Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (31 page)

In search of a song that would do justice to his ambitions he turned back to the writers with whom he had enjoyed his greatest run of success, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. In the two years since they'd last worked with Spector, Barry and Greenwich had enjoyed a string of hits at Red Bird. But now Red Bird had folded, and their marriage with it; they divorced in December 1965, just a few weeks before Spector approached them. But despite the emotional upheaval in their own lives, despite the lingering ill feeling over “Chapel of Love,” Greenwich and Barry agreed to Spector's request. As a gesture of conciliation—and in a demonstration of his own pressing need—rather than insist they come to Los Angeles, Spector flew to New York and together they began to work on new material. “It was like vomiting it out,” Greenwich told the writer Ken Emerson. In less than a week they had produced three new songs.

Was “River Deep—Mountain High” the best? Certainly it was the most idiosyncratic. In the heyday of their collaboration, all three writers would sit around the piano, swapping ideas and themes. But now friendship had given way to estrangement. According to Greenwich, each arrived at the writing sessions with a different part: Greenwich provided the melody of the verse; Spector provided the melody of the chorus; and Barry most of the words. Even before it was recorded, the effect was an awkward fit; two quite separate songs that seemed to have been plucked from opposite corners of the room and forced to dance together—although the stop-start tempo made dancing almost an impossibility. And what the hell was the song about anyway? In a self-conscious attempt to get away from the “silly little songs” he had written for the Ronettes and Crystals, Barry had contrived a tortuous lyric using the childish devotion to ragdolls and puppies as metaphors for adult love. “Lyrically, we just all jumbled, jumbled on the chorus,” Greenwich recalled. “When you think about ‘River Deep—Mountain High' that lyrically says a lot about where we were coming from at that time. It was also a big sound, almost a desperate sound—but exciting! It breaks out: freedom!”

Back in Los Angeles, Spector began rehearsing Tina at the mansion. “I remember her coming home and saying, ‘Well, this guy is really different,'” Ike Turner says. “I said, ‘What do you mean?' She said, ‘You can't vary his lines…he doesn't want you to vary his lines.' Phil didn't tolerate any improvisation at all. I mean, Tina was real trained before he met her—anyone who has been around me a lot can sing. But he really put her through it.”

In February, Spector gathered his troops at Gold Star and the assault began. It would require five sessions and more than $22,000 to complete. The first two sessions were spent merely preparing the musicians and establishing the shape of the backing track. Word quickly spread through Hollywood that Spector was working on something truly special, the ne plus ultra of the Wall of Sound, and the control room filled with onlookers. Rodney Bingenheimer, the teenage “scene maker” of the Sunset Strip, arrived with Brian Wilson. Jack Nitzsche, who was also recording with the Rolling Stones, brought Mick Jagger. Dennis Hopper moved around the room, taking photographs.

For the third session, on March 7, Tina Turner arrived at Gold Star to find herself confronted by twenty-one musicians, an equivalent number of backing singers and a gallery of gaping onlookers. She was so intimidated by the crowd and the atmosphere of feverish expectation that she was unable to sing, and the session was abandoned.

A week later, she returned to the studio, this time with Ike. As she went through take after take, Spector pushing her remorselessly toward his vision of perfection, the temperature rose and the sweat flew. “We were a little more naïve about things then than we are now,” Larry Levine says. “After a couple of hours of this, Tina said, ‘Do you mind if I take my blouse off when I sing?' Well, Phil looked at me and I looked at Phil, and we didn't mind. I don't know how Ike felt about it. We just had one light lit on the wall so she could see her music. But to watch her was fantastic. What a great body. I don't think Ike was too happy, but I don't recall ever seeing Ike happy. I seem to recall he and Phil had some words about something or other—probably money.”

Over two more sessions Spector added strings and mixed the record. When all was finally done, spent but exhilarated he turned and embraced Jack Nitzsche. “Jack said that he and Phil looked at each other and they both smiled because they knew this was as good as it was ever going to get,” Denny Bruce remembers. “I think they both knew that things had now run their course; they'd had an incredible run, but it had come to an end.” But, finally, it was all too much. In trying to surpass himself, Spector had actually outreached himself. The sound was titanic, huge and echoing, an unstoppable hurricane, but like a hurricane it left destruction in its wake. Turner's vocal, monumental itself, was buffeted and bruised in the tumult of the arrangement. The wildly colored threads of melody were twisted and bent until their shape and color were all but lost. It was the simulacrum of all Spector's grandiosity, his overarching ambition; it was all his passion, his thirst for revenge and his madness. It was a record that swept you up into its peculiar psychosis and left you stunned and exhausted in its wake. You could be enthralled by it, moved by it, but you could never love it.

