He's a Rebel (26 page)

The Ronettes went on the tour with another cousin, Elaine, as the third member and with Nedra taking over Ronnie's lead vocals. Then, with the tour almost over, Phil relented and allowed Ronnie to go on.

But now the Ronettes were hot. In early 1964, the follow-up record, “Baby, I Love You,” hit No. 24, and another invitation came in—this time from England, where the Ronettes' records were selling heavily. Promoters wanted the group to co-headline a tour with the Rolling Stones, who were in the vanguard of the exploding British rock scene but thus far known mainly as an unwashed, uncouth answer to the skyrocketing Beatles. Phil reluctantly gave Ronnie the go-ahead, but only because he would be there with her. The fact was, Phil had wanted to go to England in any case. His records sold well there, all the way back to “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” and in recent months he had negotiated a historic deal with England's Decca label, which had been distributing the Philles line on its London Records sublabel. Though Spector was given the largest known advance from a foreign record company, he recouped the entire advance for London with his first new record, “Be My Baby.” Even as the Beatles and the British band scene was sparking tremendous worldwide attention, establishing England's first real rock identity and crowding American pop music off the charts there like never before, Spector's girl-group sound was highly popular. Thus, with the Rolling Stones—who recorded for Decca—geared up for their second national tour, importing the Ronettes was wise planning. In addition, Andrew Loog Oldham, the twenty-year-old Carnaby Street industry bumblebee who was co-managing and producing the Rolling Stones' hard-bitten records, was doing publicity work, gratis, for Phil out of his promotion company. Oldham idolized Spector at a
transatlantic distance, and linking up with the Ronettes had been his suggestion.

For Phil, the trip gave him the chance to present himself amid the clangy guitars and high nasal harmonies of the Merseybeat sound as the biggest force in pop music since Elvis, immune to a change of the rock guard but born out of the same rebellious spirit as the English rockers.

On January 24, 1964, a limousine came to his apartment to take him to the airport. As the car pulled out of the driveway, Annette Spector happened to be on the terrace of her apartment. “I watched his limousine roll down York Avenue and suddenly I thought, I'm nineteen years old and my husband's going to England,' and I freaked out. I realized I was all alone.”

Phil—clad in a scarlet-lined suit and vest, pin-tucked mustard shirt and matching handkerchief, gold watch fob dangling from his vest pocket, a pearl stickpin and pointy brown shoes with spats—landed in London to find that Andrew Oldham, and his business partner Tony Calder, had stirred the interest of the English press about his arrival. Newspaper reporters clamored for interviews with the American Mozart. “It was pure manipulation,” Calder said. “We told them, ‘Phil Spector's coming but you can't talk to him.' And of course then everybody wanted to talk to him.” The first interview, by Maureen Cleave of the
London Evening Standard
, took place in the back of the limousine that carried Spector from Heathrow Airport to his hotel. Phil, who had not encountered this kind of media notoriety at home, reveled in it. “I've been told I'm a genius,” he said to Cleave. “What do you think?” Cleave wrote of him as a mercurial homunculus—“He walks like Chaplin, for every three steps forward he takes one back or to the side”—and a loner. “I'm the least quoted man in the industry,” Spector said. “I stick to my little bourgeois haunts and I don't bother with the masses.”

The Ronettes had preceded Phil to England by two weeks. They appeared on the television variety show “Sunday Night at the Palladium,” and their month-long tour with the Rolling Stones was proceeding excellently. The Stones were received wildly by big, enthusiastic crowds, yet the band itself seemed to be more interested in the Ronettes. As both groups spent days together, and went to local clubs and parties, the real prize of the tour for the Stones seemed
to be if any of them could get a Ronette into bed—although Ronnie was deemed off-limits. “She was always a no-go area,” Tony Calder remembered, “but I've got to tell you, I think everybody in the band was in love with Ronnie. She didn't play around, and everybody presumed it was because of Phil. But we were all madly in love with all of them, because they were the Ronettes. I mean, the Stones were in awe of them. To them
they
were the stars, not Phil, because not everybody knew who Phil was yet. The Ronettes had a special magic right from the start, and everybody was after them.”

