He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  The Leonard Cohen sessions were typically unpleasant. Cohen, like John Lennon, was pushed aside and ignored. Phil was so paranoid about the tapes that he took them home each night with an armed guard. And there was yet another violent scene in the studio when violinist Bobby Bruce began to joke with Phil by speaking with an affected, faggoty lisp. Phil, who was always sensitive about his own lisp, thought Bruce was mimicking him and ordered it to stop. “Yeth, Phil,” Bruce replied, whereupon a maniacal Spector tore out his gun, aimed it in Bruce’s direction, and ordered him out of the studio. Larry Levine, who had left A&M and engineered the Cohen sessions at Gold Star, was shaken by the incident, and he and the rest of the musicians could not go on with the date.

  “It scared the shit out of me,” Levine said. “Phil was crocked and I was trying to talk to him, because you hear about accidents, and it was the scariest thing when he got like that. It was the booze. When Phil started drinking, he was out of his head. That was not Phil. That’s not the Phil I knew.”

  Released in early 1978, the album, Death of a Ladies’ Man, bombed, heard by few ears except those of the rock critics it offended—the lone dissenter being Robert Hilburn, the Los Angeles Times music writer, who called it the year’s best album. In fact, the lyrics—a primer of a hopeless romantic caught in the warp of modern feminism—may have been the poet’s most trenchant to date. But Cohen himself led the attack on the record, which disastrously set fey lyricism, backed on some tracks by Bob Dylan, against the Spector sound machine. Despite their shared depression, Phil’s hyperbolic bombast clobbered Cohen; and when Cohen heard the mix he publicly renounced the album even before it was out. Ladies’ Man, Cohen told Rolling Stone, was “the collaboration of an Olympian and crippled nature.” Spector, he said, had “taken the guts out of the record. . . . I think that in the final moment, Phil couldn’t resist annihilating me. I don’t think he can tolerate any other shadows in his own darkness.

  “I say these things not to hurt him,” Cohen concluded. “Incidentally, beyond all this, I liked him. Just man-to-man he’s delightful and with children he’s very kind. But I would also like him to know . . . that he was urged to reconsider his approach to recording by a man who knows him well and who has suffered because of his failure to allow things to breathe.”

  Dan and David Kessel were the next to divert Phil from what Leonard Cohen called a “Medici pose” of living death inside the cold and dark house. Dan and Dave were hanging around with the New York punk rockers and the Ramones when the group was on tour in L.A. With disco now dead and the new wave mudpie of British and Lower East Side assault rock seeping into the mainstream, there was a clear rationale for suggesting that Phil get involved with a punk band. The leather jacketed and dour-faced Ramones, fronted by the endomorphic six-foot-nine-inch lead singer Joey Ramone (the same surname was used by the four nonrelated band members, which also included guitarist Johnny, bassist Dee Dee, and drummer Marky), the Ramones were probably the most talented of all the bands out to subvert a rock world gone soft around the middle. Playing in the punk idiom of feverish rapid-fire guitar chords broken into two-minute bursts, they also fused many rock influences, including Phil Spector’s records, and the satiric humor of mock shock song titles like “Blitzkrieg Bop” and “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.” One of the first and few punk acts to land a recording contract, they self-produced three modest-selling albums for Sire Records, a Warners subsidiary label, but the frantic excitement of their hugely popular live shows was lost on vinyl and they had not yet broken through to the masses.

  Dan and David took Phil to a Ramones show at the Whisky-a-Go-Go, and his interest in the band was indicated not by his words but by the fact that he went backstage later. The first thing he said to them was “My bodyguards wanna fight your bodyguards.” Then, announcing his availability, he said, “You wanna make a good album by yourselves or a great album with me?” Phil’s main interest in the Ramones was really Joey, whose melodically sharp, New York-sounding inflections was nearly a male version of Ronnie’s voice. Phil wanted to record Joey solo. “He said he was gonna make me the next Buddy Holly,” Joey recalled. Informed that the group was the act, they both committed to an album and Marty Machat made a deal with Sire president Seymour Stein. A song-plugger along the old Broadway, Stein went way back with Phil and knew what it would require to get an album out of him to benefit the Ramones: he gave Phil carte blanche and then left him alone, knowing no one would see an album for long months. In return, Phil agreed to produce one of Stein s pet acts, the Paley Brothers. Spector immediately cut a handful of tracks with Andy and Jonathan Paley before, through no fault of his own, they split up as an act.

