Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (32 page)

Outside, Spector went from one photographer to the next, offering to buy up any pictures they might have taken of Bruce's body, to spare his friend the final indignity of public exposure.

According to Davis, the next morning a police lieutenant arrived at Spector's offices and presented Davis with a manila envelope. Inside was a sheaf of glossy 8 × 10 pictures—the official police shots of Bruce lying dead on the bathroom floor. “They could make one helluva album cover,” the policeman told Davis. “The price is five thousand dollars.” Davis immediately phoned Spector, who instructed him to buy them.

Bruce was buried two days later. Spector paid for his funeral, and delivered the eulogy at a memorial service held on August 21 at the Eden Memorial Park Cemetery in Mission Hills, where cemetery officials had tried to block the service after advertisements appeared urging mourners to bring box lunches and noisemakers.

Already depressed by the failure of “River Deep,” Spector went into a state of almost theatrical mourning for his friend, locking himself away in his study and playing Bruce's recordings over and over again.

The Ronettes had been invited to tour with the Beatles. (The group would play their last ever concert on August 29 at Candlestick Park, San Francisco.) Ronnie was beside herself with excitement at the prospect of renewing her acquaintance with the group that had now become the most successful in the world. But Spector forbade her to join the tour, giving the excuse that he wanted her in Los Angeles to concentrate on more recording. Her cousin Elaine took her place. Spector made no move to take Ronnie into the studio, but in the autumn she rejoined the Ronettes for a tour of U.S. Army bases in Germany. By Ronnie's account, whenever they booked into a hotel, a message would be waiting for her to call Spector, and they would talk deep into the night, Ronnie often falling asleep with the phone line open, awaking in the morning to his voice on the other end of the line. Ronnie thought it was impossibly romantic. Her sister Estelle told her it was Phil's way of making sure she didn't spend the night with anyone else.

The tour was to prove the Ronettes' swan song. As a recording act they were clearly a spent force. Nedra had been seeing an English disc jockey named Scott Ross, and they now made plans to marry and have a family. Both would shortly become born-again Christians, and Ross would train for the ministry. Estelle was also in a relationship, with the Ronettes' tour manager, Joe Dong. And Spector, it was clear, had no interest in attempting to revive the group's fortunes as a recording act. By Christmas 1966 the Ronettes were no more. Only Ronnie remained, freed from the encumbrance of her sister and cousin, confident that Spector would now concentrate his attentions on making her what she had always dreamed of being—a solo star.

         

In January 1967, apparently at a loss to know what to do next, Spector stirred himself to go into the studio once more to record Tina Turner, calling on his old allies Jack Nitzsche and Larry Levine. “I'll Never Need More Than This” was one of the songs left over from his writing sessions with Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich a year earlier. Where the melody of “River Deep” had been as complicated as algebra, this had a hook that recalled the glorious simplicity of Barry and Greenwich at their best. But the production was overblown, gusty with echo (Turner sounded as if she were singing from the far end of the Grand Canyon), almost a parody of the titanic excesses of “River Deep.” “We were trying to copy a sound, which turned me off a little bit because we weren't going on to something new,” Larry Levine would recall. “We were coming back to what we'd done.”

The record was never released.

Within a year, the music business had changed beyond all recognition. The Wall of Sound was obsolete; girl groups, a thing of distant history. There was no place for Phil Spector. His muse—anger, frustrated genius, revenge, the need to prove himself—had fled. Spector would make no more records in 1967; the closest he came to Gold Star was a large picture that he acquired from the Beat artist Wallace Berman, to whom Spector had been introduced by Dennis Hopper—a collage of Spector himself standing behind the control board of Studio A, with his arms outstretched, like an Old Testament prophet. The picture took pride of place in the living room of the mansion.

With no product to work, Danny Davis grew bored and distracted. “I was getting $800 a week, but I'd go into the office every morning and there'd be nothing to promote, no records,” Davis later recalled. “Instead there'd be a list on my desk, from Phil, of maybe fifteen things to do that morning.

1) Call the garage to have my mother's car serviced.

