by Mick Brown
“I remember when he’d had four or five hits in a row—something that hadn’t been done too often in those days—and he said to me, ‘How long can I go on without making a flop?’ I said, ‘What difference does it make? You’re talented enough; you’ll always make hits. So you only have three out of five, or two out of five. What’s so terrible about that?’ But Phil needed five out of five. The thought of anything he made not being a hit was painful to him. There was always this thought in his mind, How much longer can I keep doing this? And he was pushing and pushing himself. He couldn’t bear it.”
Spector might have crowed that he was “a genius.” But Tempo sensed something else. “Phil’s problem wasn’t that he thought he was too good. It was that he never thought he was good enough.”
For Spector, success was always provisional, his good fortune something that might be snatched from him at any moment. To be cast back into anonymity and poverty was a thing of terror. Jack Nitzsche would recall an occasion, visiting New York, when Spector acted as his Virgil, guiding him through the bacchanalian sleaze and squalor of Times Square (much as Michael Spencer had acted as Spector’s guide a few years before).
“Very strange big-city scenes were being played out all around us,” Nitzsche remembered. “Guys with handkerchiefs around their heads—that kind of tough guy—were walking down the street. I saw someone pull off a pickpocket routine right in front of me. It was the first time in my life I’d ever seen drag queens in two-piece bathing suits. These black prostitutes were threatening to beat up Phil because they said he was staring at them strangely. I said, ‘Phil, let’s get out of here.’ He told me, ‘No, we have to stay here and soak it all in, man—we have to see how it would be like if it had gone the other way.’ Very serious.”
No matter how great his achievements, Spector always seemed to need people to believe he’d done more, and could never resist an opportunity to self-mythologize. Bruce Johnston remembers driving down Sunset Boulevard one day with Spector and Terry Melcher—the son of Doris Day, and a singer who would himself become a highly successful producer—when Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” came on the radio.
“Phil was saying, ‘I should have had more guitar on there…’ I said, ‘Excuse me?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s the voice is too loud…’ ‘So you produced that?’ ‘Uh-huh…’” As far as Johnston knew, Spector had been nowhere near the session. “With all the success he was having on his own label, and he was claiming he’d produced Elvis…” It was as Doc Pomus once said: “Phil always told a lot of stories, but here’s the reality: what actually happened, what Phil wished could have happened, and what he says happened.”
Johnston, who had played with Spector at bar mitzvahs and house parties, could see the change that had come over his old friend, how the small, nervy, unprepossessing teenager with the Pee-wee Herman voice was now wreathed in an air of grandiosity and self-importance. Spector produced a single by Melcher, “Be a Soldier,” notionally for Philles but that was eventually released under the name of Terry Day on Columbia. “Terry said Phil spent most of the session on the phone. And that’s when Terry thought, Okay, bye, Phil…”
In the studio, Spector’s mood could swing wildly between elation—the palling-around and backslapping, the endless stream of jokes—and periods of dark, moody depression.
“People would say that Phil was a tyrant, or Phil was a horrible person, but I wanted to make him happy, because he was so hard to make happy,” LaLa Brooks remembers.
“I’d be singing these things—‘da doo ron ron, da doo ron ron…’—and it used to weigh on me that he would be so stressed-looking if I didn’t get it right. You’d be doing a song, and it would be like Sonny doesn’t like my phrasing or Jack likes the phrasing. And Phil would be sitting there—you wouldn’t know whether he liked it or he didn’t. He would sit there and squirm in a chair and put his legs up, and sometimes you’d think, Where is he? His head would be down, or he’d have this deadpan expression on his face, and he would always have things like raisins and nuts there on the desk, and he’d take from the raisins and nuts and stoop down into a chair and you could never feel where he was, where his emotions were. Phil would never say to you, ‘This is great.’ Never. Sonny would say it as his mouthpiece. And Sonny would tell him, ‘It’s great, it’s great, leave it.’ But that wouldn’t work, and Phil would have you do it over and over and over because he was never satisfied. And even then, when it was perfect, and he did get hits out of it, even then you never knew. Even with ‘Da Doo Ron Ron,’ which was one of the biggest, even with that, Phil never came up to me and said, ‘Thank you, LaLa.’ Never, never, never.”
