He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  “The real point of it was that Dennis Hopper could put Phil Spector in a movie and not let him talk,” related Danny Davis, who by knowing both men was hip to the in-joke. “That was Dennis shutting up Phil Spector, which of course was something nobody could ever do. It’s true, believe me, you don’t know these two guys. Something like that would turn on Dennis immensely.”

  Phil’s next winning hand was getting Dennis to rent an office next to his at 9130 Sunset; he bragged all over Hollywood about that. But Dennis had a royal flush in 1970 when he made none other than The Last Movie, without one cent from Phil.

  More important was the March release of the first Spector-produced records on A&M. The debut single was the Checkmates’ “Love Is All I Have to Give,” written by Spector and Bobby Stevens, a mordant blues wail made glacierlike by an overload of mandolins, guitars, and strings. An inauspicious miss, it was a hardly noticed No. 65 in mid-May, offering no clue as to whether the radio blockade of his records had lifted. A second March issue was the Spector-Levine-Wine “You Came, You Saw, You Conquered,” sung by Ronnie but released, amazingly, as “The Ronettes Featuring the Voice of Veronica”—the very phrase that once turned Ronette against Ronette. Produced in early Ronettes style, Phil may have hoped for nostalgic uplift or else was still frozen by his failure with Ronnie as a solo. If it was that he was simply not willing to give her any autonomy—during the sessions Ronnie sat forlornly in the back of the booth when not recording, allowed nowhere else—he ran her off the rails hard; an engaging record, “You Came” never charted.

  In truth, Phil gave neither of these records a second thought once they were released. These were A&M obligations, and even Phil seemed to shrug his shoulders as he described his work with the Checkmates to Rolling Stone: “Very commercial records. Good records. Easy records. Soul records. Some have depth, some don’t have.”* However, he made one vital change for the second Checkmates single, which was to be “Black Pearl.” Needing sugar-plum soul for the song, he went with Sonny Charles on lead vocal. A huge man with horn-rimmed glasses, Charles’s high and sweet trill was normally a counterpoint to Bobby Stevens’s blues burr. But Phil loved Charles’s voice and released “Black Pearl” under the name of “Sonny Charles and the Checkmates Ltd.,” which did not please Stevens.

  Seeing how well “Black Pearl” congealed in the studio, Phil rushed the record out in April, now the explicit thrust of his comeback. Irwin Levine and Toni Wine, in New York, knew he had cut the song but had not heard anything from him. When they heard an early dub, they were dazed. “It was incredible,” Levine said. Spector had made changes; he also kept the song unaffected. Above all, Sonny Charles was monumentally convincing as a sensitive and prideful man throwing off the pain of the ghetto in a way Mann and Weil would never accept—“No more servants baby; they’re gonna serve my queen,” Charles laid down, softly and firmly on a record that may have been Spector’s finest of all. “Black Pearl” shimmered like topaz, certainly recorded and mixed more diaphanously than any of the others. The effect was so soufflé-light that the Wall of Sound was more like a floating cloud of strings, woodwinds, and electric pianos that played off funky keyboard runs and a stately, sinewy bass line. Extending R&B into a romantic Formica, it showed the way for the synthesizers and stringed hooks of soul in the seventies and eighties.

  It also showed that an earnest Phil Spector still could not be touched when it came to the art of making a record.

  “Black Pearl” hit the chart on April 10. At the beginning it stalled, stuck in the old mucilage about whether it was too black for white radio. But as the record’s soothing charm made its impression, the same crowd that pilloried “River Deep” became swept into the rapids of Phil Spector’s suddenly hot comeback. Top 20 in six weeks, “Black Pearl” eased up to No. 13 pop and Top 10 soul in July. Though it went no higher, the song would not leave the chart for another seven weeks; while it might not have been bought in overwhelming numbers, it was surely a song that people wanted to hear.

