by Mick Brown
Sometimes Spector would not even bother to supervise the sessions himself, assigning the task of composing and producing them to musicians such as Don Randi. “Phil would call me up and say I want you to go in and do a B-side,” Randi says. “And if it starts sounding good, stop. It’s a little sore point with me, because I feel I wrote some of those songs, and I never got credit for that. I’d go in and do it and Phil would figure them out at the end. And then put his name on them.”
While the musicians in New York had tended to view Spector with a mixture of superior disdain and grudging respect, the team he built at Gold Star came to regard him with unbridled affection.
“Musicians respected him because he could play himself and understood the trials and tribulations of making music,” says Don Randi. “All the guitar players in particular loved to work for him because he understood the guitar better than any other producer, and he could play it so well. If Phil had decided not to be a record producer and become a jazz guitarist, he could have done that, no question.”
“Phil would push the musicians to the limit, but you never saw them get upset,” remembers the Crystals singer LaLa Brooks. “Some musicians in New York, they’d say, ‘Listen, man, I’ve had enough, I’m going home, stick it up your ass…’ I’ve seen them do that. Fifteen takes! They wouldn’t even go to five takes! They’d be collecting their instruments and ‘We’re outta here! Because he’s a nut!’ But at Gold Star it was a family. They had positive and they had negative, but everybody chipped in, and they would stay there hours to produce that sound. If Phil said he wanted a kettle drum, then somebody would go and find a kettle drum, and everybody else would just sit there and wait.”
Spector could be imperious, dogmatic, demanding, but he knew how to create an atmosphere in the studio that would encourage the musicians to give of their best. Gifts would be sprinkled like confetti. When Leon Russell played a piano part that Spector particularly loved, he stopped the session and wrote out a $50 check on the spot.
He would frequently leaven the sessions with bouts of joking and horseplay. “The bane of my recording career is that I didn’t have a tape recorder running during those sessions,” Levine says. “When things were going well—and that was most of the time—Phil would do stand-up comedy. He’d get on the talkback microphone into the studio and he’d do twenty-five minutes of one-liners, just throwing them out there. And then the guys would come back at him; Barney Kessel in particular had a really wry sense of humor. It was Phil’s stage. And he loved it, and we all loved it. Even I loved it, and I was the brunt of the jokes that Phil would crack, which was okay with me because it was never meant other than in humor, and I knew that.”
The musicians would respond in kind. When Spector turned up at the studio wearing a T-shirt bearing a picture of Beethoven, Ray Pohlman organized for everybody to turn up at the next session wearing T-shirts bearing a picture of Spector. He loved it. Don Randi recalls another night when Hal Blaine arrived with a movie-prop phone that he set ringing in between takes. “Phil’s going, ‘What the fuck is that?’ Hal picks it up and says, ‘Phil, it’s for you.’ It totally destroyed the mood but it was great.”
“Phil didn’t mind spending studio time that way,” says Levine. “As long as the work got done. He always paid the Gold Star bill and the musicians. He never stinted on that. I remember one time he said, ‘This is where I live, and you’ve got to pay the rent on where you live.’”
Spector’s brushes with the musicians’ union in New York had made him more cautious working in Los Angeles. “The greatest thing Phil did for musicians was observing union contracts,” says Don Randi. “Everything was put on a contract; he insisted upon it. And he made all the other producers go along with the program, so we benefited enormously. Where that comes back is that fifteen, twenty years later, I will go to my mailbox and there’ll be a residual check for three hundred dollars or seven hundred dollars where they’ve reused the track. We would do anything for him.”
But if Spector treated the musicians like kings, he showed less consideration for the singers. “The musicians were all pros,” says Levine. “The singers, for the most part, were just kids.” But Spector regarded them simply as components in the machine, useful only for as long as he needed them and eminently disposable if he didn’t. There was only room for one ego at Gold Star.
