He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  In the early evening of that Tuesday in August, Phil heard the morbid news on the radio: Lenny Bruce was found in his bathroom, a needle in his arm, dead of an apparent overdose. Hauling Danny Davis with him, Phil slid behind the wheel of his white Cadillac and, with Danny too scared to move or say a word, the car tore rubber all the way down the slinky roads to Lenny’s house. After arriving in a great screech of brakes, Phil blew past the policemen at the door and scrambled upstairs to the bathroom death theater. In a showy outburst of grief, he threw himself to the floor next to where Lenny’s body lay facedown next to the toilet, his jeans down at his ankles, a bathrobe sash tied around the arm from which the needle jutted. Looking up at the policemen all around, Phil screamed, “You killed him! All of you killed him!”

  Leaving moments later with Danny, the Cadillac sped back down the same winding turns, which now were only vague outlines in the dark. Danny concluded that this was the end, that if Harold Kaplan was right about Phil, this was the time he had chosen to kill himself. But then Phil eased up and hit Sunset. And although Phil did a lot of mournful wailing about Lenny that night, this crisis had been a short one. Although he was madder at the world for it, there would be no suicide watch this time.

  The very next morning, Danny was in the office when a strange man came by. “A nice-looking man in a gray suit,” Davis recalled all too well. He gave Danny a card that identified him as a lieutenant in the LAPD, homicide. Telling Danny he had something to show him, he pulled out a proof sheet of pictures—the police photos of a dead Lenny Bruce, needle in his arm and sprawled on the floor. Taken aback by the gruesome pictures, Danny could only ask, “What’ll I do with ’em?” With straight-faced sarcasm, the cop replied, “I thought you could use ’em for an album cover.”

  “I’ll never forget it as long as I live,” Davis said. “I looked at him and I thought the man was absolutely demented. I thought he had lost his mind.”

  When the lieutenant began talking price, a horrified Danny called Phil at home and informed him of the grotesque offer.

  “How much does he want?” Phil wanted to know.

  “Five thousand dollars. I told him we would have no interest in them.”

  Without pause, the phone was nearly blasted out of Danny’s hand by Phil’s bellowing voice. “Buy ’em!” he ordered.

  Danny, though, would not draw out the money. “I sent the guy’s card up to the house and Phil took care of it,” he said. “I didn’t want a thing to do with it. I thought it was one of the sickest things I’d ever heard of.”

  Danny preferred to believe that Phil wanted to hoard those ghastly negatives to keep them out of the hands of others who might exploit them. A decade later, when the movie Lenny was made, the death scene was re-created with Dustin Hoffman, vérité-style, in the manner of the photos. “The picture that came up on screen just before the end title was the superimposition of the real picture of Lenny Bruce,” Davis said. “Phil sold that picture to the movie company and made maybe three times what he had purchased ’em for.”

  Phil paid for Lenny’s funeral and gave the eulogy. In true Spectorian style, it was an ostentatious affair and almost all of Hollywood was invited—except many famous comedians who paid lip service to Lenny after his death. Fresh in Phil’s mind was the night he took Lenny to The Trip and Bill Cosby and the Smothers Brothers avoided their table. “The Mort Sahls, Bill Cosbys, Buddy Hacketts—those are the people that really let Lenny down,” Spector told Rolling Stone. “They’re the ones who all said, when Lenny died, that they wanted to bury him—only they wanted to bury him when he was living, because none of them were there.”

  Danny Davis was not at the funeral either, by his own choice, turned off by what he perceived to be rites of feigned sorrow. Phil upbraided him for it. “He left me a note that ripped me a new asshole. He said that Lenny was our friend, we should pay him respect . . . but the respect he wanted to pay to Lenny was circus in nature.”

  By the end of 1966, Phil had released only two more records. One was the old Righteous Brothers’ album cut, “White Cliffs of Dover.” The other was the Ronettes’ “I Can Hear Music,” which came out of the Spector-Barry-Greenwich writing sessions for Tina Turner and was actually produced by Jeff Barry. Except for the early Lester Sill records, it was the only single ever issued on the Philles label not produced by Phil, and it taunted the Spector legend by tickling the chart at No. 100 in late October. Phil did cut one new record, Tina’s “I’ll Never Need You More Than This,” also from the Spector-Barry-Greenwich pool. A slushy facsimile of “River Deep,” it went unreleased.

