He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  Phil’s work with Lennon and Harrison had been vital, cauterizing the emerging individual identities of the two ex-Beatles. But now he wanted to get back his own identity, to start recording again in L.A. with his old imperial authority. And the truth was, he had little other choice. George was doing his own producing now, with none of the Spector guile—in George’s hands, the mystic beat became a harangue, and it would cost him the gains of the past two years. John, meanwhile, was an alcoholic, drug-abusing wreck. The Nixon White House and the Senate Judiciary and Internal Security Committees labeled him a security threat because of his left-wing affiliations. Under surveillance, his phones tapped, and his apartment bugged, John grew so paranoid that he thought most everyone he saw was following him, and for a time he conducted his business in the backseat of his limousine. Unfortunately for Phil, the rub was that he had no frame of reference other than the free ride he had with the two superstars. For one thing, he had lived for nearly three years solely within the restrictive girders of their music. For another, Phil the chameleon had taken on some of John Lennon’s more unsavory traits. He began to drink and his already-substantial paranoia worsened.

  Hoping that he could stave off his own descent, Phil looked to shore up his domestic life, which had sagged under the weight of neglect and chained love. Phil, who was big on symbols of family unity, got no closer to Ronnie but he did adopt two more children, twin six-year-old blond boys, Gary and Louis, in December 1971. Musically, though, he was at a standstill. His contract with A&M expired with the last Checkmates single in 1970, and though he cut a number of instrumental tracks with Larry Levine, there was no thread to his work nor acts to sing over the tracks. If he was going nowhere, he was getting there even slower when the new boys did not keep his marriage from crumbling and Ronnie filed yet a third set of divorce papers. That set off a mudslide of retribution that occupied his attention almost entirely for the next two years of court battles.

  The final unraveling of the marriage was a carnival of irrationality. It began on June 9, 1972, when Ronnie got into her Chevy Camaro. According to her court papers, Phil “took the keys away from me and refused to return them to me. . . . My husband locked me out of our bedroom and told me to stay out.” Ronnie spent the next two nights sharing the room which her mother was using in the house. Then, on June 12, she said, “My husband came to my mothers room, told me I should get a lawyer to get a divorce . . . and yelled and screamed at me. My son Don’té was present in the room at the time and began to cry. In an attempt to get away from my husband I ran downstairs to the kitchen where the governess and cook were present. I was followed by my husband, who grabbed my handbag out of my hand and the contents were strewn over the floor. My husband then pushed me out of the house through the kitchen door. When I left the house, I had no funds or assets of any kind.”

  Ronnie spent that night at a hotel, then stayed with her mother for three more nights. Once more she tried to get into the master bedroom so that she could gather up her clothes, but the door was locked and Phil refused to let her in. The next day Ronnie hired Beverly Hills lawyers Jay Stein and Daniel Jaffe, who called Phil and informed him that they had filed, and that Ronnie was seeking custody of Don’té. “Thereafter, my mother and I [went to] a hotel,” Ronnie said. That same day Phil told her he had dumped all of her clothes “in a garbage can on La Cienega Boulevard.”

  Phil, who had recently been slightly injured in a collision while driving his Rolls-Royce, apparently felt healthy enough to swamp and terrorize the switchboard at the Beverly Crest Hotel for weeks trying to speak to Ronnie, and several of the operators testified that he threatened them when they complied with Ronnie’s request not to put him through. In July the court ordered Phil to pay her hotel bills and to allow her visitation rights to see Don’té (she was not interested in the twins), but Ronnie claimed he was slow with the payments and was cutting short her time with the boy, and in addition refused to return her wallet, driver’s license, and her “full-length mink coat.”