“River Deep—Mountain High” was released on May 14, 1966.
Billboard
featured it among its top 60 picks, describing it in the curious demotic of the trade: “Exciting dance beat production backs a wailin' Tina vocal on a solid rock tune penned by Barry and Greenwich.” On May 29, the record entered the
Billboard
charts at number 98. The following week it crawled to 94. A week later, to 93. By June 18 it moved up to 88. The following week it dropped out of the charts altogether. Spector's biggest production had become his biggest failure.

After the death, the inquest. For Ike Turner, the failure of the record was a simple case of the institutionalized racism of America in general, and the music business in particular. “If Phil had released that record and put anybody else's name on it, it would have been a huge hit. But because Tina Turner's name was on it, the white stations classified it as an RB record and wouldn't play it. The white stations say it was too black, and the black stations say it was too white, so that record didn't have a home. That's what happened to ‘River Deep—Mountain High.'”

For Jeff Barry it was hubris, the inevitable consequence of Spector pushing himself further and further forward, at the expense of the artist and the song. Spector, Barry told Richard Williams, “has a self-destructive thing going for him, which is part of the reason that the mix on ‘River Deep' is terrible. He buried the lead and he knows he buried the lead and he cannot stop himself from doing that. If you listen to his records in sequence, the lead goes further and further in, and to me what he is saying is: ‘It is not the song I wrote with Jeff and Ellie, it is not the song—just listen to those strings. I want more musicians, it's me, listen to that bass sound…' That, to me, is what hurts in the long run.”

For others, the record's failure was a matter of revenge. The “Tycoon of Teen” had become too arrogant, too overbearing, too complacent for his own good. There were stories that Spector now considered himself too important to glad-hand with the foot soldiers in the radio stations and trade magazines, that he was “too busy” to give interviews; rumors that he had been informally blacklisted by DJs, because he refused to deliver the usual blandishments in cash or kind to have his records played. The industry had turned on him.

“Phil antagonized some people,” Jack Nitzsche would later reflect to the writer Harvey Kubernik. “Phil had a way to always bring up the idea that he had more money and that was power, which it probably was. He had thirteen hits in a row without a miss. Around ‘River Deep—Mountain High,' people started to want him to fail. That's how it is with sports and everything. You get too good and people don't like it, too successful and people don't like it. There was no competition for Phil in those days.”

“Phil was an abrasive character,” Larry Levine says. “And to a large degree he grew into the character that he was portrayed as by the media. He started to enjoy being that. A lot of people envied him, and a lot of people were waiting for him to fail—hoping for him to fail. So it didn't take much to push it over that edge, to the degree that
Cash Box
and
Billboard
both came out with only a B-plus for the record, which was effectively the kiss of death. But I always felt, and I still feel, that Phil tried to take that record to a place where the available technology couldn't go. It just wasn't enough for what he wanted to do. But that had a lot to do with Phil's personality too. He wasn't content to do what he'd done before. Phil was always looking to move on to the next plateau, until there just wasn't a plateau there to move on to.”

In later years, Spector would attempt to make light of the failure of “River Deep.” Talking to
Rolling Stone,
he would explain that the record “was just like my farewell. I was just sayin' good-bye and I wanted to go crazy, you know, for a few minutes, that's all it was. I loved it and I really enjoyed making it, but I didn't really think there was anything there for the public.” Talking to
New Musical Express
a decade later he would go further still, arguing that had he been egotistical the failure of the record might have affected him. “But I'm not egotistical. I am an egomaniac. My ego is so high you just can't beat me down.”

But in truth, he was devastated. When Catherine and Linda visited him at the house, he cried as he told them how sure he had felt that “River Deep” would be a big hit. “It was the only time I ever saw him really depressed,” Catherine recalls. “He said, ‘I was sure people would love it; I just don't understand it.' More than upset, he felt betrayed by the American public.”

