He's a Rebel (47 page)

Phil was not far behind. Even though only two tracks necessitated outside musicians—a full orchestra for a cover of “Baby I Love You”; Steve Douglas and former Electric Flag keyboardist Barry Goldberg on “Rock 'n' Roll Radio”—the sessions at Gold Star were laborious and wounding. Producing the title track of
Rock 'n' Roll High School
, Spector took eight hours mixing the long opening guitar chord to his satisfaction. On every song he overdubbed the Ramones' guitar, bass, and drum parts long into the night—but when he felt unsure about how to deal with this new style of music, he would stop the session and do the old routines with a beleaguered Larry Levine. “Or if a stranger came in and Phil didn't know about it,” said Joey, “work would cease and Phil would get weird, do his tantrums or he'd have . . . guys would bring him these little white cups of Manischewitz and after a few of them Phil would start bangin' on the floor and screamin' . . . ‘
piss, shit, fuck. Fuck, shit, piss!
' He would just go on, he started freakin' out, and there would be no reason to go on any longer with the session.”

As Dee Dee Ramone and Phil came closer to going over the edge, the studio became a collision course waiting for an accident to happen. At one crisis point, Joey and the band's musical director, Ed Stasium, warned Phil his drinking was killing the album and he eased off. “We wanted Ed there to oversee,” Joey said, “but then pretty soon Phil was plyin' him with daiquiris and they were hangin' out havin' candlelight daiquiris.” Finally, provoked by a drug-blitzed Dee Dee, Phil snapped in his usual manner—brandishing his gun.

“He held his gun to Dee Dee's head,” Joey said. “Dee Dee was kinda fucked up on Quaaludes or something and he told Phil he was gonna kill him. I guess Phil felt he had only one way to respond.”

This latest gun incident turned off Dee Dee further, and it may
have also helped send Larry Levine to the emergency room. Larry, smoking almost without end despite suffering a heart attack six years before, went home one night and had stabbing chest pains. He got to the hospital in time to live out his second heart attack.

“The Ramones, Jesus, that was a terrible experience.” Levine flinched. “It was a contributing factor to my heart attack. The night before it happened, Phil and I had this . . . we had gone around. He wasn't doing any work. He was drinking and he was procrastinating and we couldn't get any work done. The Ramones were in the studio, they were there all night and I couldn't get him . . . he wouldn't focus. He'd sit there and he'd be in a stupor. It was really that bad.”

Convinced that he had caused Levine's heart attack, a distraught Phil did not visit him in the hospital. “He wouldn't even talk to me until years later. I'm sure he felt responsible. I tried to assure him he wasn't. I was due for it anyway, with the smoking. . . . But it was very difficult when he was drinking. I would go back and forth with him as a gag because Phil would put people on and it was an effort to try and communicate. But it just got impossible to move ahead. We were stuck.”

“Phil was frustrated by the fact that we make our own decisions,” Joey Ramone suggested. “We're our own band, we have our final say, and Phil's not used to having that. So I don't know if working with us was his dream come true or his nightmare come true.”

It seemed more like twenty years when, eight months from the start date, the Ramones'
End of the Century
was released in February 1980. For a budget-busting $200,000—the average Ramones LP was made for around $70,000—Seymour Stein bought himself the Ramones' best work. Critical reaction was favorable, and it became the first Ramones album to go Top 50 on the chart. As he did with Lennon and Harrison, Phil did not alter the basic idiom; rounding and widening the punk beat, not one ounce of the raw energy was sacrificed. The entire record bristled with a dynamic range and clarity the Ramones did not know was possible. Kurt Loder of
Rolling Stone
called it “the most commercially credible album the Ramones have ever made [and] also Phil Spector's finest and most mature effort in years, undoubtedly his most restrained production since his work with John Lennon. Surprisingly,
End of the Century
doesn't
sound like the end of the world overdubbed on twenty-four tracks in some airless Los Angeles studio. . . . [Spector] has created a setting that's rich and vibrant and surging with power, but it's the Ramones who are spotlighted, not their producer. More than ever before, Spector has managed to conceal his considerable art and thus reaffirm it.”
*

“I personally loved the album,” Joey said, “but I'm probably the only one in the band who felt that way. See, I had a sort of decent rapport with him. Sure he's difficult and yeah it was hell. I mean there are things about Phil . . . he's not the nicest guy in the world. But you just accept what he is to work with him. And I thought he did a great job. There were a couple of things that made me cringe, but ‘Danny Says' is a fuckin' classic and ‘Rock ‘n' Roll Radio' sounds great. What he did with the opening chord of ‘Rock ‘n' Roll High School' is like ‘Strawberry Fields,' the way it fuses into the drums.”

Joey had been home in New York for months when Phil called him one morning to play him the album's first single, the “Baby, I Love You” cover, over the phone. “It was like six
A.M
. in L.A. but he never sleeps. He doesn't sleep and he doesn't eat. He just mixes records all night.” Unfortunately, the choice of the song as a single—another of Spector's conditions with Seymour Stein was that one of his songs would be the first release—was a bad one. The only overtly Spectorian tune on the album, with its glutinous and stabbing string line, it may have directly merged the rock and roll of Phil Spector and the Ramones, but it failed to grab air play. In some quarters it was held as a joke, though not in England where the song went to No. 2.

As a Phil Spector album, it presaged a possible return to the wars for the world's top record producer, but the discord and horror stories surrounding it was a deterrent; though Spector's contract had an option for a second Ramones LP, even Joey rejected that idea. Phil considered hooking up with the new wave band Blondie after seeing them open for the Ramones one night, but that band's leader, Chris Stein, told Joey there was no way he could work with Phil.

