by Mick Brown
For a while, Spector harbored an infatuation with the singer Jackie DeShannon. One day he asked Bono, “If she saw me driving, do you think she’d like me better with my glasses on or off?”
Bono replied that he had no idea.
With a handful of surreptitious phone calls, Bono was able to find out DeShannon’s schedule and calculate that she would be driving down Sunset Strip at a certain time. Spector and Bono stationed themselves on the street and, when DeShannon drove past, set off in pursuit. At length they pulled alongside her car. “Phil positioned himself so that he was sitting almost completely sideways,” Bono remembered. “Most of his back was toward the window. He was, he thought, looking as cool as possible. From Jackie’s point of view though, he was barely visible.”
For a mile Spector drove parallel to DeShannon, holding the pose, until at last DeShannon turned off the Strip, apparently oblivious to the fact that it was Spector in the car beside hers. Spector, Bono remembered, was “crestfallen. ‘Damn,’ he said, ‘the sunglasses probably scared her.’”
Spector’s fastidiousness about his wardrobe and appearance could be comical, but it seemed to hint less at vanity than at some more troubling, underlying insecurity. Preparing for a recording session or a meeting, he would spend hours posturing in front of the mirror, matching different shirts and jackets, testing colognes and experimenting with different ways of combing his fast-thinning hair, which only Annette Merar was allowed to cut.
“And every single strand would have to be perfect…‘Okay, so fix it at the back to make it compensate for the bit at the front that’s long.’ But to me he was adorable, and a very sexy guy. I remember one occasion when we were living on Fifty-eighth Street, and he was going off to work dressed in a Beau Brummel kind of velvet vest and a jacket; his hair was perfect; he was just mesmerizing, and I just loved him so hard, but I never said anything. He walked out and closed the door and it was…‘Oh my God.’ He was my type of guy.”
Spector’s obsession with his appearance would never leave him. For years afterward, whenever he was in company he would leave the room at frequent intervals to preen and primp in front of a mirror. “It wasn’t arrogance or egotism,” Annette says. “It was like the opposite that drove him to be perfect.”
Joel Adelberg was a tall, cadaverous man with a sense of humor not so much dry as parched—Beverly Ross would describe him as “the funniest man I’ve ever met.” Born in Brooklyn in 1938, Adelberg had developed a childhood fascination with cowboy legend and lore that never left him (Mike Stoller would describe him as dressing “like the Marlboro Man”). As a teenager he sang in doo-wop groups and made a couple of singles, changing his name to the more memorable (and Gentile) Jeff Barry, before deciding to concentrate on songwriting. He collaborated with Beverly Ross—shortly before Ross met Spector—and in 1960 had a Top 10 hit co-writing the “death song” “Tell Laura I Love Her” for Ray Peterson. In that same year he met Ellie Greenwich and they began writing and recording the occasional song together. When they married in 1962, Greenwich brought her songwriting partnership with Tony Powers to an end.
Spector would regard the partnership that he forged with Greenwich and Barry as the most productive of his career, and the happiest he had with any of his teams of writers. “Jeff and Ellie really understood me, really knew what I wanted, and were able to deliver. The others understood, but not as much as Jeff and Ellie did.”
In Always Magic in the Air, Ken Emerson would provide an astute analysis of how Greenwich and Barry differed from Spector’s other songwriting partnerships, and the particular sensibility they brought to their songs.
They had little interest in Broadway musicals or the Great American Songbook, and even less in classical music or jazz. Unburdened by the past and by the ambitions and doubts that the past can inspire, they took themselves and their music less seriously. This freed them to write entirely and unself-consciously in the present tense of teenage rock ’n’ roll.
Unlike most other songwriting teams that generally followed a division of labor between lyricist and composer, Greenwich and Barry both moved easily between each discipline. This open-ended creative fluidity made it easier to accommodate a third collaborator in Spector.
“In the beginning Spector was sort of like an ideas man, bouncing off things and we were really doing the majority of the work,” Greenwich told the writer Rob Finnis. “He would more or less say, ‘Oh, I think we should write a song about the most important thing in the world—love,’ and Jeff and I would start dribbling and Phil would be eating a sandwich and then suddenly go, ‘Ooh! Go back a little bit. The third line you played. Start from there.’
