Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (28 page)

Along with the house, he acquired all of the furnishings, the French Empire furniture, the marble-topped consoles and the nineteenth-century oil paintings. Life-sized blackamoors, dressed in gold leaf, lined the hallway; a Steinway grand piano stood in the living room. In the library, Spector installed a mammoth sound system, with industrialsized speakers from Gold Star, and a pool table. Just as he did in the studio, he kept the air-conditioning set to almost arctic temperature, the drapes closed to shroud the house in a perpetual twilight. In the sitting room a large fish tank provided the main source of illumination. “It was dark, dark, dark—like a dungeon,” one visitor remembers. The entrance hall became his gallery, where over the years Spector would hang photographs of himself with sundry music celebrities, actors and sports stars—some simply taped over the nineteenth-century oils. For Spector, any association with fame, no matter how tenuous, was an affirmation of his own status. The photographs were his trophies.

There was an oil painting of Muhammad Ali; signed photographs of the basketball player Wilt Chamberlain, Elvis Presley and Fred Astaire. Spector adored Astaire, once entertained him at the La Collina house and continued to correspond with him for years afterward. Spector could never resist kitsch ephemera or a joke-shop novelty, and scattered around the house were whoopee cushions and chattering teeth, Batman paraphernalia, and satin cushions from the tourist shops on Hollywood Boulevard embroidered with the names of his heroes Stan Laurel and Bela Lugosi.

Over the years the house would become like a menagerie. Shortly after he'd moved in, a friend gave Spector a live chicken as a joke. Taking the joke one step further, he kept it upstairs in its own room, feeding and looking after it until the novelty waned. He kept a mynah bird in the kitchen, and an ostrich in a pen in the backyard, as well as a succession of dogs of varying sizes and degrees of ferocity.

Visitors to the house thought it looked “like a stage set,” with Spector, as one described him, “like Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

“It was Phil's idea of being classy,” Michael Spencer says. Spector employed a cook, George Johnson, who had worked for Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and now served dinner on white linen tablecloths with silver service.

When Spector told Annette he was moving into a big Hollywood mansion, her response was scathing. “I thought, How foolish is that. I asked him, ‘Why? What do you need that for?' And the answer was because it made him feel that he was worth something.”

After almost two years of living in limbo, Annette had finally asked for a divorce. Spector prevaricated, saying that she would have to arrange it herself. But eventually he relented, and late in 1965 he flew to Tijuana to obtain a Mexican divorce. Annette was granted $100,000 alimony, spread across five years of weekly payments—half of Spector's income for the one year that they had been married. As a condition of the settlement, she was also obliged to sign papers relinquishing her position as vice president of Philles, forsaking any further income from the company. She kept her pear-shaped diamond engagement ring, which she still wears today.

         

Casting around for acts that could connect him to a new audience, in the summer of 1965 Spector turned his attention to a New York group called the Young Rascals, a white rock band who played in a black soul music style; precisely the recipe that had made the Righteous Brothers so successful. The leader of the Rascals was a gifted singer and writer named Felix Cavaliere, who had occasionally performed at the Peppermint Lounge when the Ronettes were dancers there, and it was Ronnie who first alerted Spector to the group.

Spector was not the only person with his eye on the Rascals. The group was managed by the New York promoter Sid Bernstein—the man who brought the Beatles to Shea Stadium. Bernstein's stunt of broadcasting a message on the electronic scoreboard at Shea—The Rascals Are Coming!—during their performance angered the Beatles but created a palpable buzz of excitement around his young protégés. Bernstein had also been courting a number of industry figures, Jerry Wexler at Atlantic among them.

Wexler traveled out to Long Island, where the Rascals had a residency at the Barge, a floating club moored off Westhampton Beach. “Everyone from the music business was there; Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, about three different lawyers, the Aberbachs,” Wexler remembers. “And somehow Jerry and Mike seemed to have some sort of clutch on the guys from the band. Every time I tried to talk to them, Jerry and Mike would whisk them away to the toilet.”

