Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (20 page)

One of the most frequently told stories about Spector concerned the occasion when he suffered a panic attack on an aircraft shortly before takeoff from Los Angeles, obliging the captain to turn back to the gate so that Spector could get off the plane. The story first appeared in a profile written by Tom Wolfe, and published in the
New York Herald Tribune
's Sunday magazine in 1965, under the title “The First Tycoon of Teen.” Wolfe's account began in a dazzling burst of high-octane prose. “All these raindrops are high or something. They don't roll down the window, they come straight back, toward the tail, wobbling, like all those Mr. Cool snow heads walking on mattresses. The plane is taxiing out toward the runway to take off, and this stupid infarcted water wobbles, sideways, across the window. Phil Spector, twenty-three years old, the rock and roll magnate, producer of Philles Records, America's first teenage tycoon, watches…this watery pathology…It is sick,
fatal.
He tightens his seat belt over his bowels…”

Jeff Barry, who along with his wife Ellie Greenwich was on the flight with Spector, recounted the story to the writer Richard Williams a few years later. “We were on the plane waiting, boarded…plane's loaded. I was sitting across the aisle from Phil, and he leans over to me and says, ‘Hey, man, I don't think I can make it.' Does his Ahmet Ertegun imitation. And says, ‘Hey…it's filling up…I don't know. Look there, Jeffrey, all the way in the back, it's filling up…people…losers.' So I said, ‘Yeah, that's it,' and he says, ‘I gotta get off. Miss, I gotta get off this plane.' And he's flying…he's always on pills when he's flying and he's flying before he's flying. So the stewardess went up front and evidently the pilot gave permission to let this guy off…

“Phil gets off, and Ellie and I sit there, and I think, Phil Spector's too bright. I don't wanna bet against Phil Spector.
Let's get off the plane.
So we raised our hands also, and asked to be excused. All these fairly straight people were sitting there, and I had a two-day growth of beard because we'd been in the studio, and Phil looks weird as shit anyway, and they were all saying, ‘Who are these weird people? This blonde, and this other tall, skinny jerk and this little twerp, what IS GOING ON?' Anyway, like fifty people wanted to get off the plane.

“The plane was held up, the captain was grounded on the spot for opening the doors again in the first place…So we got off and Phil got off and I understand that a lot of other people got off. The flight was delayed, and they had to get another captain to take over. They took our luggage off, we waited for it, and when it came we ran right over to get on the next flight…And then Phil comes staggering down, and the word went from one airline to the next, not to let this guy on. He could not get out of Los Angeles—he had to go to another airport someplace else, where the word hadn't gotten out yet.”

This picture of Spector, the frightened flier, would become part of music business legend. Joe Smith, who worked as chairman of Warner Bros. and Capitol Records and was a long-standing acquaintance of Spector, enjoyed telling the story of another occasion when Spector was flying, this time with Ahmet Ertegun.

“Phil really didn't want to fly. Ahmet was saying, ‘I'm with you, I fly all the time, I'll hold your hand,' blah, blah. Now, Ahmet is a man who if he's flying to Indonesia, as soon as he fastens the seat belt—click—he's asleep. And he doesn't wake up until they're telling you not to stand up until the doors are open. So they get on the plane. And Phil is immediately imagining the engine's on fire, and they haven't even left the ground. Ahmet's trying to go to sleep, and Phil's prodding him, he's terrified. So Ahmet says to him, ‘Listen—this plane is either going to make it, or it's going to crash. And you know what'll happen if we crash? We'll all die. And you know what'll happen then? Atlantic Records will take out an ad in all the trade papers, rimmed in black, and it'll say, “Ahmet Ertegun, born whenever/died whenever. Phillip Spector, born whenever/died whenever.” And at the bottom it'll say, “and don't forget the great new Solomon Burke hit,” because Jerry Wexler wouldn't waste a dime…'”

10

Going to the Chapel

O
n February 18, 1963, in the rabbi's chambers in an Upper West Side synagogue, Phil Spector enacted the traditional Jewish wedding ritual of crushing a wineglass under his foot—a symbolic representation of the sacking of the Temple in Jerusalem—a reminder in the midst of joy that bad things may happen. Standing beside him, Annette Merar thought “it was the happiest day of my life.”

Getting married, she says, “was one of the few mutual decisions Phil and I ever made. I remember he was in the bedroom and I was lying on a couch in the living room. And I was like, should we go back to L.A. and have a wedding? And Phil said, ‘What's the point? We're here, why not just do it?' Okay…”

In the time that they had been living together, Spector had continued to see Dr. Kaplan on a regular basis. He never disclosed what was discussed in these sessions. But then, even with Annette, he would seldom talk about his anxieties, the difficulties of his childhood, and never about the trauma of his father's death. “Other people sometimes talked about it, with regard to the way he was or to explain some of his behavior, but Phil never talked about it. It was as if he just shut down so hard with that. I picture the image of a deadbolt just slamming shut. I think he just couldn't deal with the pain and the loss. And blaming himself. But with Phil, I could never determine what were his genuine internal dynamics, and what might be the result of traumatic events like the suicide.”