2) Call Minnesota Fats and see if he wants to shoot pool at my home this weekend.

3) Call Shelby and see if they can get four new tires for my car, etc., etc.

“Never anything to do with records.”

Nobody's gofer, and anxious to make a career elsewhere, Davis eventually walked out, with four months still left on his contract. Spector threatened to sue him for a quarter of a million dollars, but then dropped the case. He closed down Philles Records and the office on the Sunset Strip. It was taken over by the coming record producer Richard Perry, who in turn would pass it to another mogul-on-the-make, named David Geffen.

Emil Farkas had gone. As his driver and principal bodyguard Spector took on a bearish Armenian named Mac Mashourian, whose fearsome appearance disguised a surprisingly refined and delicate temperament. Unmarried, Mashourian lived with his sister and her family, and his favorite topic of conversation was his mother, of whom he spoke with a rhapsodic sentimentality. “I can't imagine that she was still living,” one friend remembers, “although Mac was not that old—he just seemed old.” To Spector he became as much a friend as an employee.

Sometimes Spector would set forth in his Rolls-Royce with Mac at the wheel, immaculate in black suit and tie, to cruise his old watering holes. But the thrill had gone. Not only a new generation but a new species seemed to have descended on the Sunset Strip, decked out in Day-Glo and love beads. Spector was only twenty-seven, but already he seemed to belong to another age. Drugs seemed to have wrought some peculiar metabolic change in the record business. Marijuana was the new martini; LSD, the holy sacrament. Spector hated dope, the sense of time standing still, the woozy introspection, the touchy-feeliness of it all. LSD simply terrified him. He had taken the drug only once, under the supervision of Dr. Kaplan for psychotherapeutic purposes and, according to Danny Davis, it had triggered his most deep-rooted trauma: he had imagined himself watching his father commit suicide.

“Phil always said he hated his father for what he did, taking the easy way out,” Davis would recall. “The acid went right to the heart of that hatred, to the pain, and it horrified him.”

He could not bear the thought of losing control.

In his interview with Jann Wenner of
Rolling Stone,
Spector would talk of how much he distrusted the growing influence of drugs in music. “A lot of people said they've listened to ‘River Deep' stoned, and they had their earphones on, and they just freaked out, you know, with the sound. Well, you know nobody was stoned when they made the record, I can tell you that…Drugs tend to frighten me a little in an audience because it doesn't make for good hearing and concentration. Now, I'd hate like hell to have an incoherent jury listening to me when I'm tryin' to plead a case…just spaced out. I'd get frightened. Just like I hate to bet on a fighter or horse that's drugged. That's scary. I don't give a fuck what they do in their own time, but if a disc jockey is going to review my record, and he's stoned, well, you know, he can go either way. It depends on how good the stuff he took was, and he's either gonna love my record or hate my record. But, I mean, you shouldn't be judged that way. In fact—art can't and shouldn't be judged at all! Because it's all a matter of taste.”

The Monterey International Pop Festival, held over three days in June 1967 in the small northern California town of that name, was the harbinger of the new cultural order, a gathering of the new aristocracy of rock: Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead. Also appearing on the bill was the soul singer Otis Redding. Already a success on the chitlin' circuit and the RB charts, Redding was an unknown quantity to most of the hippie audience at Monterey, but his high-octane “gotta, gotta, gotta” performance made him a surprise hit of the festival. Redding recorded for the Stax label, an affiliate of Ahmet Ertegun's Atlantic Records, and after the concert he traveled down to Los Angeles for a meeting with Ertegun.

Ertegun took Redding to Spector's house, where Spector sat at the piano and paid tribute to his old friend and mentor, playing Redding a medley of songs that Ertegun had composed. “Otis was blown away. He knew some of the songs, but he had no idea I'd written them.” Then Ertegun suggested an excursion, to a club in Watts where Esther Phillips was performing. “Otis and Esther sang duets together for hours,” Ertegun remembered. “Phil was playing the piano, and he'd remind them of different songs and play the introduction and sing behind them. We were there until five in the morning. Two of my all-time favorite singers, Otis and Esther, and Phil on the piano. It was one of the greatest evenings of my life.”

