Worried sick about Lenny and too committed to turn away from him, Phil could only keep plying him with handouts. Meanwhile, he posed in Lenny’s scruffy perverse image. The house at La Collina became a hangout for the grungy poet Allen Ginsberg and others of Lenny’s Greenwich Village loyalists, and Phil spoke of doing an album of Ginsberg’s poetry. At times, Phil’s sympathy pains seemed frighteningly real. In the studio, he would cower in a corner and call out, “I need my heroin.” It would scare all but those who really knew him.
“People said he was a junkie, but I never believed it,” Vinnie Poncia said. “You have to know Phil. He would’ve fainted at the sight of a needle. I never saw him get high, never even saw him with a joint. He was crazy enough as it is. Phil had that chameleon thing. If he was with smokers he’d say, ‘Gimme a cigarette’ and never inhale it. If he was hangin’ out with Lenny Bruce he was sufferin’ with him. He’d adopt a heroin habit without stickin’ a needle in his arm.”
“Phil wore Lenny on his wrist,” Danny Davis said. “He loved Lenny, but it was one of those ‘periods.’ Karate, pool . . . Lenny Bruce was one of those.”
Phil had his own explanation of Lenny’s purpose. “He was at the time my closest friend,” he told Rolling Stone a few years later. “He was like a teacher or a philosopher. He was like a living Socrates.”
Phil transferred the business—now operating under the umbrella name of Phil Spector Productions—from New York to a penthouse suite in a tinted-gray glass office building at 9130 Sunset, mere minutes from his house and punctuating the “happening” juncture of Doheny and the Strip. Joan Berg, who elected not to move west, was replaced in the setup by a sales manager, Bob Kirstein. Danny Davis, as always, was the keeper of the cash drawer, which was now being opened less for music matters and more on rehabilitation cases. There was Lenny Bruce, of course, but no more so than the demands of the Spector family.
Regarding Bertha and Shirley, Davis said, “Phil has the classic love/ hate thing with them; they, of course, think he’s the end of the world.”
Working on the love side of the equation, Phil put Bertha up in an apartment that he paid for and he bought her a car. If he hoped that relieved him of the frustrations he had about his family ties, friends doubted it worked for very long, because his mood never seemed to brighten when the subject was family relationships. There was, for one thing, the continuing distress about his sister. Shirley was still seeing doctors up in Palo Alto and Phil had an iron-clad pact with himself to pay for every cent of her care. “I’d have to send money to people at the hospital, the doctors, to keep her in,” Davis recalled. “Once Phil wanted me to go up and get her out when she was bein’ discharged. I got out of that job fast. No way I wanted to do that.”
At the core of his unease about Shirley, Phil may have worried that he might somehow go over the edge as well. In his concern for Shirley’s health, he pondered long and hard trying to come to grips with her descent and learning about her particular demons, as if that could distance his own. While he could be genuinely sensitive, empathetic, and even optimistic about Shirley’s therapy, it still struck others that Phil had left himself unprotected, and in fact had put himself in line for a breakdown by his inability to assimilate into the world around him.
Vinnie Poncia noticed the telling contradiction that Phil could feel other people’s pain, while being helpless to ease his own.
Vinnie Poncia said, “My wife killed herself in the seventies and Phil sent me a heartfelt letter that made me understand why it happened. He knew about alienation. Phil couldn’t ever make peace with people around him. He always feared he was out there on the fringe looking in.”
By this time, 1965, the West Hollywood boys touched by Phil’s art and personal blessing were making their move on rock—some abetted, ironically, by Marshall Lieb. Marshall himself had edged upward after the Teddy Bears, as had tiny Annette Kleinbard, who under the name Carol Connors had written the 1964 Rip Chords hit “Hey Little Cobra.” In 1960 Marshall sang in the road version of the Hollywood Argyles—whose big novelty hit “Alley Oop” was produced by old friend Kim Fowley—and then, working with Lee Hazelwood, played guitar on Duane Eddy sessions. He went on to produce songs for Timi Yuro and then the Everly Brothers. “When I got away from Phillip,” Lieb said, “I was able to make some money” By 1965 Marshall’s presence was formidable. When the Rolling Stones came to record in L. A. that year, Marshall gave a party for the band at his house. Phil, who did not miss the chance to play host to the Stones in L.A.—and played bass on the session at which “Play with Fire” was cut—nonetheless stayed away, his coolness to Marshall having turned bitter cold now that he was a creative threat.
