Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (51 page)

The letter was the characteristic mixture of showboating and self-mythologizing. In fact, Spector had had nothing to do with remixing Starsailor's first album,
Love Is Here,
which had not been a number 1 record in Britain; it had stalled at number 2. But his joy at being back in the races was apparently unconfined. He e-mailed his old friend Bill Walsh. “He said, ‘Bill, can you imagine at our age! Recording rock and roll again!' He was very excited about it.”

In March 2002, as was his habit, Spector traveled to New York for the seventeenth annual induction dinner at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, held at the Waldorf-Astoria. The following month, his old friend Helen Noga died, at the age of eighty-eight. She was buried at the Forest Lawn Cemetery; Spector, inevitably, delivered the eulogy.

Now, it seemed, Spector had decided to completely remake his life. While it had been years since they'd lived together, Janis had continued to function as Spector's prop—the person who took care of his daily needs and effectively kept his life on an even keel. But relations between them had become increasingly strained, and in March 2002 Janis decided that she had had enough and stopped working for him. A month later, Spector fired his driver Morgan Martin, who had worked for him for the previous five years. Paulette Brandt was also let go. Paulette was crushed. It had been a long time since she had been “in love” with Spector, but she continued to love him. For years she had been unfalteringly loyal; now, without a word of explanation, he had cut her out of his life. Paulette saw it as just another example of Spector's perversity. “Things had been running quite smoothly for the last couple of years, and I think that's part of what upset him—things were too good. It's like the Lenny Bruce cartoon ‘Thank You, Mask Man,' where the people tell him there's no more need for him because the Messiah has returned. And then Mask Man says, ‘Well, I'll make trouble because I'm geared for it.' And I think that's a lot of what Phil's problem is. Things were getting boring for him. Everything was going smoothly, no problems. So then he let everybody go, and then this whole thing happened.”

With Janis and Paulette now gone, Spector took on a new personal assistant, Michelle Blaine, the daughter of the drummer Hal Blaine. Spector had known Michelle as a child, but the acquaintance had been renewed two years earlier, when Hal Blaine was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Blaine had injured his foot and was unable to attend the ceremony, and Michelle collected the award on his behalf. Michelle was working in film production, and married with six children. She quickly became what one observer describes as “the go-to person”—the sole intermediary in all of Spector's dealings with the outside world.

At the end of August 2002 Spector flew to London to begin work with Starsailor, taking with him Nicole and his bodyguard and aide-de-camp Jay Romaine. It was—though nobody actually used the word—an audition. Starsailor would not commit themselves to Spector producing an entire album until they were sure he was the right man. But Spector had no doubts about the outcome: he told the Kessels that it was “the Beatles all over again.” In search of a talisman, Spector had told Starsailor that he wanted to use the engineer who had worked with him on the Lennon and Harrison albums, Phil McDonald. But McDonald had long since retired from the music business and was now working as a masseur. Instead, Starsailor suggested a young engineer named Danton Supple, who had recently been working with Coldplay.

Spector spent a week with the band working at Metropolis Studios, recording two tracks, “Silence Is Easy” and “White Dove.” He was in good spirits, cracking jokes, regaling the band with stories: cranking the playback up to his preferred deafening volume, he blew two speakers that had not needed to be replaced in years.

The results were so impressive that Starsailor had no hesitation in deciding that Spector should take on the rest of the album.

Returning to Los Angeles, Spector now made the decision to fire Jay Romaine. For the past four years, Romaine had served much the same function as George Brand had fulfilled for so many years—not simply a bodyguard, but a companion and watchdog. When Spector ventured out for an evening's carousing, Romaine would usually be with him, keeping a watchful eye. But when Spector moved into the castle, relations between the two men began to sour. And now that he was sober, he had less need of someone to act as his minder. For most of his life Spector had surrounded himself with people—secretaries, bodyguards, lovers, flunkies—who could look after him and keep him out of the worst kind of trouble. But now, with the departure of Jay Romaine, he had let the last of them go.

“It was like the old drunk who insists he's all right to drive,” says Denny Bruce. “Like, ‘Hey, I'm okay now.' ‘Well, are you sure you can drive?' ‘Yup, I'm okay now, I'm okay; just give me the fucking keys…'”

         

In October 2002 Spector returned to London to resume recording with Starsailor, this time in the company of Nicole and Michelle Blaine. The sessions had now transferred to Abbey Road Studios, the scene of Spector's earlier triumphs with Lennon and Harrison.

But while the earlier sessions with Starsailor had gone without a hitch, it quickly became apparent that all was not well with Spector.

