Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (30 page)

The record producer Denny Bruce (no relation), who was then playing drums for Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, remembers accompanying Zappa to a meeting with Spector and Bruce in Canter's in the autumn of 1965. (Like Spector, Zappa idolized Bruce, thought he was “a saint.” Zappa's manager, Herb Cohen, had once run a nightclub, Cosmo Alley, which was busted for obscenity when Bruce performed there in 1959, and Cohen and Zappa later released a double album by the comedian,
The Berkeley Concert,
on their Bizarre label.)

Expecting to meet the sharp-suited, wisecracking legend, Denny Bruce was shocked to be confronted by a bloated, ashen-faced figure in a stained sweatshirt and jeans. “It was like he was in jail. And his whole conversation was: ‘You know, the Fourth Amendment…' Not one joke. Nothing.”

In many ways, Bruce was the embodiment of the hipster Spector himself had always yearned to be; the towering, uncompromising iconoclast who had taken on the system. While Spector had fought against the short-armed fatties of the record industry, the legion of uncomprehending straights, and earned only their opprobrium, Bruce had taken on the establishment in a more profound and dangerous way—and paid a far higher price. He was a true martyr to his genius, just as Spector fancied he was a martyr to his.

Bruce became a frequent visitor to the La Collina house. Politics, history, society—these were the stuff of Lenny's shtick, and his travails had made him unusually well versed in law—all subjects that fascinated Spector and on which he was also well informed. “They'd sit there and chitchat for hours,” Emil Farkas remembers, “intellectualizing about how America was going down the drain because there was no freedom and you couldn't get up and say what you liked, et cetera, et cetera. Phil felt that both of them were on the same page—Phil was antiestablishment, anti-cop. It was the whole era. And he loved the fact that Lenny had the balls to stand up to anything and anybody, to tell people they were full of shit. Phil loved that, because that's the way Phil wanted to be himself. The difference was that Phil didn't have the balls to get up on the podium and speak his mind, so he could live that vicariously through Lenny.”

But now that Spector was a man of substance he could do more than just idolize Lenny. He could help him. He took up Bruce's cause, writing a stream of letters to the government, law enforcement agencies and lawyers, pleading on his friend's behalf. He made his offices and staff on Sunset Strip available for Bruce whenever he wanted to use them, and would write out checks when he needed money—which was often. He would drive miles out into the boondocks to support his friend whenever Bruce could find a club willing to book him. He produced an album,
Lenny Bruce Is Out Again,
which was released in October 1965, and financed a fifteen-day residency at the Music Box Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, where Bruce played to largely empty houses. Some regarded Bruce as “an expert leech,” but Spector helped his friend generously and uncomplainingly, and Bruce's appreciation was genuine enough.

One night Spector took his young friends Catherine and Linda to meet Bruce at his house in the Hollywood Hills, prepping his young friends en route. “He was saying, ‘Don't mention the FBI, don't mention the police; Lenny's got some problems and we don't want to make him all sad,'” Catherine remembers. “It was obvious that Phil idolized him, and that this was a special thing we were doing. It felt like he was giving us a special gift.”

At the house, Bruce answered the door and ushered them inside. Catherine was shocked. “I come from a nice middle-class home where my mother always had things looking nice. But this place…there were dishes in the sink, mattresses on the floor, everything filthy. I couldn't understand it. He was living there with his daughter. She was about the same age as me, close enough that I identified and felt so sorry she had to live like this. But Lenny had such a gentle heart and was blazingly intelligent. And he and Phil behaved very lovingly to each other. They were clearly good friends.”

For two hours they sat around talking, Bruce disappearing from time to time—presumably, Catherine thought, to fix. When finally he began to nod out, Spector told them it was time to go. As they left, he embraced Bruce and kissed him tenderly on the cheek.

14

River Deep, Mountain Low

N
umber 1 for three weeks, seven weeks in the Top 3, “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'” had brought Phil Spector the biggest hit of his career, at a time when he needed it most, and for a while the momentum it generated seemed unstoppable.