  Turning to the Ramones, pulling the Phil trips and control games on a ripened and off-the-wall band set in its own ways, his manic presence at once divided the group and obscured the rock-and-roll bond they shared. At an early idea meeting Phil insulted drummer Marky Ramone s girlfriend. As they drove to Phil’s house for the first time, they thought they were entering a compound. “You drive in there,” Joey said, “and you see all the signs about dogs and electrified fences . . . the barbed wire, the mine fields. I’m sure a good portion of it’s a put-on, part of the persona, the psychosis, but it can be intimidating. It’s like when you went there, you were there; you can’t get out until he’s ready to let you out, and he’s never ready, ’cause I guess he didn’t have company too often and I guess he likes to keep you around. You’d say, ‘Well, Phil, it’s time for us to go now,’ and he’d disappear. Then he’d come back and he’d want to show you his terrarium or some of the hideous-looking things he had in there. The night had to belong to Phil, just like the studio does. . . . It was just too weird. One time I opened a closet door in his kitchen and this St. Bernard dog jumped out of the dark. It was locked in, just hangin’ out in there.”

  While the other three Ramones had misgivings, Joey held them in line. “I mean, I was excited about it, because Phil Spector was a major inspiration to me and because we were both pioneers. When the Spector sound came around there was a void, there was Pat Boone and then there was Phil Spector. He was a reaction to all that superficial whitebread crap. When we came out there was a gap too; it was the beginning of disco, of the corporate sound, Journey, Foreigner. There was no exciting rock as we knew it, the music we grew up on. I think Phil liked that aspect of us and I think it was important to him in a lot of ways to get involved with us.

  “But there was a lot of shit in the beginning. Phil obviously had a real bad drinking problem and he made it difficult. John was pretty okay about it. Dee Dee was . . . well, Dee Dee was goin’ through his own period, he had his demons. And L.A. is the kind of place you can get into trouble, especially if there’s a lot of waiting around. We were based in L.A. already at that point for about two months ’cause we had just finished the movie Rock ’n’ Roll High School. And then we were doin’ the album with Phil and it’s like Phil would run down the songs like a couple of hundred times before he’d even do one take; he was listening for something. We were used to goin’ in and knockin’ ’em out in one take. We like it to be spontaneous, you like to capture that. It takes us like a month to record an album. But with Phil, this album took forever. It was like a crazy Chinese water torture and Dee Dee started crackin’ up.”

  Phil was not far behind. Even though only two tracks necessitated outside musicians—a full orchestra for a cover of “Baby I Love You”; Steve Douglas and former Electric Flag keyboardist Barry Goldberg on “Rock ’n’ Roll Radio”—the sessions at Gold Star were laborious and wounding. Producing the title track of Rock ’n’ Roll High School, Spector took eight hours mixing the long opening guitar chord to his satisfaction. On every song he overdubbed the Ramones’ guitar, bass, and drum parts long into the night—but when he felt unsure about how to deal with this new style of music, he would stop the session and do the old routines with a beleaguered Larry Levine. “Or if a stranger came in and Phil didn’t know about it,” said Joey, “work
would cease and Phil would get weird, do his tantrums or he’d have . . . guys would bring him these little white cups of Manischewitz and after a few of them Phil would start bangin’ on the floor and screamin’ . . . ‘piss, shit, fuck. Fuck, shit, piss!’ He would just go on, he started freakin’ out, and there would be no reason to go on any longer with the session.”

  As Dee Dee Ramone and Phil came closer to going over the edge, the studio became a collision course waiting for an accident to happen. At one crisis point, Joey and the band’s musical director, Ed Stasium, warned Phil his drinking was killing the album and he eased off. “We wanted Ed there to oversee,” Joey said, “but then pretty soon Phil was plyin’ him with daiquiris and they were hangin’ out havin’ candlelight daiquiris.” Finally, provoked by a drug-blitzed Dee Dee, Phil snapped in his usual manner—brandishing his gun.

