He's a Rebel (2 page)

Even more than that, it was a flop. The public rejected the record in 1966, and a record industry hostile to Spector, the outsider, gloried in his defeat. However, Spector lived to see his record become more much than a record. Spector envisioned himself as a rock-and-roll Richard Wagner, and “River Deep—Mountain High” is a rock-and-roll
Der Ring des Nibelungen
, a timeless piece of genius and raw power. When it was released, its competition on the record charts were songs titled “Secret Agent Man,” “Spanish Flea,” “Paperback Writer,” “Hanky Panky,” and “Juanita Banana.” The top three records of 1966 were “I'm a Believer,” “Ballad of the Green Berets,” and “Winchester Cathedral.” To hear all of these songs today is to regress to a different world, and in music to a different universe. In terms of rock art, “Good Vibrations” and “I Am the Walrus” have frayed edges now. Though it was never a hit song, “River Deep—Mountain High” sounds as if it could have been recorded this morning. Probably it always will sound as if it were recorded this morning.

And though Phil Spector's hit records have been limited since 1966, he is just as current in the same weird way, an implicit if hushed presence, something like a guardian angel, on a rock-and-roll stage he hasn't graced now in seven years. More than a cult figure, Spector is a never-fading musical influence. Bruce Springsteen's rumbling saxophone arrangements and histrionic tableau of noise is a straight cop of Spector's famed “Wall of Sound,” as Springsteen has himself attested. No musician, regardless of his age and context, fails to recognize that rock and roll was not taken as serious music before Spector made music more than something to chew gum by and get pimples to. “River Deep—Mountain High” can be taken as a metaphor for Phil Spector himself, and if you could scatter the song into pieces, what you would have is Spector's
oeuvre
, the sum of the parts of his work from 1957 to 1966. Even the ludicrous teenage themes of Spector's early records sound like
The Ride
of the Valkyries
, elevated to Valhalla by a tide of inspired commotion that was the Wall of Sound (or as Spector would have preferred, “a Wagnerian approach to rock and roll; little symphonies for kids”). The progression of Spector's Wall covers some of the most definitive music of the sixties—the Crystals' “He's a Rebel,” “Da Doo Ron Ron,” and “Then He Kissed Me”; Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans' “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” and “Not Too Young to Get Married”; Darlene Love's “Today I Met the Boy I'm Gonna Marry”; the Ronettes' “Be My Baby,” “Walking in the Rain,” and “Baby I Love You”; the Righteous Brothers' “You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling.”

Spector was a prodigious force in pop music. From 1961 to 1965 his records made the charts twenty-seven times; seventeen of those nestled inside the Top 40. As a body of work, they were a cultural seed. Spector's work, as a whole, has a peculiar kind of relevancy in the eighties, as it did in the two previous decades. Because we never really come of age, or long not to, the teen ethos Spector rhapsodized has a visceral hold on the subconscious of anyone born early or late enough to appreciate his work. The
bom, bom-bom
intro riff of “Be My Baby” is an immediately identifiable heartbeat. Indeed, the Wall of Sound doesn't
reflect
the sixties motif as much as it is the era's apotheosis by lionizing the sentimentality in all humans. Spector's 1963 Christmas album—an astounding portrait of maudlin beauty—is this generation's “White Christmas.”

At the height of his reign, Spector's authority over a song was not unlike that of Frank Capra, Federico Fellini, or George Lucas's authority on celluloid. In the record business, then as now, it was unprecedented. This is because Spector's ascendancy was completely different from any other producer. Before, and since, Spector, producers have had an understanding about their craft: they are merely part of the blueprint of recording, subordinate to artist and product. In the late fifties, the word producer was not used in relation to record-making. In the autocracy of pop music then, the record companies “made” the records; the producers were known only within the industry. Then came Phil Spector, who had a new set of assumptions. When he was sixteen, Spector wrote, produced, and co-performed the classic fifties' innocence song, “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” It went all the way to No. 1. Spector had no reason to believe anyone could make records like he could, and as he rose to prominence on that assumption, he delighted in the arrogance of power. He demanded a producer's credit on his records'
labels. He was ruthless in establishing his own million-dollar record and publishing companies. He trampled the rights of his artists and co-writers. Spector's success was one of genius and nerve, and it was not for nothing that when the Beatles' farewell album,
Let It Be
, was in shambles and needed a singular kind of music man to salvage it, John Lennon paged Phil Spector—who promptly made history's apocalyptic band a Phil Spector product and earned himself the right to produce the first solo works of Lennon and George Harrison.

