HE’S A REBEL
Phil Spector
Rock and Roll’s Legendary Producer
Copyright © 1989 by Mark Ribowsky
First Cooper Square Press edition 2000
This Cooper Square Press paperback edition of He’s a Rebel is an unabridged republication of the edition first published in New York in 1989, with the addition of 29 textual emendations. It is reprinted by arrangement with the author.
Grateful acknowledgment is given for permission to quote excerpts from the following:
“The Rolling Stone Interview: Phil Spector” by Jann Wenner from Rolling Stone, Nov. 1, 1969, by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. © 1988. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“Black Pearl” lyrics and music by Phil Spector, Toni Wine, Irwin Levine © 1969 Irving Music, Inc. & Mother Bertha Music & Jillbern Music, Inc. (BMI).
“He’s a Rebel” © 1962 Unichappell Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Excerpts from “The First Tycoon of Teen” from The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby by Tom Wolfe. © 1963, 1964, 1965 by Thomas K. Wolfe, Jr., © 1963, 1964, 1965 by New York Herald Tribune, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published by Cooper Square Press,
An Imprint of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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Distributed by National Book Network
The E, P. Dutton edition was cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows:
Ribowsky, Mark.
He’s a rebel / Mark Ribowsky. —1st ed.
p. cm.
Discography. Includes index.
1. Spector, Phil, 1940-. 2. Sound recording executives and producers—United States—Biography. I. Title.
ML429.S64R5 1989
784.5'4'00924—dc 19 [B]
88-18932
CIP
ISBN: 978-0-8154-1044-7
™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
For my mother
The sources that made this book come alive number over one hundred. Of these, almost all spoke on the record freely and thoughtfully, and their contributions are self-evident in the pages of history that follow. My deepest thanks to all of them, as well as to those few sources who chose anonymity rather than risk Phil Spector’s wrath but still kindly provided crucial information.
I would like to especially acknowledge the aid of Annette Merar Spector and Marshall Lieb. There simply could not have been a definitive Phil Spector book without the vivid memories of both of these wonderful people. Though Annette had to relive the pain and anxiety of a crumbled marriage, she repaid my constant intrusions with grace, understanding, and complete cooperation. A busy man in Hollywood movie circles these days, Marshall knew how important it was for me to speak with one who had traveled with Spector from childhood to manhood. With the patience of a schoolteacher conducting a history lesson, he acted both as tour guide of their old West Hollywood neighborhood and chief interpreter of Spector’s psyche.
I would like to single out a number of others who offered invaluable recollections in long, sometimes tedious interviews. My sincere appreciation goes to Carol Connors, Donna Kass, Michael Spencer, Steve Douglas, Harvey Goldstein, Stan Ross, Don Kartoon, Lew Bedell, Lester Sill, Elliott Ingber, Russ Titelman, Beverly Ross, Doc Pomus, Terry Phillips, Ray Peterson, Gene Pitney, Gerry Goffin, Snuff Garrett, Bobby Sheen, Fanita James, Arnold Goland, Larry Levine, Sonny Bono, La La Brooks, Mary Thomas, Nedra Talley, Vinnie Poncia, Danny Davis, Irwin Levine, Dan and David Kessel, and Joey Ramone.
One can’t begin to describe the feeling a rock-and-roll devotee and scholar gets by spending time with the legendary studio musicians of rock’s age of romance. For the thrill of a lifetime and for enriching my music education, I particularly want to thank Howard Roberts, Barney Kessel, Hal Blaine, Earl Palmer, Ray Pohlman, Gary Chester, Artie Kaplan, Artie Butler, and Charlie Macey.
I would also like to acknowledge with gratitude the hardy souls who dutifully culled archives for precious details of the early rock terrain now covered by two decades of dust and neglect. Buried deep in file cabinets and basement catacombs, the recording contracts, ledgers of fabled studio sessions, and long out-of-print record labels were reclaimed through the time and efforts of Bob Rafkin of the American Federation of Musicians Local 47, the House of Oldies in Greenwich Village, and Bob Merlis and Meryl Zukowsky of Warner Brothers Records.