“Phillip was always a very strange person,” Sonny Bono would tell the writer Justine Picardie. “He always had a tough time staying rational, a real tough time. I don’t think it was any reason you or I would know—you’d have to go back into his family history and trace it. It was more than just his success that was the crux of the problem…His sister, his whole family was a turbulent family. His mom would come to every session and drive us all nuts. He hated his mom and [we] hated it when she came to the sessions. His sister was committed [to an institution]—and sometimes I’d have to go and give his sister money from him, and I’d have to slip it under the door. It was a strange family.”
Bono would recall how sometimes, when things in the studio got particularly difficult, Spector would call a halt and vanish into another room to telephone Dr. Kaplan back in New York, the musicians and singers killing time for an hour or two until Kaplan had managed to talk him down. The psychiatrist’s long-distance contribution would be acknowledged in one of Spector’s throwaway instrumentals, “Dr. Kaplan’s Office,” which appeared on the B-side of “Why Do Lovers Break Each Other’s Heart?” The studio, Bono said, “was like a road-show Dr. Kaplan’s office.”
The conversations with Dr. Kaplan would often revolve around Spector’s greatest fear. From the moment he had first set foot in an aircraft, at the age of eighteen, traveling with the Teddy Bears from Los Angeles to New York, Spector had had a mortal terror of flying. And the constant shuttling back and forth between the East and West coasts in the years since then had done nothing to assuage his fears. For Spector, every flight was an agony. Being 30,000 feet in the air, with only a thin skin of aluminum between you and certain death; the sudden bucking and swaying in turbulence; the sheer lunacy of entrusting your life to the total stranger in the pilot’s seat—it was all fuel being poured on to the flame of the one thing that Spector feared most—losing control. Sometimes he would plead with Jack Nitzsche to fly with him. “He told me he didn’t want to die alone,” Nitzsche remembered.
One of the most frequently told stories about Spector concerned the occasion when he suffered a panic attack on an aircraft shortly before takeoff from Los Angeles, obliging the captain to turn back to the gate so that Spector could get off the plane. The story first appeared in a profile written by Tom Wolfe, and published in the New York Herald Tribune’s Sunday magazine in 1965, under the title “The First Tycoon of Teen.” Wolfe’s account began in a dazzling burst of high-octane prose. “All these raindrops are high or something. They don’t roll down the window, they come straight back, toward the tail, wobbling, like all those Mr. Cool snow heads walking on mattresses. The plane is taxiing out toward the runway to take off, and this stupid infarcted water wobbles, sideways, across the window. Phil Spector, twenty-three years old, the rock and roll magnate, producer of Philles Records, America’s first teenage tycoon, watches…this watery pathology…It is sick, fatal. He tightens his seat belt over his bowels…”
Jeff Barry, who along with his wife Ellie Greenwich was on the flight with Spector, recounted the story to the writer Richard Williams a few years later. “We were on the plane waiting, boarded…plane’s loaded. I was sitting across the aisle from Phil, and he leans over to me and says, ‘Hey, man, I don’t think I can make it.’ Does his Ahmet Ertegun imitation. And says, ‘Hey…it
’s filling up…I don’t know. Look there, Jeffrey, all the way in the back, it’s filling up…people…losers.’ So I said, ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ and he says, ‘I gotta get off. Miss, I gotta get off this plane.’ And he’s flying…he’s always on pills when he’s flying and he’s flying before he’s flying. So the stewardess went up front and evidently the pilot gave permission to let this guy off…
“Phil gets off, and Ellie and I sit there, and I think, Phil Spector’s too bright. I don’t wanna bet against Phil Spector. Let’s get off the plane. So we raised our hands also, and asked to be excused. All these fairly straight people were sitting there, and I had a two-day growth of beard because we’d been in the studio, and Phil looks weird as shit anyway, and they were all saying, ‘Who are these weird people? This blonde, and this other tall, skinny jerk and this little twerp, what IS GOING ON?’ Anyway, like fifty people wanted to get off the plane.
