Over the coming weeks, Leonard was a regular visitor to the mansion. Spector was a night owl, so it would be afternoon before Leonard would drive the short distance from his rented house in Brentwood. Leonard was dressed for work, wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. He looked, Dan Kessel recalls, “like a suave, continental Dustin Hoffman.” The maid would take Leonard to the living room, where the thick velvet curtains were firmly drawn against the bright California sun and an air conditioner blasted icy air, and leave him there alone, giving his eyes time to adjust to the round-the-clock twilight. A few minutes later Spector would make his entrance, flanked by Dan and David Kessel. The Kessel brothers had known Spector since childhood; their father, the jazz guitarist Barney Kessel, was a close friend of Spector who had played on a number of his hit records. His sons, who were also guitar players, had in turn appeared on several Spector records, including John Lennon’s Rock ’n’ Roll album, which Spector produced.
An antique silver cart was rolled in, laden with drinks and food. While the Kessel brothers retired to the adjoining room, Spector’s office, Leonard and Phil hung out for a while and chatted before getting to work. Sometimes they would pick a song to listen to from Spector’s jukebox, which was stacked with obscure R & B and rock ’n’ roll as well as old hit singles: Elvis, Dion, Dylan, Sun-era Johnny Cash, Frankie Laine. Then they would start work on the songwriting, sitting together at the piano on the long mahogany bench. The Kessel brothers would listen in on the studio monitors in the office, giving an opinion when Spector asked for it and, when their services were required, coming in and playing guitar. The rest of the time they shot pool.
“All day and into the night, every day, they would work for a while, break for a while, work for a while, break for a while,” says David Kessel. “Suggestions went back and forth between them. Leonard had notes with him and Phil would say, ‘Well okay, that story line goes on this kind of a music track,’ or Phil would have the music track and Leonard would go, ‘Hey, man, that kind of brings to mind this for me.’ Many times during breaks I sat outside with Leonard by the fountain and he would go, ‘Wow, this is different.’ ‘This is interesting.’ ‘This should be quite something.’ ‘I’ve never done this like this.’ He would use us as sounding boards: could we give him any insights as to where this was headed or what he could expect? All Phil said about it was, ‘This is cool, it’s going to be interesting; I want to see how it comes out and hopefully it’ll come out pretty good.’ ” Dan Kessel remembers, “Leonard was notoriously slow and deliberate; Phil got straight on it and got it done. Even so, or maybe because of that, they complemented each other as songwriters. There was plenty of laughter.” When Doc Pomus, the blues singer-songwriter, Spector’s friend, came by the house one day to visit Spector, they were “like two drunks,” he said, “staggering around.”2
Among the papers Leonard carried in his briefcase were lyrics of some of the songs he had worked on with John Lissauer for Songs for Rebecca—“Guerrero” and “Beauty Salon,” given different melodies and arrangements, would become “Iodine” and “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On.” Leonard also brought along an unfinished song called “Paper-Thin Hotel,” which he had begun writing on the New Skin tour. The song “Memories,” though, was written at the piano in Spector’s mansion. Introducing it at a concert in Tel Aviv in 1980, Leonard called it a “vulgar ditty that I wrote some time ago with another Jew in Hollywood, in which I have placed my most irrelevant and banal adolescent recollections.”3 Leonard’s lyrics recalled, in an almost Spectorian fashion, his high school days and the near-terminal case of sexual longing with which he was plagued. At times it also evokes his failed seduction of Nico:
I pinned an Iron Cross to my lapel
I walked up to the tallest
and the blondest girl
I said . . . Won’t you let me see
Your naked body
In less than a month, they had around a dozen songs ready to go. In January and February 1977—plus one last session in June—they recorded nine of them: the eight songs that made it onto the final album plus one that didn’t, another of the Songs for Rebecca songs, “I Guess It’s Time.” Recording began in Gold Star, a small, dark studio in the shabby heart of Hollywood. Spector’s favorite place to record, its old tube equipment gave the studio its rich, expansive sound, as well as a distinctive smell of burning dust when the tubes in the mixing board started heating up. “It also had a famous echo chamber,” says Hal Blaine, “like a cement casket running the length of the studio; an amazing sound. We did so many hits with Phil at Gold Star.” Blaine, a drummer, was a linchpin of the loose group of top-notch, versatile L.A. studio musicians nicknamed the Wrecking Crew. Spector would always hire them when he needed a band; Death of a Ladies’ Man, says Blaine, “was just another job. We never knew what we were going to do until we got there and did it.”
