by Mick Brown
With his partner, Tony Calder, Oldham set up his own management and music publishing company. He went on to discover Marianne Faithfull (“in another century you’d set sail for her, in 1964 you’d record her”) and to found one of Britain’s first independent labels, Immediate Records.
Spector was Oldham’s model, his hero, his inspiration. Like Spector, Oldham affected the dandified clothes, the twenty-four-hour shades, the air of cocky, sardonic languor. He rode around town in a Cadillac; his driver carried a gun, not only illegal in Britain but virtually unheard of. As Spector had taken on “the short-armed fatties” of the American music business, so Oldham determined to wage a similar war of attrition against the plutocrats and Denmark Street spivs who ran the British industry.
In 1963 when Oldham and Calder traveled to America, to make connections, Oldham’s first priority was to pay homage to Spector. “Andrew was in awe,” remembers Calder. “First of all, Phil was American! We hadn’t seen Americans before. Americans were exotic! And it was all there: the hair, the arrogance—he was very arrogant, and rightfully so because he was so successful—the high-pitched Ahmet Ertegun voice. Ahmet was Phil’s hero. You’d say, ‘We saw Ahmet last week.’ And it would be: ‘That cocksucking douche bag.’ If you didn’t know Phil you’d think he was being insulting. But it was actually total respect. And that was the only way he knew how to express it.”
Recognizing something of himself in Oldham, and flattered by his attention, Spector obligingly played the role of mentor. “He gave us the rundown on everything,” says Calder. “Distribution, how you get records on the radio, how you put them in the right places, where you put the stock. It was a master class. For Andrew, it was a case of being wrapped up in the game. Idolizing, respecting—and getting some fucking great ideas off him, because we always worked on the basis that whatever we nicked and adapted we always took the best. And at that time Phil Spector was the best. He’d shown the bravado, the bullshit. These are the enemy—all the straights—we’ll beat them. And it was like a Panzer division coming toward you. He blew open doors just by walking up to them. ‘Hi Phil, how are you?’ ‘Fuck off.’ And that bullshit works. It really works.”
At the end of their stay, to cement the friendship, Spector presented Oldham and Calder with a gold watch apiece from Sy Devore. Calder wore his for years, “until my wrist went green…”
When Spector landed at London’s Heathrow airport, Oldham was waiting to greet him. He was accompanied by Maureen Cleave, a journalist for the London Evening Standard. A clever girl of impeccable breeding, with a Mary Quant bob and a cut-glass accent, Cleave was one of the first journalists in Britain to write seriously about pop music, and her columns were hugely influential. It was to Cleave, two years later, that John Lennon would confide his belief that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.”
Spector, Cleave noted, had traveled from New York dressed in “a dark suit, lined in scarlet, a black brocade waistcoat with the pattern standing a quarter-of-an-inch off the surface, a pin-tucked mustard shirt, and mustard silk handkerchief. At the end of the tight trousers were long, pointed, brown shoes with spats to match. In his tie was a pearl stickpin; looped across his stomach a gold watch chain. And he carried a small briefcase with the word ‘Phillip’ tooled in gold in one corner.” He walked “a little like Charlie Chaplin, i.e., for every three steps forwards he takes one backwards or to the side. He is a man you can’t take your eyes off.”
“I’ve been told I’m a genius,” Spector informed Cleave, en route from the airport. “What do you think?” Cleave took note of his prodigious accomplishments—“fifteen hits in a row,” the musical breakthrough of the Wall of Sound. His records, he told her, were “built up like a Wagner opera. They start simply and they end with dynamic force, meaning and purpose. It’s in the mind. I dreamed it up. It’s like art movies. I aimed to get the record industry forward a little bit, make a sound that was universal.”
“He has a Cadillac limousine,” Cleave wrote, “and a tendency suddenly to give everybody presents. He originally meant to be a lawyer and can stenotype 300 words a minute. He admires Abraham Lincoln and Lenny Bruce.” “I am the least quoted man in the industry,” Spector told her. “I stick to my little bourgeois haunts and I don’t bother with the masses.”
Arriving at their destination, Spector stepped out of the car. There was a stiff wind, Cleave now remembers, and she noticed that he involuntarily put his hand up to clutch at his head. After years of fussing and fretting over his thinning hair, Spector, it seemed, had finally surrendered to the inevitable and was now wearing a toupee.
Decca had arranged for Spector to be installed in an efficiency in Dolphin Square, close by the Thames Embankment, and a young assistant from the promotions department named Tony King was assigned to look after him. On his first day in town, Spector announced that he wanted to go shopping. King took him to a West End department store, where Spector embarked on a hurricane spending spree. When it came to settling the bill, King was dismayed when Spector announced that he had no money, and that he expected Decca to pay for his purchases out of his royalties. An anxious King was obliged to telephone his office for authorization. “I was shocked, but Phillip was deeply satisfied at the outcome. I think he was trying it on. He was very funny—tiny, tiny with that strange high-pitched voice—and kind of sweet-natured really. But a bit like a naughty schoolboy, not helped by the fact that Andrew was tagging along with him most of the time. Andrew was obsessed with Phil and obviously modeled himself on him. They were getting into all sorts of mischief.”