  “He held his gun to Dee Dee’s head,” Joey said. “Dee Dee was kinda fucked up on Quaaludes or something and he told Phil he was gonna kill him. I guess Phil felt he had only one way to respond.”

  This latest gun incident turned off Dee Dee further, and it may have also helped send Larry Levine to the emergency room. Larry, smoking almost without end despite suffering a heart attack six years before, went home one night and had stabbing chest pains. He got to the hospital in time to live out his second heart attack.

  “The Ramones, Jesus, that was a terrible experience.” Levine flinched. “It was a contributing factor to my heart attack. The night before it happened, Phil and I had this . . . we had gone around. He wasn’t doing any work. He was drinking and he was procrastinating and we couldn’t get any work done. The Ramones were in the studio, they were there all night and I couldn’t get him . . . he wouldn’t focus. He’d sit there and he’d be in a stupor. It was really that bad.”

  Convinced that he had caused Levine’s heart attack, a distraught Phil did not visit him in the hospital. “He wouldn’t even talk to me until years later. I’m sure he felt responsible. I tried to assure him he wasn’t. I was due for it anyway, with the smoking. . . . But it was very difficult when he was drinking. I would go back and forth with him as a gag because Phil would put people on and it was an effort to try and communicate. But it just got impossible to move ahead. We were stuck.”

  “Phil was frustrated by the fact that we make our own decisions,” Joey Ramone suggested. “We’re our own band, we have our final say, and Phil’s not used to having that. So I don’t know if working with us was his dream come true or his nightmare come true.”

  It seemed more like twenty years when, eight months from the start date, the Ramones’ End of the Century was released in February 1980. For a budget-busting $200,000—the average Ramones LP was made for around $70,000—Seymour Stein bought himself the Ramones’ best work. Critical reaction was favorable, and it became the first Ramones album to go Top 50 on the chart. As he did with Lennon and Harrison, Phil did not alter the basic idiom; rounding and widening the punk beat, not one ounce of the raw energy was sacrificed. The entire record bristled with a dynamic range and clarity the Ramones did not know was possible. Kurt Loder of Rolling Stone called it “the most commercially credible album the Ramones have ever made [and] also Phil Spector’s finest and most mature effort in years, undoubtedly his most restrained production since his work with John Lennon. Surprisingly, End of the Century doesn’t sound like the end of the world overdubbed on twenty-four tracks in some airless Los Angeles studio. . . . [Spector] has created a setting that’s rich and vibrant and surging with power, but it’s the Ramones who are spotlighted, not their producer. More than ever before, Spector has managed to conceal his considerable art and thus reaffirm it.”*

  “I personally loved the album,” Joey said, “but I’m probably the only one in the band who felt that way. See, I had a sort of decent rapport with him. Sure he’s difficult and yeah it was hell. I mean there are things about Phil . . . he’s not the nicest guy in the world. But you just accept what he is to work with him. And I thought he did a great job. There were a couple of things that made me cringe, but ‘Danny Says’ is a fuckin’ classic and ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Radio’ sounds great. What he did with the opening chord of ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll High School’ is like ‘Strawberry Fields,’ the way it fuses into the drums.”

  Joey had been home in New York for months when Phil called him one morning to play him the album’s first single, the “Baby, I Love You” cover, over the phone. “It was like six A.M. in L.A. but he never sleeps. He doesn’t sleep and he doesn’t eat. He just mixes records all night.” Unfortunately, the choice of the song as a single—another of Spector’s conditions with Seymour Stein was that one of his songs would be the first release—was a bad one. The only overtly Spectorian tune on the album, with its glutinous and stabbing string line, it may have directly merged the rock and roll of Phil Spector and the Ramones, but it failed to grab air play. In some quarters it was held as a joke, though not in England where the song went to No. 2.

  As a Phil Spector album, it presaged a possible return to the wars for the world’s top record producer, but the discord and horror stories surrounding it was a deterrent; though Spector’s contract had an option for a second Ramones LP, even Joey rejected that idea. Phil considered hooking up with the new wave band Blondie after seeing them open for the Ramones one night, but that band’s leader, Chris Stein, told Joey there was no way he could work with Phil.