In Britain, the story could hardly have been more different. The record quickly climbed the charts, and by the middle of July it had peaked at number 2. But its success seemed only to inflame the hurt and anger Spector felt at the American industry and public. In a fit of self-righteous pique he took out ads in
Billboard
and
Cash Box,
invoking the name of the American general who during the War of Independence had plotted to surrender the fort at West Point to the British: “Benedict Arnold Was Right.” And they hated him even more.

Then Phil Spector closed the door of his mansion, and disappeared from view.

15

Marriage in Purgatory

T
he brave face that Spector put on the failure of “River Deep—Mountain High” was just that—a face. The failure of the record left him spent and exhausted. The manic energy and drive that had propelled him for the past three years now drained out of him.

“With Phil, it was as if they'd given him the ball, and one day he woke up and the ball had gone,” Tony Calder reflected. “The minute he went cold, the business buried him, they killed him. He'd had the success and he'd crapped on everybody. He's just fucking died…push him down in his own shit. It's human nature…”

He was too depressed even to go near the studio. The writing sessions with Barry and Greenwich had produced another song, “I Can Hear Music,” which Spector allotted to the Ronettes. But he was so uninterested that he passed the production over to Jeff Barry (the record went nowhere, although the Beach Boys would have a Top 30 hit with the song three years later). Another producer, Bob Crewe, was invited to record a handful of sessions with Ike and Tina Turner.

Jack Nitzsche had quickly put the disappointment of “River Deep” behind him and was in demand as a producer and arranger for artists like Lou Christie, Bobby Darin and Bob Lind, whose single “Elusive Butterfly” went to number 5 in December 1966. The musicians of the Wrecking Crew were now occupied on sessions for virtually every record of note that was coming out of Los Angeles.

For six years Spector had focused all his energies and dreams on one thing—the desire to transmute rock and roll, and the base metal of his anger, genius and monumental ambition, into art. He had taken on the music business on his own terms, and won. His vision had changed rock and roll forever, but in changing, it had left Phil Spector behind.

Throughout the making of “River Deep—Mountain High,” Dennis Hopper had been holding out to Spector a vision of a new future—film production.

Hopper had a reputation for being volatile, hard-drinking, temperamental and brilliant; a man who saw himself in the tradition of the great Hollywood hell-raisers such as John Barrymore and Errol Flynn. He had been a close friend with James Dean, acting alongside him in two films, the seminal “misunderstood teenager” movie,
Rebel Without a Cause,
and
Giant.
Hopper idolized Dean, and Dean's death in a car crash in 1955 seemed to throw him off balance. Shortly afterward, working on the set of
From Hell to Texas,
Hopper got into a fight with the director Henry Hathaway after Hopper's insistence on improvising his lines required upward of one hundred retakes. He was fired from the film and effectively blacklisted by Hollywood for several years. He moved to New York, studied acting with Lee Strasberg and made a career in television shows, mostly Westerns, usually playing the part of brooding and misunderstood desperadoes, for which he seemed to be typecast. He also developed a serious reputation as a photographer, moving in New York art circles, photographing every contemporary artist of note, including Warhol, Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns, while at the same time assembling a modest collection of their works.

Hopper and Spector had been acquainted for two or three years. “We hit it off really well right from the beginning,” Hopper remembers. “Hanging out in Canter's, chasing girls. Phil had been through some really bad trips—his father committing suicide; you don't get rid of those things. And he'd been attacked, physically. You see all these rap guys running around with bodyguards nowadays—well, Phil Spector really needed bodyguards. There really were people after him. And when he put out ‘River Deep' and they refused to play it, that was a disaster for Phil. They shot him down and Phil was really hurting after that.”