  “He started to show me signs of questioning his talent, and whether he really knew or cared what was happening in music,” Davis recalled. “The things he said, the way he said it. About his records. He’d say: ‘Jeez, Danny, I just don’t know.’ ”

  “He came down from that lofty perch where he truly thought he could make a hit record with anybody. All of a sudden he was down to reality,” Vinnie Poncia reflected. “It started with Tina. That was the groundwork. Tina was the straw that broke the back.”

  The few hours Phil was in the studio were unpleasant. His head was not into music and his mood was truculent. “One time we got into a screaming thing,” Larry Levine said, “because somebody had a pizza sent over and I said, ‘You gotta give the kid a tip.’ He said he didn’t and out of that grew this thing where I was never gonna work with Phil again. So Phil wanted to take his tapes and I wouldn’t give him his tapes until he paid his bill. So he’s siccing the bodyguards on me, telling’ ’em to beat me up. They didn’t know what to do, they knew we’d been working with each other so long. I said, ‘Have ’em do something and I’ll sue you for everything.’ It just got real ugly.”

  As always, things were smoothed out between them, but for Larry it was a sad time. He knew that the age of Phil Spector was over.

  Phil was a very normal person at the beginning of his career . . . but as time went on, they started writing about him being a genius and then he said, yeah, I’m a genius. And then they would say he was a mad genius, so he became the mad genius. I mean it was anything they wrote about him: he’s a recluse, so he became a recluse. I think if Phil hadn’t read anything about himself he would still be the same. But that sort of destroyed him because he became a replica of everything he read about himself. . . . I wouldn’t say he’s mad. I think a lot of time he’s pretending to be, because I’ve seen him straight and I’ve seen him act that weird way of his. So a lot of it is intentional, to let people wonder: what is this guy all about? [Because] I think he’s always wanted attention.

  —RONNIE SPECTOR

  The Ronettes, who in 1964 were one of the most popular rock-and-roll acts in the world, could hardly book an appearance in 1966. Always the only real spigot of income for the group, their road dates that year netted the three Ronettes under $10,000 each. As “family” with Phil, the act could have plodded on as a rock cliché for as long as Phil endured in that role himself. But when Nedra Talley married in March of 1966, it signaled the end of the bumpy road. The man she married, Scott Ross, had once been Murray the K’s program director and then turned to religious broadcasting as a born-again Christian. For Nedra that meant new values and priorities. “I made a commitment to Christ and it turned my life around,” she said. “I didn’t feel I could continue what I was doing and really grow in any way. Because of the tensions we had with Phil, I did not feel, career-wise, that we could go in the direction we needed to go in with Ronnie emotionally involved with him.”

  The Ronettes sang together for the last time in January of 1967. It was an appropriate portent that in this new year—which would be rock and roll’s apocalypse—Philles Records had gone dark.

  Another symbol of foreclosure came from Larry Levine, who also chose January to change his status. With Phil not around, and Gold Star’s antiquated facilities shunned by the new rockers, work had slowed to a near standstill. Seduced by Herb Alpert, whose records he engineered from t
he start, Larry accepted the job of chief engineer at A&M Records. A&M had recently bought the old Charlie Chaplin movie studio on Sunset and La Brea, and Levine supervised the construction of recording studios there. “By then Phil was out of it, so I didn’t feel I was walking out on him,” Levine said. “I went to Stan and Dave and they said I should do it.”

  At the Philles office, meanwhile, Danny Davis was still drawing paychecks for little more than turning on the lights. “It was ludicrous,” he said. “Philles was in the toilet, it was no longer a viable entity. We weren’t sellin’ records and he was gone. I was doin’ things in my office that were just . . . a guy who had a lock on all the industry awards, who had a lock on every radio guy in the world, who knew everybody, and I was sittin’ there doin’ nothing. He was just carrying me. He would leave me notes about things to do. Those notes he left me, God, it was disgusting. ‘Call to get my car done.’ ‘Change my tires.’ ‘Call Minnesota Fats and tell him to come over.’ I was like Sonny Bono, I was his gofer.