On January 24, 1977, Leonard arrived at Gold Star for the first session dressed in pale slacks and a dark blue blazer, “looking,” as David Kessel recalls, “like he was entertaining a date on the Riviera.” Walking into the studio, Leonard was taken aback. The room was crammed with people, instruments and microphone stands. There was barely space to move. He counted forty musicians, including two drummers, assorted percussionists, half a dozen guitarists, a horn section, a handful of female backing singers and a flock of keyboard players. “It blew his mind,” says David Kessel. “He was kind of disoriented, like, ‘Whoa. Okay. Is this how he normally does it? What are we doing here? Can you help me figure it out?’ This was a different thing for him.” Spector, who was up in the control room and even more sharply dressed than Leonard, in an expensive black suit, green shirt and Cuban-heeled boots, called over the studio monitor, “Anybody laid-back in this room, get the fuck out of here.”4 On the console was a bottle of Manischewitz Concord grape wine. Spector picked it up, poured it into a Tweetie Pie glass and sucked it through a plastic straw.
There was another face in the room Leonard recognized: Ronee Blakley, the vivacious folksinger he had met in Montreal on Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour. Blakley, who had recently become famous for her portrayal of a fragile country star in Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville, was a friend of Spector. “I wasn’t his girlfriend,” says Blakley, “but I went around with him a little bit. Phil has a very, very dear, sweet side to him.” Spector had asked her to come and sing duets with Leonard on “Iodine”—the first track they recorded—a song about failure, loss and the wounds of love, which had been given a beguiling Nino Tempo arrangement. She also sang with him on the album’s bittersweet opening track, “True Love Leaves No Traces,” which was based on the poem “As the Mist Leaves No Scar” from Leonard’s 1961 book The Spice-Box of Earth, and “Memories,” a rambunctious burlesque number whose lyrics make wry reference to the kind of teen-angst pop in which Spector specialized and whose chorus was made for drunks in midnight choirs to sing along with.
It seemed to be the first time Leonard had heard anything about duets, but he raised no objection. “He was an elegant man, soft-spoken and thoughtful and kind,” Blakley says. “He was not mean, not sharp, never ‘I’m intelligent and I have a way with language and I know how to make a remark that may sound fine but has a cruel edge to it.’ ” There were no rehearsals or charts; they simply sang the song through together once or twice and Blakley made up her part. She remembers that “it wasn’t that easy.” As Hal Blaine points out, Leonard’s “weren’t regular rock ’n’ roll songs. These were songs written by a poet for a rock ’n’ roll record and kind of off the wall. Leonard was in a whole other world.” The other problem was that Leonard seemed insecure about his singing. Says Blakley, “He really believed that he doesn’t have a great voice, although it’s amazing—so sensitive and vulnerable. It trembles at times, but at the same time it almost rumbles, it has that biblical quality. I think it’s a voice that female voices work with especially well.”
The sun was
starting to come up by the time the first recording session ended. The Kessels checked that the tapes had been correctly cataloged and oversaw the loading of them onto a dolly, which was wheeled out to Spector’s car after every session under armed guard—Spector’s bodyguard George. “Phil always took his tapes home,” says Dan Kessel. “He didn’t single Leonard out, that’s just the way Phil conducted his business. Studios don’t protect your tapes with the same stringency you do.” George was a retired U.S. federal marshal. Like Spector, he wore a gun in his shoulder holster. The difference, says Dan Kessel, was that “the bodyguard’s gun was always loaded. Phil’s never was.” Leonard joked about getting his own armed bodyguard and having a shoot-out on Sunset Boulevard. He asked Malka Marom, who was visiting him in L.A., to come to the studio with him. He told her that Spector was afraid of her because he thought she was an Israeli soldier. Marom agreed to go to the studio. She found the atmosphere “very scary—because Phil Spector was sitting there with bottles of Manischewitz wine and a gun on the table. I said to Leonard, ‘Why are you recording with this madman?’ He said, ‘Because he’s really very good at what he does.’ ”
Harvey Kubernik, who had been given the job of food runner—Spector or Marty Machat, who would come by the studio with his girlfriend Avril, would dispatch him to Canter’s deli to bring back chopped liver and corned beef sandwiches—had witnessed Spector in the studio before. Compared with other albums, he recalls, Spector’s sessions with Leonard were “not too chaotic.” But for Leonard, says David Kessel, “it was a bit of a whirlwind.”