He would often keep them waiting for hours while he listened back to the tracks, thundering around the studio at deafening volume, indifferent to their boredom or needs. They would often curl up on sofas and try to sleep, until roused by Spector to provide another take. And he thought nothing of summoning them from their homes at a moment’s notice if their services were required. Spector seemed to particularly relish the power he had over them to make or break their careers. “Phil would say, ‘They’re all mine,’” remembers Annette Merar. “‘Without me, they’re nothing. They will do what I want.’ Again, it was full power, full control.”
“He rode the singers hard,” Don Randi says. “Sometimes to get a performance he would go to such lengths that I would have to leave the studio. He had an ear, and if somebody was off-pitch—look out. Things were said, hurtful things. He could be brutal to get that performance out of them. This was out of the singers, but never the musicians.”
“Oh, he was so critical!” remembers Gloria Jones. “‘The clapping’s not right…’ So we’d do that for ten or twelve takes. ‘That note didn’t make it.’ The sessions would just go on and on and on and on. He was a genius-maniac—that’s what I call Phil. He threw his little weight around, and he would kind of frighten people because of the way he acted. He was like God to a lot of people.”
But not to Darlene Wright. As much as Spector loved her voice, and Wright would come to respect his talents, the two would argue constantly. “Darlene would say just what was on her mind to Phil, and he would back up like a little kid,” Jones remembers. “Sometimes Phil would have it so cold in the studio, and Darlene would say, ‘Turn that air-conditioning off,’ and he’d turn it off. She had the balls to stand up to him, and he listened. I think he knew what he had in Darlene.”
Jones, for her part, found Spector “scary” the aloof, faintly menacing air, the dark glasses. But she fancied she could see vulnerability behind the façade. “I remember I had to come into the studio one time to get my money, and my husband came with me, not for any particular reason. And you could tell Phil was scared to death—like I was bringing my husband to beat up on him or something. Phil might have been a genius, but he was just a little punk, throwing his little weight around. I respected him because of his talent, but I didn’t like him at all.”
Jones’s close friend and fellow singer Fanita Barrett saw things differently. “Nobody has a nice thing to say about Phil, but to me he was a nice man. He tried to make people laugh, but none of his jokes were ever funny. But he fascinated me, and I loved the way he worked. He made those sessions feel like family. I was just in awe—he was such a genius. I remember one time I was pregnant, and he told me, name the baby Philles and you’ll never have to worry about her again. He offered to pay for her college education and everything. And you know what? I didn’t do it. I called her Crystal—and I didn’t know he was feuding with the Crystals at the time. Stupid idiot that I was, my poor baby never got a dime.”
8
“He Wanted to Be Thought Of as Interesting”
Shy and painfully self-conscious, Bernard “Jack” Nitzsche was the antithesis of hip when he first came into Phil Spector’s orbit. Medium height and slight of build, he wore his hair in a short brush cut, dressed conservatively in short-sleeve sports shirts and a tie, and blinked from behind thick horn-rimmed spectacles—“sweet and a little nerdy-looking,” according to Fanita Barrett. Everybody knew him as “Specs.”
Nitzsche and Spector had much in common. Nitzsche had grown up on a farm in Michigan, under the shadow of a protective and overbearing mother—like Spector, a lonely child who had found consolation in musi
c.
“Jack had music running in his veins,” one friend remembers. “He could listen to windshield wipers and tell you what time signature they were in, and what songs would go along with it. I remember being with him in a car when ‘Summertime Blues’ came on, and he turned on the wipers to prove his point. They matched exactly.”
Like Spector, Nitzsche had a particular reverence for black music, holding a lifelong belief that rock and roll—including whatever he would create himself—had been stolen from the black man. His son Jack Jr. would describe Nitzsche as “prejudiced in reverse. He hates white people.”
