Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (39 page)

With the Beatles sojourn at an end, Spector was impatient to get back to work, and in the summer of 1973 his business manager Marty Machat negotiated a deal with Warner Bros., giving Spector his own boutique label Warner-Spector under the umbrella of the company.

Machat was a short, stocky man—“he could look Phil right in the eye,” remembers one acquaintance—who favored custom-made suits, expensive colognes and large cigars. In earlier days he had dabbled in artist management, representing among others the Four Seasons and the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. He had a reputation as a tough negotiator—“a very smart, fun fella who fought for his artists and double-checked the fine print,” remembers Joe Smith, who was chairman of Warner Bros. Records at the time. “You'd check your jewelry when you shook hands with Marty. He knew how to play the angles.”

Smith enjoyed telling the story about Jac Holzman, the founder of Elektra Records, who retired and moved to Hawaii. On a visit to Los Angeles, Holzman had dinner with Smith and Mo Ostin, the president of Warner Records. “And we said, ‘Do you miss the music business?' And Jac said, ‘I do. Sometimes I even think of getting back into it—and then I remember Marty Machat…'”

Spector's new relationship with Warner got off to a shaky start. Early in the negotiations, he invited Smith, Ostin and Warner's head of AR, Lenny Waronker, to the mansion, and as Smith remembers, “pulled one of his numbers. He was drinking. He locked the doors. And he had what he claimed were his guard dogs outside and he wasn't going to let us go. I later learned they weren't guard dogs, but the three of us couldn't get out. It was just his practical joke. But we didn't think it was very funny. We sat there for another hour or two. Maybe he wanted to exert some power; show us what we were dealing with.”

(Stan Ross was another who would experience Spector's compulsive need for control—or fear of abandonment. He recalls an occasion when Spector called “out of the blue” saying he had something he wanted to discuss. Spector sent George Brand to collect Ross and the songwriter Tommy Boyce. “We get to the house, and Tommy says, ‘You guys talk,' and he just slides under the grand piano and closes his eyes. I say, ‘This won't take too long, right, Phil?' He said, ‘No, I just want to ask you a couple of questions about a project I want to do.' So blah, blah, blah, this goes on. And finally I say, ‘It's time to go.' So Phil says, ‘A few more minutes.' So we give him a few minutes, and I say, ‘Phil, we really got to go back to work.' He says, ‘Don't go out the door! You gotta wait until I press a button, because if I don't press a button the guys outside will shoot. They have instructions to shoot first and ask questions later.' I said, ‘You push all the buttons you want, we're leaving.' Then I realize we don't have a car. I say, ‘Phil, we need your chauffeur.' He said, ‘I think he's sleeping.' He was just playing his game. But don't play with me. So eventually we get out. Nobody knows why he does these things. He's got to be different.”)

Joe Smith was disconcerted still further when, as a gesture to mark the new partnership, he invited Spector to join a party to watch Muhammad Ali fight Ken Norton at the L.A. Forum. Smith had laid on a luxury bus to ferry his guests, who included some of the cream of the music aristocracy, among them Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond and James Taylor. Spector was the only one to turn up with his own bodyguard, George faithfully dogging his footsteps. “We had to park in the lot across the street where the buses park,” Smith remembers. “These people never parked anywhere except under the stage; they didn't even know how to get across the street! I said, it's going to be like summer-camp buddies—everybody hold on to somebody so we know where we're going. I had to hold hands, literally, with Bob Dylan and James Taylor. I was leading, and Mo Ostin and somebody else from the record company were at the back, in case we lost anybody. And then I noticed that Phil had a gun, strapped around his leg. I said, ‘What's that for?' and he said, ‘Oh, it's security.' I said, ‘Who cares about you here? We're going to the fight! Nobody's going to shoot you!' But Phil was strange like that…”

After the fight, Smith took the party to Trader Vic's for dinner. Sitting in the restaurant, three tables away, was Frank Sinatra, who had an interest in Warner Bros. through his Reprise label. “He sent a message to me, saying, ‘What are you doing with those creeps?'” remembers Smith. “I went over and said, ‘These creeps have each sold more with their last release than you have with your last two.' He said, ‘I think I'd better come over and say hello.' He came over and just blew them all away—Hi, guys, bang, bang, bang…” Spector, in the presence of one of his idols, was for once speechless.