As a reward for their efforts, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil might have expected Spector to gift them with the follow-up. Instead, he turned back to another favored songwriting partnership, Goffin and King. Their collaboration, “Just Once in My Life,” closely modeled on “Lovin' Feelin'” with its lavish orchestration and opening section sung by Bill Medley, reached number 9 in May 1965. A third single, “Hung on You,” stalled, until disc jockeys flipped the record and began playing the B-side—an impassioned version of the standard “Unchained Melody” sung entirely by Bobby Hatfield. The record reached number 4 in September.

But all was not well between Spector and the Righteous Brothers. Spector's ploy of appending his name to “There's a Woman”—the “piece of shit” composed by Medley and Hatfield that had appeared on the B-side of “Lovin' Feelin'”—thus entitling himself to a third of the songwriting royalties, still rankled. And Medley was proving to be a far more independent-minded figure than Spector was used to dealing with.

From the moment “Lovin' Feelin'” had begun its rise up the charts, Medley had been agitating with Spector to release an album to capitalize on the single's success. But Spector balked at producing one without another couple of hits to include. When Larry Levine weighed in on Medley's behalf, Spector relented, agreeing to let Medley, who fancied himself a producer (he had overseen a handful of songs by the pair at Moonglow), bring the project to fruition.

The result was distinctly mediocre but successful enough to persuade Spector to relent once more when Medley began demanding to produce more tracks for a second album.
Just Once in My Life…,
released in May 1965, contained only two productions by Spector, the single of the same name and “Unchained Melody.”

To make matters worse, relations between the Brothers themselves were also deteriorating. Medley's growing self-importance was a cause of concern not only to Spector but also to his partner Bobby Hatfield. Hatfield had never quite got over being relegated to the secondary role on the pair's greatest hit, “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin',” and as Medley flexed his muscles in his studio, Hatfield began to feel even more the junior partner. Emboldened by his own starring role in “Unchained Melody,” Hatfield now threatened to sever the partnership altogether and go solo.

Spector, suddenly alarmed at the prospect of seeing his greatest asset evaporate before his eyes, suggested a compromise—an album for the Christmas market, entitled
Back to Back,
that would give both singers equal solo prominence and that would also include their own compositions. Medley would produce his own songs; Spector would produce Hatfield's.

It was during the recording of the album that matters became ever more vexatious. Suspicious of R. J. van Hoogten's accounting, the Brothers had ordered an audit of Moonglow's books, which revealed that van Hoogten had allegedly shortchanged them by some $28,000 on royalties owed for their earlier recordings. Meanwhile, van Hoogten was pursuing his own argument with Spector. Under the original contract between Philles and Moonglow, Spector had the rights to release Righteous Brothers recordings only in America, Canada and the U.K. Van Hoogten planned to capitalize on the Brothers' success by releasing their recordings in other territories, but now alleged that Spector had failed to turn over a number of masters.

Van Hoogten dispatched a letter to Spector, alleging breach of contract and terminating his agreement with Philles, at the same time instructing the Righteous Brothers to cease all recording with Spector forthwith. Convinced that they could make it without Phil Spector, and seeing an opportunity to escape their obligations to both their paymasters, Medley and Hatfield filed lawsuits against both van Hoogten and Spector, claiming that because van Hoogten had breached their Moonglow contract, his contract with Spector was no longer enforceable.

Desperate to bring the proposed Christmas album to completion, Spector attempted to persuade the Brothers to return to the studio, but they declined, letting it be known that they were being courted by a rival company, MGM. Spector promptly riffled through the tapes of unreleased material produced by Medley and came up with six songs that he slapped on the album,
Back to Back,
which was released in December.

Medley and Hatfield were furious. In January 1966, an item in
Billboard
announced that the pair had signed for MGM. Spector immediately filed suit against MGM. In late January, the Righteous Brothers went into the studio to cut their first single for MGM, “(You're My) Soul and Inspiration.” The song's writers were Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Forgetting how he had overlooked the writers after “Lovin' Feelin'” and stung by what he perceived as a massive betrayal, Spector pleaded with Mann and Weil to withdraw the song—but to no avail. In May, “(You're My) Soul and Inspiration” went to number 1. The Brothers enjoyed only two more Top 40 hits for MGM before fading away. It would be a further eight years of struggle, breakup and reconciliation before they were back in the Top 10.

