He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  Phil came out of the hospital under medication and his hair spray-colored gold and silver to divert attention from the hideous cuts on his face and scalp. He also wore a gigantic cross around his neck. “He’d just seen The Exorcist and he said he wasn’t taking any chances,” Dan Kessel said. “We told him he looked like a circus freak but he thought it was normal in Hollywood.” Outside Canter’s one night, Phil got into a big argument with a man he did not know was a plainclothes cop. Phil was ready to have a Wyatt Earp showdown until the man pulled out his badge. “This cop had seen Phil’s holster,” Kessel said, “and on a guy with gold hair and a cross around his neck, he thought we were a Charles Manson weirdo gang.” The policeman put Phil, Dan, and David up against a car and yelled, “Where are the guns?” Though all three of them were licensed to carry their weapons, they spent that night in the West Hollywood jail.

  Guns, in fact, were becoming a major part of Phil’s identity, which he seemed to enjoy. Giving cues in the studio to each segment of the orchestra, when he would come to the Kessels he would call out: “Gun section.” When Phil and the Kessels went to Las Vegas to see Elvis Presley in concert and then went backstage so that Phil could meet the King, there was an uneasy moment while the two armed camps checked each other out. Finally, when all seemed cool, everyone took off his holster in a kind of modern showbiz peace ritual.

  The growing industry talk about Phil’s instability, his guns, and the horrifying Lennon sessions did not stop Warner Brothers Records Chairman of the board Mo Ostin from signing him to a thee-year deal that included the formation of the custom Warner-Spector label, the logo for which looked like a large crystal ball—a fitting imprint given that no one could even guess what Spector would do for the label. Worked out by Phil’s new heavyweight show-biz manager Marty Machat, he received an advance in the high six-figure range. Playing all sides to Phil’s advantage, Machat took the rights to Spector’s new product from Warners and licensed them to England’s Polydor Records under the name of Phil Spector International—letting Phil pocket another chunk of advance money. Under this arrangement, Phil had baronial powers; he cut however many records he had to for Warners but released only what he wanted to in the United States.

  Ostin willingly accepted these conditions. Phil Spector was the prize moose head on his office wall, and he feted Spector with a round of welcome parties and a media blitz. None of the movie stars in the Warners lots received more attention, and the result of all this fawning was that Phil did not have to move a creative muscle. Ideas and acts were pushed on him, with assurances that whatever he did would be boffo. No one forced him to go into the rock woods and come out with something fresh and profound. Phil had no sooner arrived when Ostin prevailed upon him to produce another of his new superstar signees, Cher, the onetime Spector session singer turned queen of Vegas and television bathos. Cher—whose lone pantsuit from the old days was long gone, replaced by an array of the world’s most brazenly immodest and unsightly show gowns—had several solo hits in the early seventies, but now that she was divorcing Sonny Bono their popular variety series was in a ratings dive. Her career in decline, Cher had dropped into the John Lennon sessions as Phil was cutting a cover track of the Motown song “A Love Like Yours (Don’t Come Knockin’ Every Day)” and in her pushy way tried to talk Phil into using her vocal on it. He had to scream “No!” over and over as she kept bugging him about it. Now, at Ostin’s urging, he relented, doing the tune as a duet with Cher and Harry Nilsson. He also cut Cher on “A Woman’s Story,” a brooding lament of a prostitute (written by Phil, Nino Tempo, and April Stevens), and a slowed-down cover of “Baby, I Love You.” These sessions did not go smoothly—at one date Phil punched out Cher’s manager, David Geffen, who he thought was badgering him. Looking up from the floor at Phil and his bodyguards and their arsenal of guns, Geffen pulled himself to his feet and silently left the studio, nursing a split lip. At another, an engineer, Steve Katz, became so unnerved by the guns that he refused to do the session, leaving Phil to scrounge around for an engineer.