  Over the summer, Ronnie gave testimony in divorce proceedings that Phil had “imposed his will on [me] by the use of force and threats.” Pressed on her drinking by Phil’s attorney, Jay Cooper, Ronnie said that she had used alcohol only since her marriage, “usually only with [Phil],” and did so to “shut out his continuous stream of shrieking.” After being deposed by Stein and Jaffe at the Santa Monica courthouse, Phil screamed epithets at them in the corridor, then ran after them as they walked to their car in the parking lot and continued to shower them with four-letter words. Ordered to pay temporary support to Ronnie of $1,200 a month, he sent a Brink’s truck to Stein and Jaffe’s office and three Brink’s guards delivered one of the payments—all in nickels.

  On the advice of Stein and Jaffe, Ronnie entered several hospitals for psychiatric evaluations, including a six-week stay at St. Francis Hospital in Lynwood during which she was kept under sedation. When she went back to the Beverly Crest in September, her mother had gone home to New York and Ronnie was alone. Her first day there the hotel manager found her wandering around, apparently drunk. Then, days later, she fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand and her bed caught on fire. Ronnie was narrowly rescued when a hotel employee smelled the smoke. After being taken to UCLA Medical Hospital, she said she wanted to go to New York to be with her mother, and she flew there on September 21. In the meantime, Stein and Jaffe hired an accountant to audit Phil’s business interests, bank accounts, and trust funds, and established community property of “at least $225,000,” not including $375,366.68 in royalties from Phil’s records with Lennon and Harrison. (Phil claimed there was no community property.) They had just filed the motion when Ronnie sent them a curious legal-sounding letter written in a childlike scrawl abruptly discharging them: “You are no longer to represent me in any legal actions what so ever. Any and all agreements I have signed with you are cancelled.”

  Stunned by this weird turn, Stein and Jaffe wrote to Ronnie asking to meet with her. Instead, she filed a notarized affidavit accusing them of keeping her hospitalized and drugged in order to confuse and lead her. “All [they] were doing was just trying to obtain a large sum of money for themselves . . . from Mr. Spector and myself. . . . It was [their] idea to pursue a legal battle . . . against my wishes and best interests.” In more of the same strangely stilted English she said: “I definitely feel and have always felt that I can settle the divorce matter between Mr. Spector and myself very amicably and in no way do I want to fight. In fact, I really do not want nor did I ever want anything at all from Mr. Spector. Nor do I want to see Mr. Spector pay out sums of money for things he knew nothing about and were not authorized by either him or me,” apparently referring to the enormous hospital bills she had accrued.

  Stein and Jaffe obviously felt all this was Phil’s doing, once again getting to Ronnie with his sweet talk and promises—this time, possibly, of a generous settlement if she would keep the lawyers and Don’té out of it. “We believe the fact that we have ascertained . . . substantial community property constitutes a threat to [Phil],” they told the court, “causing him to renew his effort to reach [Ronnie] and by reason of his domination and control over her, to get her . . . to discharge us.” Even Ronnie’s mother, they pointed out, was now receiving $400 a month from Phil. The two attorneys implored Ronnie to reconsider, notifying her that in the event of termination she was immediately responsible for over $4,000 in legal fees. They also went ahead on the community property issue. Ronnie first told them not to. Then, months later, early in 1973, she had a change of heart. She had moved to New York by then and may have felt she was out of Phil’s range for abuse and manipulation. In any case, she went ahead with the divorce and custody battle.

  That meant Phil would have to fight again in court. Held in the fist of the divorce war, Phil entered a new phase of depression that exacerbated the self-abusing tendencies he had acquired from John Lennon. He began to drink now himself, though because of a bad stomach and a congenital anemia
it would make him sick. “Phil can’t really drink,” Vinnie Poncia remarked. “I’ve seen him throw up on one drink. But he had to show people he could drink.” At the same time, he began to walk around with a gun protruding from a shoulder holster, just like George Brand and the other bodyguards. Combined with his drinking and his foul temper, the combination was ominous.

  *From Rolling Stone, Records, June 11, 1970:35.

  †Richard Williams, Out of His Head: The Sound of Phil Spector (New York: Outerbridge & Lazard, 1972), 156–57.