Whatever Spector's eccentricities, Smith and Ostin were confident that he would deliver the goods. “Phil had a fantastic reputation as a producer,” Smith says. “We didn't need the cachet. I felt he still had a shot. It's not like he'd been living in a cave—well, he had been living in a cave, but he'd been aware of what was happening in music. We felt if he was willing to put his name on the line, we'd just as soon bet on him than on two new acts, which is what the cost would be. No sure thing, but we'd rather lose with Phil Spector than somebody else.”

But Spector was apparently in no hurry to deliver on his end of the deal. Another, more enticing, proposition had come his way.

         

In the eighteen months since he and Spector had last worked together, things had gone from bad to worse for John Lennon. He had been engaged on two legal fronts, fighting for the right to remain in America, and crisscrossing America with Yoko in her attempts to gain custody of her daughter Kyoko. Demoralized by the bad reviews and sales of
Some Time in New York City,
he recorded a more overtly commercial album,
Mind Games
(that would be released in November 1973), then took to his bed once more, drinking heavily to anesthetize his unhappiness. In March 1973 the Lennons severed their relationship with Allen Klein as their business manager, apparently feeling that Klein had been neglecting them (it would take a flurry of lawsuits and a payoff of $4.2 million to make the divorce absolute).

To look after their affairs, they turned to Klein's former right-hand man, a lawyer named Harold Seider, who had resigned as chief counsel of Klein's company ABKCO in 1971 and moved to California. Seider flew to New York and met the Lennons at the Bank Street apartment. Seider was shocked at the Lennons' living conditions. “Talk about an embarrassment; it was in a cellar, two or three rooms, and in the back room no windows, nothing.” Lennon had shaved his head, and looked, Seider remembers, “like something that had come out of a German concentration camp.” Seider immediately found the Lennons new lodgings, in the Dakota apartment building on Central Park West.

         

May Pang, a twenty-three-year-old Chinese-American, had once worked for Allen Klein, before becoming the personal assistant to Lennon and Ono. Her duties included assisting Ono on her art films
Fly
and
Up Your Legs—
“The idea was 365 legs for peace, like her bottoms thing. I'd be calling up people like Andy Warhol and Jacqueline Onassis, saying, ‘Hi, I'm from John and Yoko; we'd like to shoot you from your toes to your thighs.'”

By the summer of 1973, according to Pang, Lennon's indolence had reached a stage of virtual paralysis—“He really felt he couldn't do it anymore”—and relations with Yoko were now at the breaking point. “It was awful. The two of them…it was hammer and tongs, chalk and cheese, whatever you want. It was just not there. I would be in the office; John would come in, talk to me; a minute later Yoko would walk in and say, ‘Where's John?' I'd say, ‘Didn't you just see him?' That's how estranged they'd become.”

In August 1973 Yoko approached May with an unusual request. She and John were not getting along, Yoko told her young assistant, and it was likely that before too long he would start seeing other women. Better, in that case, Yoko suggested, that John should have an affair with May. “I know you'd treat him right, so go out with him.” May was taken aback. Her relationship with Lennon was strictly professional; she liked him, but it had never occurred to her that she would like to have an affair with him. Lennon was apparently equally taken aback by Yoko's scheme. “He told me he was shaving when Yoko said, ‘I've fixed it for you to go out with May,'” she remembers. “He said, ‘I almost slit my throat.' He didn't ask for it, and he didn't expect it. But Yoko was pushing for it, and he finally said, ‘I'm tired of being miserable. If she says go for it, I'm going to go for it.'”

Duly authorized, May and Lennon began a tentative affair. In the first week of September, Yoko left town for a feminist conference. Harold Seider was leaving for Los Angeles; without telling Yoko, Lennon and May left with him. They moved into Harold Seider's apartment, until the producer Lou Adler offered to lend them his Bel Air home. (Adler and his girlfriend, the actress Britt Ekland, moved out to his beach house in Malibu.) Lennon, paranoid about his separation from Yoko becoming public, introduced May to everybody as “my nurse.”