  Ostin then shoved another faded star Phil’s way: Dion DiMucci, the former teen idol who like the title of one of his old hits had been a wanderer in the sixties before kicking a heroin habit and attempting a seventies rebirth with Warners. Phil saw Ostin’s logic about recording Dion: working with a fellow survivor might be revitalizing and a nice sales gimmick. When he went into the project he was as serious as Lennon had been about finding lost roots. Phil assembled a full orchestra, this time at his old shop, Studio A at Gold Star, and with Stan Ross on the control board for the first time since the Paris Sisters. He cut an album of eight songs called Born to Be with You, co-writing one of its songs with Dion and two more with Gerry Goffin; pulling up more roots, he used a song by Mann and Weil, “Make the Woman Love Me,” and both Barry Mann and Jeff Barry were credited as musicians on the album jacket.

  Also present at one session was a young Bruce Springsteen—a Spector disciple and legatee whose dense and pounding teen rock operas like “Born to Run” had won him simultaneous, if premature, cover stories on Time and Newsweek. With an avowed affection for both Spector and Bob Dylan, Springsteen’s records were essentially a blue-collar, axle-greased Wall of Sound. Brought to the studio by Robert Hilburn, Phil had the awed Bruce sit alongside him in the booth. At one point Phil opened the intercom and playfully growled for everyone to hear, “If you wanted to steal my sound, you shoulda gotten me to do it!” The facetious remark broke up the room and Springsteen laughed out loud, but it also contained a poignant truth: Bruce Springsteen’s records were cast in the image of Spector’s music, yet Phil Spector was doing nothing close to their impact and promise.

  Although Phil was recording, his personal travails always beckoned outside the studio door. The custody and divorce war was bad enough, but he had to contend with a new legal headache when Barbara Owen brought suit in September 1974 to evict him from the mansion he loved but could never commit himself to purchasing outright. Owen, now seventy-four years old, widowed and ailing, agreed to sell the house the year before to the Concord Investment Corporation, but when Phil’s lease expired in February he did not move out, as requested, claiming a ninety-day right to match the sale price of $255,000. Concord at first tried to ignore that Spector was even there; workmen began to tear down the barbed wire and fencing around the house. Seeing his security barriers torn down, a shaking Spector filed suit against Concord, saying the renovation was “causing me considerable anxiety, nervousness and grief.” Concord then began to amass its own legal ammunition against Phil, calling him a “nuisance” and that his guard dogs’ “loud and raucous barking disturbs the surrounding neighbors, and whose vicious demeanor has terrorized neighbors . . . assaulted and attacked by the dogs.” In the end, though, Spector and Jay Cooper fought the sale so long and hard that Concord eventually renewed Phil’s lease, at $6,500 per month.

  Phil fought Ronnie just as hard as one court motion after another formed a quilt of battle strategies. When Ronnie and her mother came back to L.A. in April for hearings and stayed at the Sunset Marquis, Phil sent George Brand over with Don’té for Ronnie’s visitation period—but instructed George not to allow her mother to see the boy, because it had not been specifically stipulated. Seeing Beatrice Bennett in Ronnie’s room, Brand yanked Don’té’s hand from Ronnie’s. When Ronnie and Don’té were together, the intimidating bodyguard would pull up a chair and sit in the doorway. At one point in the drawn-out affair, Phil agreed to pay psychiatric bills for Ronnie, who twice checked into hospitals—and Ronnie agreed to set community property at a mere $50,000.

  “Phil is a very smart man and he constantly played mind games with Ronnie,” Nedra Talley said. “Mind games, that was Phil Spector. He allowed her to go into the best hospitals in L.A. and say, oh, this is ‘chic’ to go to these exclusive hospitals for a week, and then he turned around and used it against her in court.”

  That seemed evident when Phil quickly filed papers saying he was �
�deeply concerned because of [Ronnie’s] alcoholism and drug problems for which she has sustained multiple hospitalizations.” Ronnie, he said, had been “taken by ambulance” to hospitals, had “repeated commitments to psychiatric wards,” and “an emotional breakdown.” In the end, the case appeared to come down to which of them was in worse shape mentally. Both Phil and Ronnie, as well as Don’té, were examined by psychiatrists. “Trying to be objective about it, it was not all Phil’s fault. Phil had his problems and Ronnie had hers too,” Nedra said. “My cousin Ronnie is a trip. She had an ego. She was not in love for love, like it should be with a man. She knew she could not drink and still she drank. Actually, neither of them needed Don’té.”