Special thanks to Bob Shannon, Arnie Kay, Marsha Vance, Kenny Vance, Jack Jackson, Barry Goldberg, and Rodney Bingenheimer for vital contacts and telephone numbers; and to Harvey Kubernik for the use of his interview material with Jack Nitzsche. My personal thanks to Patti Stren and Robin Page for their unending tap of good cheer during a grueling thirteen months.
Finally, heartfelt thanks to my agent, Geri Thoma, for believing and caring; and to my editor, Meg Blacks tone, who shared my vision and injected it with love, laughter, and enlightenment. This book is as much their achievement as it is mine.
HE’S A REBEL
Phil Spector, a little man with a Napoleon complex, faced his Waterloo in early 1966. Spector—the now-fabled record producer who was then the Boy King of rock and roll—was desperate to remain unmoved at a time when the sands of pop music were shifting beneath his feet. For the first time in half a decade, Spector had no dependable rock act under his domain. His name—once as renowned as his records, and in some high rock councils as notorious as Dillinger—was becoming an afterthought. Though Phil Spector was only twenty-five years old—the “first tycoon of teen,” as he was dubbed in 1965 by Tom Wolfe—in Spector’s manic and messianic vision this slight was the same as damnation.
To his credit, Spector did not shrink from his audacious genius in order to shift with the sands of rock. Instead, he sought to chart a new territory—an avant-garde idiom somewhere between Motown/Memphis black and L.A. off-white. This always had been Spector’s calling, as he saw it, and he succeeded in the sense that, although his arrangements were undeniably white, his vocalists sang blacker than Motown allowed its vocalists, and many of his musicians came out of a jazz era that was Spector’s first musical love. Indeed, Spector’s leading lady, eternally on records, for a tempestuous half-decade in marriage, was the remarkable Veronica Yvette Bennett—Ronnie Spector—whose heart-palpitating vibrato made rock and roll tremble with Billie Holiday overtones.
Now, in 1966, it was the time for cataclysm, and Phil Spector chose as his vanguard a human Molotov cocktail named Tina Turner, a mostly unknown rhythm-and-blues singer capable of paroxysm in front of a microphone. The vehicle for her passion and soul was a song that Spector co-wrote with the tunesmiths who had given him the fodder for his climb to the top of rock and roll, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry. It was a strange and extraordinary torch song that sounded like it was written on a psychiatrist’s couch—a carousel ride of fleeting images and admissions of a woman’s love so strong and heartfelt that it was rivaled only by the love of her childhood rag doll. It was called “River Deep—Mountain High.”
The session at which Spector cut this paean to the pain of love was the last of the grand-scale studio dates of the sixties. Spector amassed almost two dozen musicians at Gold Star Sound Studios in Hollywood. The session cost more than $20,000, an enormous figure then. The musicians—SPECTOR’S ARMY, many once wore on their shirts, signifying their debt to him in becoming the core of the West Coast rock scene—played long and loud and hard, everybody boiling
over all at once, ignoring the piecemeal overdubbing that was coming into vogue as rock technology evolved. Spector did overdub background vocals on his records, to create a swirl of voices that aped his instrumental tracks, but his love was live music, a rhythm section blaring and wailing its brains out the way the great jazz combos did. At Gold Star, a titanic rhythm section of the kind Spector had become famous for—four guitars, three basses, three pianos, two drums, and a small army of percussion—became one, as only it could, in a live, massed monolith. The room, Gold Star’s Studio A, was saturated in sine waves; they bounced off the walls and the low ceiling and came tumbling out of two echo chambers before being sucked into a tape machine. When mixed down, the sound was not of this earth, and it wasn’t a melody as we know it. It was a mood, a feel, aural poetry, and sheer rock-and-roll heaven. And when that was done, Tina Turner grabbed at her crotch in pain as she sang the lead vocal. Turner screeched and cooed and pleaded, in alternating moods of victory, defeat, bravado, and hopelessness. As each wave fell and rose again with a chorus of “Do I love you my oh my / River Deep—Mountain High,” it was clear that the song wasn’t a fugue; it was Spector’s cry for redemption. “River Deep—Mountain High” was a bacchanalian feast for the ears, an orgy of Phil Spector’s ego and instinct. Most of all, it was LOUD.