“It was almost as if he wasn't there at all,” one participant remembers. “Sometimes you couldn't get through to him, like he couldn't hear you. It was as if he'd been given something to make him normal for that first week, but then he'd lapsed back into something else. He was kind of really distant; like he was overmedicated. Sometimes he could be the nicest bloke in the world; you'd sit with him telling you stories and laughing our heads off. But other days he was not himself at all.”

Musically, too, Spector seemed to have run out of ideas. “Silence Is Easy” had established a distinctive motif with its echoing drum sound and characteristically thunderous mix—pure Spector brilliance, the band thought. But now it seemed that every song Spector touched came out sounding very much the same. “The tracks weren't anything near like what the band wanted. Phil was about overlaying and overlaying and capturing a moment; but they were musicians saying, ‘I can hear bum notes.'”

Nor were matters improved by Michelle Blaine, who some around the sessions thought was behaving more like Spector's manager than his assistant, offering her thoughts on how the music should sound and, in the words of one participant, “generally throwing her weight around.”

After five laborious and anguished weeks, the band's manager, Andrew Walsh, and Jeff Barrett, the AR manager for their record label Capitol, asked for a crisis meeting with Spector and his business manager, Allen Klein. Klein flew over to London. When Michelle Blaine walked in expecting to join the meeting, Klein pointedly told her to leave the room. Mortified at having to sack the most famous record producer in the world, Walsh and Barrett announced that the band was unable to work with Spector and the collaboration was over. Spector was stunned. He told Harvey and Barrett, “You've got big balls…”

The five weeks' worth of recordings at Abbey Road were scrapped, and the band went on to produce the album themselves, with Danton Supple. “White Dove” and “Silence Is Easy” would both subsequently appear on the record—although Spector's mix of the latter song was replaced with a new mix by the New York–based “mixmaster” Michael Brauer, which featured more guitar, brought the vocal further forward and speeded up the track. The drum sound, however, could only be Spector.

The album, entitled
Silence Is Easy,
went to number 2 in the British charts, and the single of the same name went to number 8.

         

Disconsolate, Spector returned to Los Angeles. His comeback was over. “He was pissed off, blaming the group, and saying ‘They don't know what they could have had,'” one friend remembers. “He was broken-hearted.”

29

“It's Very Difficult, Very Difficult to Be Reasonable”

I
t was barely two weeks after his return to Los Angeles that Spector's white Rolls-Royce arrived to collect me from my hotel on the Sunset Strip and ferried me down the freeway to Alhambra; that I climbed the eighty-eight steps to the door of the castle to be greeted by Michelle Blaine; that I sat in the living room, waiting for Spector, and that he appeared at the top of the wooden staircase to the strains of Handel, dressed in his black silk pajama suit with the initials PS picked out in silver thread, his blue glasses, his shoulder-length wig, his three-inch Cuban heels—looking bizarre, yet curiously magnificent.

“I always wanted to live in a castle…,” he said, “and they don't have many left…”

He sat, hunched, a small figure on a large white sofa. His face was pale, his skin looked like parchment, and his hands trembled.

For the next four hours he talked almost without pause. He was bombastic, funny, furious and melancholic by turns. His wristwatch made its whirring call, like a cuckoo clock, announcing the hour.
“It's two o'clock.”

He had always wanted to win, he said. And from childhood he knew he was smarter than most. “That's how I figured I'd get by. I cheated. People ask me today, ‘Do you play computer games?'—the guys at the studio. I don't play if I can't win. I don't play anything if I can't win. And I'm never going to win against a computer, so what the fuck do I want to play for? To lose? So those guys playing, they're morons. When I was a kid everybody used to get ecstatic winning at Monopoly, or Scrabble. I just figured out, Shit, if it's all about winning…so I just went out and bought another Monopoly game, took the money and hid it in my pocket, and then go to people's houses and add an extra one hundred or five hundred and I'd win every time. I'd beat Nicole playing Monopoly when she was twelve years old. Beat the shit out of her! I don't care! I ain't going to lose at some fucking board game with dice. Scrabble, I would take the ‘X's and the blanks and when somebody turned their head I'd put a blank tile on my rack. I'd always have to win. Because I'm not going to lose, so don't invite me over! Because everybody takes winning so seriously—I beat your ass at Scrabble, Phil. Oh yeah, so try again. If you can't win, don't play. What's the fucking fun in losing? Where's the joy in that? The breakfast of champions is the opposition.”

He laughed—once more the small and furious boy, delighted to be putting one over on the world.

“I like the idea of winning. I've made art that wasn't successful; and I didn't enjoy the art as much as when it was successful. What's so great about making a record or a movie and it not being a hit?”