Maybe that is what Phil really wanted, to be just left alone.

Jack Nitzsche, who had not seen Phil in years, showed up unannounced
at the front gate late in 1979. Nitzsche had blossomed during and after working with Phil—he produced, among many others, Bobby Darin, Rick Nelson, and Jackie DeShannon, and recorded four solo albums; one,
St. Giles Cripplegate
, in 1972, utilized the London Symphony Orchestra. Nitzsche had been in the thick of the seventies' soft-rock wave, co-producing Neil Young's first LP and producing and writing for Young's backup band Crazy Horse, for a time joining the band on the road as their pianist. He also produced the Neville Brothers and the first two Mink Deville albums. Branching out into films, he scored the Mick Jagger movie
Performance
, then
The Exorcist
and
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
. However, Nitzsche was in a bad way now. Recently he had been arrested for assaulting his girlfriend, actress Carrie Snodgress, who said that Nitzsche, in a drunken rage, raped her with the barrel of a gun, kicked and beat her, and threatened to shoot her and her small child.

Seeing Nitzsche, Phil thought he was scary. Rather than let him in, Phil leaned out of an upstairs window and was said to have aimed a gun at his onetime arranger and ordered him off the grounds. Nitzsche fled back down La Collina Drive and into a wasteland of his own misery, but the real question about Phil Spector now was whom if anyone he would welcome inside that dark house.

*
From “The Ramones and Phil Spector in Radioland,” Kurt Loder,
Rolling Stone
(March 20, 1980):26.

Where is his son,
That nimble-footed madcap Prince of Wales
And his comrades, that daff'd the world aside
And bid it pass?

—
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
,
Henry IV

At 10
P.M
. on the night of January 23,1980, ten-year-old Donté Spector walked into a West Hollywood police station and told police he had lost his bicycle. Asked by a deputy sheriff if his parents knew he was out so late, Donté said that he had run away from home that morning. He had been staying with his nine-year-old girlfriend since school let out and he did not want to go back home.

An hour later a police detective and a probation officer called Phil and informed him that his son was at the station house. Refusing to come over and get Donté, he told them, “I don't care what you do with him.”

When Ronnie was notified, she immediately petitioned for custody, and Phil allowed Donté to move to New York to live with her. Ronnie's singing comebacks in the seventies had failed and a recently signed recording deal only provided her with a $2,000 advance, but she stated she could give Donté “the opportunity of living with a loving parent.” In April, with Phil and Ronnie in attendance and at a safe distance, the court gave her custody and ordered Phil to pay child support of $850 a month—“by check or money order,” the judge warned a sneering Phil, “no pennies, nickels or quarters.”

Phil's lawyers, fearing that Ronnie was still on the sauce, asked for attorney's supervision over her in New York. “I'm satisfied the mother's a good mother,” the judge replied. “They can spend their time supervising people who really need supervising, not Mrs. Spector.”

“Thank you,” Ronnie said.

Maliciously, Phil made out the first four support checks in Donté's name, not Ronnie's, and was again found in contempt of court.

By the mid-eighties Ronnie had remarried, to a show-biz manager named Jonathan Greenfield, and had her first natural-born children—ironically, they were twins—but rather than stability, Donté felt more alienation. He went back to L.A.—not to live with Phil but with an elderly Bertha Spector. “Donté got into trouble,” Nedra Talley related, “because neither Phil nor Ronnie did right by him. Getting Donté was a threat to Ronnie, I think. She may have felt he was a challenge to her new life.

“I was trying to see about getting Donté to live with me. I was willing to do that because I've given myself to raising my children and one more to love would not be a problem. Donté needs that kind of love. He's sort of caught in the middle of two crazy situations. The last time I was out there, about five years ago, I went to the house about Donté and Phil didn't want me to let Donté know that I had come. I said, ‘Phil, I'm not gonna play games. I don't know what game you and Ronnie are playing but don't include me in the middle.' My only angle was that I loved Donté and that the last time I saw him he told me he wanted to be with me.

“But that was the last time I saw Phil and nothing more was said
about it. Now Donté's a big boy, he can do whatever he wants, and you just hope he's okay. But I think with Phil and Ronnie, they were more afraid that it would look like a failure on their part if Donté lived with me. And Phil never liked to admit failure.”

At forty years of age, Phil Spector was retired from rock and roll. Either the distilled techno-pop of the eighties was not worth his time or he was too insecure about being able to find a place in it on his psychopathic terms and would rather deny that he had to try. His only active involvement over the first half of the decade, with Yoko Ono in 1981, seemed like yet another postscript. This was after the murder of John Lennon, when Phil could not bear to live with the karmic demerit that John went to his grave with the bitterness of 1973 unresolved between them. Right up until his death, John had not forgiven him. Only weeks before, when Doc Pomus mentioned Phil's name to him in idle conversation, John tensed and said, “I don't wanna talk about him.” Following John's assassination, Yoko became locked in litigation with the producer of the Grammy-winning Lennon-Ono
Double Fantasy
LP, Jack Douglas. Phil, who still had a financial stake in the Lennons' account books, flew to New York to testify on Yoko's behalf. If he could not make up with John, this at least broke down the barrier with Yoko, who had never liked Phil and had spoken unkindly of him in a recent
Soho News
interview. When she went into the studio to commemorate John with her
Season of Glass
LP—which featured John's shattered and bloodstained glasses on the front cover—she hired Phil to produce. Yoko, however, needed to have unstinted authority to express and dictate the deepness of her personal loss, and she told Phil he could go home after about half the record was complete. The parting was in no way acrimonious, and she later gave Phil one of John's guitars. For Phil it was like a conciliatory hand reaching to him from the beyond.