Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (24 page)

As Philles' West Coast promotions man, Sonny Bono was in a better position than most to realize that the Wall of Sound was beginning to crumble. Making his customary round of the local radio stations to promote “Walking in the Rain,” Bono had received the same ominous message. When he played the song to a usually reliable DJ at the L.A. radio station KFWB, the response was distinctly lukewarm. “He gave me a less than enthusiastic look—actually a grimace,” Bono would later recall. “‘You know, the thunder and the tricks and the Wall of Sound…it kinda sounds tired.'”

Steeling himself, Bono telephoned Spector to recount the conversation. It was, he later recalled, “my fatal mistake.” There was an agonizingly long pause at the other end of the line that Bono recognized as his death sentence.

Bono's gaffe fueled the growing resentment that Spector had been feeling toward his gofer. After spending almost two years in Spector's shadow, quietly watching and learning, Bono had begun making efforts to further his own and Cher's careers. In the spring of 1964 he wrote a song called “Baby Don't Go” and produced a demo of himself performing it with Cher. Bono played it to Spector in the hope that he would produce the song for release. Spector passed, but he did offer Bono $500 for half the publishing rights. Encouraged, Bono began producing records on the side for the Vault and Reprise labels. To Spector, it all smelled dangerously of disloyalty. The telephone call was the final straw. Spector now decided to dispense with Bono's services. Rather than tell him personally, Spector instructed Danny Davis to deliver the coup de grâce by telephone from New York. Bono left without so much as a good-bye.

12

“The Last Word in Tomorrow's Sound Today”

A
t first glance, the Righteous Brothers presented a picture of Mutt-'n'-Jeff incongruity. Bill Medley was tall, dark and cadaverous with an undertaker's pallor; Bobby Hatfield, short, fair, fresh-faced and button-nosed. But improbable as they might have looked, they were the blackest white singers Phil Spector had ever heard. Medley sang in a dark and throaty baritone; Hatfield, in a keening tenor, which reminded Spector of one of his favorite singers, Clyde McPhatter. Together, their sound was pure, impassioned storefront gospel—“righteous,” in the opinion of the black servicemen at the El Toro Marine base in San Diego where they often performed: hence the name. In 1962, they signed for a small Los Angeles label, Moonglow. Their first single, the exuberant “Little Latin Lupe Lu,” went to number 39 in 1963. “Koko Joe”—a cover of an RB hit for Don and Dewey that had been written by Sonny Bono in his days as an AR man at Specialty—and a third single, “My Babe,” written by Medley and Hatfield, both failed. All these records were made at Gold Star, and it was his old friend Stan Ross who first alerted Spector to the group. The Righteous Brothers had also performed on a bill at the Cow Palace in San Francisco with the Ronettes, where Spector himself appeared as “guest” leader of the band, quietly standing at the back of the stage, playing guitar.

Spector was galvanized—not only by the Brothers' singing, but also by the prospect they offered of a way out of his impasse. Shooting the messenger had not altered the harsh truth that Sonny Bono had delivered to Spector. The Wall of Sound—more specifically, the girl group sound
—was
getting kind of tired. And even Spector was beginning to recognize it. Jack Nitzsche would later recall how recording the Ronettes' follow-up to “Walking in the Rain,” “Born to Be Together,” Spector had taken him to one side and told him, “It's all over. It's over. It's not here anymore.” “The enthusiasm was gone,” Nitzsche said. “We had done it so many times. The musicians were changing. They didn't want to work overtime for a deal. Everybody. It just wasn't the same spirit anymore. The spirit of cooperation started to change. And for Phil as well. It was a combination of things, and it just stopped being so much fun. The Beatles were coming…”

         

The Righteous Brothers provided a vision of redemption. Not only did they have precisely the kind of soulful voices Spector loved, but the fact that they were white men, he reasoned, would make them easier to sell to radio, television and a pop audience increasingly enamored of British pop groups. However, there was a downside to all this: Spector had grown used to working with artists he could easily manipulate and control; the Righteous Brothers had opinions of their own. Furthermore, they were already contracted to Moonglow—the best Spector could do was arrange a deal leasing them to Philles, rather than signing them directly, as he would have wished. But these, he believed, were just minor obstacles. Only later would they become major ones.

The deal that Spector signed with Moonglow's boss, R. J. van Hoogten, gave him the rights to record and release the Righteous Brothers on Philles in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, while Moonglow retained the rights for all other territories.

