He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  The only other George Martin–produced song suitable for release before Phil arrived was the Let It Be title cut, Paul’s gospel plea for redemption from Mother Mary. It came out in early March, but only a month later Paul issued his first solo LP, McCartney, with an accompanying announcement that he was done with the Beatles and that the group had ceased to exist. Against this noxious backdrop, Phil rushed to complete Let It Be, which was now beyond any question going to close the Beatles’ legacy. Amassing strings and choirs, he coated the urchin tapes with aristocratic heavy cream. Most of the songs in the tapes were blues-flavored rockers and Phil could have gone with the taut rhythm of “Instant Karma.” Instead, he felt obligated to send the group off with great sentimental joy and sorrow. If the Beatles were averse to that, none of them made it known. George, who was soon to begin his own solo LP, attended some of the overdubbing sessions and thought that Spector’s tumbling, dreamlike educements would perfectly suit the eastern mystic motif of his own music; right away George got a commitment from him to produce the album.

  Phil did not want Let It Be separated from the chain of Beatles progression. There had been gossip in the music papers that this album was going to be an aggregation of “lost” Beatles tracks, a novelty rather than an important new work. Shunning any novelty interpretation, Phil avoided oldie covers like “Save the Last Dance for Me” and stuck with original Beatles tunes. To sustain the Beatles’ musical versatility he let stand some of the raw tracks, in leathery, trenchant contrast to the rest. One of these was the original “Get Back,” which had funkier Billy Preston keyboard riffs and John’s immortal spoken closing: “I hope we passed the audition.” When the album was ready, Phil sent an acetate to each Beatle, and each sent him a telegram of approval.

  Still, Phil had no delusions about Let It Be. He knew he could not win, that no matter how well he did with the album there would be those Beatle wprshippers who would look at an outsider—an American outsider, and one with a legendary ego—and see only desecration. In England Spector’s vast popularity was confined to his own music. If Phil needed the ego trip, he was sure he would not need the approaching storm of dissent—a dark omen of which came mere days before the album’s release when Paul suddenly changed his mind, disquieted because of what Phil did to his song “The Long and Winding Road.” The album’s first single, this languid and mawkish ballad was originally cut only with an acoustic guitar, and now Paul hardly recognized it in a Spectorian slew of swelling strings, harps, and background singers. Repulsed by what he heard as shlock, Paul vehemently told Phil and Allen Klein that he wanted the song pared down to size. But by then the album was already in the pressing shop. When Paul sued Klein and the other three Beatles months later, he cited “The Long and Winding Road” in his court papers, claiming it was evidence that the group had conspired to “ruin my career artistically.”

  Paul’s ire was a prelude. When Let It Be was released on May 5 and the extent of Spector’s influence was known, the critical inquisition was “River Deep” revisited; Phil was punished just as universally. Spector, wrote Rolling Stone’s John Mendelsohn in a typically mean-spirited review, “whipped out his orchestra and choir and proceeded to turn several of the rough gems of the best Beatle album in ages into costume jewelry. . . . One can’t help but wonder . . . how he came to the conclusion that lavish decoration of several of the tracks would enhance the straightforwardness of the album. . . . To Phil Spector, stinging slaps on both wrists.” Mendelsohn judged “The Long and Winding Road” to be “virtually un-listenable” and “an extravaganza of oppressive mush.”*

  As difficult as his job had been, and given the fact that he had no part in the original recordings, Phil felt no reason to be anybody’s whipping boy. With the carping at a fever pitch—including some stinging criticism by George Martin—Phil angrily told British journalist Richard Williams: “It was no favor to me to give me George Martin’s job because I don’t consider [him] in [my] league. . . . He’s an arranger, that’s all. As far as Let It Be, he had left it in deplorable condition, and it was not satisfactory to any of them, they did not want it out as it was. So John said, ‘Let Phil do it’ and I said, ‘Fine.’ Then I said, ‘Would anybody like to get involved in it, work on it with me?’ ‘No.’ . . . They didn’t care. But they did have the right to say, ‘We don’t want it out,’ and they didn’t say that. In five years from now maybe people will understand how good the material was.”†

  Looking back through the tunnel of time, it is preposterous that so many people could have believed Spector “ruined” Let It Be. In a moving victory of the proletariat, the album sold over two million copies in its first two weeks, setting an American sales record for an album at that time. It stayed at the top of the album chart for five weeks and was on the chart for fifty-four weeks. With sales of over four million worldwide, Let It Be outsold the Beatles’ Revolver and Yesterday . . . and Today LPs. Though it was obviously a Phil Spector production—it simply could not have sounded like anything else—the character and essence of the Beatles was present in every groove. Indeed, the reviled “Long and Winding Road” became a letter-perfect parable of the Beatles’ adieu, a sentimental journey through an epoch now run out of time, and a No. 1 song. When Let It Be won a Grammy for best original score in a motion picture, the award was accepted by none other than Paul McCartney, apparently aware that his career was not ruined after all.