In the meantime, Harold Seider had been poring over the former Beatle's accounts, and now delivered some bad news. Lennon's earnings from the Beatles had been frozen in the ongoing court case over the dissolution of the group. He had been living on a £5,000-a-month stipend from the receiver, plus money borrowed from Allen Klein. And now, Seider informed him, Yoko had demanded $300,000 “security” money in his absence. The former Beatle was effectively broke. He was also facing another problem—a lawsuit from the music publisher and boss of Roulette Records, Morris Levy, alleging that Lennon had plagiarized his song “Come Together” from Chuck Berry's “You Can't Catch Me.” Looking for a quick solution, Seider persuaded Lennon's label, Capitol, to trump up an advance of $10,000 for Lennon to record an album of rock and roll standards, and as a way of settling the action with Levy negotiated a deal whereby Lennon would include a number of songs controlled by Levy on the album, theoretically guaranteeing him a royalty windfall.

Lennon now contacted Spector to see if he would produce the album.

“John told him, ‘I want to do an album of the songs I love,'” Pang says. “He said, ‘I just want to be the singer in a band; I don't even want to produce.' And Phil was like, ‘You're giving me the whole thing?' Because that had never been. It had always been co-productions before. John said, ‘Yup, I just want to be a singer in the band.' And we were all thinking, this is trouble.”

Spector would arrive each night at the Adler house for rehearsals. He had developed a fleeting enthusiasm for amyl nitrate “poppers,” which gave a short and euphoric rush, but left his clothes, May remembers, smelling of “old socks.” He would often be wearing a holster, “sometimes one on either side, under his arm. He'd be waving these guns around, and John and I would look at each other thinking, Can this be? Surely George, his bodyguard, wouldn't let him have real bullets in them.”

Working on Lennon's albums in Britain, Spector had been on foreign soil. Now he was on his turf, doing things his way, and he started to put the call out for musicians to play on the sessions. Lennon had requested that they use the drummer Jim Keltner and the session guitarist Jesse Ed Davis; in keeping with the “back to the roots” nature of the project, he expected to be working with a small group of musicians. When he and May Pang arrived for the first session at AM Studios, they were astonished to find a seemingly endless procession of illustrious session players filing into the studio, among them Hal Blaine, the guitarists Steve Cropper and Larry Carlton, and keyboardists Leon Russell and Barry Mann. “So many,” Pang remembers, “they were trying to figure out where they could all sit.”

Spector arrived customarily late, accompanied by George Brand, and proceeded to spend the next four hours painstakingly testing sound levels and mike placement and laying down the backing track. Finally, at three in the morning, Spector declared he was ready to do the vocal. With May sitting beside him, Lennon completed his takes within half an hour.

Among the troupe of musicians Spector had invited to the sessions were Dan and David Kessel, the sons of the guitarist Barney Kessel. Both in their early twenties, Spector had known them since infancy, from the times when Barney would bring them along to Gold Star sessions (Dan had played percussion on a Crystals session when he was eleven), and had always held a special fondness for the two brothers. They were like family. When Spector was in London, working with Lennon and Harrison, he had sent the boys postcards and souvenirs that he knew they'd get a thrill out of—Apple wristwatches, notes written on the Beatles' stationery. Both played guitar, and Dan also played drums. On the first night of the Lennon session, Jim Keltner was late arriving. “Phil was running the song down, getting an initial balance, so I volunteered to play the drums,” Dan Kessel remembers. “He said, ‘Okay, let Hal play the fills; you just keep the time.' So I go out there, sticks up. The other musicians were wondering who I was and what was going on. And Phil said, ‘Wait a minute; this is Barney Kessel's son; and if Barney Kessel's son says he can play the drums, he can play the drums.'” After a while Keltner turned up and took his place behind the drums. But at the end of the session Spector invited the brothers back the following evening. “He said, ‘And bring your instruments,'” Dave remembers. “We said, ‘Okay.' And then he said, ‘You do play, don't you?'”

On the second night, Spector arrived at the studio dressed as a surgeon, in a white lab coat, with a stethoscope hanging around his neck—his pun on Lennon's nom de plume of Dr. Winston O'Boogie. As he followed his customarily painstaking preparations, Lennon grew increasingly restive.