Hopper had been around Gold Star, chronicling the epic progress of the “River Deep—Mountain High” sessions (which he would remember with a haiku-like concision: “Long hours. A lot of big orchestras. Phil being a perfectionist. Ike doing nothing. It was fabulous”), and he would go on to shoot the cover photograph for the Ike and Tina Turner album of the same name. His primary ambition, however, was to direct films. With his friend Stewart Stern, the screenwriter for
Rebel Without a Cause,
he had come up with the idea for a film called
The Last Movie,
about a Hollywood film crew shooting a Western in a tiny Mexican village, and the chaos and confusion they leave in their wake. A parable of corrupted innocence, the film had been inspired by Hopper's own experiences making the John Wayne film
The Sons of Katie Elder
in the Mexican town of Durango. Hopper had paid Stern to prepare a preliminary treatment by selling some of his paintings (Hopper had no cash). Jennifer Jones and Jason Robards expressed interest in starring. Enthused at the prospect of breaking into movies, Spector offered to produce the film and made an agreement with Stern to write the screenplay. He gave Hopper office space at Philles to work from, and began talking up his new career.

In June 1966—at the moment that “River Deep” was disappearing from the American charts—he gave an interview to Peter Bart of the
New York Times,
declaring that he had now “lost interest” in the record business, and was in need of “a new creative outlet.

“Art,” he mused, “is a game. If you win that game too regularly it tends to lessen your motivation,” adding that to carry on making records “would just be playing for public approval, not for what suits me.”

The Last Movie,
he declared, would be in the tradition of the directors he most admired, Truffaut, Kubrick and Fellini.

Asked whether his lack of experience in film would be a hindrance, Spector declared that if anything it would be an advantage. “It's helpful to come to something fresh. That's why I want to make my next career in movies. I'm not fresh to records anymore.” Filming on
The Last Movie,
he said, would begin in September. He confidently predicted it would win first prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

         

While Hopper and Stern set to work on the project, flying down to Durango to scout locations, Spector moped in his mansion, unsure where to turn next. As a film producer, he was finding out, there wasn't really that much to do. He invited Tony Hall, the Decca promotions man in London who had been so instrumental in the success of “Lovin' Feelin'” and “River Deep,” to come and stay. Hall and his wife had never been to Los Angeles before. They were met at the airport by a Cadillac and driver and taken to Spector's mansion. “It was extremely weird. Phil eventually appeared, greeted us and promptly disappeared again, saying he'd see us later. We waited, and eventually, at about three a.m., he came back and said, ‘I'll show you the town.' He insisted on driving—this tiny little figure in this huge Cadillac. He took us to some really sleazy hamburger joint—all very odd—then drove us back at around five a.m. We didn't see him again for days. We hadn't got a rental car, we were unable to go anywhere. It was like being in prison. Periodically he would poke his nose around the door and say hi, and on one occasion he drove us down to see Gold Star, because I'd asked to see it. But half the time—and I later discovered this from other people—he was hiding in one of the other rooms in the house.” After five days, thoroughly bemused, Hall and his wife cut short their visit and left.

Lynn Castle was another visitor. Castle had always harbored her own ambitions to be a singer and songwriter, but in the years since she and Spector had dated she had made her living as a hairdresser, the “hot scissors” for half of the Los Angeles rock fraternity, including Sonny and Cher and the Byrds. She was a close friend of Jack Nitzsche and Lee Hazlewood. In 1966, she recorded her own composition, “Rose Colored Corner,” along with a song called “The Lady Barber,” which Hazlewood produced and released on his LHI label. Castle was striking-looking, with luxuriant brunette hair that she wore in a twist, adorned with a rose; she wore miniskirts and knee-high boots. It was a look that Nancy Sinatra would adopt when she released her single “These Boots Are Made for Walkin',” which Hazlewood wrote and produced.

Castle had not spoken to Spector in some five years, and was astonished one night to receive a telephone call completely out of the blue—“I was so happy to hear from him,” she remembers—in which Spector launched a tirade of abuse at her. Castle was deeply shocked, but rationalized the outburst as an extreme symptom of Spector's old jealousies. “I think his feelings were hurt because I was such close friends with Jack and Lee. I said to him, ‘Why are you saying all this?' It was so mean, and so sad. And I just hung up on him.”

A few months later Castle was out carousing with Jack Nitzsche. “Jack was drunk and it was: ‘Okay, what are we going to do tonight? Let's go see Phil!' So we were out there, howling behind that iron gate: ‘Phillip!' And he opened up for us.”