  “And every time I wanted to leave he kept giving me more money. I was up to like a thousand a week. Everyone else was either fired or workin’ on half-salary, but he didn’t want me to leave. The fact is, Phil was always good to me. We had a genuine affection for each other.”

  But Danny began to worry that his industry clout might rust away in the Philles tomb. “He had taken my forte away from me, because he had no records to promote. It got to a point where if a Top Ten list came in on green paper, I would write, ‘Love the shade of green,’ just to stay in touch with guys. I was doin’ nothing for him and he just didn’t understand that.”

  Phil gave little thought to the hard realities of the business; just existing carried the pretense of influence. On that assumption, he began to reissue his old singles in compilation packages. In the spring of 1967 he sent out releases to the trade papers disclosing that he had signed Ike and Tina Turner to a new three-year deal; a new Ike and Tina single was to be out by June. Billboard ran this encouraging kernel of news in May with a headline reading “Spector Revives Push On Philles,” but long after June no record had materialized.

  Phil’s illusions did nothing to prevent his imprint on rock from evaporating. On January 16–18, the Monterey International Pop Festival, which drew 50,000 to an outdoor concert featuring Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, and the Jefferson Airplane, rang in the new ethos of the late sixties, the music and culture of psychedelic rock. By the summer, when the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album came out and the country was at war with itself over Vietnam and the generation gap, rock and roll weighed in on the side of enlightenment, dissent, and drugs. Phil Spector sat out the fray. He made no records in 1967 and—frightened by the runaway excess and false catechism of drugs within the music industry—he had no use for the wanked-out lunacy all around him. On only two occasions did Phil come into contact with LSD, one of those indirectly. That was when he picked up the phone one night and on the other end was a weak-sounding Annette in New York. That evening she had gone to a downtown rock club where, without her knowledge, someone spiked her drink with acid. Completely disoriented, Annette, who never had taken the drug before, did not know where she was and freaked out, screaming that her hand was gone. Taken to a hospital, she called Phil when her head cleared.

  “He was incredibly angry, he just didn’t believe it,” she remembered. “He said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.’ He found out somehow who did it and I don’t know what happened and I don’t want to know. But Phil really came through for me. He always treated me like gold after everything was over. When I had some trouble he was there for me.”

  Phil’s one personal experience with acid was just as terrifying for him. He took it under the guidance of a doctor, hoping he could better know what was at the root of his psyche. The problem was, he may have seen the answer all too clearly.

  “He put himself under the influence of LSD prescribed by Dr. Kaplan and he told me that when he was under he saw his father commit suicide,” Danny Davis related. “Phil always said he hated his father for what he did, for taking the easy way out. The acid went right to the heart of that hatred, to the pain, and it horrified him. That’s why he was against LSD or anything that was ingested. He didn’t care about a little pot every once in a while but he was very much against the acid, because it made him confront what he didn’t want to.”

  Finally Danny decided that he could not go on. With four months left on his contract with Philles, he handed in a letter of resignation. Phil reacted badly.

  “Don’t think you can just get up and walk out,” he told Danny.

  “What do you hope to get if you sue me, Phil?” Danny laughed. “All I have is a Mustang and a color televison set.”

  Danny did not think anything of Phil’s threat. Then, a few weeks later, he was served with legal papers. Phil was suing him for $250,000 for breach of contract. “Even Jay Cooper, Phil’s attorney, didn’t understand it,” Davis recalled. “Cooper thought it was a godsend that I was gonna leave and save Phil all that money.”

  Coincidentally, at about the same time Phil became stuck in a legal row of his own, over The Last Movie. By mid-1967 expenses had swelled to over $1 million and the movie had not even been shot. At that point, Phil backed out of the project. Not only did Dennis Hopper sue him, so did Steven Stern, who still had not seen a dollar of his $71,000. Phil desperately needed someone to testify for him, to somehow prove he had reason to walk out. He realized he needed Danny Davis.