Wexler wanted to sign the group to Atlantic, and when Bernstein told him that Phil Spector was in town on a shopping expedition and would be meeting with the Rascals that night, Wexler immediately called Ahmet Ertegun, who had a house on Long Island, and asked him to get out to the Barge and clinch the deal. That night, after the show, Ertegun and Spector each took turns with the group for what Wexler describes as “a riffing contest.” It was the old master versus the cocky apprentice, “strangely Oedipal,” Wexler says. “But Ahmet wiped Phil out. As they say in the blues, don't mess with the messer. And Ahmet was the messer.”

The Young Rascals' first single for Atlantic, “I Ain't Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore,” reached number 52 in the charts later that year, presaging a run of hits for the band over the next four years.

Having failed to secure a white RB group, Spector now turned his attention to the coming genre of folk rock. He had been sent a demo of a song called “Do You Believe in Magic,” by a New York group called the Lovin' Spoonful. Led by a young folksinger named John Sebastian, the Spoonful played a ragged, slap-happy variant of jugband music. Spector thought he could make something of it and, with Jack Nitzsche in tow, he went to see the group perform at the Night Owl Cafe in Greenwich Village and offered them a deal. But Sebastian shrewdly reckoned that the Spoonful's singular charm and personability would be swept away in the Wall of Sound and turned down Spector's offer. “Do You Believe in Magic” entered the charts in September of that year, rising to number 9.

Spector finally found what he was looking for on the Sunset Strip. The Modern Folk Quartet had started life as a traditional folk outfit modeled on the Weavers and the Kingston Trio—all acoustic guitars and close harmonies. But following the example of other erstwhile folkies like the Byrds, and the Mamas and the Papas, they had gone electric, securing a residency at the new cradle of folk rock, the Trip. Spector met with the group's manager Herb Cohen, and made a deal, and over the last weeks of summer set about rehearsing the group at the house on La Collina.

“We'd go over there just about every day,” remembers Henry Diltz, who sang and played banjo in the group. “Phil would be upstairs somewhere. If we were supposed to get there at one he would show up at four. We'd go in and play pool, have a few tokes in the garden, and eventually he'd come down the stairs—‘Oh, you guys are here!' He'd sit at the piano, we'd stand around him and sing harmonies—old '50s songs, different things. It was like a musical boot camp.”

To polish their musicianship, Spector added Diltz and his fellow member Jerry Yester to his army of musicians on sessions for the Righteous Brothers and the Ronettes.

“I remember sitting next to Barney Kessel, thinking how in the world am I next to this giant?” Diltz says. “I couldn't even read the lead sheet. Jack Nitzsche would walk through the room and plonk it in front of you. It would say five-string banjo—F sharp 7…sus 4. I could play chords, but I couldn't for the life of me understand this. And Jerry would lean over and whisper ‘Put your little finger here…'—talking me through it. They were beautiful chords, like big band chords, and I was just an amateur.”

One night, Spector even joined the MFQ onstage at the Trip, playing twelve-string guitar as they sang “Spanish Harlem.” After several weeks, Spector finally took the group into Gold Star to make their first recording, a song called “This Could Be the Night,” which had been brought to Spector by a young Los Angeles songwriter named Harry Nilsson. Nilsson had written the song as a tribute to Brian Wilson. Spector's production sounded as if it had been recorded in a school gymnasium—a vibrantly echoing mélange of chiming guitars, bells and exuberant, sunny harmonies. It could—oh, the irony!—almost have been a Beach Boys record. Brian Wilson happened to visit Gold Star as the song was being completed.

“We could see him in the recording booth, in his robe and slippers,” Diltz remembers, “sitting there in silence, playing our song over and over, for what seemed like hours. He was our god, and he was there because Spector was a god to him.”

“This Could Be the Night” was a breath of fresh air, the most contemporary-sounding record Spector had made in a year. But his nerve failed him. Once again racked by uncertainty, Spector prevaricated and put the recording on the shelf.

“We thought we'd made it,” Diltz remembers. “Phil Spector's produced our song; Brian Wilson is in love with it. We sat around for weeks waiting, and nothing happened. We'd call the office and nobody would know anything. I've since come to understand that this was a period when Phil had become paranoid about putting out a song that wouldn't be number one. He didn't want to put out something that would only make it to ten or seven. And we were an experiment. He wasn't sure enough that it was going to be the smash hit that he needed it to be, because of who he was.”