Even more than that, it was a flop. The public rejected the record in 1966, and a record industry hostile to Spector, the outsider, gloried in his defeat. However, Spector lived to see his record become more much than a record. Spector envisioned himself as a rock-and-roll Richard Wagner, and “River Deep—Mountain High” is a rock-and-roll Der Ring des Nibelungen, a timeless piece of genius and raw power. When it was released, its competition on the record charts were songs titled “Secret Agent Man,” “Spanish Flea,” “Paperback Writer,” “Hanky Panky,” and “Juanita Banana.” The top three records of 1966 were “I’m a Believer,” “Ballad of the Green Berets,” and “Winchester Cathedral.” To hear all of these songs today is to regress to a different world, and in music to a different universe. In terms of rock art, “Good Vibrations” and “I Am the Walrus” have frayed edges now. Though it was never a hit song, “River Deep—Mountain High” sounds as if it could have been recorded this morning. Probably it always will sound as if it were recorded this morning.
And though Phil Spector’s hit records have been limited since 1966, he is just as current in the same weird way, an implicit if hushed presence, something like a guardian angel, on a rock-and-roll stage he hasn’t graced now in seven years. More than a cult figure, Spector is a never-fading musical influence. Bruce Springsteen’s rumbling saxophone arrangements and histrionic tableau of noise is a straight cop of Spector’s famed “Wall of Sound,” as Springsteen has himself attested. No musician, regardless of his age and context, fails to recognize that rock and roll was not taken as serious music before Spector made music more than something to chew gum by and get pimples to. “River Deep—Mountain High” can be taken as a metaphor for Phil Spector himself, and if you could scatter the song into pieces, what you would have is Spector’s oeuvre, the sum of the parts of his work from 1957 to 1966. Even the ludicrous teenage themes of Spector’s early records sound like The Ride of the Valkyries, elevated to Valhalla by a tide of inspired commotion that was the Wall of Sound (or as Spector would have preferred, “a Wagnerian approach to rock and roll; little symphonies for kids”). The progression of Spector’s Wall covers some of the most definitive music of the sixties—the Crystals’ “He’s a Rebel,” “Da Doo Ron Ron,” and “Then He Kissed Me”; Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans’ “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” and “Not Too Young to Get Married”; Darlene Love’s “Today I Met the Boy I’m Gonna Marry”; the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” “Walking in the Rain,” and “Baby I Love You”; the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.”
Spector was a prodigious force in pop music. From 1961 to 1965 his records made the charts twenty-seven times; seventeen of those nestled inside the Top 40. As a body of work, they were a cultural seed. Spector’s work, as a whole, has a peculiar kind of relevancy in the eighties, as it did in the two previous decades. Because we never really come of age, or long not to, the teen ethos Spector rhapsodized has a visceral hold on the subconscious of anyone born early or late enough to appreciate his work. The bom, bom-bom intro riff of “Be My Baby” is an immediately identifiable heartbeat. Indeed, the Wall of Sound doesn’t reflect the sixties motif as much as it is the era’s apotheosis by lionizing the sentimentality in all humans. Spector’s 1963 Christmas album—an astounding portrait of maudlin beauty—is this generation’s “White Christmas.”
At the height of his reign, Spector’s authority over a song was not unlike that of Frank Capra, Federico Fellini, or George Lucas’s authority on celluloid. In the record business, then as now, it was unprecedented. This is because Spector’s ascendancy was completely different from any other producer. Before, and since, Spector, producers have had an understanding about their craft: they are merely part of the blueprint of recording, subordinate to artist and product. In the late fifties, the word producer was not used in relation to record-making. In the autocracy of pop music then, the record companies “made” the records; the producers were known only within the industry. Then came Phil Spector, who had a new set of assumptions. When he was sixteen, Spector wrote, produced, and co-performed the classic fifties’ innocence song, “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” It went all the way to No. 1. Spector had no reason to believe anyone could make records like he could, and as he rose to prominence on that assumption, he delighted in the arrogance of power. He demanded a producer’s credit on his records’ labels. He was ruthless in establishing his own million-dollar record and publishing companies. He trampled the rights of his artists and co-writers. Spector’s success was one of genius and nerve, and it was not for nothing that when the Beatles’ farewell album, Let It Be, was in shambles and needed a singular kind of music man to salvage it, John Lennon paged Phil Spector—who promptly made history’s apocalyptic band a Phil Spector product and earned himself the right to produce the first solo works of Lennon and George Harrison.