Where, I asked him, did this need to succeed come from?

“I don't know. It's about seeing success around you and wanting to work with the best and bring out the best in those around you. I know a lot of people who like to work with mediocre people and feel they're the most important. I like to work with the best—geniuses. It brings out the best in me.

“It's very hard in the business today to find extremely talented young people. But it was very hard to find extremely talented people thirty years ago too; I was fortunate I fell into the Stones, John Lennon, rest his soul, people with extraordinary talent—Tina Turner. Timing is the key to everything.”

He jabbed a finger at me across the table. “Okay. You ask me, ‘What's your name?' And then you ask me, ‘What do you do for a living, and what's the most important part of what you do for a living?' Go ahead! Just for the conversation.”

“Okay. What's your name?”

“Phil Spector.”

“And what do you do for a living?”

“I'm a record producer.”

“And what's the most important—”

“
Timing—
” and he broke up in laughter.

“So that is the key. For some reason, if you say ‘lucky' about people, people say, ‘Oh, you're demeaning their talent.' No—there's an element of luck in everything. But I call it timing.”

It was timing that took him into Gold Star Records in 1958, with “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” Luck that took him to Lew Bedell at Era Records; luck, timing and maybe something else too that had gotten “To Know Him Is to Love Him” played on
American Bandstand.
“I learned a lot by being in the Teddy Bears,” he said. “I learned I didn't want to be a singer. I learned about payola and distributors and manufacturing. I learned about the Mafia. I did
American Bandstand, The Dick Clark Show.
If you broke your record in Philadelphia, it became a national hit. And if Dick Clark played you on national TV, well…that's where payola started.” He paused and gave a sly smile. “Everybody around Dick Clark went to jail, except for Dick Clark.

“But that's where black music broke,” he went on. “The black disc jockeys started taking on their names—Rosco, Big Mama—and for fifty dollars you could get them to play your record and it meant something. They would have a record hop and charge a dollar, and eight thousand kids would show up. No overheads. The groups would come for free and lip-synch, so it was eight thousand dollars' profit. It was an incredible time.”

“And that's when you decided you wanted to be a producer,” I said.

“I wanted to be in the background—but I wanted to be
important
in the background. I knew about Toscanini. I knew that Mozart was more important than his operas. That Beethoven was more important than whoever was playing his music. I knew that the real folk music of America was George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin. Those names were bigger than the music. That's what I wanted to be.”

I asked how had he educated himself musically?

“Just by listening. By going downtown and buying the sheet music.” He paused.

“Black music is our American culture. But our folk music is George Gershwin and Jerome Kern. I was always listening to jazz, rock and roll—sepia music, they called it then; black music. The thing that I liked about rock and roll music, before they called it rock and roll, was that they didn't only sing their own songs. The Fortunes would sing ‘Marie' by Irving Berlin. They were open about it. That was what was wonderful in those days. When we were number one with ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him,' number two was ‘Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu' by Domenico Modugno; number three was Conway Twitty with ‘It's Only Make Believe'—a country and western song. So rock and roll really gave everybody a chance.”

He reached for his glass, enjoying the roll of the conversation.

Did I know he'd first met Elvis Presley in 1958?

“Sure…And in 1960 I worked on his album, coming out of the army. Very few people know that. But Elvis was terrific, wonderful…

“I went to New York and tracked down his publishers, Hill and Range music. I went to them and said, ‘I'm a genius and I want to meet Elvis Presley.' They said, ‘Sign a contract.' I said, ‘I don't want to sign a contract.' I looked up all the writers—Doc Pomus—all the names I saw on records, and I knocked on all their doors and told them who I was and what I did. I had already recorded ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him.' I was working at the UN as a translator and as a court reporter. I went to see all these people and just pushed my way in. And these people introduced me to Elvis, and Elvis liked me.”

He laughed. “I believed I was the best in the world. I really believed that. Everybody I met from Johnny Mercer to Ahmet Ertegun, I would tell them I was a genius. And then they would agree with me. I'd prove it to them, by conversation, talk. I made demos for Elvis, for songwriters. I made ‘Suspicion' for Terry Stafford—I didn't get any credit or any money. I didn't care. I just loved making records. I did a lot of songs for Ahmet and Jerry Wexler that I didn't take credit for, because I loved them. Ahmet was like a father to me. All these people loved me; they saw money in me. And I was willing to work for nothing. I did Elvis's album for nothing. I just wanted a reputation, and the way you earn a reputation is by working and people start buzzing. And to have Elvis talking about you—very important. To have Ahmet Ertegun talking about you—he's brilliant, he's a genius—that's more important than money. I was living in a seventy-five-dollar-a-month apartment. Didn't matter. I was young and vital and they wanted young blood. It was a great fucking time.

