album's liner notes for her “grave concern in the face of overwhelming odds.” But her sympathies had been exhausted. “I came to the conclusion that I had no business putting myself in a position where I was behaving like a groupie. I disrespected myself. I was an accomplished musician; I was bright and able, and I let myself get trashed.” She resigned from her job, and went back to working for Warner Bros.

On its release in 1978, the critics savaged
Death of a Ladies' Man.
Spector was accused of assassinating Cohen's poetic sensitivity with grotesquely inappropriate arrangements and an overwrought production. But the critics were wrong. Out of the fog of alcohol and recrimination, Spector had somehow fashioned a series of almost vaudevillian settings that were perfectly pitched to Cohen's unsparing depiction of himself as a weary boulevardier, desperately seeking spiritual consolation in the pleasures of the flesh, in the face of advancing years and diminishing opportunities. A melancholy waltz for “True Love Leaves No Traces” bump-and-grind burlesque for “Iodine.” “Paper Thin Hotel,” a minor-key, bittersweet rumination on infidelity, was dressed with choirs, pedal steel guitars and pianos, with a melody that recalled the work of Jimmy Webb at his most wistfully romantic. In this context even the hokey country hoedown arrangement of “Fingerprints” made a bizarre kind of sense.

Death of a Ladies' Man
may not have been Phil Spector's greatest production, but it was certainly the oddest, and in many ways the most compelling.

Cohen attempted to distance himself from the record, describing it to
Rolling Stone
as “an experiment that failed,” while acknowledging it had “real energizing capacities.” In the final moment, he said, Spector “couldn't resist annihilating me. I don't think he can tolerate any other shadows in his own darkness. I say these things not to hurt him. Incidentally, beyond all this, I liked him. Just man to man he's delightful, and with children he's very kind.”

The album would be the worst-selling of Cohen's career. Spector laconically told a friend that he had “got hate mail from all eight of Leonard's fans” and would never miss an opportunity thereafter to make a joke at the poet's expense. In 1993 he was approached by an academic seeking a contribution for a proposed volume of tributes to mark Cohen's sixtieth birthday.

Spector replied by sending a copy of a letter he had recently written to another correspondent, who had seemingly written to Spector seeking his opinion of—of all things—the Partridge Family. While Spector made clear that he regarded the Partridge Family as “an obscene joke,” there was one distinguished artist of his acquaintance, he wrote, who had confessed to being “extremely influenced” by them. “And that artist is Leonard Cohen. Underneath that brooding, moody, depressed soul which Leonard possesses lies an out-and-out Partridge Family freak.” Spector suggested that his correspondent might even wish to contact Cohen to discuss the Partridge Family further.

Signing the letter, “Cordially, Phil Spector,” he helpfully appended Cohen's telephone and fax numbers, just in case his correspondent wanted to get in touch.

22

“Thank You, Folks—Have a Good Life”

L
ife had not been easy for Ronnie Spector in the years since leaving Phil Spector. She continued to receive her alimony payments (“Fuck off”), and four times a year she would fly to California to see Donte under the terms of her visitation rights. Ronnie would check into a hotel where Donte would be delivered to her in the back of Spector's Rolls-Royce, stepping out, Ronnie would recall, “like some midget prince.”

With Nedra and Estelle having retired from the business, Ronnie recruited two other singers to work as the Ronettes, but the project was short-lived, and she had no more luck as a solo artist until an introduction to Steve Van Zandt, the guitarist for Bruce Springsteen, led to her recording a Billy Joel song, “Say Goodbye to Hollywood,” with Springsteen's E Street Band. In the summer of 1977, a promotional tour brought her to Los Angeles, where Harvey Kubernik met her in her hotel on the Sunset Strip. Afterwards he paid a visit to Spector. “I told him I'd just interviewed Ronnie. He said, ‘You interviewed Ronnie Spector. I was married to her. That's the end of this conversation.'”