“The plane was held up, the captain was grounded on the spot for opening the doors again in the first place…So we got off and Phil got off and I understand that a lot of other people got off. The flight was delayed, and they had to get another captain to take over. They took our luggage off, we waited for it, and when it came we ran right over to get on the next flight…And then Phil comes staggering down, and the word went from one airline to the next, not to let this guy on. He could not get out of Los Angeles—he had to go to another airport someplace else, where the word hadn’t gotten out yet.”
This picture of Spector, the frightened flier, would become part of music business legend. Joe Smith, who worked as chairman of Warner Bros. and Capitol Records and was a long-standing acquaintance of Spector, enjoyed telling the story of another occasion when Spector was flying, this time with Ahmet Ertegun.
“Phil really didn’t want to fly. Ahmet was saying, ‘I’m with you, I fly all the time, I’ll hold your hand,’ blah, blah. Now, Ahmet is a man who if he’s flying to Indonesia, as soon as he fastens the seat belt—click—he’s asleep. And he doesn’t wake up until they’re telling you not to stand up until the doors are open. So they get on the plane. And Phil is immediately imagining the engine’s on fire, and they haven’t even left the ground. Ahmet’s trying to go to sleep, and Phil’s prodding him, he’s terrified. So Ahmet says to him, ‘Listen—this plane is either going to make it, or it’s going to crash. And you know what’ll happen if we crash? We’ll all die. And you know what’ll happen then? Atlantic Records will take out an ad in all the trade papers, rimmed in black, and it’ll say, “Ahmet Ertegun, born whenever/died whenever. Phillip Spector, born whenever/died whenever.” And at the bottom it’ll say, “and don’t forget the great new Solomon Burke hit,” because Jerry Wexler wouldn’t waste a dime…’”
10
Going to the Chapel
On February 18, 1963, in the rabbi’s chambers in an Upper West Side synagogue, Phil Spector enacted the traditional Jewish wedding ritual of crushing a wineglass under his foot—a symbolic representation of the sacking of the Temple in Jerusalem—a reminder in the midst of joy that bad things may happen. Standing beside him, Annette Merar thought “it was the happiest day of my life.”
Getting married, she says, “was one of the few mutual decisions Phil and I ever made. I remember he was in the bedroom and I was lying on a couch in the living room. And I was like, should we go back to L.A. and have a wedding? And Phil said, ‘What’s the point? We’re here, why not just do it?’ Okay…”
In the time that they had been living together, Spector had continued to see Dr. Kaplan on a regular basis. He never disclosed what was discussed in these sessions. But then, even with Annette, he would seldom talk about his anxieties, the difficulties of his childhood, and never about the trauma of his father’s death. “Other people sometimes talked about it, with regard to the way he was or to explain some of his behavior, but Phil never talked about it. It was as if he just shut down so hard with that. I picture the image of a deadbolt just slamming shut. I think he just couldn’t deal with the pain and the loss. And blaming himself. But with Phil, I could never determine what were his genuine internal dynamics, and what might be the result of traumatic events like the suicide.”
Annette had never set eyes on Dr. Kaplan, but with the wedding looming, Spector now insisted they should meet. “He said, ‘My doctor wants to meet you, and you have to come and talk with him.’ I think he wanted to check me out, like a test.”
Annette was not impressed. “Phil was very dependent on him. But Dr. Kaplan became very dependent on Phil too. Phil was like the boy genius, and Dr. Kaplan was into power, success and money.”
Nevertheless, if it was a test, she passed.