  Phil went into the studio with George Harrison in late May. Off and on for the next six months they recorded an ambitious twenty-three-song, three-record boxed set album philosophically titled All Things Must Pass. It was a converging of two studio fanatics; George rearranged and Phil overdubbed so many times that Allen Klein gave up trying to set a release date. However, Spector and Harrison could not have been better tailored to each other.

  Harrison’s material was essentially a profusion of mantras that swayed in much the same anesthetizing manner as “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” Taken on its face, Harrison’s preachy Krishna litany seemed a stupefyingly unappealing concept. But George’s ideas, his nasal twang, weeping guitar, and humility were sharpened by Spector, who also deepened the metaphysical feel. Phil’s rhythmically pounding basses and drum feels sutured George’s sentimentality with cheerful energy and made Indian asceticism into dance music. As with John’s “Instant Karma,” Phil worked with a small but powerful rhythm section that included superstar musicians Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Dave Mason on guitar, Ringo Starr on drum, the American keyboardist Billy Preston, and Rolling Stones horn player Bobby Keys. Polished as they were, these top sidemen—whose monster jam session formed the third record of the LP—had never played the way they did under Spector’s direction.

  “He was unique the way he worked,” recalled Billy Preston, who was also a major contributor to Let It Be. “He would use a lot of keyboards playing the same chord to make it big and strong. We would do it several times in different octaves and it was monotonous as hell. But he was making it the Phil Spector sound. Myself, I never really was a fan of his sound. I thought it worked on the Ronettes’ stuff, it worked on certain things but not on others. But with George’s stuff it was perfect.”

  The collaboration worked well all around. “It was a lot of laughs,” Preston said. “Phil didn’t seek to overtake George or anything. He would hold court and all you could do was laugh ’cause he had the floor and Phil looked like a cartoon to me, a funny little guy with a funny little voice, loony but a lot of fun. And he was brilliant. I still don’t know how he got the echo like he did; he’d record with an echo in the room and that was the only time I ever saw that, man. He had every machine going all at once and he knew what every one was doin’ in relation to the others. It was a circus and he was the ringleader.”

  Astounding almost everyone in the industry, All Things Must Pass, released in late November 1970, became the No. 1 album in England and the U.S. inside of two weeks. Its first single, the two-sided “My Sweet Lord”/“Isn’t It a Pity,” held
the top spot for five weeks; the second single, “What is Life?” went to No. 9. While with the Beatles, George, allotted two songs per album, saw only one of his songs become a hit single, “Something.” All Things Must Pass did not just enhance Harrison as an artist—it propelled him beyond Lennon and McCartney. With invaluable aid from Spector, he also forged the seventies first new rock idiom.

  Almost obscured in the buying frenzy of George’s album was the release only ten days later of Lennon’s first solo LP, one that was nothing short of an exorcism. This record, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, produced by Phil out of a series of harrowing sessions in the fall, was as stridently negative as George’s work was spiritually optimistic. It surfaced because the impressionable and tortured Lennon felt he needed to sort out his post-Beatle life and who he was. John’s whole life had been a quest for meaning and knowledge, but he could never make sense of the man underneath. His solution, temporarily, was the sneering program of “new wave” California therapist Arthur Janov. Janov had written a book called The Primal Scream, Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis, the theory of which was that human beings repress negative emotion rooted in childhood. Taking therapy directly from Janov for three months, John was put through agonizing sessions in which he lay spread-eagled on the floor and cried and screamed in anger as he recalled his tragic childhood—his frightening apparitions not unlike those seen by Phil while on his LSD trip. Although John eventually spurned Janov and primal therapy as a panacea, he thought he had found and could express his inner self. He wrote songs that were jarring in their naked honesty, and Phil produced them as “primal rock”—the Wall of Sound cropped to exact the image of a bare room with one harsh light bulb. As Lennon screamed and raged in anguished self-pity, his guitar, Ringo’s drum, Preston’s keyboard, and Klaus Voorman’s bass played a madrigal that cut to the bone. A No. 6 LP in December 1970, nearly two decades later the album is as compelling and important a work as any in rock, pricking the ears with John’s seething rejection of his mother and his scalding précis: “The dream is over.”