Clearly, Spector was both a product and an incredible anomaly of his era. Elvis was over, the Beatles were five years away, and stereo and video were barely more than words in the dictionary. Pop music was dominated by a corporate cabal of power-broker publishers; they hired the songwriters, chose the acts to record them, and got the songs released. Though they considered themselves a fraternity of gentlemen, their ethics were dirty, their turf wars bloody. Injected into this vinyl jungle, Spector learned the rules of backstabbing and conquest—better than most. Not only could he walk in the ethereal haze of artistic genius; unlike many creative types, he was also calculating and empirical, with a hard business eye, no conscience, and a misanthropic streak. Spector was a visionary, not a revolutionary. He didn’t change the system, he used it. Entering a world in which a rock-and-roll session meant a small band—guitar, piano, bass, drum—playing simpleminded arrangements, Spector didn’t invent a new rock and roll. He simply multiplied the old, using the same simple arrangements but with more and more instruments. The Wall of Sound is often thought of as the height of sophistication, and in a way it is, as an example of technology that engendered a new sound. But the technology itself was archaic even then. Spector’s block of legendary hits were recorded in mono, in the days when musicians were not blocked off from each other, and when there were too few microphones to pick up more than a dozen instruments. It was crazy for Spector to cram two dozen instruments into his studio, but in his hands the aural effect was a tool of purpose. Thus, Spector needed the technology of the fifties to recast rock in the sixties. What made it seem advanced was his synergy in processing the old into a new formula. As a rock-and-roll milestone, it is as significant as Chuck Berry’s guitar chords, the Beach Boys’ harmonies, and Jim Morrison’s ballads.
The flip side of Spector’s crusade was that when music did chang
e, too radically for him to keep his process intact, he was a genius lost and fearful of having to slay yet another kind of rock autocracy. While Phil Spector can provide almost any act in rock with a viable hit, his price is too high. The price is subjugation, which is apparently what Spector wants to exact in exchange for his services. In truth, Spector and the rest of rock and roll have been at odds ever since artists began carving songs out of their own visions. It was a breach of authority that Spector evidently couldn’t tolerate. He has lived for years in a private world, alone with his genius, shut off from the reality of his failure to retain power. Although he is desperate to return to active producing, he has scared away artists who have solicited him with what seems to be a pathological urge to make sure that he never will return. His longtime seclusion, interrupted by sporadic and fleeting bursts of work—most recently eight years ago with the Ramones—have led many to compare Spector with Howard Hughes. A better parallel may be Orson Welles, a genius in his twenties who drew back thereafter in resignation, unwilling or unable to compete with his own legacy.
Regrettably, but not surprisingly, Phil Spector refused to participate in or sanction this book. Although I reiterated, in a series of letters—the seat of his empire is now a post office box number in Pasadena—that the book was conceived as history’s categorical record of his life and work, none of the letters was answered. Spector’s attorney, Marty Machat—who led Spector into his ill-conceived and embarrassing album project with poet Leonard Cohen in 1978—chose to run in horror from my calls to his office. It can be inferred that Spector has made it plain that reality is not to intrude on myth. Spector’s attitude, in fact, makes one wonder if he, like Michael Jackson, craves a certain perverse public image. Unlike Jackson, however, Spector engineers none of his perversity; no bits of bizarre behavior are leaked to the media from Spector’s Pasadena compound. He is a recluse in the truest, proudest sense. In the context of his iconoclastic, who-gives-a-damn attitude—the land that stamped rock and roll forever—he is to be admired for it. Indeed, by way of personal prologue, I think it necessary to say that I hold Spector in the highest regard. From my place in the legion of baby boomers who reached teenhood in time to appreciate, and be affected by, Spector’s music in its original issue, he is a stately, heroic figure.
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