“Phil could never accept anybody being on a level with him,” Larry Levine said. “I could feel the animosity between them, and I found that Phil’s dislike for Adler spilled over to me years later when I worked with Lou too. I didn’t like him, just because of Phil. At first Lou would come in when Phil was doing things and they’d be acting friendly. Then Phil was funny. He’d turn up the speakers as soon as Lou came into the control room. That was like stepping into a scalding shower.
“Phil would love to blast the sound because it was a great feeling of all this coming at you, but he’d start off at a moderately low level and grow used to it. But when a visitor would walk in, he’d crank it up, like, hey, let’s impress him. And they wouldn’t make head or tail of it.”
Crowding Lou Adler out of the studio was Spector’s way of ignoring a potential rival. “He had no respect for anyone he thought was a threat to him in any way,” Lester Sill believed, and by 1963 that applied to Don Kirshner as well. After recording Mann and Weil’s brightly upbeat but again too-fatalistic song, “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” the next Darlene Wright-fronted Crystals hit, Phil did not go to Aldon for two years. “He thought he was making Kirshner too big,” Annette said.
His alternative became a a young woman from Long Island, Ellie Greenwich. Mostly unknown around Broadway, Greenwich had recorded briefly for RCA in the late fifties, taught school for a while, and now was writing under the Leiber and Stoller banner at Trio Music—in another irony of mixed industry blood, it was Terry Phillips who recommended her for a job while he was dating her best friend. Greenwich was a melody writer of immense ability, and her songs were inventive teen tripe, with beguiling chord changes and cute hooks. Armed with songs, the blond and spunky Greenwich tried to play some for Phil one day in the Brill Building. Spector looked in a mirror, combed his hair, and ignored her. Greenwich scolded him, yelling “Are you going to listen?” and he huffed out, apparently turned off to her. But when Phil heard her demo of a song she’d written with a Trio collaborator named Tony Powers, “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Gonna Marry,” he thought they could do business and invited them to his apartment. Phil came home very late, and Greenwich accosted him in the lobby, again berating him for being rude. This time Phil smiled at her, as if she had passed a test. He took her and Powers up to the apartment, sat them at a piano, and heard much that he thought he could use.
The first Greenwich-Powers-Spector tune, correctly listed in that order, was “Why Do Lovers Break Each Others’ Hearts?”, a chugging, glockenspiel-punctuated piece sung in unison by Bobby Sheen and Darlene Wright and released as a Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans record. The second, “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Gonna Marry”—credited as Spector-Greenwich-Powers—made Darlene Wright into an unlikely torch singer. Wright sang the ballad the only way she could, as if she were in a pulpit, and it was a loud wail that Phil did not want to use as a Crystals record. When released, it was with the name of a new Philles act: Darlene Love.
Phil was in the studio all the time now, hopping from coast to coast, cutting mostly in L. A. but also doing album fillers with the real Crystals at Mira Sound. He stepped away, briefly, on a February day in 1963. On that day, he married Annette Merar.
As much as she loved Phil, and though things were good between them, Annette was not happy as a live-in love interest for a man almost never at home. She was young, still friendless in New York, and she had seen a darkness in Phil that was disconcerting. As had Donna Kass, Annette felt the hot breath of Phil’s jealousy. When Phil was in L.A. cutting “He’s a Rebel,” she told him over the phone that she was about to go sunbathing. “He got freaked out and so pissed that I was wearing a two-piece bathing suit that I couldn’t sunbathe in it,” she said. “He made me promise not to wear it.” All too often, Annette stood in the firing line of his temper. “The worst of it was his verbal abuse and arguing. Phil loves to argue, and he would destroy me, and I’m no dummy. But he’d have to win.” Trying to cope with his bottomless pit of insecurities, Phil had begun seeing a Park Avenue psychiatrist named Dr. Harold Kaplan, on Mondays for group therapy plus two or three private sessions during the week.