It was late on the second night of recording when Bob Dylan showed up at the studio. “He comes in through the back door,” says David Kessel, “and he’s got each arm around a different woman. In his right hand, around the woman, he’s got a bottle of whiskey and he’s drinking the whiskey straight.” Allen Ginsberg followed close behind with his lover, the poet Peter Orlovsky. Seeing them, Spector jumped up and hailed them over the monitor. There were so many Jews in the room they could have a bar mitzvah, he joked. Work stopped while Spector came down to socialize. There was much hugging and drinking, then, as happened to anyone who came into Spector’s studio, the visitors were put to work.
Leonard was recording “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On,” a boisterous commentary on domestic bliss. Dylan, who was in the process of being divorced by his wife, Sara, seemed to have no problem entering into the spirit of the song. Ginsberg said later that “Spector was in a total tizzy, ordering everybody around, including Dylan: ‘Get over there! Stay off the microphone!’ ”5 Dan Kessel remembers, “He was very animated. He was behind the console, then with us in the studio, back and forth, interacting with everyone and conducting us.” Says Blaine, “It was like he was conducting the philharmonic, and it went on for hours. But that’s the way we worked with Phil; he wasn’t trying to run us into the ground, he was looking for that feeling. That magic.”
The session had turned into a boozy party. By daylight, when most of the revelers had gone, Spector and Leonard listened to the tape through the big studio speakers, the volume up, the music ferocious. “This,” said Spector, sipping at his Manischewitz, “is punk rock, motherfucker!” Leonard poured himself a glass of Cuervo Gold. “Everybody will now know,” said Leonard, “that inside this serene, Buddha-like exterior beats an adolescent heart.”6
At Dan Kessel’s suggestion, the next session was moved to Whitney Studios in Glendale. A new building in a more sedate neighborhood, with all new, state-of-the-art equipment, it was owned by the Church of Latter-Day Saints; Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart had recorded there. “One night,” says Dan Kessel, “Phil was monitoring at supersonic levels—Leonard had to put his hands up over his ears—and suddenly one of the two huge playback speakers completely blew out, rattling the three-paned soundproof glass window separating the studio room from the control booth. The roar of the Wall of Sound at high volume can do that.” While the speaker was being fixed, the recording moved again, this time to Devonshire Sound Studio in the San Fernando Valley.
Leonard could not say precisely when he lost control of the album, but he knew that he had. “It definitely wasn’t hippie or mellow, but Leonard was very together, very dignified and professional,” says David Kessel. “Then it got a little freaky for him.” The “entire enterprise,” as Leonard described it, was as “an ordeal.” Spector, as painstaking at getting the instruments and sound right as Leonard was with his endless rewriting, would often make him wait until two, three, even four in the morning to sing, at which point Leonard was exhausted and his nerves were shot. “It was just one of those periods where my chops were impaired and I wasn’t in the right kind of condition to resist Phil’s very strong influence on the record and eventual takeover of the record,” Leonard said.7 In the early hours of morning, after watching Spector’s car drive away, taking the tapes of the day’s recording to his mansion, Leonard drove back to his rented house in a foreign city, to a family on the verge of breaking up.
“I’d lost control of my family, of my work and my life, and it was a very, very dark period,” Leonard said. “I was flipped out at the time and [Spector] certainly was flipped out.” Where Leonard’s darkness manifested as “withdrawal and melancholy,” with Spector it was “megalomania and insanity, and the kind of devotion to armaments that was really intolerable. People were armed to the teeth, all his friends, his bodyguards, and everybody was drunk or intoxicated on other items, so you were slipping over bullets, and you were biting into revolvers in your hamburger. There were guns everywhere. Phil was beyond control.” During one session, at four o’clock in the morning, as Leonard was finally getting to sing, Spector came down from the control room. In his left hand was a half-empty bottle of Manischewitz and in his right hand a gun. Spector wrapped an arm around Leonard’s shoulder in a comradely manner. Then he pushed the nuzzle of the gun into Leonard’s neck. “Leonard, I love you,” he said, cocking the trigger. “I hope you do, Phil,” Leonard replied.8
“Bullets all over the floor is an exaggeration,” David Kessel says, and in all likelihood that is true; the more media interviews a person does, the more an incident gets polished and hyperbolized. “There weren’t bullets on the studio floor,” Kessel continues. “He’s probably talking about Phil’s house. By the way, there are a lot of Americans who have firearms for whatever purpose, and the Constitution says you can have that.” Dan Kessel says, “Leonard seemed intrigued with the whole Spector milieu and often made witty comments and observations about us, but I never got the feeling he was uneasy about the guns or anything else. On the contrary, in his own low-key way, he seemed to enjoy himself during the production.”