  People call me a genius. Well, Phil Spector is a genius.

  —BOB DYLAN during a concert at the L.A. Forum,

  November 15, 1978

  The decision of whom Phil would produce in L.A. was made for him—by John Lennon. Just months after Phil had stepped a continent away from Lennon, John himself came to the West Coast. Yoko had become so tired of his misery-laced booze and drug binges that she virtually kicked him out of their apartment and sent him to L.A. in hopes that the separation would do John and the marriage good. Arriving in October of 1973 with his young Japanese travel and bed partner, May Pang, John had little else to do except look up Phil and do an album.

  John’s music was more wayward than ever. Recently he had taken refuge in the empty commercial pop of his Mind Games LP, and in contemplating what kind of album to do now he figured he could regenerate his sense of purpose by going back to the place he found it: old-time rock and roll. John made up his mind to cut covers of oldies. “I just wanna be like Ronnie Spector,” he told Phil in placing the production entirely in his hands. But if this idea sounded good to John, it was a stick of dynamite to hand Phil on his own turf during this trying period. An excessively avaricious Spector immediately paid for the sessions himself, thus wresting official control from John, Apple Records, and his American label, Capitol. While Mind Games was the name of his last album, it soon came to characterize Phil’s design for this one. John could not get through the A&M studio gate unless he told the guard he was there for the Phil Spector sessions. Booking scads of his favorite musicians for the dates, Phil conceded John only his guitarist friend Jesse Ed Davis, Plastic Ono Band drummer Jim Keltner, and John’s New York engineer, Roy Cicala.

  In the past, John could be firm if he thought Phil went on too long with tracks or took the Phil trip too far. Now sessions were held in an air of unbearable tension as Spector tinkered and did run-throughs until dawn and generally treated John like one of the help. At one session, Phil kept putting off John’s vocal until John asked him, “When are you going to get to me?” Phil, not even looking at him, mumbled, “I’ll get to you, I’ll get to you.” In the next instant, John smashed a headset against a console and yelled, “You’ll get to me!”

  An added and ugly complication was that John and Phil were drinking—and John was in such bad shape that he appeared bent on killing himself with booze, downing fifths of Courvoisier and Remy Martin in one swallow. “You have to understand, with Phil, drinking isn’t the bottom line, it’s just an anger cushion,” said Dan Kessel, who with his brother David—the two sons of Barney Kessel, all three of whom played guitar on the sessions—had become Spector acolytes and quasi-bodyguards, “just being real bugged about a lot of things and wanting it to sort of cushion the nervous system, as opposed to where John got wild and out of hand. John was good in the studio but outside it he got weird.”

  The combination of snail-like sessions and tapwater-free booze was deadly. For long hours, John, and some musicians, had little to do but drink. John got so sloshed and violently out of control late one night that Phil and George Brand hustled him into their car and took him home. There, they bound John’s wrists and ankles with neckties because Phil said he didn’t want John to hurt himself. They left him like that, tied up like a steer, with John yelling “Jew bastard!” at Phil as he and Brand left.

  “Phil had to handcuff John because John would have killed himself,” Dan Kessel said. “Yoko really blew John’s mind when she threw him out, and he was raging out of his head and threatening suicide. John would sleep at Phil’s house and Phil would have to lock the door on him when he’d get too crazy. But when he woke up and it was all over, it was kinda like, you know, ‘Thanks a lot for doing that.’ ”

  John recorded around a dozen tracks, including outrageous versions of “Be My Baby” and “To Know Her Is to Love Her.” But when the sessions did not get any easier, and Phil continually picked fights with a variety of people in the studio, John became disenchanted with the album. He spent much of his time on wild and destructive drinking binges with Harry Nilsson, whom he met when the singer/songwriter dropped by the sessions. Twice a disorderly Lennon was asked to leave nightclubs—the second time when he and Nilsson heckled and disrupted a show by the Smothers Brothers and were unceremoniously dumped on the street by the bouncers.