  In December, terms of the divorce were finalized. Phil was ordered to pay $2,500 a month to Ronnie for thirty-six months, in addition to community property that was a tiny fraction of what Jay Stein and Daniel Jaffe once projected. For Phil, who had won around $1 million on the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman fight (betting heavily on the underdog Ali), the money was irrelevant. By far more important, he was given custody of Don’té.

  Unshackled, Ronnie dried out at Scott Ross and Nedra Talley’s suburban Virginia home. It was many months before she could even think about returning to the business on her own.

  “Darlene and I saw Ronnie after the divorce and we were shocked at how she looked,” recalled ex-Blossom Gloria Jones. “She was not the same person. We looked at her like ‘What happened?’ Ronnie was like the cheerleader in the old days, happy-go-lucky. Phil took that away from her.”

  The divorce was Phil’s lone victory of 1974. In November Warner/ Spector issued two singles within two days: Dion’s “Make the Woman Love Me” and Cher’s “A Woman’s Story.” Both ballads, they were swept aside in the middle seventies’ disco craze. The Dion redux, which was doubly hurt by the somber and maudlin mood of both artist and producer, was actually doomed weeks before when Phil quarreled with Dion’s manager, Zach Glickman. “Zach was wearin’ his manager’s hat, getting too pushy for Phil’s taste,” David Kessel recalled. Among other things, Glickman demanded that Phil turn over the album’s tapes—which for Phil Spector, like the tearing down of his barbed wire, was akin to a declaration of war. “Phil doesn’t like to be pushed,” Dan Kessel said. “He had it all goin’, there was no reason why it couldn’t go on the way it was. And Dion was freaked out because of the inability of Zach and Phil to get it goin’, but that could’ve only happened one way—Phil’s way. If it’s not gonna go Phil’s way, there’s nothing in it for him. He does it his way or he doesn’t need to do it at all.” Having arranged with Dick Clark for Dion to go on “American Bandstand” and break “Make the Woman Love Me,” Phil spited Glickman and killed the gig. Then, when the record did not sell, he released the lugubrious and depressing Born to Be with You only in England rather than risk more rejection at home. If Dion was bewildered and disillusioned by the experience, the fact that the debut Warner/Spector album was to be unavailable in the United States disgusted Mo Ostin and ended his special interest in Spector.

  Although Phil was freed of the divorce albatross, the torment of 1974 levied a toll on him, and his work fared no better through the next three years. Disappointed by the failure of “A Woman’s Story,” a record he put a lot of thought into, he seemed to give up trying to influence popular tastes. The idea that he would have to compete with people making inane disco pulp no doubt made Phil shudder more than anyone who thought about that numbing anomaly. Riding out the era as a detached spectator, he proceeded to fulfill his contractual obligations by signing two acts he cared nothing about. The first was a disco group called Calhoon and the other a singer/guitarist named Danny Potter. “With those,” David Kessel remembered, “Phil threw up a couple of mikes and said, ‘Go,’ then we left the studio. He didn’t produce them but he made sure they were recorded, in order to justify the label.” In between unsuccessful singles by these acts, Phil did commit to an act he thought might please him and the mass market, singer Jerri Bo Keno, a white girl from New York who had sung in disco clubs. Thinking she could be a Vickie Sue Robinson-style diva of dance music (Robinson had a smash disco hit), he cut the closest thing the Wall of Sound ever deigned come to the shamelessly syncopated disco beat. Spector announced her to be his comeback vehicle, but when a single he had written called “Here It Comes (and Here I Go)” failed in the fall of 1975, “it was sort of like vaporization,” said Dan Kessel. “He said hello and good-bye to her.” And to disco, none too soon.

  The Warner/Spector label was closed out almost as a Phil Spector rock postscript. In July 1976 two old tracks by Ronnie, “Paradise”/“When I Saw You,” were issued with no other purpose but as an exercise in Spector mockery. This was followed in February 1977 by a new track cut with Darlene Love, “Lord, If You’re a Woman,” backed with her unreleased Poncia/Andreoli track “Stumble and Fall.” To fulfill his album commitment, Phil released a Lenny Bruce retrospective, a two-record greatest hits compilation, and a reissue of the Christmas album.