Stan Ross, the assistant engineer and co-owner of Gold Star, took an opposite view. “My main memory of that whole episode was that Phil and Leonard were both very unhappy with what was coming off and I think rightly so.”9 Devra Robitaille, Spector’s assistant and, until recently, girlfriend, who played synthesizer on the album, agreed with Ross. She told Spector biographer Mick Brown that Leonard and Spector “didn’t see eye to eye at all. There were a lot of creative differences. It was always very tense, very uncomfortable.” And unpredictable. Spector “could be in a great mood or he could be a raving lunatic. A lot of it was the drinking. Someone would say something, or he’d just get in a mood and stalk off. Everybody would be hanging around and then tempers would start to build and it’s five o’clock in the morning and everyone’s exhausted. . . . There were a couple of times when he would pass out drunk and Larry [Levine] and I would have to haul him back into his chair and revive him, and sometimes he’d somehow rally and that would be the brilliant take, the moment of genius.”10 Even Levine, Spector’s longtime engineer and friend, had to say that Phil was “not at his best” and Leonard “deserved better than he got.”11
The fiddle player who had a gun pulled on him during the recording was Bobby Bruce. It was late, and he was doing a solo on “Fingerprints,” a
countrified song about a man in love losing his identity, and Spector, Dan Kessel remembers, “wanted Bobby to do it again with a certain feeling. ‘Do it this way, Bobby. No, more like that.’ ” The atmosphere in the studio was tense and, in an attempt to lighten it, Bobby started affecting an effeminate manner: “Why of course, Phillip, I’m just mayonnaise in your hands,” says Don Kessel. “Ordinarily Phil might have laughed but he wasn’t in a lighthearted mood.” Spector pulled out his gun. Levine stepped in to try to calm things down, but Spector refused to put away the gun. The engineer had to threaten to turn off the equipment and go home if he did not. “He finally realized I was serious and put the gun away,” said Levine. “I loved Phil. I knew that wasn’t the real Phil.”12 Bruce quietly shut his fiddle in its case and quit.
For the recording of the album’s title track at Whitney Studios, Leonard brought along his own protection: Roshi. Dan Kessel remembers, “Leonard’s Zen master was nice and friendly and spoke quietly. He was wearing proper monk’s garb.” Says Ronee Blakley, “He was the kind of man you wanted to be around, funny, kind and disciplined—special. Leonard was also serving as Roshi’s driver. It was—I hope I’m not saying this wrong—a lesson in humility. He was learning to serve.” Leonard had tried to persuade Ronee to go to Mount Baldy and sit with Roshi. “He told me,” she says, “that it had saved his life.”
The session started as usual at seven thirty P.M. but by three thirty A.M. they had still not played “Death of a Ladies’ Man” all the way through; Spector had the musicians play no more than six bars at a time. At four A.M., Spector stood at the window of the control room and clapped his hands, and Leonard began singing his nine-minute meditation on love, marriage, emasculation and the emptiness left behind when “the great affair is over.” The enormous studio room had a cathedral pipe organ in it, which Spector told Dan Kessel to play. Kessel had never played one before. “I turned on the power switch, sat down and quickly experimented with the stops till I got the hugest sound I could find.” Then Spector “began leading us like a symphony orchestra conductor and Leonard came in at the perfect moment and started singing his heart out, while forty musicians came in together with sensitive attention to every breath of Leonard’s vocal. Miraculously, without a chart and with no rehearsal, we all managed to glide in together for a smooth landing. We were all exhilarated when we wrapped,” says Dan Kessel, “and no one more so than Leonard.”
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 31