In search of material for his new signing, Spector turned back to Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, sending them copies of the Righteous Brothers' Moonglow recordings. A new hit from the Motown group, the Four Tops, was rising up the charts at the time, the deliciously romantic “Baby I Need Your Loving.” “[The Righteous Brothers] were singing Sam and Dave kind of stuff,” Barry Mann later recalled. “We thought, Well, it would be great to do a ballad. We loved ‘Baby I Need Your Loving' and it was kind of an inspiration…”

Sketching out a preliminary verse and chorus, the two songwriters flew out to Los Angeles, where Spector joined them in their suite at the Chateau Marmont to develop the song. The tune that Mann and Weil had written was in the same medium tempo, and with all the heart-clutching, anthemic quality of the Four Tops' song—and more. Cynthia Weil's lyric took the Four Tops' theme of yearning and transmuted it into loss, starkly declaring in its opening lines the evidence of a dying love—“You never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your lips…” Even the title was a respectful nod to the song's original inspiration: “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'.” Spector loved it but suggested that the tempo should be slower still, and added a masterstroke—a dramatic middle section, measured by a bass riff modeled on “La Bamba.” With the change in tempo and the addition of the new section the finished song was almost twice as long as Mann and Weil's original demo—almost twice as long as any pop song of the time. But Spector refused to change a note. As autumn turned to winter, he prepared to make the biggest record of his life.

         

Despite his deepening involvement with Ronnie, and the acrimonious way in which their marriage had ended, Spector had been unable to let go of Annette. He had never admitted his infidelity, and he pleaded with her for them to get back together again, telling her that he would even drop the Ronettes from their contract if she would return to him. But for Annette it was impossible. “I just said, ‘No way.' It devastated me.”

By early 1964 she had moved out of the apartment on Sixty-second Street, but Spector would occasionally drop by to see her in her new home—“If I'd had a shred of self-respect at that point I would never have let him in the door”—and they spoke frequently on the phone. With his professional associates, he would wear his customary face of cocksure bravado and self-confidence. There were few people to whom he would dare to confide his fears, but Annette was one of them. Sometimes she would answer the telephone at three or four in the morning to find him on the other end of the line in California, anxiously seeking reassurance that he had not lost his gift, or his position, at the summit of the pop music hierarchy.

“It would be: ‘Okay, the Beatles are number one, and the Stones are number two, but am I before Bob Dylan or after Bob Dylan?' And I'd say, ‘No, you're definitely number three and Dylan's number four'—even though I didn't really think so. He never talked about Dylan's lyrics or his music. But always these conversations about where Phil fit in.”

Now, as Spector worked with Mann and Weil at the Chateau Marmont on the new song for the Righteous Brothers, Annette flew out from New York to see him, staying with him at Brynmar, the modest, Spanish-style house that Spector rented in the Hollywood Hills. One night he played her a tape of the song-in-progress. Annette thought it was wonderful. “And then Phil told me that he'd come up with the phrase ‘You've lost that lovin' feeling' and that it was written for me. It wasn't nice when he said that. Because he was totally another woman's man. I just remember at five in the morning I bolted up and said, ‘I'm out of here.' I grabbed my stuff, and I went back to New York on the train that day.”

Apparently unperturbed, Spector pressed on with his preparations for the sessions. For the first time since “He's a Rebel,” two and a half years earlier, Jack Nitzsche had told Spector that he was unavailable. Nitzsche had begun to see a world beyond Phil Spector. When the Rolling Stones recorded some sessions at the RCA Studios in November, he was invited to sit in on keyboards, beginning a relationship with the group that would flourish over the next few years. Working with the Stones was a liberating experience for Nitzsche. He told Bill Wyman that they were “the first rock and roll band he'd met that were intelligent,” and he relished the freedom to experiment and the way the Stones followed their own instincts in the studio. “The great new thing about them was, they'd record a song the way they had written it,” Nitzsche said. “If it didn't work, nobody thought twice about making it a tango! They tried every way possible. Nobody had the big ego thing about keeping a song a certain way. That changed me. That was the first really free feeling I had in the studio.” Over the next two years, Nitzsche would become something of a “sixth Stone” in the recording studio, playing piano and harpsichord on songs including “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction,” “Play with Fire” and “Let's Spend the Night Together.”