         

The Dion and Leonard Cohen albums had both been commercial failures—interesting failures, perhaps, but failures nonetheless. Spector had no interest in the music that now dominated the American charts: the solipsistic, Californian singer-songwriter musings of the Eagles and Jackson Browne; the numbing stadium rock of groups like Journey and Kansas; the increasingly bland and mechanical repetitions of disco.

At the age of thirty-eight, Spector might have been expected to feel even more estranged from the rude arrival of punk rock, but the opposite was to prove to be the case.

The Kessel brothers had made an early connection to the Los Angeles punk rock scene that was incubating at a Hollywood club called the Masque, with bands like the Bags, the Weirdos and the Germs. When a New York punk rock group called the Ramones made their Los Angeles debut at the Roxy Club in August 1976, the Kessels were in the audience, and they quickly became friends.

In fact, the Ramones were less a “punk” group than a cartoon of one. They dressed in a uniform of black leather jackets, ripped Levi's and shaggy Beatle-esque haircuts, and each member affected the group's name as a surname. They displayed none of the self-conscious “art” posturing of other New York bands of the period such as Television or Talking Heads, nor the working-class agitprop of British punk groups like the Sex Pistols and the Clash. The Ramones' medium was dumb garage-band pop; a lineage that went back to? and the Mysterians and the Count Five, the Kingsmen and greasy-haired, street-corner doo-wop. Signed to Sire Records, a New York label run by an old acquaintance of Spector's from the Brill Building days named Seymour Stein, the group released their debut album in 1976—a collection of comical three-chord teenage mantras like “Chain Saw” and “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue,” all played at breakneck speed and none lasting longer than two minutes. The album was over almost as soon as it had begun.

When the Ramones performed at the Whisky a Go Go early in 1977, the Kessels took Spector to see them. But it was Blondie, the group they were sharing the bill with—or more specifically the group's Monroe-esque singer Deborah Harry—that caught his eye. After the show, he invited Blondie back to the mansion and expressed an interest in producing them, but nervous of Spector's reputation, they turned down his offer.

Later that same year the Ramones returned once more to Los Angeles, where the Kessels produced two songs with the group at Gold Star for the brothers' own label. At the end of the session, Dan Kessel played the songs over the telephone to Spector, and he invited them up to the house.

The journalist Roy Carr happened to be visiting, still in discussions about the film that was never going to be made, and Spector was at his most expansively entertaining, playing his old records, regaling the assembled company with stories and showing off his firearms. “They were just a bunch of kids from Queens,” Carr remembers. “Dee Dee was particularly dumb. He said something quite innocently which Phil took exception to. And Phil pulled this pistol out and pointed it at him. Dee Dee was shouting, ‘Okay, if you want to shoot me, shoot me. Phil Spector wants to kill me!'”

Spector seemed to “get” the Ramones immediately; their irreverence, their vitality, and the way they connected to an earlier, less self-conscious, era of rock and roll. “Phil just loved their music,” David Kessel says. “It was like, God, you mean there's a rock and roll band around? The simplicity of the chords; the lack of improvisation. He understood that it was back to Buddy Holly. He thought they were the best rock and roll band in America.”

He was particularly taken with the group's lead singer. Tall and gangling, Joey Ramone (born Jeffrey Hyman) was Ichabod Crane in shades and tennis shoes. “Phil and Joey clicked immediately,” David Kessel says. “Joey had his rock and roll history shit together. And they had all that New York street-corner stuff in common. In L.A. you don't care where the street corner is because even if it's half a block away you're still going to get in the car. Phil and Joey talked street corners, they talked doo-wop. The rest of the group were in shock.” As the evening wore on, Spector's enthusiasm for working with the group seemed to grow.

“I remember he asked them how many records they'd sold,” Roy Carr says. “They didn't know shit from Shinola, so Phil disappeared for about ten minutes and came back with this big computer printout and told them their sales figures. Obviously he was tapped into the Warner mainframe. And their sales were going down.”