  As Apple Records broke into pieces, most of its side acts sent packing and its grand show-biz aims dashed, it fell to Phil to hold together the business order of what was left. Named head of A&R, he chose releases by the group Badfinger and held spending in line, with an orderliness that worked to the Beatles’ benefit since Allen Klein’s shadowy investment practices thrived on chaotic, indecipherable account books. Phil also tried to make inroads into the new British blues band scene. He produced a song called “Tell the Truth” for Eric Clapton’s group Derek and the Dominoes. But Clapton did not like how the mix sounded and refused to issue the record. This, however, was a mere diversion. In early 1971 John wrote and Phil produced “Power to the People,” the final anthem in the Lennon political trilogy after “Revolution” and “Give Peace a Chance.” If John was deadly serious about the sledgehammer doggerel, Phil had the wisdom to temper it into more like a tickling feather. Despite the sinister-sounding marching feet of the intro, the hard and honking rock arrangement made militant protest amiable enough to make it a No. 11 record in March.

  Phil bounced back and forth between London and L.A. so much that he spent very little time with Ronnie. In August of 1969, before the Lennon and Harrison gigs came about, he had another divorce alarm when Ronnie again filed court papers, but Phil was able to get her to back down as he did the first time. Now he made good on his soothing promises by taking Ronnie to London early in 1971 to record a song that Harrison wrote for her called “Try Some, Buy Some.” Though the song was cut and released on the Apple label, it was completely wrong for her—another of George’s mystic chants, it forced Ronnie to try to appeal to the spirit instead of the flesh and it was ignored.

  Two months later, in more serious business, Phil produced the Harrison single “Bangladesh,” a song that identified the first of rock’s humanitarian causes: the starving refugees of civil war-torn East Pakistan. George and the Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar organized a relief fund, into which royalties from the record were routed. “Bangladesh,” an emotional plea to “feed the people,” was a big hit, and that prompted George to make rock-and-roll altruism a grand spectacle. On August 1 he gave two benefit concerts in Madison Square Garden with a lineup of guest musicians including Ringo, Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, Bob Dylan, and Leon Russell, the onetime Spector session pianist who was now a major force on his own and in the sessions and performances of Dylan and Joe Cocker. Stationed in a backstage trailer, Phil recorded the shows for a live album—a three-record set called Concert for Bangladesh—that was released in the fall and won a Grammy.

  When Phil arrived in New York for the concerts, he sent a ticket to Annette Merar so she could attend the year’s major rock event. “I had the best seat in the house, like third row center,” she recalled. “But I never could find him and then after the show was over I went backstage and was informed that he had left with George and Ringo about a half an hour before. That was shitty. He knew I was there. He’s the one that called me and asked me if I wanted to go.” Actually, Phil almost didn’t make it out of the arena in one piece that night. During the evening show he became agitated and got into a loud confrontation backstage with security police who proceeded to pound him with their clubs. “I’m Phil Spector!” he could be heard screaming. “Don’t you know who I am!” When they began to hustle him out, George Harrison yelled to Pete Bennett, “They’re beating up Phil!” The obedient and bull-like promotion man wedged himself through the ring of uniformed bodies around Phil and pulled him free.

  “George Brand was just sitting there, he didn’t make a move to save Phil,” Bennett said. “I got in there and I grab him and put his head under my arm so they couldn’t beat on his head. I said, ‘What are you doing? He’s our producer!’ and one of the guys says, ‘I don’t care what he is, he’s a nasty son of a bitch.’ He was just bein’ Phil, a little wild, but he’s a genius and you don’t treat a Phil Spector like that. I said to ’em, ‘Come on, try anything and I’ll kill youse all!’ And they just walked away. I think they woulda killed him if not for me.”