Yet so good were the vibes that by the tour's end it was of minor importance that none of the Stones could bag a Ronette. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards tried with Estelle, Brian Jones with Nedra, but the girls thought the Stones were grimy and foul-smelling, their hair
too
long. Nondrinkers, they reeled from the band's hard drinking and pill-popping, and they did not care for the Stones' music. Still, they loved being in the spotlight so far from home, and for them the tour was lit with a neon glow.

Phil was lit up too in London. After a few days with Andrew Oldham, he was orbiting the earth, kept in the ionosphere by a nonstop ingestion of marijuana and pills from Oldham's pockets. “Andrew used to have a pill box with every different color under the sun,” Calder said. “I'm quite sure he gave Phil something to take him up a little bit and something to calm you down a little bit, and something not to make you overanxious, and after a half dozen of those there's another pill to make sure you don't black out.”

Phil had not used drugs before he came to England, fearing they would strip him of his self-control and leave him at the mercy of his neuroses. But the English scene, with its self-aware notion of being different and happening, made easy demands, and Oldham made a convincing Brahman of the new order. Hollow-cheeked and urchinlike, with long strands of blond hair and a mouthful of hip jargon, he was actually a latter-day, if less uptight, analogue of the early Spector. At the time they met, the Rolling Stones had released only two songs, and they were only on the outer edge of stardom. Oldham's publicity work for the Beatles and Freddie and the Dreamers was mostly volunteered, a willingly uncompensated hustle for attention and favor. As Oldham began to wrest control of the Stones from the band's other manager, Eric Easton, he and Tony Calder rented a two-apartment office in a row house at Ivor Court
in London's Gloucester Place section, eating up every cent they had. Oldham had to bum tea and biscuits from friends, but he was known far and wide on the British rock scene.

There were not many people Phil could have taken cues from, but he did from Oldham. “Andrew and Phil considered each other to be oddballs,” Tony Calder suggested. “I think Phil admired in Andrew the fact that he really did break the rules, and knew how to deal with people. And for Andrew it was near to the point of worship in respect to Phil's ability to produce a good record.”

Taking an almost paternal interest in Andrew and the Stones, Phil decided he wanted to distribute the band's records in America on the Philles label. He and Andrew worked out a deal that would have Decca license the Stones' catalogue to Philles, and then went to see Sir Edward Lewis, the aging head of Decca Records. They presented the plan to him, and for forty-five minutes Lewis, who spoke in a pinched old-world British tongue, prattled on by way of saying no. Phil did not understand a word Lewis said, but it was clear the Stones were forbidden to go through any other channel but London Records and its usual outlets. Phil and Andrew left, mad.

That night the Stones had a session at their studio, a small and musty place called Regent Sound on London's Denmark Street. Andrew brought Phil and also Gene Pitney, who was in England during a foreign tour of his own. Since “He's a Rebel,” Pitney had fallen out with Aaron Schroeder and gone on to have a number of hits. Cultivating the British market, he turned to Oldham to do promotion, and Oldham later produced Pitney singing a Mick Jagger-Keith Richards song, “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday,” which became a hit in England. Two other rockers filtered into Regent Sound that night, Graham Nash and Alan Clarke, who were the core of the Hollies. But at first it was difficult to get anything done.

“It was one of those days where the Stones all hated each other,” Pitney recalled. “Later on I realized why Andrew was the best thing they ever had goin' for them. He had a nice ability with them in the studio to get them to put things out. Left on their own egos, they always had a problem with each other.

“So that night, I had just come in from Paris with five fifths of duty-free cognac, and I had a fifth with me at the studio. It was my birthday that day and I told everybody they had to drink to me.
And it did the trick. Everybody got a little mellow and started jammin' around a little bit.”

Half wasted, all of them sang a musical piss-off to Sir Edward Lewis in which everybody shouted “Fuck you, Sir Edward” and other obscenities. Oldham recorded it, gave it the title “Andrew's Blues,” and pressed copies to give to his friends as an inside joke. The real work that night, though, was cutting the Jagger-Richards song “Not Fade Away,” which Oldham produced in what must have seemed a dreamscape, working with America's top producer.