Annette believed that their love was the only emotional cement of their lives. Phil said as much when he proposed marriage. In January, he gave her a glimmering 2½-carat diamond ring. They also moved to an apartment Annette had secured from a realtor, a magnificent terraced penthouse at Sixty-second Street and York Avenue with a breathtaking view of the East River and neighbors that included Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. They took the apartment completely furnished, the living-room walls painted in shades of olive, expensive French frying pans dangling on hooks in the kitchen. The only new piece was a television sent as a gift from Don Kirshner. On February 18, they were wed in a rabbi’s study of a synagogue on Central Park West. The ceremony was attended only by three of Phil’s friends: Arnie Goland, an arranger who charted many of Phil’s New York sessions, was best man, and the other witnesses were a Liberty Records producer named Ed Silver and Peter Bitlisian, a show-biz photography who sometimes took Phil to Las Vegas to meet celebrities. The reception was held at Helen Noga’s sprawling Central Park South apartment.
Joyous as the wedding day was, it ended in tears. “We had a fight that very night,” Annette said. “I don’t remember why, but we were arguing again. I’m telling you, he loved to argue. And I remember sitting there on the floor of the dining room crying my eyes out.” Only days later, Phil left for another session at Gold Star. “I was devastated. He just walked out and left me there. I couldn’t believe he could be that cold.”
Annette, reaching out on her own, began school, studying English literature at Hunter College. And in the coming months, life as Mrs. Phil Spector seemed good to her. “We had a high life,” she said. “I had beautiful clothes, a maid three times a week, and a limousine to and from school. We went out to the Copa, sat at the best tables, went dancing and discothequing, the whole thing.” At home, Phil could seem like an endearing little boy. “You know how he lives? He lives like a middle-class Jewish boy, with his salami and bagels in the refrigerator. He liked to sit with a cup of coffee and watch a litde TV we had in the kitchen.” Now growing into domesticity, Bertha Spector instructed Annette about how to please her little boy. “The only thing his mother ever said to me was to tell me how to freeze bacon, to wrap it in four-strip packages and put it in the freezer. That’s all I remember of Bertha. I ran into a lot of Phil’s craziness, and I was the love of his life.”
In time, the partying and domestic tranquility ended, and the biggest problem for Annette became her alienation from Phil’s life. He still took her to the studio with him, but that now bored her. “I felt very out of place in the studio. I was very mubh in the background. I’d take one of my French literature books out and read so I could do something. Sometimes it was great. I went to rehearsals with Jeff and Ellie that were phenomenal, and with Darlene Love, who would sing and make you want to cry. But those sessions, God, those were hard work—just sitting there was hard. I liked him much better at home just with his guitar.
“I just never felt part of his circle, the rock-and-roll people, like Kirshner and Leiber and Stoller. I was friends with Doc Pomus and Michael Spencer and his wife Ruth, but I never would allow myself to ride on his coattails, because it was not my success. I never gave up my identity to him and he didn’t like that, because he wants everybody to be a moth around his flame.”
Eventually Annette was cut out from his life almost completely. For long periods Phil never wanted to go out of the apartment. Annette, a nature lover, felt caged. “We’d just stay in and argue. One perfect example was when I told him there was a difference between a dictator and a demagogue. He said there was no difference, and we got into a big fight about that. If I said red, he’d say it’s green, just to be contentious.” After that, he would leave and be gone, for hours or days.
Marrying Phil, it seemed, had reduced his capacity to love her. It was as if, having beco
me a part of him, he could not accept her being that close.
“Phil seemed to thrive on destroying his opponent, even if it was his wife,” Annette said. “He changed after we married. He never let me sit next to him and he gave me little affection. Sex was okay, it was, but as far as affection, he was like a hummingbird. He was an emotional tease. He would appear to be the sensitive, lovely genius, but the minute you expected it to bloom, it would fly off.”
To Annette, the arguing and the little symbols of neglect arose from a cavity in his soul.
“I think the man doesn’t really know how to love. I think he loves his music and that’s it. So I was slowly being destroyed, by waiting for his calls, and he would never come home and then he would walk in at five in the morning.
“Phil is so charming and sophisticated and talented. But he has a shadow side, as everybody does. And his shadow side is violent, and it came out; he has no control over the beast inside of him. That’s the trouble. He’s a victim of his own mind. He doesn’t control it, and I’ll tell you something. To be subject to that on an intimate level was devastating, and it has affected my whole life.”