Clearly, Spector was both a product and an incredible anomaly of his era. Elvis was over, the Beatles were five years away, and stereo and video were barely more than words in the dictionary. Pop music was dominated by a corporate cabal of power-broker publishers; they hired the songwriters, chose the acts to record them, and got the songs released. Though they considered themselves a fraternity of gentlemen, their ethics were dirty, their turf wars bloody. Injected into this vinyl jungle, Spector learned the rules of backstabbing and conquest—better than most. Not only could he walk in the ethereal haze of artistic genius; unlike many creative types, he was also calculating and empirical, with a hard business eye, no conscience, and a misanthropic streak. Spector was a visionary, not a revolutionary. He didn't change the system, he used it. Entering a world in which a rock-and-roll session meant a small band—guitar, piano, bass, drum—playing simpleminded arrangements, Spector didn't invent a new rock and roll. He simply multiplied the old, using the same simple arrangements but with more and more instruments. The Wall of Sound is often thought of as the height of sophistication, and in a way it is, as an example of technology that engendered a new sound. But the technology itself was archaic even then. Spector's block of legendary hits were recorded in mono, in the days when musicians were not blocked off from each other, and when there were too few microphones to pick up more than a dozen instruments. It was crazy for Spector to cram two dozen instruments into his studio, but in his hands the aural effect was a tool of purpose. Thus, Spector
needed
the technology of the fifties to recast rock in the sixties. What made it
seem
advanced was his synergy in processing the old into a new formula. As a rock-and-roll milestone, it is as significant as Chuck Berry's guitar chords, the Beach Boys' harmonies, and Jim Morrison's ballads.

The flip side of Spector's crusade was that when music
did
change, too radically for him to keep his process intact, he was a genius lost and fearful of having to slay yet another kind of rock autocracy. While Phil Spector can provide almost any act in rock with a viable hit, his price is too high. The price is subjugation, which is apparently what Spector wants to exact in exchange for his services. In truth, Spector and the rest of rock and roll have been at odds ever since artists began carving songs out of their own visions. It was a breach of authority that Spector evidently couldn't tolerate. He has lived for years in a private world, alone with his genius, shut off from the reality of his failure to retain power. Although he is desperate to return to active producing, he has scared away artists who have solicited him with what seems to be a pathological urge to make sure that he never
will
return. His longtime seclusion, interrupted by sporadic and fleeting bursts of work—most recently eight years ago with the Ramones—have led many to compare Spector with Howard Hughes. A better parallel may be Orson Welles, a genius in his twenties who drew back thereafter in resignation, unwilling or unable to compete with his own legacy.

Regrettably, but not surprisingly, Phil Spector refused to participate in or sanction this book. Although I reiterated, in a series of letters—the seat of his empire is now a post office box number in Pasadena—that the book was conceived as history's categorical record of his life and work, none of the letters was answered. Spector's attorney, Marty Machat—who led Spector into his ill-conceived and embarrassing album project with poet Leonard Cohen in 1978—chose to run in horror from my calls to his office. It can be inferred that Spector has made it plain that reality is not to intrude on myth. Spector's attitude, in fact, makes one wonder if he, like Michael Jackson, craves a certain perverse public image. Unlike Jackson, however, Spector engineers none of his perversity; no bits of bizarre behavior are leaked to the media from Spector's Pasadena compound. He is a recluse in the truest, proudest sense. In the context of his iconoclastic, who-gives-a-damn attitude—the land that stamped rock and roll forever—he is to be admired for it. Indeed, by way of personal prologue, I think it necessary to say that I hold Spector in the highest regard. From my place in the legion of baby boomers who reached teenhood in time to appreciate, and be affected by, Spector's music in its original issue, he is a stately, heroic figure.