“Phil really produced that one,” Tony Calder said. “It was just one of those magical nights when all kinds of forces came together. Phil actually sat there in the booth and said, ‘Hey, Andrew, let's do it like this' and ‘Hey, Mick, let's put the maracas in here,' and he went outside and he was playin' the maracas with Mick and showin' him how to play 'em. It was one of those scenes you never forget. And on the record you can actually hear Phil tapping a coin on the cognac bottle and Brian Jones sayin', ‘Drink some more cognac to change the note on the bottle.' It was that ridiculous, and that wonderful.”

Released as the Stones' next single, “Not Fade Away” would become their first big hit in America, going Top 5. Phil would be credited with co-writing the British B side, “Little by Little,” although this was just a few riffs jammed on the spot, and that song would draw royalties for him by its inclusion on the Stones' first album. Also on that album was an instrumental version of Marvin Gaye's “Can I Get a Witness”—which Oldham retitled “Now I've Got a Witness (Like Uncle Phil and Uncle Gene).”

Phil was buoyant throughout his stay in London. Assuming the role of the hip hobgoblin that the media had created for him, he brushed his hair straight out like pinecones and began to wear dark glasses wherever he went. He appeared on the television shows “Ready, Steady, Go” and “Juke Box Jury,” alternating thoughtful insight with playacting. Riding around London one night with Decca promotion man Tony Hall in a long black Rolls-Royce hired by Hall, Phil asked the driver to stop and go out to a grocery store for a container of milk. “We were somewhere in Mayfair and the driver got out and Phil jumped in the driver's seat, did a quick U-turn, and drove off,” said Hall, “this funny little man wearing the chauffeur's hat behind
the huge wheel of this Rolls-Royce and driving on the sidewalk. I was in the backseat and I was freaking.”

Tony Hall's house on Greene Street in Mayfair, the site of many parties attended by members of the top rock groups in London, was right across the road from the flats of John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. Hearing that the Ronettes were in town, the three Beatles asked Tony Hall if they could meet the girls. Again, Ronnie was the Beatles' focal point, the known commodity, and when Hall gave a party for the meeting, they had no reason to think Phil would be there. But Phil did come, with Andrew, and it was a disastrous entrance.

“Phil was very weird that night,” Hall said, “and the atmosphere was strained to begin with because the girls weren't exactly overflowing of personality. And Phil was never easy to get along with. Whenever you'd meet him he would be extremely moody.”

“I remember Phil came in that night and he was talking high, like a girl,” Nedra Talley said. “He would stop and it got embarrassing.”

“I think Andrew encouraged him, just as Phil encouraged Andrew,” Tony Calder said. “It was just a game to be . . . you see, we would call it weird now, but at the time it was not weird. They were camping it up, they were taking unlawful substances, and they were just talking nonsense and sending people up. They were havin' a giggle.”

Still, Andrew knew he had to get Phil out of there and get his head together. “Andrew dragged him off someplace and they returned a couple of hours later and everything was fine,” Hall said. “I think Phil was a bit stoned when he came back, he'd had some smoke. He started telling the Beatles about his records, who played on them and things that happened on the sessions, and it was a great atmosphere, everybody was getting on fine.”

Before the evening ended, George Harrison and Estelle Bennett retired to an upstairs room. And while Phil did not have the instant affinity with the Beatles that he did with the Rolling Stones, they parted as friends. A week later, on February 7, the Beatles were about to depart on their first trip to America, to appear on the “Ed Sullivan Show” two consecutive Sundays. Before they left, apprehensive about stepping onto a strange land, they called Phil over to tell them about what they should expect in New York and how to
handle it. To continue the indoctrination, they asked him to fly to New York with them.

And so Phil Spector flew back across the Atlantic with the Beatles, on a flight crackling with anticipation, fear, and excitement about what Beatlemania would do to America. Five years later Spector would describe the flight as “a lot of fun. It was probably the only time I flew that I wasn't afraid, because I knew that they weren't goin' to get killed in a plane.