“Really it was a hotchpotch way of writing, because the three of us were spewing out ideas simultaneously. I’d be pounding on a piano, Jeff would be playing a tambourine or banging something and Phil would be strumming his guitar and the three of us are singing away like maniacs at the top of our lungs…we’d find some melodic thing, or lyrical thing, that hit all of us at once more or less, because our minds were on the same wavelength, you could say. There was just something about the three of us together that sparked off one another.”
The first collaboration between the three, in the early part of 1963, would exemplify all the winning charm and innocence of the team’s “silly little things,” as Jeff Barry described the songs. “Da Doo Ron Ron (When He Walked Me Home)” was composed over the space of two days in Spector’s office on Sixty-second Street. The title—which serves as a punctuation for each stanza, as well as the chorus—was a piece of gobbledygook made up on the spot until a proper lyric could be written, but Spector liked it so much that he decided to keep it—its infectious, nursery-rhyme charm a perfect illustration of Jeff Barry’s songwriting dictum of keeping things “simple, happy and repetitive.”
A friend of Spector’s, Bill Walsh, an independent promotions man from Boston, happened to drop by as Spector, Greenwich and Barry worked on the song, inadvertently inspiring the rhyme for the song’s opening line about meeting a boy on a Monday, “and my heart stood still / Some boy told me that his name was Bill.” Once again, Spector decided to use the Crystals’ name, although the group themselves had become largely superfluous to requirements. Darlene Love had effectively become the voice of the group. But when Spector recorded her singing “Da Doo Ron Ron” he had a change of heart. The song was designed to be infused with all the giddy, adolescent joy of falling in love for the first time. Love’s voice, he decided, was “too old,” too knowing, to put the song’s lyric across effectively. Instead, he turned back to the group whose name he intended to put on the record.
Barbara Alston was nominally the Crystals’ lead singer and had taken the lead on the group’s first three singles for Philles. Alston’s voice was light and seductive, but it lacked projection, and when “He’s a Rebel” became a hit, it was the youngest member of the group, LaLa Brooks, who took the lead on the song onstage. Brooks was only fifteen, but she sang with a full-throated power that bore a closer resemblance to Darlene Love, and she diligently applied herself to imitating Love’s Southern-inflected diction.
Spector had a particular soft spot for LaLa. While she thought he was “sweet” on Barbara Alston, he treated LaLa herself like a younger sister, sometimes singling her out for special favors. At Christmas he gave all the other Crystals identical sets of luggage, but LaLa was treated to a special set, printed with red and black roses, “classier and more expensive,” she remembers. On another occasion she was riding with Spector in a limousine when he suddenly stopped the car and stepped out, instructing her to wait. Returning a few minutes later, he presented her with a gift-wrapped box. Inside was a black toy poodle. “I was so happy. But then I was afraid to take it in the studio because Dee Dee and Barbara and all the others would see it and I didn’t know how they’d feel.”
Recognizing the strength of LaLa’s voice, when recording the Crystals in New York Spector would move her away from the microphone, to prevent her overp
owering the rest of the group. Now, he decided, her combination of gutsy projection and teenage innocence was just what he needed for “Da Doo Ron Ron.”
Spector flew LaLa out to Los Angeles, leaving the rest of the group to continue on a tour with Sam Cooke. It was the first time LaLa had ever been on a plane, the first time she had ever been separated from the protective circle of group or family. Sonny Bono was waiting at the airport with another gofer, Tom, to meet her. “I’ll never forget, they were teasing me about how Tom had had an eye transplant, to help me loosen up. I’m a black girl from Brooklyn in a car with two white guys and it was a little bit scary—not that they would do anything, but the company wasn’t of black people.”
In the studio, Brooks was mystified when Spector talked her through the song for the first time. “I said, ‘Phil—da doo ron ron—what does it mean?’ He said it doesn’t matter what it means, just sing it. It sounded so funny on my tongue. But me being a kid it sounded kind of cute, it fit right into my age and character. And I think that was why it came out so good.”