  This was a victory almost as much for Larry Levine as for Phil. By no rights should “Black Pearl” or the other new Spector records have recalled the symphonic splendor of the vintage Philles songs. Although Larry built the A&M studio to the dimensions of Gold Star, the ceiling at the old Chaplin studio was higher, the acoustics tinnier, the echo chambers far inferior. “It didn’t sound like Gold Star; it never could,” Levine said. “And the Wall of Sound was indigenous to Gold Star, to the studio, the chambers, the walls.” Moving to a different studio, and in his post-Philles head, Phil did not come in wanting or thinking it possible to resurrect the Wall. Complicating the Spector style further, Phil cut in stereo for the first time at A&M, although he recorded and mixed the rhythm track completely in mono.

  “I feel that ‘Black Pearl’ was less Wall of Sound and more Detroit anyway,” Levine said. “Phil was out of that old thing. Once he left Gold Star it was over. But Phil always wanted bigness, the echo, so even though the chambers were not what I wanted them to be, you work at it. That’s what an engineer does; you search and work to get it right. Somehow we mixed it to what it was. I remember this one producer at A&M used to get on me for the chambers, that I couldn’t get a good echo. So I played ‘Black Pearl’ for him and said, ‘You mean like this?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, you could never get an echo like that here.’ ”

  With “Black Pearl” a hit, Phil brought Irwin Levine and Toni Wine to the coast for writing sessions during the summer. But now, his statement made, Phil was only marginally interested in A&M work. “He would waste a lot of time,” Levine recalled. “He had pinball machines all over the place and it was hard to get any work done. Sometimes we would get in his car and he’d drive down Sunset and torment the hippies. He’d have American flags up all over his antenna and Phil and the hippies would be hollering through the window and they’d be throwing things. It wasn’t that Phil was ideological, he just likes to torment people.”

  It was during this time, in fact, that Phil apparently fell out with Don Kirshner when he went too far in tweaking the uptight songmeister.

  “Phil had the largest dog on record, this Russian wolfhound named Olga or something,” Levine said. “Donnie was visiting Phil one day and Donnie was deathly afraid of dogs, any dog. The smallest dog in the world Kirshner was afraid of. So Kirshner was sitting in a chair and Phil brought in this dog, which I’m telling you was as big as a horse, and he had him come up to Donnie and put his paws on Donnie’s chest. Donnie almost had a heart attack. I don’t know if Kirshner ever spoke to Phil again after that.”

  Phil had cut several tracks for a Checkmates album, but problems had developed with the group. Despite “Black Pearl” and the national attention it brought, Bobby Stevens’s discontent about Sonny Charles’s sudden prominence was still a bleeding wound. “He was having a problem with them all because of it,” Levine said, “and it was driving Phil crazy. He was disgusted. I remember he told me, 1 could walk down the street and find a bunch of black guys on any corner and make ’em stars.’ It was like, who are these guys to fight like this when I made ’em famous? It got to the point where he couldn’t get into the rest of the project.”

  Phil left the completion of the album, including a truly pretentious “Hair Anthology Suite,” a medley from the Broadway play, to producer Perry Botkin, Jr., who arranged “Black Pearl.” In the late fall the Checkmates LP, Love Is All We Have to Give, was released and sold poorly—though, ironically, Spector’s booming cover of “Proud Mary,” the last Checkmates single, gave Ike and Tina Turner the idea to cut their own smash cover a year later, breaking them out to the public the way “River Deep” did not. The album and the single hardly mattered to Phil, now for a specific reason. He had gotten a higher calling.

  *From the Rolling Stone interview, jann Wenner (November 1, 1969): 23.

  †From the Rolling Stone interview, Jann Wenner (November 1, 1969): 29, 28, 27.

  *From the Rolling stone interview, Jann Wenner (November 1, 1969):
23, 25–26.

  *Ibid., 29.

  *From the Rolling Stone interview, Jann Wenner (November 1, 1969): 29.

  Everyone was saying, “Oh Beatles, don’t break up, give us something to remember you by,” and you give it to them and then the critics just knock the shit out of it. “It’s awful, it’s this, it’s that.” But it’s your Beatles, your great Beatles! Forget my name . . . if my name hadn’t been on the album there wouldn’t have been all that. George told me that, John, everyone. That’s the dues you have to pay. It was nothing to me. I had my reputation before the Beatles were around . . . they knew that and I knew that. I knew who I was and what I was before I met the Beatles.