Marshall, on the other hand, wished they could renew their friendship. In a way, he felt joined to Phil even now—by the Wall of Sound. Even in its evolved form, Marshall believed it was a style of music the two of them had worked out. “The loss of quality in the vocals, background, bass, the big wash of the mix, Phil and I had worked a lot on that: the transparency of music,” Lieb said. “The Wall of Sound was a very transparent wall. People who tried to duplicate it did it wrong. They were always adding to make more sound. But it wasn’t a lot of sound, not a lot of people playing a lot of notes. It was more air than sound.
“Phil always knew what he wanted, and the two of us were able to achieve it quickest. He could achieve it with Nitzsche, but it took him forever because he didn’t have anyone that he could talk to. Nitzsche was close, but not where we were. The Teddy Bears was its own sound and Phil Spector was its own sound. But ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’ is a classic and it outsold every Philles record.”
When Phil went to New York, Marshall was the man who could make it happen for the next generation of rockers of West Hollywood, who were now out of school. One was Don Peake, the kid who made that green Japanese guitar wail on the Friday night jam sessions at Michael Spencer’s house. Through Marshall’s recommendation, the eighteen-year-old became lead guitarist for the Everly Brothers. Peake was the hottest L.A. sideman when Phil began inviting him to play on Righteous Brothers dates. There was also Ira Ingber, the younger brother of Elliott, who had played the “Bumbershoot” gig with Phil. Marshall produced a demo on a band that Ira was in. Others in the old neighborhood crowd were forging their own success. After two years in the army, Elliott Ingber was deep into the new scene in West Hollywood, which centered around Canter’s Deli. Soon he had a reputation as a guitar fool—although years later he confessed that he still could not play “that be-bop shit Phil did”—and joined Frank Zappa’s pop-and-protest band the Mothers, a cult fave on the freak underground circuit. Elliott’s guitar partner on the “Bumbershoot” gig, Larry Taylor, was the bass player in Canned Heat, a rising electric boogie band. Kim Fowley’s old partner in the Sleepwalkers, Bruce Johnston, was with the Beach Boys. And then there was Russ Titelman, who, playing a Spector-like game, made demos of his own songs that led to an apprentice writing job in New York with Don Kirshner. Back in L.A. now, he was an office rat at Liberty Records. “It was a vital, happening time,” he said.
In the midst of this crackling vibrancy, Phil finally found a band he could produce in the hues of his vision. The Modern Folk Quartet, an ensemble that combined acoustic folk with modern vocal harmonies, had made two folk albums for Warner Brothers Records, and one of their single records was John Stewart’s “Road to Freedom.” As regulars at the Village Gate, they had opened shows for Woody Allen and John Coltrane. When folk and rock merged, the group electrified its guitars and jumped into the L.A. thicket, performing at The Troubadour, Whiskey-a-Go-Go, and The Trip. Phil saw the MFQ, as they were called, as a unit he could make into his version of the Byrds. Negotiating a deal with the band’s manager, Herb Cohen, he went into it headlong with the Phil trip.
“We spent three or four months hanging out with Phil,” recalled Henry Diltz, who was a member of the MFQ. “We’d go to his house and he’d keep us waiting, it would take him two hours to come dow
nstairs and make his entrance. But then he’d be fine, and it was very inspiring to stand around the piano as he’d bang out chords and take us through these great old rock and R&B songs and try to get us to sing and harmonize a certain way. It was a nice feeling to have somebody famous like that interested in us.”