For Spector, not even the $600,000 he extracted in settlement from MGM could assuage his fury at his prize assets deserting him. He would never forgive them. Three years later, in 1969, talking to Jann Wenner of
Rolling Stone,
he would dismiss the Brothers as “a strange group in that they really were non-intellectual and unable to comprehend success. They couldn't understand it and couldn't live with it and accept it for what it really was. They thought it was something that could be obtained very easily and once it was attained, it could be consistently obtained…

“I just think it was a great loss, because the two of them weren't exceptional talents, but they did have a musical contribution to make. I loved them: I thought they were a tremendous expression for myself. I think they resented being an expression. I think now if they had it to do again, they never would have left.”

Even those closest to Spector felt the depth of his hurt. Don Randi was not only one of the mainstays of the Wrecking Crew; he regarded himself as Spector's friend. Like all of the Crew, Randi played on a variety of sessions around town. When he was called in by MGM to play a Righteous Brothers session, Randi was happy to be reunited with Hatfield and Medley, and with the paycheck.

“And about a week later I got a call from Phil. ‘Why did you work for them?' ‘Why did I work for who?' ‘You know who I'm talking about…Bill and Bobby.' He said, ‘How could you do that? They were my artists!' I said, ‘Phil, I work for who I want. If you want me to work exclusive to you, I've got a price and I'd be glad to do it.'

“He said, ‘You should have walked out.' ‘I can't walk out!' I think he felt really bad because he could have gone on and on with Bill and Bobby. But that was it with Phil and me. Not only that. After that, Jack Nitzsche does a date for Lester Sill. So I was helping him out. He asked me to bring something down to Lester; I was working next door. So I dropped the music off. And Lester Sill goes, ‘Get out of here! And don't you ever come down to my sessions.' I didn't understand what the fuck was going on. But Lester hated Phil at that point, and because he knew I was close to Phil…”

It would be more than twenty years before Randi worked with Spector again.

         

The farrago over the Righteous Brothers was not the only thing preoccupying Spector in the autumn of 1965. He had been asked to work as associate producer and musical director on
The Big TNT Show,
a televised concert modeled on
The TAMI Show,
which had aired the previous year and been so instrumental in breaking the Rolling Stones and introducing James Brown to a rock and roll audience.

Recorded on two days at the end of November at the Moulin Rouge Theatre,
The Big TNT Show
presented a curiously mixed bag of performers, reflecting the diversity of the pop charts at that time. Among them were the current heartthrobs of Sunset Strip, the Byrds; the English singer Petula Clark; the folksinger Donovan; country singer Roger Miller and RB acts Bo Diddley and Ray Charles. (Robert Marchese, the stage manager of the show, would enjoy telling the story of how Charles approached Spector during the recording. “Are you Mr. Phil Spector?” Charles asked. “Yes.” “Are you the Boy Genius?” “Yes.” “Are you the inventor of the Wall of Sound?” “Yes.” “Are you the guy who had over twenty hit singles in a row?” “Yes.” “Then, Mr. Spector, how come there's no toilet paper in the bathroom?”) There was the odd spectacle of the folksinger Joan Baez singing “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin',” accompanied by Spector himself on piano. But the undisputed stars of the show were its closing act, Ike and Tina Turner.

Ike Turner was one of the unsung giants of RB. Guitarist, pianist, producer and bandleader, Turner's career had started when he was eleven years old, playing piano behind the blues singers Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Nighthawk. He had worked as a disc jockey, arranged and played piano on what is widely regarded as the first proper rock and roll record, “Rocket 88,” a number 1 RB hit for Jackie Brenston in 1951; worked as a talent scout for Sun and Modern records, and produced and played on dozens of sessions for blues performers like Elmore James, B.B. King and Howlin' Wolf.