  Phil went on with the album, but he was reaching his breaking point as well. Stories had been coming out of the La Brea studios, of equipment damaged, of studio rooms trashed, of people defecating in hallways and elevators. Because the Lennon sessions were so turbulent and besotted, A&M officials assumed it had to be Spector’s gang and ordered them out. “That was a raw deal,” David Kessel said. “I can tell you that Phil and his crew had nothing to do with any of that. He really ran a disciplined ship. I know how it went down and Phil got framed.” Rather than pleading his case, Phil silently fumed at Herb Alpert for this opprobrious treatment and moved operations to L.A.’s Record Plant. “He didn’t want to dignify the whole thing. He didn’t know if it came down from Herb but there was some scuttlebutt to that effect and it was like If you believe that, fuck you. I’ll go somewhere else. I don’t need this hassle.’ ”

  Only days later, he snapped. Not getting what he wanted during a stormy session, he drew his gun, pointed it over his head, and fired a shot into the ceiling. John—who had assumed that Spector kept his gun unloaded and on his hip only for effect—was startled. His ears ringing from the shot, he said, “Phil, if you’re gonna kill me, kill me. But don’t fuck with me ears. I need ’em.”

  Said David Kessel: “There was heavy burnout goin’ on in there, a lot of raw nerves on edge. In a position like Phil’s, he walks in and forty musicians come up and wanna ask questions or talk about the old days or offer advice on how to arrange and mix. And Phil doesn’t really need or want to hear any of that. He gets to the point where . . . it’s a way of saying ‘Leave me alone! I’m makin’ the record!’ Granted, shooting a gun is radical, but so is Phil Spector. These aren’t your normal sessions when you’re in and out in three hours. These people are in there hour after hour after hour.”

  Already tainted, the sessions were brought to a halt when Phil, facing a custody hearing, could let nothing else enter his mind. He even got John to come to domestic court with him as a character reference, but as soon as Ronnie came into the courtroom Phil spat streams of obscenities at her. John tried to restrain him but he was a maniac, and when he refused to stop screaming the judge found him in contempt. Phil was so deranged that he did not notice John get up and leave the courtroom. Never again would they be in the same room.

  John did not want to deal with the abandoned album, but he was shocked that he could not even get his hands on the tapes—Phil, claiming ownership, took them from the studio and dropped out of sight. Whenever John called him, an underling would give a different reason why Phil was inaccessible. Then, in early February, Phil had another accident in his Rolls. After jamming on the brakes, he went through the windshield and was taken to the emergency room at UCLA Medical Center bleeding from severe facial cuts. Suffering from multiple head and body injuries and burns, he underwent surgery.

  The accident, in typical Spector fashion, was cloaked in secrecy and mystery. Rolling Stone, failing to run down any details, speculated that Phil might simply be incognito after having a hair transplant. Lennon, calling to get his tapes again, was told, “Mr. Spector died in an accident.” That was when he gave up trying and left it
to Capitol to retrieve the tapes. John cut a lightweight album with Harry Nilsson, Pussycats, and went back to New York, calling his eight months in L.A. his “Lost Weekend.” In June 1974 Capitol came to a settlement with Phil and paid him $94,000 for the irksome tapes. They were brought to John in New York, where he looked at the metal cannisters holding the tapes and cringed with memories of L.A. and Spector; unable to force himself to listen to them, he later gave the raw and unmixed tapes to a music publisher as a payoff in a plagiarism lawsuit. John, who had begun to remix and recut the songs for a compensatory album, was mortified when seven untouched Spector tracks were suddenly released along with eight redone ones as a television mail-order album called Roots. That led Capitol to issue five unremixed tracks as part of Lennon’s Rock and Roll album. A myriad of lawsuits ensued, the result of which was that John—in the sweetest of ironies—won $140,000 in damages from both parties over an album he regretted ever doing.