Annette had never set eyes on Dr. Kaplan, but with the wedding looming, Spector now insisted they should meet. “He said, ‘My doctor wants to meet you, and you have to come and talk with him.' I think he wanted to check me out, like a test.”

Annette was not impressed. “Phil was very dependent on him. But Dr. Kaplan became very dependent on Phil too. Phil was like the boy genius, and Dr. Kaplan was into power, success and money.”

Nevertheless, if it was a test, she passed.

The marriage was planned for Valentine's Day, but February 14 fell on Shabbat, a Friday night. Instead, they married on the following Tuesday. Annette's parents and friends had been unable to make the journey. Of Spector's friends, only the arranger Arnold Goland attended the ceremony, as best man. Helen Noga loaned the newlyweds her Manhattan town house for the reception, where some forty people, mostly Phil's friends from the music business, toasted their health. As the couple cut the cake, Michael Spencer caught Spector's eye. “He looked at me askance,” Spencer remembers, “like ‘Is this for real? Do you believe this?' It was as if he wasn't taking it seriously.”

There was no honeymoon. On the day after the wedding, Spector flew to Los Angeles for a recording session. It was a portent of things to come.

Now that they were married, Annette wanted to pursue her own dreams as a writer; she abandoned her secretarial job and enrolled at Hunter College, studying English literature and creative writing. With Lester Sill out of the way, Spector had drawn up papers making Annette vice president of Philles. He continued to commute furiously between the two coasts, recording in Los Angeles, and running his business out of the downstairs office on Sixty-second Street. He took on a secretary, Joan Berg, and Chuck Kaye, Lester Sill's stepson, now joined him in New York, spending his days yammering on the telephone to distributors, disc jockeys and the trade papers.

From his earliest days with the Teddy Bears, Spector knew how quickly and easily money could be taken from you in the music business, and how hard it could be to extract what you were owed. But with Lester Sill out of the picture he had finally achieved the total independence, and the total control, he had always craved. Spector no longer needed to go cap in hand to a distributor or major label to finance his recordings. He paid for everything—the musicians, the studio costs, the pressing, the promotion—and he owned everything. Most important, he retained control of the masters. The masters were his fortune and Spector would never let them out of his grasp. For the rest of his life, whenever he was recording, at the end of every session the tapes would be carefully boxed and carried home with him for the night—the gold bars under the mattress—to be brought back to the studio next day.

Philles was now so hot that he no longer needed to plead with distributors to handle his records or pay their bills. Now, if they didn't bow to his terms and pay promptly he could threaten to withhold product, depriving them of any share of future revenue from the seemingly endless flow of hits. “As well as being a musical genius, Phil was also a very good businessman,” Annette says. “He had a natural talent for that. He knows how to cover his ass. He liked musicians, he liked creative people. But he really didn't like the people in the industry, the distributors and so on. He'd talk about the cigar-smoking fatties. He always felt he was butting heads with the industry rather than complementary with it. And he just assumed the posture with everybody that they were an antagonist before they were a friend. He'd come on to people in a very aggressive way.”

Almost from the moment he left school, Spector had kept musicians' hours, often not going to bed before three in the morning, seldom rising before ten. He had a small music room in the office downstairs, with a piano, guitars and tape equipment, where he would usually work until the early hours of the morning, to Annette's growing frustration.

“He never came home for dinner, whether it was cooked or not. Many, many nights I'd phone down. ‘Hello, Phil—where are you?' ‘I'll be right up,' blah, blah, blah. And he never was. He was married to music. And that's okay, but I just didn't know…and it's very difficult when you wait and wait and wait, and then go to the studio and wait and wait.”

Annette had always accepted her husband's traveling, his long absences, but as Philles grew more successful, and his schedule more hectic, so Spector's absences grew more frequent and longer. In the early stages of their relationship, music had been one of the things that bound them together; Spector respected Annette's taste and judgment and would frequently call on her for advice or an opinion about a song. On occasion, she had been enlisted in the studio as a backing singer, or banging a tambourine. But that was no longer the case. Music began to keep them apart. It was as if now that Spector had captured Annette he felt he no longer needed to pay her the attention required to keep her.

As their marriage began to unravel, Dr. Kaplan suggested that the couple should see him together for counseling, but after a handful of sessions Spector gave up on the idea. Instead, he and Annette continued to see Kaplan separately—and drifted further apart.

“Phil was just not available as a husband, partner or friend,” Annette says. “And I made the mistake of believing that whatever he did was right, and I did was wrong, so I never took much initiative or challenged him, even though he may have been wrong in lots of ways about lots of things. For me, our love affair was the courtship: as soon as we were married everything started going to hell.”