Wearing the MFQ like a bib, Phil made the club rounds with them, the prince of rock and his new mid-sixties vanguard. In the fall he took the band into Gold Star and cut a song he had bought from a Van Nuys singer/songwriter named Harry Nilsson. An uptempo folk-rocker titled “This Could Be the Night,” the song sounded more like a Wagnerian folk march with the Wall of Sound, but Phil thought it was a certificate of Sunset Strip viability. Preening in the hippie crowd, he was on an extraordinary high one night at The Trip. As the quartet was doing its set, Phil bounded from his seat and onto the stage with a twelve-string guitar. In one of the least-known major events of the rock epoch, Phil Spector—who renounced public performing because he could not bear a roomful of hard eyes staring at his rodent features—unfurled his guitar, picked up the microphone, and began warbling fifties songs backed by the Modern Folk Quartet. “It was weird—this was Phil Spector up there! But it was completely unannounced and some people in the place probably didn’t know who it was,” Diltz said.
One of those fortunate to see and know was Kim Fowley, who happened to be at the club that night. Fowley, with his hulking size and black-vested, mortuarial foreboding, was a resident scenemaker, closely identified with Frank Zappa’s freak circle. But few things blew Fowley away more than watching Spector front a rock band on a public stage. “Amazing, man, and the pity was that there was a lot of kids in there who didn’t know what the fuck was happening,” Fowley remembered. “I think about it now and it’s like, how’s that for a memory? And he was good too. I’d never heard his voice. He had good mike technique, good delivery. He sounded like he would’ve been a good lead singer.”
It was around this time that Phil became the central figure in a concert movie called The Big TNT Show. Shot intimately on videotape and then transferred to film, TNT was modeled after the 1964 concert film The TAMI Show, which provided major exposure to the Rolling Stones and the Supremes and years later gained fame as a prime documentary of sixties’ rock. Phil was signed by producer Henry Saperstein to serve as musical director and associate producer for a fee of $20,000 against 20 percent of the film’s profits. Two concerts were taped, on November 29 and 30, at Hollywood’s Moulin Rouge Theater. The talent Spector chose made up a strange rock, folk, and soul mélange of past and present—Joan Baez, the Byrds, the Ronettes, Ray Charles, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Donovan, Petula Clark, Bo Diddley, and a veteran soul act, the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. Eager to promote the Modern Folk Quartet, Phil used “This Could Be the Night” as the movie’s theme and ran the song over the credits.
Awed by the amazing sixteen-week run of “Lovin’ Feelin’ ”—No. 1 for two weeks, the record spent seven weeks in the Top 3 before falling off the chart in late March—Larry Levine could not understand why Phil had no plans for a Righteous Brothers album. “Phil was so dumb. He was so brilliant but he was so dumb,” Levine said. “Here you got this record and it was selling millions before it ever got to the Top 10 and then it kept going and going. I said, ‘Phil, why don’t you put an album out? Call it Lovin’ Feelin’. He said, ‘No, I don’t do albums that way. I put out a bunch of singles. When I got enough singles, I put out an album.’ I argued and argued and finally I said, ‘Listen, Phil, let Bill and Bobby and me go in and we’ll do it, just one album.’ He said okay and we went in on a weekend and Bill produced it.”
Phil would come to regret his decision. Medley produced ten tracks of his own choosing on the mid-1965 LP, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, all but the title song. Two months later he produced all but two tracks of the second Righteous Brothers album, Just Once in My Life. As Medley’s self-importance ballooned, Bobby Hatfield fretted. Bobby had not lived easily with Medley’s solo vocal on the entire first verse of both “Lovin’ Feelin’ ” and “Just Once in My Life,” believing Medley was slowly eclipsing him. By the summer of 1965, Hatfield, flushed with the success of “Unchained Melody,” refused to sing with him. Contending suddenly with fratricidal Righteous Brothers, and not able to stress business perspective with two men he thought were rather dim bulbs and had little common sense, Phil intended to use a third Righteous Brothers album—the first two had sold extremely well—as a vinyl demilitarized zone. Aside from “Hung on You,” there would be three new songs by Medley and Hatfield; Spector would produce the Hatfield songs, Medley his own. In mid-September Phil cut Hatfield’s covers of “Ebb Tide,” “For Sentimental Reasons,” and “White Cliffs of Dover.” Medley completed the songs for “Loving You,” “God Bless the Child,” and “Hallelujah I Love Her So.”