Together now, and separately, they began to see Dr. Kaplan. “But there was no change at all,” Annette believed. “Kaplan was like another fan for Phil, an ego trip for both of them.”
Disheartened as she was, even darker storm clouds were on the horizon.
His music gave him so much altitude and respect as a person. That was his power source, and it was such a tremendous source that it just drove him higher and higher.
—SONNY BONO
Phil Spector had a peculiar kind of hit factory by mid-1963. As he stepped into Gold Star and rolled more and more records down the echo-chambered assembly line, he knew that few cared who the artist on the label would be. The startling fact that a producer mattered more than the artist suggested that Beethoven had not rolled over for rock and roll after all. Spector was, as he always had dreamed, an apparition of Richard Wagner right in the middle of pimple-cream music.
Befitting a latter-day classic master, Spector fiercely protected his musicians’ interests. Hal Blaine earned thick steaks after sessions and the forbearance to poke fun at Phil’s recording methods. Sitting at his drums for a typically long haul awaiting his cue, Blaine one time pulled out an alarm clock and let the bell sound, rupturing what the band was playing. Phil laughed with everyone else. A brilliant new pianist, Leon Russell, once played a solo that moved Phil so much that he came onto the studio floor and wrote him out a $50 check. “Phil always took care of us. There was never a problem with bread, never,” Steve Douglas said. “In fact, one time I remember him being pissed because we hadn’t been paid for something by Warner Brothers. He yelled, ‘Goddamn it, stop this session. Fuck those people! I’m gonna get you guys paid!’ We had to convince him it was cool, that they really weren’t that late with the money.”
One time, after arranging and contracting a session, Arnold Goland submitted a bill that Phil wouldn’t accept. “He wanted to pay me more,” Goland said. “He said, ‘You’re not charging me enough.’ He wanted to pay me double what I asked for.”
As a joke, but a telling one, the musicians came in for one date wearing T-shirts bearing a picture of Phil’s face—a take off of his habit of wearing shirts with Beethoven’s face. “Phil was flabbergasted,” said Ray Pohlman, who devised the joke. “He loved it.”
Conversely, although Barbara Alston, Darlene Wright, and Bobby Sheen were crucial to his records, they were now little more than tools. Phil demanded that they be available to him, but no one ever knew what group name would be chosen for each song—and he seemed to delight in this arcane power to make kings and break hearts. “He’d talk about it,” Annette recalled. “He would say, ‘They’re all mine. Without me, they’re nothing. They will do what I want.’ Again, it was full power, full control.”
No one inside Phil’s inner circle could ever fail to see that. No man, no musician—not Larry Levine, not Jack Nitzsche—was allowed to penetrate his wary omnipotence and to know him too well. “Phil had yes-men, but he didn’t like to surround himself with people, that didn’t make him feel good,” Annette said, “because they’d want to know him and want to get close, and he doesn’t want to—even though he feels very small if he is just himself. That’s where his bravado and lying come in.”
One confederate who came closer than most was a short, swarthy industry hustler, Sonny Bono. Squinty-eyed, and with a casaba-sized nose, Bono was a West Coast rock denizen for years, including a spell when he was partners with Jack Nitzsche. Bono sold his first songs while driving a meat truck in the mid-fifties, and he was hired as a writer/producer at Specialty Records in 1957 when he just happened to come in after the R&B label fired Sam Cooke and his producer Bumps Blackwell. At Specialty, Bono placed two of his songs on the flip sides of Larry Williams’s hits “Short Fat Fanny” and “Bony Maronie.” Meeting Nitzsche, Bono hired him to do lead sheets at $3 apiece. Bono and Nitzsche went on to write songs for the Robins, and then Jackie DeShannon’s “Needles and Pins,” but neither man prospered. When Nitzsche went to work for Lee Hazelwood and Lester Sill, Bono went into promotion at a Hollywood distributing firm. But Bono longed to get back to making records, and when Nitzsche fell in with Spector, Sonny considered it the job in music. Because his distributing house handled the Philles line, Bono, a huge fan of Spector’s records, offered himself up as a quasi-promotion man, sideman, and all-around stooge.