  —PHIL SPECTOR, 1970

  If the final and climactic year of the sixties tied up the loose ends of an exhilarating and hideous decade, the first year of the new decade peeled back the pages of the calendar in search of old comforts. Although they had changed the world, a battle-weary generation now looked for the solace and immunity of innocence—ironically allied with a Phil Spector scornful of late sixties’ rock. “I feel like an old-timer wishin’ for the groovy young days,” Spector told Rolling Stone, “but I listen to the Beatles’ album and I know they’re wishin’ for it too, because you can hear it. ‘Lady Madonna’ was such a groovy old-time thing.” Now, early in 1970, it was written by fate that Phil Spector would be in London seeking to create a fundamental rock-and-roll perspective for the great merchants of social change in the sixties. Sequestered in a basement studio in the Apple Records office building at 3 Savile Row, he sorted through almost thirty hours of unmixed recording tape trying to find some way to make it the last testament of the Beatles.

  This hellacious and thankless task was taken with almost no help from a sundered Beatles. By the fall of 1969, the Beatles were finished as a group, wrecked by internal strife, jealousy, and rampant mismanagement within their Apple Records business structure. Hastening their demise, John Lennon had begun to release solo records with Yoko Ono as a way of abrading his already nasty personal and business feud with Paul McCartney. John, who was playing concerts and promoting the peace movement with the Plastic Ono Band, had made up his mind to quit the Beatles flat that fall but was persuaded by the group’s recently named American manager, Allen Klein, to hold off until he found an equitable way to divide their assets—an impossible wish since Klein was the bone of contention between Lennon and McCartney; Paul, who had pitched his father-in-law, show-biz lawyer Lee Eastman, as manager, wanted Klein removed before any dissolution.

  A year before, as this situation began to presage the group’s undoing, Paul convinced the other three Beatles to record what was intended as a musical rapprochement: a documentary movie and soundtrack album of their recording sessions and final public concert. Paul believed the Beatles had to set aside their separate music directions, which had soured the White Album, and “get back to their roots.” When the sessions went on in January 1969, the project was given the working title Get Back. But the whole episode sank the Beatles further into a morass. Over three weeks they cut a number of disjointed tracks, some new, some covers of oldies, in a malaise of bitter feelings and raw nerve endings during which George Harrison briefly quit in a huff. For the grand finale, the farewell concert, they climbed to the roof at 3 Savile Row and on an icy-cold day reflective of their spirit of frozen loathing sang several songs before 16-mm cameras and a few puzzled spectators on the street below. Without looking at or relating to each other, the Beatles were eternally captured on film disintegrating in open fratricide. The wonderful single of “Get Back,” produced by George Martin, came out of the sessions, but the film and the album—eventually retitled Let It Be—were nothing more than ungainly reels of tape and film. No Beatle cared enough to go back and complete songs or choose any for inclusion on the album, and for that reason Martin refused to even begin mixing the tapes, which sat on a shelf at Apple. “Nobody could look at it,” John Lennon later said of the stomach-turning project. “I really couldn’t stand it.”

  John himself was much more concerned with his solo work. Although the Beatles did put aside their differences over the summer of 1969, recording the ingenious and intimately beautiful Abbey Road in one last breath of unity for art’s sake, John’s personal and artistic feelings were reserved for his own records, such as the brutally honest “Cold Turkey.” After the turn of the new decade he wrote “Instant Karma,” a rollicking caveat to the enemies of his world that they better get themselves together or they were gonna be dead. However, he was not eager to produce the song. John was not turned on by the intricacies of record-making; getting in front of a microphone and singing rock and roll was all he ever wanted to do, which is why he could record “Give Peace a Chance” in a hotel room bed. In producing “Cold Turkey,” he became frazzled running back and forth from the studio to the booth. John did not want a repeat with “Instant Karma,” and in discussions with Allen Klein the name of Phil Spector came up.