Even as Phil Spector was reciting his marriage vows to Annette, he had another girl on his mind. Veronica Bennett was the lead singer of the Ronettes, three spectacularly beautiful girls from Spanish Harlem, who embodied the racial melting pot that was New York. The mother of nineteen-year-old Veronica and her twenty-year-old sister Estelle was half black and half Cherokee, and their father was white. Their eighteen-year-old cousin Nedra Talley was half Spanish.

Of the three girls, Veronica—or Ronnie, as she was known—was the most extrovert; the precocious child who would push herself forward at family gatherings to sing and dance, the attention seeker, the best singer and the natural focal point for the group.

Inspired, like every girl group of the period, by the Chantels' “Maybe”—Nedra Talley remembers sitting in her bedroom and listening to the song “over and over and over again”—the group started singing in local sock hops and talent contests. They landed a job dancing at the Peppermint Lounge, and performed at the disc jockey Murray the K's “caravan of stars” nights at the Brooklyn Fox Theater. The standard demeanor of girl groups of the day was one of demure innocence. Publicity photographs would usually show the groups modestly attired in formals, like high-school prom queens, or in their Sunday best. But the Ronettes looked as if it was Saturday night and they were cruising for trouble—figure-hugging dresses, hair piled into improbable beehives, and lashings of mascara, which transformed the youthful high school girls into vamps. In 1961, the group signed for Colpix, the recording arm of Columbia Pictures, and was put together with the house producer Stu Phillips, who had enjoyed a number 1 hit earlier that same year with the Marcels' “Blue Moon.”

“This wasn't an amateur-looking bunch of little girls who were shy and retiring,” remembers Phillips. “They were nice-looking, trim and danced like crazy, and they had the big hair, which was important in those days. They put on a show. They looked like they could
taste
being stars.”

But try as he might, Phillips couldn't find the right musical formula for the group. They released a handful of singles on Colpix, and the label's RB subsidiary May, under the names Ronnie and the Relatives, and the Ronettes, but without success. They were on the verge of quitting the business altogether when, in the first months of 1963, they met Phil Spector.

Accounts vary as to how this happened. Writing in her autobiography,
Be My Baby,
Ronnie Spector tells the story of how the girls, frustrated with their lack of success, decided to track down Spector themselves, dialing information and asking for the number of Philles Records. When Estelle called, she was put straight through to Spector, who immediately invited the group to audition. Nedra Talley offers a less fanciful account, recalling that Spector was told about the group by his friend Arnold Goland, and went to see them perform at one of Murray the K's shows at the Brooklyn Fox. After the show, he went backstage to introduce himself and invited the group to audition for him. A few days later, the Ronettes duly presented themselves at Mira Sound Studios, where Spector put them through their paces. “He sat there hunched over his piano, attacking it, playing different songs for us,” Nedra Talley says, “and I remember looking at him and thinking, Boy, he's really not much to look at; but he had this reputation for being a boy genius. I was impressed with him in that sense. So it was okay, but what could he bring to us?”

Spector himself was apparently no more impressed with the group as they launched into a rendition of the song on which they had traditionally practiced their three-part harmonies, the old chestnut “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin' Along.” But when Ronnie took the lead on the Frankie Lymon hit “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” he was galvanized. “Stop!” Ronnie would describe him saying. “That's it. That is it!
That
is the voice I've been looking for.”

The problem was that the Ronettes were still under contract to Colpix. Knowing full well that Colpix would balk at any attempt by him to buy out the group's contract, Spector instead suggested the girls tell the label that they were giving up singing to follow other plans.

“They came into Colpix,” Stu Phillips remembers. “And one of them claimed she had nodes on her vocal cords and couldn't sing anymore; another one said she was sick of the business and was going to be a nurse. I said to my boss, Paul Wexler, ‘Don't believe them; I think they're full of shit.' But Paul said, ‘We're not having any success, let them go.' The next thing I hear is that they're on Philles. I put my head in my boss's office and said, ‘I don't want to say I told you so…but I told you so.'”

In March 1963, the Ronettes signed with Philles. Spector quickly moved the group to the top of his list of priorities, and for the next few weeks devoted most of his time to rehearsing them in New York. LaLa Brooks was given an early portent of the Ronettes' growing importance when the Crystals were gathered in Spector's office one day, and the Ronettes walked in, giving every sign of being very much at home. It was the first time the two groups had met. “That was the end of our rehearsal. All of a sudden he wanted to rehearse them.” LaLa also noted a certain chemistry between Spector and the Ronettes' lead singer. “Ronnie was paying a lot of attention to Phil, and he was married to a very nice girl.”

In May 1963, after a few weeks of rehearsal in New York, Spector was ready to take the Ronettes out to California to record. Spector and Ronnie had begun stealing kisses between rehearsals, and it was now clear that, in his mind, Nedra and Estelle were already beginning to fade into the background. Telling them he could not afford to pay the airfares for all three members of the group, Spector flew to Los Angeles with Ronnie—with her mother Beatrice in attendance as chaperone—leaving Nedra and Estelle to make the 3,000-mile journey by car with Bobby Sheen.