“In the '60s I was motivated by a sense of destiny. I didn't know that Lincoln Ford Mercury, McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken were going to be using our songs. But I sure as hell knew our songs were going to be around in forty years. I tried to tell all the musicians about a sense of destiny. Because they made fun of me. Even my good friends today, they made fun of the little kid who was making rock and roll records, and the hold notes—over and over, the same thing, the same thing, the same thing; and not playing for three hours and then at the last minute we play. Six hours and nine hours and twelve hours, the same thing over and over. I
knew…

“These were the greatest musicians in the world. I would want these guys and only these guys. I knew it was demeaning to them, to have these giants playing ‘hold' notes, because they were much better than this, but I didn't care. Barney Kessel, Red Norvo. I knew these guys were saying ‘Shit'…But when they were doing it for one hundred thousand dollars a year for everyone else, trying to get the same sound, they were laughing all the way to the bank.

“I would try to tell all the groups, to impose a sense of destiny on them. We're doing something very important to me. Trust me. I always called it art. And I was the first person that took the words AR and called it ‘producer.' I said, I am the producer. I do everything. I produce this work. I was concerned with art. And it was very hard because these people didn't have that sense of destiny. They didn't know how good they were. They didn't know they were producing art that would change the world. And it did change the world.

“I heard something different, and I saw a different kind of music coming out. I waited eight, ten records before I added strings. I heard a different kind of rock and roll than Fats Domino or Chuck Berry, who were big influences for me. I didn't want to imitate or copy them. I never knew why I was commercial. I couldn't figure that out. I didn't think that what I was doing was commercial. Except I knew I was
writing
hits; I always knew what a hit song was. But I thought that what I was doing was a little too sophisticated compared to Fats Domino.

“I thought we had gone a little too far and each time I felt we were breaking the barrier a little too much. I thought we'd gone too far with ‘Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah.' It was so big and busy that I couldn't even put the drum in. There's no drum on that record; only a bass drum. There was nowhere sound-wise I could fit it in. I tried for six hours and couldn't fit it in. And then I thought, Well, maybe this record won't work. And I always had that dilemma.”

What he had always wanted, he said, was the best, and to be best, and only the best. “I was very sure of what I was doing. I convinced myself that Gold Star was good, but it was the hardest studio in the world to work in. It would take me days and days to get the right sound, whereas at Motown…I used to be so envious of them, because they could go in and in five minutes get that same drum sound and ‘ooh, ooh, baby, baby,' and make number-one record after number-one record. I'd say, ‘Shit—how do they do it so fucking easily?' The Supremes, thirteen number-one records or whatever it was and I'm working my ass off, and my groups are leaving me left and right because I'm not putting out records. They loved me, but they couldn't stand it. But it was more important to create the revolution to make the change. You think back on the history of American music and only a few names come up; not quantities of names. So I figured that's okay.

“At Philles I was turning down records every day. I turned down ‘Louie, Louie'—all these number-one records. My distributors would call me, asking me to put them on Philles. I said, ‘I can't put this shit on Philles, even if it is number one in Seattle or wherever. I mean, I love “Louie, Louie,” but I can't put this shit on my label with “Be My Baby.” I have a standard, and I can't lower it for money. I can't do it.'”

He shrugged, as if to say, What could be clearer than that?

“Y'know, the hardest part was convincing people that it could be done. I've tried to teach Nicole, the hardest thing in life is people who don't get it. About anything. I would explain what I was doing to people and they just didn't get it.

“If I wanted three pianos, I couldn't get three pianos in the studio, so I'd get three piano players sitting at one piano, fighting to get their hands on it. Leon Russell, Brian Wilson sometimes…”

He laughed at the memory.

“People said, ‘Three people sitting at a piano? You can't do that! You can't make the needle go into the red! You can't do this or that.' It's always: You can't, you can't, you can't. So timing put me in a position where I
can
do these things. Because I had these ideas, these thoughts, these sounds in my head. I would read about Mozart and Beethoven and Wagner and it was all about what they had, how they could express themselves and how many people didn't believe in them.”

So you wanted immortality? I asked.

He nodded vigorously. “Yes. Very much. I think when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he was thinking, People will remember this. When Gershwin wrote, he may have said, ‘I don't know about this
American in Paris,'
but I think he said, ‘This is something special.' I think Irving Berlin had an ego, that he wanted people to remember this. I think he wanted to be number one. And so did I.”