Good hardly describes it. A cloudburst of handclaps, Don Randi’s driving piano triplets and honking saxes, Hal Blaine’s drum fills rattling like gunfire, “Da Doo Ron Ron” is probably the most irrepressibly exhilarating song that Spector ever recorded, LaLa Brooks’s vocal a gust of sheer, heart-lifting, lovestruck joy. You can almost see the smiles spreading from ear to ear around Gold Star as the song fades into the distance.
“The minute I heard the title was ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ I knew this was gonna go Top 10 so fuckin’ fast your hair’ll fall out,” Don Randi remembers. “It was so silly, but so great. That record had every hook in the book to make it a hit.”
For LaLa Brooks it was “the most exciting moment of my life” for the rest of the Crystals, it was further evidence of their increasing obsolescence; for Darlene Love, a reminder that to Spector nobody was indispensable. “But that was Phil,” remembers LaLa. “He was a perfectionist all the way, and he didn’t care if people’s feelings got hurt. It wasn’t about feelings, it was about Phil. And whoever could pull it off, that’s who he would use. He didn’t give a damn.”
“Da Doo Ron Ron” entered the Top 40 in the second week of May 1963, eventually rising to number 3.
Its follow-up, “Then He Kissed Me,” would capture even more perfectly the essence of the Barry, Greenwich and Spector collaborations—the juxtaposition of a lovely melody and a sweet and heartfelt sentiment with a production of painstakingly crafted towering grandeur, “this great wall of enormous sound,” as Doc Pomus once described it, “and somehow through it all there was this lovely…romantic, sentimental innocence.”
The song opens with a simple chiming guitar figure, before a flourish of castanets establishes a shuffling variation on the baion rhythm; Jack Nitzsche’s string arrangement soars above the dense impasto of massed guitars, keyboards and brass; a choir echoes LaLa Brooks’s lead lines, and then peels off to swathe the song in a chorus of ethereal sighs—the sonic equivalent of the dream of satin, tulle and eternal love conjured in the lyric: “I felt so happy I almost cried / And then he kissed me.” It was the closest thing to perfection pop music had ever produced.
But for LaLa Brooks, the song’s lyrics had a particular poignancy. “I was fifteen years old, and I’d never kissed a boy! That’s the honest truth. So to sing those lyrics, ‘Well, he walked up to me and he asked me if I wanted to dance…’ I was wondering, ‘Well, who is going to kiss me—and where the hell is he?’”
9
Little Symphonies for the Kids
At the age of twenty-three, Phil Spector was the most successful rock and roll producer in America. In the eighteen months since founding Philles he had produced ten Top 40 hits, four of them Top 10, and one—“He’s a Rebel”—a number 1 smash. With his “little symphonies for the kids,” he had shaped a palette of teenage yearning, desire and heartache; the ecstasy of a good-night kiss, the agony of being too young to be married; innocent and knowing, neon-bright and dungeon-dark all at the same time. He had alchemized the base metal of his own pain, alienation and resentment into something fabulous, mythical and beautiful. The school yard loser, the nerd, the loner, was now a figure of power and substance. He dressed in bespoke suits from Sy Devore—the Hollywood tailor who styled himself as “the man who dressed the Rat Pack”—silk waistcoats, ruffle-front shirts, bootlace ties, pointy-toe stack-heel boots. He had taken to sporting a neat little jazzbo goatee beard, of the kind favored by Ahmet Ertegun and Mike Stoller, and dousing himself in expensive Caesar cologne. He walked with a bantam-cock strut. To the outside world Spector might have been small, strange, a disturbing presence; in the studio he was a god, shaping his own universe.
Watching Spector’s endless flow of hits from the East Coast, Ahmet Ertegun was deeply admiring of his friend and former apprentice—if ruing the fact that the promise he had always detected in Spector was now coming to fruition elsewhere.