Six months later, on December 10, 1967, Otis Redding died when the small plane he was traveling in crashed into Lake Monona, in Madison, Wisconsin.

         

The Last Movie
was grinding slowly to a halt. September had come and gone, and by spring 1967 the film was no nearer to beginning production. Spector pulled out. According to Hopper, he encouraged Spector's withdrawal from the project. “We went around to all the studios and got turned down by all of them. And Phil finally said that he was going to put up the money himself. I said, ‘How much money do you have, Phil?' He said, ‘I have a million and a half dollars.' Even though it was something I wanted more than anything else in the world, I told him I wasn't going to let him do that. So that's something that he thanked me for for his entire life.”

Stewart Stern, who had been busy working on the screenplay, remembers it differently. “[Spector] didn't understand what the situation was, that you have to do research, that you have to spend time alone, that you have to write—all that stuff. He had the itch. But it turned into a terrible business.”

According to Stern, Spector refused to pay his fee—“not one dollar”—and Stern took legal action. “I hated to do it, but I had no alternative. As I remember it, my lawyer was doing everything in every way to serve him, and Spector was doing anything he could to outfox him and refuse to accept the subpoena.” In the end, the case was settled out of court.

Hopper himself would eventually complete
The Last Movie
in 1970. It did not win Cannes, but it did win the Critics Prize at the Venice Film Festival. But American critics hated it, and two weeks after its release in New York the film closed. Dennis Hopper would not direct another film for a decade.

         

The collapse of
The Last Movie
did nothing to impair Spector and Hopper's friendship. They continued to spend time together at Canter's or at the La Collina mansion, often in the company of Hopper's friend, the actor Peter Fonda, with whom Hopper was now busily developing another film project,
Easy Rider.
The son of Henry Fonda, Peter seemed to be in a state of permanent rebellion against the conservative strictures of his upbringing. After a series of clean-cut film roles, he had become a cult figure acting in two Roger Corman films,
The Wild Angels
(a biker flick which earned Corman the singular distinction of being sued by the Hells Angels for what they perceived as a negative portrayal of their image), and
The Trip,
in which Dennis Hopper also appeared. Fonda had given up alcohol for pot and acid, and lived on raw eggs, bananas, milk and vitamin compound, mixed in a blender. He rode around Hollywood on his Harley motorcycle, dressed in a tuxedo and an assortment of military headgear. He wrote terrible poetry. He was close friends with the Byrds and their producer Terry Melcher.

Spector may have been “bizarre,” Fonda remembers, but he “wasn't weird yet. There was something wonderful about Phil. He was a gentle person, and somewhat afraid. But I was impressed. There was this diminutive fellow who obviously had all sorts of personal conflicts, but had still been able to make this wonderful music. Most record producers in those days were slightly slimy, slightly shady; you'd get the feeling they'd cook the books on you if they could. But Phil didn't give that impression at all.”

Fonda felt a particular kinship with Spector, founded on mutual tragedy. When Fonda was ten, his mother, the socialite Frances Seymour Brokaw Fonda, suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to a sanatorium. It was there, on her forty-second birthday, that she committed suicide, cutting her throat from ear to ear with a razor blade that she had supposedly secreted in a framed photograph of Peter and his sister Jane.

Incredibly, Peter Fonda was never told the truth of his mother's death. It was not until 1960, when he was twenty-one years of age and working in a summer stock theater in upstate New York, that a man in a diner pulled out a yellowing news clipping from the
New York Times
reporting the suicide. Fonda was completely traumatized and would later tell the story of how he took to wearing a T-shirt with the words of the Beatles' song “Day Tripper” printed on the front describing how it had taken him so long to find out…and on the back, “but I found out.”

Spector never discussed his father's suicide with Fonda, but after Fonda learned of it from a mutual friend he began to understand Spector's air of vulnerability. “I felt such empathy for him over that; it was a point of acknowledgment of what that abandonment felt like.”