Spector offered to sign the group on the spot. “He said, ‘I'll give you $150,000 and you can have it tonight. I'll get Marty to come over and sort it out.' And he said, ‘Roy's going to be your manager.' I said, ‘This is news to me, Phil, thank you very much.' Then the group turned to me and said, ‘What shall we do?' I said, ‘Don't ask me.'”

The Ramones turned Spector down. Instead, at Seymour Stein's suggestion, he turned his attention to another Sire act, a power pop duo from Boston called the Paley Brothers—Andy and Jonathan. The brothers had recorded one, eponymous, album for Sire, and had already discussed the possibility of being produced by two of Spector's former associates, Steve Douglas and Jack Nitzsche (whom Andy Paley remembers as being “totally obsessed with Phil”).

Paley was staggered to be awoken at 3:00 a.m. one morning in Boston by a telephone call from Spector himself, asking whether the brothers would be interested in working with him. It took Spector some minutes to convince a disbelieving Paley that he wasn't a friend playing a prank. The brothers were on a plane to Los Angeles three days later. Paley passed the flight reading
Elvis: What Happened?,
a book by three of Presley's former henchmen. Paley's attention was particularly taken by a passage where Presley allegedly ordered one, Red West, to kill his karate instructor Mike Stone, suspecting that Stone had been having an affair with his wife Priscilla: “Mike Stone must die. He must die.”

After checking into their hotel the brothers were ferried up to Spector's house. Sitting in the lounge waiting for Spector to appear, Andy Paley was staggered when a handsome, well-built man walked into the room and introduced himself as…Mike Stone.

Spector spent most of the next month rehearsing the brothers at his home, breaking off for the occasional excursion to clubs and restaurants. He had acquired a beaten-up VW van with darkened windows, which he loved to drive, he told them, “because nobody would realize anybody famous was inside.”

“He'd separate us off,” Andy Paley says. “‘Andrew, you go back to the hotel I need to work with Jonathan.' Then a few hours later Jonathan would come back and say, ‘Phil took me to this movie; he didn't think you'd like it.' And then a few days later he'd say, ‘Andrew, I want you to stay behind'—and he'd take me off to a party, and say, ‘I didn't think your brother would be into this…' I could never really figure that out.”

At length, Spector rounded up some of his old musicians from the Wrecking Crew and took the Paleys into Gold Star. After all the preparation, the sessions lasted less than a week, and produced only a couple of tracks. “We'd get phone calls, Christmas cards,” Paley recalls, “but the record never came out.” Eventually, the Paley Brothers split up, and Andy Paley embarked on a new career as a producer.

         

An unexpected financial windfall arrived in the form of the teenage actor, Shaun Cassidy. The half brother of the pop idol David Cassidy, Shaun was the star of a television program
The Hardy Boys,
and had recently signed with Warner Curb Records, a label owned by an entrepreneur named Mike Curb, who had started in the business hiring out musical instruments. Larry Levine would remember Curb as “a little nebbish,” who was occasionally seen hauling a keyboard into Gold Star for a Spector session. It was a period that Curb evidently remembered with some fondness. Looking for a song for Shaun Cassidy's first single, Curb steered the young singer toward “Da Doo Ron Ron.”

To promote the song, someone at the label came up with the idea of featuring Spector in the video. The scene called for him to be shown seated in the backseat of a limo, pulling away from the sidewalk, pursued by a knot of screaming girls, as Cassidy turns to the camera and asks, “Who was that guy?” It was a reasonable question. “Frankly, I didn't think any of Shaun's fans would have a clue,” remembers Nola Leone, who was managing Cassidy's affairs at the time. “But I thought it was kind of hip. And Shaun thought so, too.”

Spector, apparently happy to participate in any legend-building exercise, agreed to take part.