  Maybe that is what Phil really wanted, to be just left alone.

  Jack Nitzsche, who had not seen Phil in years, showed up unannounced at the front gate late in 1979. Nitzsche had blossomed during and after working with Phil—he produced, among many others, Bobby Darin, Rick Nelson, and Jackie DeShannon, and recorded four solo albums; one, St. Giles Cripplegate, in 1972, utilized the London Symphony Orchestra. Nitzsche had been in the thick of the seventies’ soft-rock wave, co-producing Neil Young’s first LP and producing and writing for Young’s backup band Crazy Horse, for a time joining the band on the road as their pianist. He also produced the Neville Brothers and the first two Mink Deville albums. Branching out into films, he scored the Mick Jagger movie Performance, then The Exorcist and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. However, Nitzsche was in a bad way now. Recently he had been arrested for assaulting his girlfriend, actress Carrie Snodgress, who said that Nitzsche, in a drunken rage, raped her with the barrel of a gun, kicked and beat her, and threatened to shoot her and her small child.

  Seeing Nitzsche, Phil thought he was scary. Rather than let him in, Phil leaned out of an upstairs window and was said to have aimed a gun at his onetime arranger and ordered him off the grounds. Nitzsche fled back down La Collina Drive and into a wasteland of his own misery, but the real question about Phil Spector now was whom if anyone he would welcome inside that dark house.

  *From “The Ramones and Phil Spector in Radioland,” Kurt Loder, Rolling Stone (March 20, 1980):26.

  Where is his son,

  That nimble-footed madcap Prince of Wales

  And his comrades, that daff’d the world aside

  And bid it pass?

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Henry IV

  At 10 P.M. on the night of January 23,1980, ten-year-old Donté Spector walked into a West Hollywood police station and told police he had lost his bicycle. Asked by a deputy sheriff if his parents knew he was out so late, Donté said that he had run away from home that morning. He had been staying with his nine-year-old girlfriend since school let out and he did not want to go back home.

  An hour later a police detective and a probation officer called Phil and informed him that his son was at the station house. Refusing to come over and get Donté, he told them, “I don’t care what you do with him.”

  When Ronnie was notified, she immediately petitioned for custody, and Phil allowed Donté to move to New York to live with her. Ronnie’s singing comebacks in the seventies had failed and a recently signed recording deal only provided her with a $2,000 advance, but she stated she could give Donté “the opportunity
of living with a loving parent.” In April, with Phil and Ronnie in attendance and at a safe distance, the court gave her custody and ordered Phil to pay child support of $850 a month—“by check or money order,” the judge warned a sneering Phil, “no pennies, nickels or quarters.”

  Phil’s lawyers, fearing that Ronnie was still on the sauce, asked for attorney’s supervision over her in New York. “I’m satisfied the mother’s a good mother,” the judge replied. “They can spend their time supervising people who really need supervising, not Mrs. Spector.”

  “Thank you,” Ronnie said.

  Maliciously, Phil made out the first four support checks in Donté’s name, not Ronnie’s, and was again found in contempt of court.

  By the mid-eighties Ronnie had remarried, to a show-biz manager named Jonathan Greenfield, and had her first natural-born children—ironically, they were twins—but rather than stability, Donté felt more alienation. He went back to L.A.—not to live with Phil but with an elderly Bertha Spector. “Donté got into trouble,” Nedra Talley related, “because neither Phil nor Ronnie did right by him. Getting Donté was a threat to Ronnie, I think. She may have felt he was a challenge to her new life.

  “I was trying to see about getting Donté to live with me. I was willing to do that because I’ve given myself to raising my children and one more to love would not be a problem. Donté needs that kind of love. He’s sort of caught in the middle of two crazy situations. The last time I was out there, about five years ago, I went to the house about Donté and Phil didn’t want me to let Donté know that I had come. I said, ‘Phil, I’m not gonna play games. I don’t know what game you and Ronnie are playing but don’t include me in the middle.’ My only angle was that I loved Donté and that the last time I saw him he told me he wanted to be with me.