He and Spector shared a passion for Motown and a fascination with the sound that Berry Gordy Jr. was conjuring from his small storefront studio in Detroit, which Gordy, with characteristic bravura, had christened “Hitsville USA.” Nitzsche enjoyed telling the story of how one day he and Spector were driving down Sunset Boulevard when Marvin Gaye’s “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” came on the radio. Spector immediately turned the volume to full blast—a sure sign a record had his attention. When the drums kicked in, Spector and Nitzsche looked at each other in amazement and said in unison, “Who the fuck is playing the drums?” (It was Marvin Gaye himself.) Spector was so excited he lost control of the wheel, the car spinning on its axis to face the oncoming traffic. As cars weaved past them, the drivers sounding their horns and giving them the finger, Spector brought the car to a halt, he and Nitzsche clutching each other in laughter.
To Annette Kleinbard, Spector and Nitzsche were “the perfect match. Jack was somehow able to totally get into Phil’s mind, and he knew exactly what Phil wanted. Nitzsche,” she says, was “a modern-day Stravinsky. He never got the recognition he deserved.”
“If Phil was the visionary, Jack was the architect,” says Denny Bruce, who was a close friend of Nitzsche and managed him in later years. “He could draw the blueprint that you handed to the guys who were doing the building, so at least they’d know what the ground floor was supposed to look like. You’re getting the feel, the tempo, the important things before you build any more. So the Wall of Sound was structured the way an architect will build a house; yeah, the closet doors do close. Jack was really meticulous about writing and copying charts, and he had such a good ear. There might be three or four acoustic rhythm guitars playing the same thing and it would be, ‘Hold on, Glen—I think it’s your high E string.’ Jack would hear everything, but what he really excelled in was tempo and groove.”
Nitzsche shared Spector’s love for classical music, and his growing symphonic ambitions. As big as Spector wanted the Wall of Sound to be, Nitzsche was happy to encourage him to make it bigger still.
“Jack was musically educated,” remembers one friend. “If Phil said, ‘I want some Strauss here,’ he’d know what he meant. They just bounced off each other. Phil was ready to go out on a limb and Jack was ready to go out there with him. Phil would say, ‘It needs a saxophone,’ and Jack would say, ‘Let’s double it,’ and Phil would say, ‘Let’s triple it.’ Jack was having the time of his life, and liberties were taken all the way around, which was the beauty of it all. They were like two scientists in a laboratory, experimenting, and they got tremendously lucky. They became very close friends.”
Nitzsche was one of the few people around Spector in the studio who would answer him back and dare to contradict him. Spector would defer to Larry Levine on matters of technical expertise and frequently ask for his opinion on a particular performance or instrumental phrase. After a while, he even trusted Levine to do edits in the studio. But Levine was always aware that he was first and foremost an employee. Nitzsche felt confident enough in his abilities to be able to challenge Spector when he disagreed with something. “They had terrible fights,” says Denny Bruce. “Jack was always walking out on Phil. But he would always come back.”
Nitzsche idolized Spector to the point of brushing his hair forward in the same way and affecting the same dark glasses, rain or shine. On one occasion, Spector took him to New York and introduced him around the Brill Building, radio stations and trade papers as “my partner.” Nitzsche was thrilled; Spector had finally given him the acknowledgment he felt he deserved. But Spector never used the word again.
Nor was Nitzsche generously rewarded for his efforts—he was paid just the standard $50 a session. But he took a pragmatic view. Not only was working with Spector a unique experience, he would later explain, but “the credits helped secure employment for years.” Even while working for Spector, he was busy elsewhere as an arranger. With Sonny Bono he wrote the song “Needles and Pins,” which became a hit for Jackie DeShannon and, later, the British group the Searchers. And in 1963 Nitzsche enjoyed a minor hit himself with the instrumental “The Lonely Surfer,” written by his friend Al Hazan.
Finally, he felt emboldened enough to go to Spector and ask for a raise. Spector turned him down. “He told Jack, ‘Look, the body of work you’re making here is going to keep you going for the rest of your career,’” Denny Bruce remembers. “But Jack had a wife and a child to support. And there wouldn’t be a session for a month or two, so he would work with other producers who wanted a Phil Spector sound. He was with Phil in Martoni’s restaurant and one of the guys Jack was going to work with was there, and Jack was talking to the guy. And when he went back to the table, Phil said, ‘I don’t want you talking to him anymore.’ Jack said, ‘Well, I’m going to do some work with him.’ And Phil said, ‘I don’t like him and he doesn’t like me, and you are in my camp.’”