It was the first time Castle had been inside the mansion. “And my God, talk about the Little Prince…All that stone, all that huge emptiness, and this endless dining room table. And there was little Phillip—my God, he looked so lost. And I thought, Who would want this? What are you doing here? What is this big lonesome? I mean, do you like this? Because I would never want to be here. It's too big, too cold, too lonesome. Is this just a thing about you're strong and you're powerful and you can live in a big frigging castle? Like, who gives a shit? Does that actually make you feel big about yourself? It was like somebody who feels so insecure and frightened inside. It made me so very sad.”

For a while after that, Castle and Spector would sometimes talk on the phone. “And I'd hear him on the other end of the line, he'd be hollering out, ‘Yeah, go and get that, bring that here.' As if there was somebody else with him. But you'd never hear a voice answering him. Like, who are you talking to, Phillip? Who's there…? And it felt like there was nobody there.” And then she stopped hearing from him altogether.

         

Spector's devotion to his old friend Lenny Bruce was so intense that, according to Ronnie, he hung a blow-up poster of the comedian in the master bedroom. Spector, she would later complain, often fell asleep before she did, and she would lie awake with the image of the haggard, puffy-eyed Bruce staring down at her from the wall.

Spector regarded Bruce as his closest friend, “like a teacher or a philosopher…like a living Socrates.” But for all his good intentions, Spector's attempts to resurrect his friend's flagging career and spirits had come to nothing. Bruce had become increasingly lost to the world in a stupor of heroin and depression. In Spector's words: “Lenny had a nail tied to his foot and was going around in circles.” He now passed his days poring over law books, fighting adversaries real and imagined. Occasionally he would turn up at Spector's offices on Sunset Strip, bearing an armful of documents to be typed and photocopied by Spector's obliging staff, and Spector continued uncomplainingly to put his hand in his pocket whenever Bruce needed anything. Dennis Hopper had known Bruce when the comedian was first starting out, long before he had attained national notoriety, when Hopper himself was working as a contract player at Warner Bros. “I went into this strip club. The regular comic had been taken sick. Lenny's mother had been a stripper, and handled strippers, so Lenny got up and performed, and they yanked him off the stage—in a burlesque house—because he was just too dirty.” Hopper would often spend time with Bruce and Spector, in Canter's or in the mansion. “Phil was wonderful with Lenny,” Hopper remembers. “He got very involved with helping him. But this was a side that people didn't see. There was this idea that Phil was a monster, but the truth is he was the most generous, the kindest guy.”

In April 1966, Bruce was fined $260 and given a one-year suspended sentence and two years' probation for a narcotics violation—possession of heroin—which had been hanging over him for more than three years. The sentence was a mere slap on the wrist—anybody else might have expected a jail term—but it did little to ease his paranoia and anxiety.

At the end of July, Spector telephoned Michael Spencer asking whether he would like to meet Bruce.

“I said I'd love to. Phillip said, ‘Well, Lenny's strange: I'm going to have to call him,' then he calls me back to verify it's me and not the police who are harassing him. So about five minutes later Phil calls me back and says it's okay.” Spector drove Spencer and a couple of friends to Bruce's house in the Hollywood Hills. “So Lenny leads us into this little study, and there was yellow paper from legal pads strewn all over the floor. I picked up a piece of paper to see what it was. And it was one word in the middle. Pick up another piece of paper. One word. He was so disassociative at that time, so out of it, he would just write one word and throw it on the floor. That's what he was doing at that time. He had a tape he wanted to play Phil of some routines he said he'd been working on. And he was spewing out venom so fast it was impossible to understand what he was saying on this tape. Phil stood there listening, and after about five minutes it became too oppressive. So we excused ourselves. As we were leaving, Phillip said, ‘I'm sorry, Lenny can be weird.'”

Four days later, on the evening of August 3, John Judnich, a friend of Bruce's who was staying at his house, walked into the bathroom—Bruce's favorite sanctuary—to find Bruce lying on the floor dead, his trousers around his ankles, a hypodermic syringe in his arm. Bruce had evidently been fixing while seated on the toilet and toppled forward. He had died of a morphine overdose. He was forty years old.

The moment Spector heard the news on the radio, he summoned Danny Davis and drove as fast as he could to Bruce's house. The scene was crawling with police, reporters and television crews. Spector was horrified. His friend's death had become a media circus. Pushing his way through the crowd he somehow managed to get into the house, where he began shouting at police “You killed him!”