“What Phil was doing was unbelievable,” Ertegun told me. “If he’d stayed at Atlantic and made those records it would have been our greatest period. But I don’t think he could have done that so easily in New York. Part of that was being able to use Gold Star studio like his own place. I had recorded at Gold Star too, but he somehow built that sound, and with those musicians, into something that was uniquely his. They were mostly the same musicians that I used, but he got his thing going to such an extent that in a sense he’s the only producer who could produce a hit record without having a hit artist. He could just get a session singer—any session singer—and have a hit. The production was everything.
“What Phil had was a vision. All good producers have that, but he had it more than most. You have to go in there with an idea of what you want, otherwise what the hell are you doing in there? It’s like I’ve told some of my groups, ‘What would you do if you didn’t have a producer? You’d have to get somebody else to roll the joints.’”
Ertegun’s partner, Jerry Wexler, brought a more analytical eye to how Spector’s approach was revolutionizing the role of the producer in pop music. Before Spector, Wexler argued, there had been two kinds of record producer. The first was what Wexler called “the documentarian,” like Leonard Chess, the founder of Chess Records in Chicago, who in the late ’50s took the raw urban blues of performers like Muddy Waters and transplanted them from the bar to the studio, simply recording them as Muddy played them.
The second category, into which Wexler put himself, was what he described as “the servant of the project,” whose job was to enhance; to find the right song, the right arrangement, the right band and the right studio; in short, to do whatever was necessary to bring out the best in the artist.
Spector had created a third category: “the producer as star, as artist, as unifying force.” To Wexler, every Spector record was “an intaglio,” an intricate design carved by a single hand into the surface of a stone. The rhythm track, the sound, the background vocal, the lead vocal—every aspect of the design was of Spector’s making.
But Wexler was no great enthusiast of the essential element of Spector’s Wall of Sound. The way in which the individual ingredients were melted together into what Wexler described as “a fascinating treacle,” to a point where it was impossible to tell which instrument was which, offended Wexler’s purist principles. “That gargantuan leakage, everything leaking out of everyone else’s mike, was something we guarded against fanatically at Atlantic. To me it was like a muted roar. I didn’t like it, and I still don’t like it. But I recognized its incredible, incredible value. Phil was making hits.”
Wexler also recognized some essential, deeper truth in the way Spector made records. “Rather than develop his artists’ careers, Phil developed himself; rather than serve the artist, the artist served Phil.”
Among the Los Angeles music business cognoscenti, Spector’s sessions became the place to be. He enjoyed an audience, and the tiny booth at Gold Star would often be crowded with visitors—record executive
s, musicians, friends and hangers-on—all eager to witness his Midas touch at firsthand. Annette’s sister, Renee, was going steady with a lawyer named Mitchell Geffen (they would marry in September 1963), whose younger brother David had ambitions to be in the music business. David Geffen had dropped out of his course at the University of Texas after less than a year and come to Los Angeles to stay with his brother, taking a menial clerical job in a bank. When Annette was in town, she would often invite Renee, Mitchell and David to tag along with her to the studio. Soon, David began turning up by himself, sitting quietly at the back of the control room and watching wide-eyed as Spector went through his paces. Geffen came from a poor, working-class Jewish family, just like Spector, and he was in awe of what the producer had achieved. “David saw Phil as a model,” says Annette. “He was kind of like a puppy around Phil.” Geffen was so obsequious around Spector that the actor Dennis Hopper, who would sometimes drop in on sessions, assumed he was on the payroll, “like a roadie or something. Phil would send him out for hot dogs and stuff.” Spector, for his part, regarded the young Geffen as an irritant and an ingrate. At the end of one session, he invited Geffen to join him and a group of friends at a restaurant. Geffen was thrilled, but when they arrived Spector told Geffen to go and sit with his chauffeur instead. “David never forgot that,” says his brother Mitchell. “It was such a slight. He felt like a schmuck.”
But for all his braggadocio posturing, it seemed that no amount of success could assuage Spector’s constant, nagging feelings of insecurity. Spector would sometimes confide his doubts to his old friend Nino Tempo, who had become a regular at the Gold Star sessions. A versatile musician, Tempo could play sax, drums, piano or guitar; he was a good pair of ears. Long after the sessions had ended and the musicians had gone home, Spector and Tempo would often still be at the control desk, playing back and critiquing the tracks.