“I was Phil’s flunky,” Bono clarified affably. “Sometimes Phil would get hungry at four in the morning, or if he wanted company, that’s what I was around for.”
Bono was a faithful and obedient basset hound—“Sonny had his nose up Phil’s ass a mile,” said Lester Sill, who gave Bono office space at the El Centro office as well—but in return, Phil included Bono on every session after he came on at a $175-a-week salary in early 1963. Bono sometimes contracted the musicians, played percussion, and sang with the background singers, but Bobby Sheen, who recorded for Bono as a teenager at Specialty, remembers him now as “a coffee guy.” The dialogue between Phil and Sonny would go like this:
“Doesn’t that sound good, Sonny?”
“Yeah, Phil, great!”
“Should we get it up higher?”
“Yeah, that sounds good, Phil!”
“Go get me some coffee.”
“Okay!”
All the while, though, the amiable and shrewd Bono was watching and learning how to make quality records.
“I was blown away when I saw what he did in the studio,” Bono said. “Even back then, the thing to do was isolate your sound as much as you could. But Phil was like Muhammad Ali with the rope-a-dope. He did everything the opposite of what you were programmed to do. Everybody wanted a clean sound, and then he comes up with this slop over and over, bigger and bigger each time, and makes a sound everybody flipped over.”
Bono was not, however, permitted a hard, honest appraisal of the music, or to make a contribution. After coming aboard, he started bringing around his seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Cherilyn Sarka-sian LaPier, who was called Cher. Tall, lean, and very pretty, Cher, a runaway who had moved in with Sonny, had dark hair down to her waist, a crooked nose, and little to her name except a white pant-suit that she wore almost every day. Bringing her to the studio, Sonny was able to insert her into the coterie of Spector’s background singers. “Phil loved it that Cher could sing because he could get a background singer for $15 instead of a standard fee,” Bono said. But Sonny had more in mind for her.
“I always wanted Phil to record Cher. But they didn’t get along. Cher was a young girl and she was overwhelmed by Phil. The communication was really weird between them; it wasn’t easy because Phil was sometimes open, sometimes introverted, and you didn’t know whether you said something wrong or not. Conversation didn’t flow with him, and it was never a piece of cake to hang out with him.”
Those around Phil learned quickly that conversation
would be scarce, a nicety he considered a distraction. “The studio was his life,” Bono said. “He ate, slept, and breathed music. Sometimes he’d go to the Beach Boys’ sessions and listen to what they were doing and talk to Brian. He was all-consumed by record studios and songs. There was no other life that I could see.”
If Bono was Spector’s pet, Nino Tempo was his pet musician. Tempo became the same kind of one-way sounding board as Bono. He was put to work on keyboards, saxophone, percussion, almost everything, and while he played nothing extraordinarily well, no session would run without him. Dark and stocky, Tempo spoke gruffly and out of the side of his mouth, gangster-style. Phil had run across him early on in New York. Trying to sell songs to Leiber and Stoller, Tempo shared an elevator one day with a nervous Spector. “He shied away from me, pressing himself as tightly as he could against the back wall,” Tempo recalled. “Later on he said he thought I was going to rob him.” Jerry Leiber had wanted Phil and Nino to write together, and when Leiber vacationed during the summer of 1960, the two of them and Tempo’s sister, April Stevens, lived in Leiber’s town house for a few weeks. Tempo then went to L.A., and when Phil happened to stop at a red light on Wilshire Boulevard two years later, Tempo was in the car next to him and Phil invited him onto the “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” session.
As a profusion of Spector hits ensued, this human good-luck charm developed a distinctive strut inside the studio. Years later the other musicians would hear about how Tempo claimed real influence on the hits. “Nino was another one who wanted to be a producer, a big macher,” said Hal Blaine. “He was kinda considered not a whole lot by the gang. He was like Billy Strange. Billy, with his big bulk, was a little bit intimidating, and when he’d say, ‘Wait a minute, let’s do this,’ everybody would do it. Nino wanted to always take over sessions and tell everybody what to do.”
He's a Rebel Page 17