The album, though, was already under a cloud, not because the Righteous Brothers had a problem with each other but because they were at the end of their line with Phil and with R. J. Van Hoogten. Although Medley and Hatfield took a quantum leap with “Lovin’ Feelin’,” that first session was a hint of things to come. The Righteous Brothers—who had once quit as an opening act on an early Beatles tour because they couldn’t stand the comparative anonymity—were now convinced that their popularity was as an echo of Spector’s name. As promotion man, Danny Davis could commiserate. “It was particularly bad for the Righteous Brothers, more so than the Ronettes,” he said. “I remember the jockeys getting on the air and saying, ‘Here’s the new Phil Spector record.’ The Righteous Brothers railed at that. They hated Phil for it.” Neither was Medley content with the doggie-bone reward of producing album filler.
For months Medley and Hatfield, believing they could make their own records and extend their own popularity without Phil, had wanted to break from Spector. Van Hoogten provided a way to go about it. In July Medley and Hatfield, who were receiving sporadic royalties from Moonglow Records, had hired an accountant and ran an audit of Moonglow’s books. The audit showed that Van Hoogten allegedly shorted them by $28,600 on royalties. Van Hoogten, meanwhile, had his own beef with Spector, who had not turned over a number of Righteous Brothers masters to him for sale in the foreign countries in Van Hoogten’s domain. Van Hoogten took this as a breach of contract. On September 15, a day after Phil cut “Ebb Tide,” Van Hoogten sent Spector a letter terminating Moonglow’s agreement with Philles. A week later Van Hoogten instructed the Righteous Brothers to refrain from doing any further recording for Spector. While Spector’s lawyers threatened Moonglow with a lawsuit, Medley and Hatfield decided to meet with Phil to clear the air of their grievances, which also included not receiving royalties due them by Philles. In recent weeks their expensive Hollywood agent, Jerry Perenchio, had met with Phil on that subject. “Jerry couldn’t get through to him,” Danny Davis recalled. “Jerry knew faster than them he was dealing with a loony.”
Now, because the album was sitting half finished, Medley and Hatfield believed Phil would have to listen. Phil told them to come to the house, and Danny Davis brought them over. But when they arrived, they were told he was out. Unfortunately, they could plainly see that he was in, and only feet away, hiding behind the door. “Phil had one of those two-way mirrors where he could see out but you couldn’t see in,” Davis said. “However, the house was always in a state of disrepair and, unbeknownst to Phil, the thing was broken and you could see him standing there. The Righteous Brothers saw that he wouldn’t answer them and they were unbelievably pissed.”
As they drove back through the gates, Medley and Hatfield decided they would break the four-year contract with Spector. On September 23, they filed a lawsuit against Van Hoogten and Spector, boldly—and speciously—claiming that because Van Hoogten breached their Moonglow contract, his deal with Phil no longer could be held in force.
While the three sides jousted in the courts of Los Angeles County, Phil was in a bind. He wanted the Righteous Brothers album to be out in time for the Christmas buying
season, yet he could not get the pair into the studio. Van Hoogten, in a Machiavellian twist for mutual gain, agreed with Phil that Bill and Bobby finish the album pending the legal outcome. The appeal fell on deaf ears. For whatever reason—either because they believed they could, or they were advised by Jerry Perenchio that they could—Perenchio sought a contract for the Righteous Brothers with another record company. Even though any label would risk immense damages in signing the act now, an aggressive MGM Records was very hot for them. MGM was in the middle of a wave of a new big-name signings and rumors filled the air that they were close to notching the Righteous Brothers. With the potentially disastrous defection staring him in the face, Phil sent Medley a cheeky telegram on October 26. Designed to wheedle and shame the pair back into the fold, it read:
Dear Bill:
Well aware of current situation involving lawyers, managers and others. This is to let you know that during the present involvement, there is no possible chance for you to have an album out for the Christmas market, or to even have an album out in general, unless you record.
Bill, believe me, this can only hurt you. You may think not, at present, but no matter what the outcome and however long it takes to reach it, I can only lose money, you can lose a career. Please remember that it is Moonglow you’re suing, not me, and you could by court order hold up all future monies payable to them by me. To protect yourselves, I don’t think you can sustain without any product. I personally feel it’s foolish for you to do so. ’Nuff said.
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