         

He bought a Rolls-Royce and opened an office on the Strip, in the Sunset Building, a five-minute walk from the house on La Collina, although, of course, he would always be driven.

Danny Davis moved from New York to handle the business, but Spector would visit each day, holding court behind a desk like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, set on a raised dais, “like a throne,” as one friend remembers. Pictures of Ronnie covered the walls—“like some kind of bizarre shrine,” she would reflect later—along with a Picasso drawing,
The Matador,
which Spector had bought from Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

He had developed a new enthusiasm: karate. Watching television one night Spector was enthralled to see a martial arts expert named Santi Josol demonstrating how to smash a brick in half with the blade of his hand. Josol and his partner, Victor Lipton, ran a martial arts school called the Tokyo Karate Federation, which had walk-up premises above a store on Santa Monica Boulevard, close to Gold Star Studios. Spector hired Josol and Lipton as sometime bodyguards and to teach him karate. At the same time, Jack Nitzsche took up fencing, and for a while both men would walk around in their respective uniforms, Spector in his karate gi, Nitzsche in his fencing bags, as if they were the latest fashion statement.

Spector became so enamored of karate that he invested in the Tokyo Karate Federation, financing a second studio in Culver City. Too busy to take care of Spector's bodyguard duties, Josol introduced him to another martial arts expert, Emil Farkas. The son of Holocaust survivors, Farkas was born in Hungary and migrated to Canada with his family in 1956, after a popular uprising was quashed by Soviet troops. To defend himself against anti-Semitic slights, Farkas took up martial arts. By the age of eighteen he held black belts in both judo and karate. He was just twenty-two when he took the job as Spector's bodyguard, along with another karate expert named Lazlo.

To Farkas it seemed that having bodyguards was more of a status symbol for his new employer than a necessity. “My feeling was that it was the old story of when you reach a certain level of money, what's the first thing you do? Buy a limousine. And then you need a chauffeur. Then you need a big house. And what else makes you a bit bigger than the other guy? Bodyguards—whether you actually need them or not.”

Unless he was doing a session, Spector would seldom leave the mansion before ten at night; the primped-up crown prince of pop, clad in his Doc Holliday suits and waistcoats, his Ben Franklin shades, his Beau Gentry ruffled shirts and his Beatle boots from Lennie's Boot Parlour, enclosed in the walnut and leather sanctuary of the Rolls, descending to the clubs along the Strip to receive the homage of his subjects.

“Say we go to the Whisky or the Trip,” Farkas remembers. “Everybody would be standing in line and Phil would just walk to the front and somebody would object to this and Phil would say ‘Fuck you,' because he knew we were behind him. In that sense it empowered him to be able to push people around. And for Phil it always had to be the front table, so anybody who was performing would come up and ‘Hey, Phil…' And for them it would be like ‘I know Phil Spector…' He liked to be recognized, he liked people running up to him. And he'd be like the king of the mountain. He
was
the king of the mountain. He was the guy that had the touch.”

Another friend from this period remembers him as “the lurking little boy. Always intrigued, yet intimidated by his surroundings. Phil was a stargazer himself, so he loved to be gazed at, especially by stars. He would sit at a table with someone but never allow himself to engage in any real conversation—he was too busy absorbing everything that was happening around him, and he liked to sit with people who would draw attention, thereby drawing attention to himself. Oh, there's Billy Wyman, he's one of the Rolling Stones. Who's he with? Oh, that's Phil Spector the famous record producer…”

But once back in the mansion, Spector was a man who for all his success and recognition seemed to Farkas curiously dislocated, empty. A man who had climbed to the top of the mountain only to find there was nothing there after all. “Phil was like a guy who had everything but didn't know what to do with himself. He'd sit there and say, ‘What shall we do now?' He was like a little kid in that way. It was sad. Here was a guy who had everything, but most of the time he didn't know where he was going from one step to the next. In many ways, he was a lonely guy. He needed people around him. Half the time we'd just hang out, watch television and chitchat.