  “He called and asked me would I bail him out of this thing,” Davis said. “I told him, ‘Listen, Phil, I’ll do whatever you want, but you’re suin’ me for $250,000. If you drop the suit, I’ll come to your aid.’ ” Phil agreed. He had to. “I mean, they were suin’ him for millions, man. There were all kinds of monies that he had guaranteed. He had guaranteed the whole production. But when the above-and below-line figures came in at $1.2 million, Phil didn’t want to live up to what he had said. It became a big imbroglio and there was all kind of heat from every quarter, from Dennis, from Steven Stern, from this one, that one. It looked very bad for him but with Phil it was ‘Man, Dennis, I’ll show you,’ and I was to be his big weapon.”

  When Danny gave his deposition, Hopper’s lawyers tried to prove that Phil had cared too little about the movie for it to have been made. “They said, ‘Isn’t it true, Mr. Davis, that during the discussions about this movie, Phil Spector sat away from the crowd reading a book on the care and breeding of St. Bernard dogs?’ And I said, ‘Yes, that’s true’—which I understand was extremely damaging to Phil. But I said, ‘Wait, you don’t understand . . .’ because, once again, you try and explain Phil Spector. That was exactly the way he wanted it to appear, that he had no interest in the movie, when indeed he wanted to make the picture, but he wanted to make it look like there was nothing important about the picture. Understand?”

  In the end, rather than try to figure out Spector, Hopper settled with him. Phil paid $600,000, according to Davis, toward the cost of the aborted movie, including Steven Stern’s fee. Incredibly, Phil and Dennis remained friends, the court case having been like a poker game of crazed nerve and dare between men too abnormal for mere logic. Davis, his part of the deal done, was free of Phil’s legal claw when he found his next promotion job—back again with Don Kirshner, at Screen Gems.

  Elliott Ingber, who had not seen Phil since “Bumbershoot,” ran into him at Canter’s Deli late in 1967. Elliott had moved far along the rock underground with Frank Zappa; writing songs in Zappa’s bitingly satirical style, Ingber’s “Don’t Bogart That Joint” was a classic send-up of the drug culture. Observing Phil during his dormancy, ringed by bodyguards yet looking so alone, Elliott thought he had never seen anything sadder in his life. “He was weirded out,” Ingber recalled. “He was dressed in his black three-piece suit and Beatle boots and a Tyrolean hat or something. It was like he was in a past life, but it was like no life.”

  Elliott tried to speak of his work wit
h Frank Zappa, but Phil was indifferent. “Uh, that’s good,” he muttered at intervals. “The only way I could relate to him,” said Ingber, “was the level I initially did, which was the guitar.”

  “You play anymore, man?” Elliott asked him.

  ‘Nah, I don’t play anymore,” Phil told him. “I don’t even think I got a guitar anymore.”

  “Well, come on down. We’re playin’ with Frank. I’ll give you a fuckin’ guitar.”

  “Nah, man.”

  Elliott then said good-bye and walked away, thoroughly bummed. If it was true that Phil Spector did not play and did not even have a guitar, that was the saddest thing of all.

  One of the few people whom Phil permitted into his retreat was Gerry Goffin. Over the past year, Goffin’s own life had turned upside down. He and Carole King wrote two huge hits, Aretha Franklin’s “A Natural Woman” and the Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” and started a new label, Tomorrow Records, on which they produced a New York band called the Myddle Class. Gerry not only watched the label fail, he also watched Carole fall in love with the band’s bass player, Charles Larkey, which led to the couple’s divorce. King and Larkey formed a short-lived band called the City, recording an album for Ode, and King later played piano and sang backup on James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James LP before recording one of history’s biggest-selling albums, Tapestry, in the early seventies. In contrast, Goffin moved to L.A. and fell into a personal hell of drugs, a failed singing career, and a lack of songwriting success. Both he and Phil were riders on the storm during rock’s changing times, which brought them together. Covered in leather, Phil on his Harley-Davidson and Gerry on his BSA, they biked up into the Santa Monica Mountains and wound through the arid hills all day. They just rode, burning oil, two men with no idea where they were going.