Nitzsche had also accepted an offer to work as the arranger on
The TAMI Show—
TAMI stood for Teenage Awards Music International—a television special that brought together the cream of American and British Invasion performers, including the Stones, the Beach Boys, the Supremes and James Brown. When Nitzsche told Spector he was unable to arrange the Righteous Brothers session, a disgruntled Spector accused him of “a lack of loyalty” (notwithstanding the fact that he agreed to make a cameo appearance on
The TAMI Show
himself). Instead, he was obliged to take on another arranger, Gene Page.

When Spector first played “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'” to the Righteous Brothers on the piano in Gold Star, they were unimpressed. They were used to singing frenetic, gospel-tinged rhythm and blues; this sounded like a dirge. Furthermore, they were used to singing in unison: Spector wanted Medley to take the first two verses solo, with Hatfield only joining him when the song was more than halfway through.

“Bill really didn't want to do it,” Larry Levine remembers. “He was the vocal one. He said, ‘This is not right, because we're an act; we sing everything together, but Bobby sings almost nothing in this; it's all me.' They really weren't impressed. And I remember saying to Bill, ‘How could you not be excited by this? This could be a number-one record, a smash, and you're not excited!'”

But not even Spector could have guessed that what he was to conjure over the next two weeks in Gold Star's Studio A would be his greatest record ever, a work of epic grandeur that would become the most played pop single of all time.

From the first magisterial incantation of Bill Medley's deep, rich baritone—sounding as if it were echoing across a storm-tossed sea, to the measured beat of distant chiming bells—“You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'” is a record that stops the heart. For the first two verses Medley beseeches and coaxes, laying bare the depths of his desolation. From the far distance, a choir, strings and the rattle of tambourines bear witness to his suffering, the verse punctuated by a bass note of almost funereal sorrow. Now the song builds teasingly to the second, glorious chorus, a storm no sooner conjured than it subsides into the middle section, as hushed and heartfelt as a prayer. A momentary respite, for now—fully two minutes, three seconds into the song—Bobby Hatfield's voice enters, as if from the wings, to engage in a furious call-and-response with his partner, each, it seems, urging the other to further extremes of despair. Now the fatalistic anguish of loss becomes a desperate plea for reconciliation and redemption—“
Bring back that lovin' feelin'
”—a plea that finally drifts into a far-distant silence, leaving you stunned in its wake. A masterpiece of chiaroscuro, of searing emotional light and darkness, of pain and catharsis, “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'” is the very summit of the producer's art.

Larry Levine for one was convinced that he had been present at a moment of greatness. “Absolutely, there was not a shadow of doubt in my mind about that. Particularly when it got to the ending, and it went to the congas—that was so amazing. But I remember Phil pacing up and down. His big concern that he voiced to me was: ‘I don't know…it's the only song I've ever done without a backbeat; it doesn't have a backbeat, something you can tie on to, and I don't know if it's going to work.'

“There was an AR guy doing something else at Gold Star, a friend of Phil's, and I remember Phil brought him into the control room. Phil wanted this guy to hear the song, because he really felt his input was meaningful. He was the first person to hear it, and so I played it back, and this guy said, ‘Play it again.' So I did, and he said, ‘Play it again. This is the greatest thing I ever heard.' So that's what Phil had even before he took the record back to New York.”

Spector's own reservations about the record were compounded by its duration. At a time when most singles ran no longer than two minutes, thirty seconds, “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'” clocked in at an unprecedented 3:46. But Spector refused to cut a second of it and, in a hapless attempt to dupe radio programmers, printed a timing of 3:05 on the label.

The response from programmers and disc jockeys to the song was one of bemused incredulity. Bill Walsh, an independent promotions man in Boston, had long been one of Spector's most ardent champions and reliable sounding boards—the first person to whom Spector would send test pressings of each new release, soliciting an opinion. Walsh was “blown away” when he heard “Lovin' Feelin'.” “But people just didn't get it,” he remembers. “A common complaint was: ‘It's too fucking long. Why don't you edit it, cut out a verse? We'd be able to play it then.' Secondly: ‘It sounds like it's the wrong speed. He keeps yelling!' The Bill Gavin ‘sheet,' which was the bible of the radio industry, actually said ‘blue-eyed soul has gone too far'! My view was: Are you people insane? I remember I had to lock the door and pin this program director in Providence, Rhode Island, up against the wall, just to prove my point. I said, ‘Do nothing else for the next five minutes but listen to this record, and bring up the volume while you're about it.' I got that record played under force and duress. But Phil's music required undivided attention, and not everybody could understand that.”

But whatever the initial reservations of the radio industry, the song was unstoppable. By mid-December, five weeks after its release, “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'” had entered the Top 10. By Christmas it was number 1.