On the day of the shoot, Cassidy, Leone and the film crew presented themselves at the mansion to collect Spector before proceeding on to the location. Spector emerged holding a goblet filled with wine in his hand—“it looked like a chalice,” Nola remembers—executed a series of theatrical karate kicks, and then invited Cassidy and Leone inside the house to talk. Leone was alarmed when he steered them into the ground-floor powder room and locked the door behind them. For the next hour, he regaled his captive audience with a list of his accomplishments. “The gist of it,” Nola remembers, “was that he was the greatest producer in the world, that he should have produced Shaun's record, and anyone could have had a hit with it because it was such a great song—just on and on and on. Every once in a while I'd say, ‘There's a lot of people waiting—we should probably go.' And he'd just ignore me. He said, ‘You be quiet; you're lucky to even be here.' It wasn't that we were afraid; it was just very strange. And finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he opened the door and we went out.”

Spector was persuaded into his limo, and the party drove to the location. At the end of the shoot, Spector offered Cassidy a ride back to the mansion. What Nola Leone remembers as “a look of panic” registered in the young singer's eyes, and he politely made his excuses and refused. Cassidy's version of “Da Doo Ron Ron” would subsequently go to number 1.

         

People came and went, with vague plans of work, projects that would never come to fruition. Spector's eccentricities had become a thing of legend, and any encounter could be relied upon to provide a suitably vivid anecdote. The '60s English model Twiggy, who had enjoyed an improbable renaissance as a singer with an album called
Please Get My Name Right,
would recall in her autobiography visiting Spector with her husband, the actor Michael Whitney, for discussions about Spector producing her. Unsettled by the guard dogs, the looming presence of George Brand and being made to wait for almost two hours in the darkened mansion before Spector eventually appeared, Twiggy was finally undone when he began brandishing a gun. She fled, never to return. Annette Kleinbard, the voice of “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” had an even more disturbing encounter.

Kleinbard had long since lost contact with Spector. After the breakup of the Teddy Bears, she had changed her name, first to Annette Bard and then to Carol Connors, recording a number of singles before turning to songwriting, enjoying early success with “Hey Little Cobra,” which was a hit for the Rip Chords. In 1977 she co-wrote the theme for the film
Rocky,
“Gonna Fly Now,” which was nominated for an Academy Award. Connors was acquainted with Marty Machat, who suggested that she and Spector might possibly work together. Machat organized a meeting at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Spector had had his altercation in 1975 with a parking valet. Walking out after the meeting, Connors remembers, they passed a woman who took one look at Spector's bristling hairpiece and let out a gasp of amused disbelief.

“She obviously came from Iowa or somewhere and she had never seen anything like it. But Phil just went off the deep end. ‘How dare she?'—ranting and raving. She was with some guy, who walked up to make something of it, and Marty was coming between them, trying to get Phil away from there. And the next thing I knew Phil had a gun in his hand. I don't know if it came from his jacket, his shoe, his belt. I just remember that it was there, and it hadn't been there before. I don't know if Phil was going to fire the gun, but there was just this
anger
there, and then Marty was getting him into the car and away from the hotel. And I remember vowing to myself, ‘I will never be in Phil Spector's company again as long as I live—ever.'”

         

For the past four years, Janis Zavala had been the one constant, stable presence in Spector's life—although to most who knew Spector, she hardly seemed present at all. Self-contained and independent-minded, she continued to work at Screen Gems, with Spector's old partner Lester Sill. She seldom visited the studio when Spector was working and seems to have largely absented herself when visitors came to the La Collina mansion. To some, it seemed as if she was Spector's special secret. One day when Harvey Kubernik was visiting he walked upstairs and happened to bump into Janis on the landing. Kubernik fancied that he had come to know Spector well over the previous two years and had visited the house on several occasions, but he'd never even heard of Janis before, much less met her. Kubernik concluded that Spector deliberately kept her out of sight. “I think Phil was afraid that people would hit on her. It was his idea of being charming.”