In 1959, in St. Louis, he discovered an eighteen-year-old singer named Annie Mae Bullock and recruited her as the vocalist for his group, the Rhythm Kings. He changed her name to Tina, and they married in a wedding parlor in Tijuana. Ike made his new bride the centerpiece of a live revue, featuring a full band and a trio of shimmying backing singers, the Ikettes, with Tina herself a vision of lust incarnate, prowling the stage like a lioness in heat, wig flying, legs pumping like pistons in heart-attack miniskirts. By the mid-'60s the Ike and Tina Turner Revue rivaled James Brown as the most thrilling act in rhythm and blues, and had enjoyed a string of hits on the RB charts with songs like “It's Gonna Work Out Fine” and “Fool in Love.” What they had not done, however, was break out of the “chitlin' circuit” of black clubs and theaters into the mainstream.

Spector had seen the Ike and Tina Turner Revue more than once, and he loved them with a passion. “That word—revue…” he would recall later. “It means something symbolic; it has class. And the show was just mesmerizing; I said, God, if I could make a number-one record with her she could go on
Ed Sullivan,
she could go to Las Vegas; she could break the color barrier. I was just devastated by her.”

Most of all, he loved Tina's voice. Barbara Alston, Darlene Love, LaLa Brooks and Ronnie Bennett—all had offered different expressions of the soulful voice that Spector so admired and loved to work with. But Tina was something else again—raw carnality, hurt, passion, power—she was “The Voice” incarnate.

For months, as he surveyed his crumbling empire, a single question had been gnawing at Spector: what next? Watching Tina Turner bring the house down on
The TNT Show,
he knew he had his answer.

What Spector did not need, however, was her husband. Ike Turner's years on the road had earned him a reputation for being suspicious, truculent and volatile. He was particularly possessive of Tina. With Danny Davis in tow, Spector visited Turner at home and spelled out his plan. He would record Tina, and he would give her a number 1 record that would transform her and Ike's career, break them out of the RB circuit into the mainstream and make their fortune. His only stipulation was that Ike himself would have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

“Ike was a doll,” Spector remembers. “Because he was interested in Tina, other women. He was not interested in drugs at the time. He'd never had a drug in his life. He was a gun-carrying black man who grew up in the South; who had to make it on his own; who pistol-whipped his band; who had them on time
…like that.
Whose revue was spot-on. Whose Ikettes moved. Who had to compete with Bobby ‘Blue' Bland, B.B. King, Bo Diddley, James Brown and all those people. He had to grow up, top-book himself…You ever think why the black artists of the '40s called themselves what they did: the jazz artists? They couldn't get booked. They called themselves Count Basie; Duke Ellington, Nat ‘King' Cole. To shove it up the white promoters, y'know? You call me King Cole. You call me Count Basie. They had to sleep, of course, in the barn; but they always kept that Count, King…They started it all.

“But Ike was easy to deal with. I had no problem with him. See, when you're going straight ahead, you have blinders on. Everybody dealt with Ike like
Ike Turner
! I didn't deal with Ike like Ike Turner.”

Danny Davis would remember it differently. Spector, he would later recall, was “scared to death of Ike.”

But Turner accepted Spector's request unhesitatingly. “Phil said he wanted to produce a record on Tina and would I agree to let him do it,” he recalls. “He said he didn't want me to interfere. Well, why would I interfere? My attitude was, if you think that you can do it, then take a shot…”

Ike made only one stipulation. While he agreed that he would have nothing to do with the record, his name must appear on it.

Ike and Tina were contracted to Loma Records, the RB subsidiary of Warner Bros. Spector paid $20,000 to lease their contract to Philles, and in the first weeks of 1966 set about planning the record that would decide his future.

One by one, Spector's options had closed down. The Righteous Brothers had gone. The Ronettes had ground to a halt. The glory days of Philles were a fast-receding memory. Spector knew this was his last throw of the dice. For the last three years, his success had been built on a kind of incremental gigantism—from “He's a Rebel” to “Be My Baby” to “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'”—each bigger, bolder, more ambitious and grandiloquent than the last. Spector didn't do small. Now, like a beleaguered general, he marshaled all his forces for the last stand.