  Phil had stayed on good terms with the Beatles through the years, in the form of communiqués that felt out the possibility of Spector producing an occasional Beatles record. When Phil released the River Deep album on A&M the previous fall in a limited American run, he obtained a cover blurb from George Harrison that gushed in praise: “ ‘River Deep—Mountain High’ is a perfect record from start to finish. You couldn’t improve on it.” John also loved Spector’s records. “If we ever used anybody besides George Martin,” he once said, “it would be Phil.” Now John and Klein agreed that bringing in Phil to produce “Instant Karma” was a terrific idea. Phil, who was aroused by the bid, didn’t think there could be any other choice.

  Ironically, Phil had publicly bad-mouthed Allen Klein only months before as a show-biz viper. A rumpled, fast-talking New York accountant with a vast knowledge of the tax laws, Klein had wormed his way into the management of both the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. Despite the fact that he was one of the most powerful men in the entertainment industry, many in the business shared Phil’s stated opinion that Klein was “not a very good cat.” “Phil could read people and he knew the guy was shady,” said Pete Bennett, the Beatles’ American promotion man whose testimony later helped send Klein to prison for two months on tax evasion. “Klein may have wanted a piece of Phil too, but Phil kept away.” Beyond Klein, Phil saw a distinct parallel in Lennon’s musical head and his own. These were the two most headstrong and idiosyncratic geniuses in modern music, yet despite their divergent rock paths Phil and all the Beatles were walking on the same tracks now—conservators of the prologue to rock’s seventies’ identity, yet unsure of where they stood in new and unpredictable territory.

  From his point of view, “Phil needed that association with Lennon and the Beatles,” Vinnie Poncia said. “He acquiesced to the thing he should’ve acquiesced to with the Lovin’ Spoonful. He thought he couldn’t possibly fail if John Lennon was with him. He didn’t particularly want the association, but he needed it.”

  Phil went to London in late January. He moved into a large suite at the Inn on the Park Hotel, sharing the room with the garrulous and uncomplicated Pete Bennett. Phil’s menagerie of hairpieces occupied an entire closet. His longtime bodyguard, George Brand, a beefy ex-federal marshal, was one adjoining door away. The “Instant Karma” session was held at the EMI studio on Abbey Road, where the famous album was recorded. Pulling a small but mandatory Phil trip, Phil showed up late, keeping Lennon and a version of the Plastic Ono Band that included George Harrison on guitar, Klaus Voorman on bass, and Alan White on drum waiting for an hour. John began the session, then Phil came in and got a take of the song on tape. But that was just the start. He fattened up the rhythm by overdubbing John on one piano, George and White on another, Voorman on an electric keyboard. Then he overdubbed a muffled drum that sounded like hands slapping a mattress.

  Expecting something like the scratchy pop funk of “Cold Turkey,” John was impressed with the broad, richly textured sound Spector created. What was accentuated
in this four-man Wall of Sound was not spare noise but the bare blues elements: the pile-driving rhythm and the authentic bite of John’s hoarse and cracking voice. Many of his Beatles records had been mixed unevenly, and rarely was the rhythm toughened like this. John was delighted, but Phil was not satisfied. He told John he wanted to take the tape back to L.A. and add strings. Lennon said no and the disc was released in early February in England. Weeks later, when released in America, the record was different, cleaner and tighter. Without John knowing, Phil had remixed it again, and in an updated symbol of the Phil Spector past the disc was inscribed “Phil & Ronnie.”

  John minded none of this. He had no trouble giving Phil his due. The record, his biggest solo hit so far, went to No. 3, selling over one million copies in the U.S. alone. Phil had done so well that John and Allen Klein asked him to take a crack at the dormant Let It Be tapes. With no restrictions on his judgment and work, Phil took to the Apple basement. Day after day in February and March, he tried to find the germ of art in all those hours of raw tape, under a vow of secrecy in case the album was unsalvageable. “I didn’t even know Phil was in England,” said Tony Hall, his closest contact across the water. “It was done very hush-hush. He did a lot of the album before I heard he was here.”