That said, it might seem contradictory, or even dirty pool, that
the pages of this book are replete with examples of Phil Spector's aberrance, his intimate pain, his manipulation and deception, his greed and his anxieties. However, to understand what went on inside Spectors head, and what put it in there, is to climb inside the very brick and mortar of the Wall of Sound. Spector didn't just come by genius—he was driven to it by gnawing, growling obsession. Admittedly, this is a presumptuous assumption, yet the weight of evidence in any biography rests on the thoroughness of its research. The conclusions in this biography are those of the people who knew Spector best, and the search for them was maddening, endless, frus-tratingly slow—and in the end as joyously fruitful as putting a Phil Spector record on a turntable. Whether he was good or bad, it is my hope that history will note that America had its own Mozart and his name was Phil Spector.

JOCASTA
:
Put this trouble from you
.

OEDIPUS
:
Those bold words would sound better, were not my mother living. But as it is—I have some grounds for fear; yet you have said it well
.

JOCASTA
:
Yet your father's death is a sign that all is well
.

OEDIPUS
:
I know that: but I fear because of her who lives
.

—
SOPHOCLES
'
King Oedipus
, in the translation
by W. B. Yeats

In 1956, when Phil Spector was fifteen years old, he lugged his second-hand guitar to Studio City in the San Fernando Valley once a week for a month to take instruction from a jazz guitarist named Howard Roberts. The young Spector, who was smitten by jazz, had specifically sought out Roberts in the directory of the musicians' union, and when he got to the jazzman's house he listened hard as Roberts explained about chord structure and the theory of rhythm guitar.

But Roberts thought there was something strange about the kid. After each lesson, Spector would leave and go home to West Hollywood without having taken his guitar out of its case. After the final tutoring session, the young man said a polite thank you, shook Roberts's hand, and was out the door.

“I never saw a guitar in Phil's hands, and he never played a note for me,” Roberts would remember over three decades later. “I waited and waited, because that's the thing kids do when they take lessons: they play for approval and advice. But he never did.”

Howard Roberts never did know if Spector was skittish about playing in the presence of an expert musician, or if the boy thought he could do whatever was required. Actually, it could have been either, or both, or neither. Spector was a shy boy but also one with rare talent. More crucially, however, in 1956 Spector
couldn't
play his guitar for approval. Not yet. This was something that was deep in his gut, playing the guitar. It may have been the only part of his identity that made him feel good, and he wanted it to be real. So Spector wouldn't play for Howard Roberts. He would play only for the darkness.

At fifteen, Phil Spector stood barely over five feet tall, not counting the bird's nest of reedy brown hair he kept piled high atop his forehead. Thin as a matchstick, and with bones as brittle, Spector was sallow and pale, hollow around the eyes and under the cheekbones. When he spoke it was in a high nasal whine and with a lisp. He was also a chronic asthmatic, and when the Santa Ana wind blew in off the Pacific Ocean it carried pollen into his wide nostrils that sent him into great coughing jags that would double him over and frighten his friends. Spector was not popular in the corridors of Fairfax High School, and most of his time was spent by himself. He was fatherless and his mother, Bertha, worked, so Spector had to make do as a latchkey kid, letting himself in after school. He appreciated this web of seclusion, since when his mother and his older sister, Shirley, were at home, they treated him like precious china. Phil's fragility was a constant worry to them both. If they didn't know where he was, or if he was out of their line of sight too long, they would flood phone lines to his friends' homes, trying to track him down. Finding him, they would spew tirades at him. They were hennish, to be sure, but they adored the male of the house, and
took his poor health as a sign that he was special and in need of protection from a cruel world.