The marriage was planned for Valentine’s Day, but February 14 fell on Shabbat, a Friday night. Instead, they married on the following Tuesday. Annette’s parents and friends had been unable to make the journey. Of Spector’s friends, only the arranger Arnold Goland attended the ceremony, as best man. Helen Noga loaned the newlyweds her Manhattan town house for the reception, where some forty people, mostly Phil’s friends from the music business, toasted their health. As the couple cut the cake, Michael Spencer caught Spector’s eye. “He looked at me askance,” Spencer remembers, “like ‘Is this for real? Do you believe this?’ It was as if he wasn’t taking it seriously.”
There was no honeymoon. On the day after the wedding, Spector flew to Los Angeles for a recording session. It was a portent of things to come.
Now that they were married, Annette wanted to pursue her own dreams as a writer; she abandoned her secretarial job and enrolled at Hunter College, studying English literature and creative writing. With Lester Sill out of the way, Spector had drawn up papers making Annette vice president of Philles. He continued to commute furiously between the two coasts, recording in Los Angeles, and running his business out of the downstairs office on Sixty-second Street. He took on a secretary, Joan Berg, and Chuck Kaye, Lester Sill’s stepson, now joined him in New York, spending his days yammering on the telephone to distributors, disc jockeys and the trade papers.
From his earliest days with the Teddy Bears, Spector knew how quickly and easily money could be taken from you in the music business, and how hard it could be to extract what you were owed. But with Lester Sill out of the picture he had finally achieved the total independence, and the total control, he had always craved. Spector no longer needed to go cap in hand to a distributor or major label to finance his recordings. He paid for everything—the musicians, the studio costs, the pressing, the promotion—and he owned everything. Most important, he retained control of the masters. The masters were his fortune and Spector would never let them out of his grasp. For the rest of his life, whenever he was recording, at the end of every session the tapes would be carefully boxed and carried home with him for the night—the gold bars under the mattress—to be brought back to the studio next day.
Philles was now so hot that he no longer needed to plead with distributors to handle his records or pay their bills. Now, if they didn’t bow to his terms and pay promptly he could threaten to withhold product, depriving them of any share of future revenue from the seemingly endless flow of hits. “As well as being a musical genius, Phil was also a very good businessman,” Annette says. “He had a natural talent for that. He knows how to cover his ass. He liked musicians, he liked creative people. But he really didn’t like the people in the industry, the distributors and so on. He’d talk about the cigar-smoking fatties. He always felt he was butting heads with the industry rather than complementary with it. And he just assumed the posture with everybody that they were an antagonist before they were a friend. He’d come on to people in a very aggressive way.”
Almost from the moment he left school, Spector had kept musicians’ hours, often not going to bed before three in the morning, seldom rising before ten. He had a small music room in the office downstairs, with a piano, guitars and tape equipment, where he would usually work until the early hours of the morning, to Annette’s growing frustrati
on.
“He never came home for dinner, whether it was cooked or not. Many, many nights I’d phone down. ‘Hello, Phil—where are you?’ ‘I’ll be right up,’ blah, blah, blah. And he never was. He was married to music. And that’s okay, but I just didn’t know…and it’s very difficult when you wait and wait and wait, and then go to the studio and wait and wait.”
Annette had always accepted her husband’s traveling, his long absences, but as Philles grew more successful, and his schedule more hectic, so Spector’s absences grew more frequent and longer. In the early stages of their relationship, music had been one of the things that bound them together; Spector respected Annette’s taste and judgment and would frequently call on her for advice or an opinion about a song. On occasion, she had been enlisted in the studio as a backing singer, or banging a tambourine. But that was no longer the case. Music began to keep them apart. It was as if now that Spector had captured Annette he felt he no longer needed to pay her the attention required to keep her.
As their marriage began to unravel, Dr. Kaplan suggested that the couple should see him together for counseling, but after a handful of sessions Spector gave up on the idea. Instead, he and Annette continued to see Kaplan separately—and drifted further apart.
“Phil was just not available as a husband, partner or friend,” Annette says. “And I made the mistake of believing that whatever he did was right, and I did was wrong, so I never took much initiative or challenged him, even though he may have been wrong in lots of ways about lots of things. For me, our love affair was the courtship: as soon as we were married everything started going to hell.”