Nitzsche dropped the session. Whatever he could get working for others was nothing compared to the joy he derived from working with Spector. “Maybe other producers liked their records,” Nitzsche would later recall. “Phil loved his records. Phil really was the artist, and it wasn’t just out of ego. Phil understood the teenage market, he could relate to their feelings and buying impulses. He was a kid. He’d call me at four a.m. and want to go out for ice cream.”
Sonny Bono was one of Jack Nitzsche’s closest friends. Born in Detroit, the son of Italian immigrants, Bono had grown up in Los Angeles, an aspiring songwriter who worked bagging groceries and driving a tug at Douglas Aircraft before landing a job at Specialty Records as an AR man. Bono had given Nitzsche his first break when he arrived in Los Angeles, writing out lead sheets for arrangements for three dollars a piece. When Bono lost his job at Specialty and was down on his luck, he slept for a few weeks on the couch in Jack and Gracia’s apartment. When Nitzsche started working as Spector’s arranger, Bono was desperate to join him. Like Nitzsche, Bono was in awe of Spector’s talent, and his hit rate. Spector, he thought, was someone he could learn from. He was also anxious to promote the career of his new girlfriend, a seventeen-year-old runaway called Cherilyn Sarkasian LaPierre. Known as Cher, she had briefly dated Nino Tempo before meeting Bono. Bono was convinced that with the proper production and coaching Cher could be a star.
In late 1962, at Nitzsche’s urging, Bono called Spector, asking for work.
“And what do you wanna do for me?” Spector asked.
“Anything,” Bono replied. “Anything.”
“I don’t know if there’s an opening under that job description,” Spector said. “I’m in the record business, you know?”
After leaving Specialty, Bono had worked as a promotions man for a distribution company, Record Merchandising, peddling new releases to radio stations on behalf of a number of small, local labels. He knew from experience that promo men would push hardest on the records they figured would be hits, that DJs often expected “incentives” in cash or kind to get behind a song, and that the vast majority of new releases ended up in the garbage. Philles, he told Spector, was too important a label to entrust its releases to someone who was also handling product from other, rival labels. What Spector needed was his own West Coast promotions man.
Spector took Bono on, but quickly found other uses for him as an all-purpose sidekick and gofer, sometimes joining the choir of backing singers or playing percussion, other
times being sent out to collect hamburgers or deli as the sessions stretched interminably into the night. Before long, Bono started to bring his girlfriend Cher to the sessions. Cher had a honking voice, so powerful that whenever she sang Larry Levine would move her to the back of the group, away from the microphone, so she wouldn’t drown out the other voices. She was also worldly beyond her years. When Spector, teasingly, asked in French if she wanted to go to bed with him, Cher snapped back at him—also in French—“Yeah, okay. For money.”
Bono was an obliging foil, happy to play the part of Spector’s flunky, always ready to laugh at his jokes and indulge his whims. “Phil only had to look like he wanted something and Sonny would be jumping—whatever,” Gloria Jones recalls. Lester Sill would put it more bluntly. “Sonny had his nose up Phil’s ass a mile.” On one occasion Bono was awoken in the middle of the night by a call from Spector asking whether he wanted to meet for a bite to eat. Groggy and befuddled, Bono dutifully climbed out of bed and drove to collect Spector from his hotel and on to Denny’s, a twenty-four-hour diner on Sunset Strip. For the next hour they sat in total silence as Spector ate his meal. Spector, it seemed, simply didn’t feel like talking.
In his autobiography Bono writes that Spector “wanted to be thought of as interesting.” He was obsessed by his appearance and how other people would see him. Spector, Bono and Nitzsche would sometimes take photos of each other, practicing the coolest way of sitting in a car or striking a pose—sunglasses on, sunglasses off…“He would put one arm on the window, try steering with one finger, all sorts of different poses,” remembered Bono. “Then he would have me stand outside the car and ask how he looked.”