  The incident was a minor irritant for Phil, who was euphoric and drunk with power when he left the Garden, two years of propping up two kingly thrones in rock now capped by the historic Bangladesh triumph. At the post-concert party at Jimmy Weston’s restaurant, an incredible conglomeration of rock superstardom jammed on the restaurant’s small bandstand—a group made up of Ringo, Preston, Keith Moon of the Who, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones—and Phil on piano. The last time Spector openly performed had been at The Trip with the Modern Folk Quartet, when he was bent on sinking into the sod of a new rock world. Now he seemed to own the mixing board of that world. As the superstars jammed, the soft-pop singer Andy Williams came into the restaurant. Looking for a meal, Andy unknowingly stepped into Spector’s intimidating line of sight. “Look! It’s Andy Williams!” Phil burbled. “Hey, Andy, come on up here and sing us a song!”

  Billy Preston remembered, “I mean Phil was really shouting at him. He was just in a good mood but Phil is a wacko and Andy freaked out, man. He got scared, he didn’t know who these weird rock-and-roll guys were and whether Phil was gonna go on like that. I looked up and Andy was running out the door. Phil could do that to you.”

  After Bangladesh, Phil produced John Lennon’s Imagine LP, a delightful work that showed a happier John facing his romantic and whimsical side, still irascible (mainly in John’s slap at Paul McCartney, “How Do You Sleep?”) but sensitive to popular tastes. The album sold million copies and went to No. 1 in October on the strength of the marvelous Top 10 title single—a hypnotic and unaffected daydream of a future with nothing to die for, no heaven and no hell. As close to ecclesiastic as a rock-and-roll song could be with its echo-diffused, almost watery vocal and string arrangement, “Imagine” was a stunning example of a minimal Spector production with maximum impact.

  By September 1971, when John tired of the stale cultural diversions
of London and he and Yoko resettled in New York, Phil had virtually become a spoke in John’s wheels. When John moved into an apartment on Bank Street in Greenwich Village, Phil rented an apartment on Seventy-second Street and Central Park West. At the time, John’s lawyers were fighting to overturn a U.S. Immigration Department ruling to deport him because of a marijuana bust three years before. Phil saw this as Lenny Bruce–style persecution. He wrote long and impassioned letters on John’s behalf—citing his artistic achievement—to politicians and newspapers. Sickened by the rock-and-roll world’s apathy to John’s cause, he fumed to music writer Robert Hilburn of the L.A. Times: “Where is Lennon’s own generation? Where are all the rock stars who owe so much to Lennon’s influence? Where are all the people whose lives were so enriched by the Beatles’ music? Why aren’t they demanding that this outrage be stopped?” After a three-year wait, the U.S. Court of Appeals struck down the deportation order and Lennon received permanent resident status.

  Acclimating themselves to the oblique and more than slightly offensive underbelly of politically active Village nudniks, John and Yoko fell in with the superstars of the radical chic underground in Greenwich Village and began to join in all sorts of bizarre leftist causes, everything from prison reform and Indian rights to the Black Panthers and gay lib. They made avant-garde films, such as the one that displayed assorted bare bottoms. Phil, by contrast, could muster no zeal for the self-possessed New Left, its buffoons like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and its screwball artists, poets, and axe-grinding street bands. He would make the rounds on the rad-chic party circuit, but not as a proselyte, only as a ray of John’s sun. The new Village was the same for Phil Spector as the new Strip had been years before: nights of stepping out in long limos, women on each arm, and kept nice and warm by ankle-length fur coats. It was the chic of money and power and attention, not politics. To be sure, Phil had made sure to blunt John’s strident political pretensions to keep his records marketable. As John got more into ear-curdling, hard-core posturing, Phil saw less of a place for himself. When he produced John’s “Happy Christmas (War Is Over),” a pleasant holiday song that was backed by the young voices of the Harlem Community Choir, it turned out to be the last of Lennon’s “Imagine”-style naïveté for years to come. His next album, Sometime in New York City, was acridly political, a Lennon relapse into dejected vitriol. A two-record set—the second being a live and chaotic jam session with the Mothers of Invention—the LP contained titles like “Attica State,” “Born in a Prison,” and “Angela,” after Angela Davis. The single release of “Woman Is the Nigger of the World”/“Sisters O Sisters” was a Lennon disaster, going no higher than No. 77. The album, its cover fashioned like a New York Times front page and emblazoned with sayings such as “Ono News That’s Fit to Print” and “Don’t think they didn’t know about Hitler,” sold an embarrassing 164,000 copies, and its mindless squirts of bile rendered Phil helpless and ready to jump off John’s treadmill.