  The sessions Phil ran during his Warners playout were a far cry from the studio spectacles of the past. Kim Fowley, who had gone on to produce Johnny Winter and Warren Zevon and had songs recorded by the Byrds, Cat Stevens, and many others, had never sung lead in his life when he got to make a record for Phil during this time. “I had used the Kessel brothers on an album called Vampires from Outer Space,” said Fowley, “and these guys are like the sons Phil never had. Wonderful guys. They dress in black, they know karate, they carry guns. I suppose if Phil Spector and Sly Stallone had twins, it would be the Kessels. So they said they were recording and I should bring my songs and some beer. I said, ‘Who’s producing?’ and they said Phil was. I said, ‘Phil Spector producing Kim Fowley the vocalist! Now I can die and go to heaven.’

  “So we went to this shitty studio across from the Chinese Theater which was horrible, a toilet. Guys were sitting around in urine-stained underwear and it looked like a junkie shooting gallery. I go in this dirty room and Phil appears—God, I’m in there the same way Bobby Sheen and all those poor bastards were, and he thanks me for coming and says, ‘I wanna make sure you guys get into this and make a great record. No matter what, just keep singing.’ So I begin and you know what he does? He sets off the fire alarm and seals the doors and leaves with the Kessels. Every fire truck in Hollywood came, guys with axes to rescue us. I didn’t know if there was a fire or not, and while they’re crashin’ the doors down I’m singin’ my ass off, man. So that was Phil Spector letting all the noise and hysteria make a vocal better. One of my tracks came out on a Spector album in England and I never got a royalty from him. Phil, if you’re reading this, you owe me something.”

  Soon after the Darlene Love record, with the early fanfare forgotten, Warner/Spector quietly folded. It left Phil with no reason to record. He closed up the Sunset office—the succeeding occupant was David Geffen—and Phil Spector Enterprises became no more than a Hollywood box number. Rather than look for acts, Phil stayed in the house, the windows covered with tarpaulin, his music activity limited to playing an album of Johnny Cash’s greatest hits. “He loved the old Sun Records’ sound, the tape delay, the ominous-sounding deep voice,” Dan Kessel said. “It soothed him.” The only way Phil would get back in the studio was if the right person talked him back. The first who qualified was Marty Machat, his manager. Machat also managèd Leonard Cohen, the Canadian poet/novelist/singer whose existentialist, often suicidal reflections of sorrow set to sparse music had begat a cult following. Machat, whose wife Ariel promoted Cohen, believed that with strong musical arrangements Cohen could find a broad audience. As a favor to Machat, and because he was lost in his own melancholia, Phil agreed to produce Cohen’s debut Warners album.

  Doc Pomus, the great old songwriter, happened to be in L.A. on business when Phil began working with Cohen. Phil, Doc’s onetime Hotel Forrest protégé, may have loved Pomus more than any other person in the business; when Doc, who was now confined to a wheelchair
, was down and out a few years earlier, Phil sent him a blank check (Pomus made it out for $3,000). Now Phil was the one who appeared to need help. Doc spent a month hanging out at the house, wincing as he watched Spector drink and act erratically. “He would change clothes four times a day,” Pomus recalled, “and each time he’d have a different gun on, to match the outfit.”

  In this Fellini-esque cuckoo’s nest, Spector and Cohen wrote songs, planned the album, and wallowed in booze. “They were really gettin’ loaded,” Pomus remembered. “They were like two drunks staggerin’ around.” So pained at seeing Phil this way, Doc practically dragged him out of that demented house each night. “He hadn’t been out for so long, they told me it was like a year, year and a half, and he was pale as a sheet. I got him to start goin’ out, but his drinking made it impossible. My driver and I never carried guns in New York but we did in L.A. because we were nervous about goin’ out with Phil. ’Cause he would walk over to the biggest guy at the bar and say, ‘You’re a faggot.’ He’d start with everybody and we’d have to save his life a few times, and then he’d go to the bathroom and throw up. He’d pull out sixty credit cards at the table and order whole lobsters and he’d eat none of it, ’cause he was drinkin’ and he didn’t know what he was doin’. God, it was so sad.

  “See, he gets a kick out of it too, because he likes to play parts. But I knew he was unhappy. He made me spend every night at the place because he’s lonely, he doesn’t see anybody. When I had to go home he said if I left he never was gonna talk to me again.”