The satisfactory outcome of this small demonstration of his power appeared to reassure Spector that he was in good hands.
Over the following week, Spector made all the mandatory stops on his Grand Tour of the English pop scene, feted as if he were a greater star than any of the artists he produced (he was), and luxuriating in the attention and acclaim. He dined with George Harrison of the Beatles, enjoying Harrison’s tale of how the group had included their version of “To Know Him Is to Love Him” on their demo recording for Decca—and been turned down. He appeared as a guest on Juke Box Jury, a television show in which a panel of celebrities would adjudicate on the new releases, voting them a hit or a miss, and put in the obligatory appearance at the studios of Britain’s most influential pop music television program, Ready Steady Go! The Ronettes were in London, having concluded their tour, and one night in their room at the Strand Palace Hotel Spector rehearsed them on a new song, “(The Best Part of ) Breakin’ Up.” “Sitting there listening to them, my scalp tingled,” Tony King remembers. “But the funny thing was, we got a phone call from the front desk complaining about the noise. I thought Phil would flip, but he just laughed it off and we all went off for dinner. It was pretty obvious there was this thing between Phil and Ronnie; you could just feel the connection.”
On another occasion, during a dinner at Mirabelle, apparently beside himself with excitement, Spector dashed out of the restaurant, commandeered the Rolls and drove off alone into the night, returning with the news that he’d almost crashed the car driving on the wrong side of the road.
At Oldham’s instigation, Spector tried to arrange a meeting with the eccentric English producer Joe Meek, who worked out of a home recording studio above a leather-goods shop in a run-down area of north London. Meek was one of the first producers to experiment with reverb and electronic effects, and his instrumental “Telstar,” by the Tornadoes, had been a number 1 hit on both sides of the Atlantic. But when Spector got through to him on the telephone, Meek railed against him, accusing him of stealing his ideas, and slammed the phone down with such venom that he broke the receiver.
Spector loved the Stones and wanted to release the group’s records in America on Philles. Oldham was thrilled at the offer and together they went to meet the chairman of Decca, Sir Edward Lewis—a man who wore the chalk-stripe suits and mannered air of a merchant banker. But Lewis refused to release the Stones from their contrac
t. “He was the first person to say no to Phil Spector,” Tony Calder says. “Phil was extremely pissed off.”
That same evening, Spector attended a Stones recording session on Denmark Street. As the evening wore on, they were joined by Graham Nash and Allan Clarke from the Hollies, and by Gene Pitney, who had arrived straight from the airport, carrying a cache of duty-free brandy. The session quickly degenerated into a drunken jam session, culminating in an improvised tribute to Oldham, “Andrew’s Blues,” sung by Spector and Mick Jagger in a parody of Sir Edward Lewis’s pukka English accent.
Yes, now Andrew Oldham sittin’ on a hill with Jack and Jill
Fucked all night and sucked all night and taste that pussy till it taste just right…
Come and get it, little Andrew, before Sir Edward takes it away from you.
Tony Hall, Decca’s head of promotions, was a ubiquitous and popular figure on the London music scene, and his gatherings were legendary. Hall lived on Green Street in Mayfair, directly opposite an apartment where George Harrison and Ringo Starr were staying at the time. “Any time they wanted to come over, because there were always kids hanging around outside their door, they’d have to order a taxi, leap into it, drive round the block and come back on my side of the road, where I’d be waiting with my door open.”
The Beatles were preparing to leave for their first visit to America, and Hall threw a farewell party for them and the Ronettes.
“It was a very sweet evening,” remembers Tony King, “because the Beatles, as big as they were at that time, had no idea what was about to hit them when they went to America, so they were very apprehensive. And Estelle and George had started to be interested in each other. Everybody was drinking Scotch and Coke and getting a bit pissed. We were all dancing along to Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave,” and Ronnie suddenly let rip, joining in with that great vibrato of hers. And I can remember John Lennon’s face, looking at her and registering ‘oh, you’re the real article.’”
“Ronnie,” Tony Calder remembers, “was the bird that everyone wanted to shag. Everybody was salivating over this incredible little thing sitting in this chair. Then Andrew came in, flapping around all over Phil, and Phil was being ‘This is my party’—even though it wasn’t. He was getting very wound up about the attention everybody was paying to Ronnie. You could feel the sexual tension, every guy in the place looking at her. Because she was exotic. And she was American!”
Two days later, on Friday, February 7, the Beatles boarded Pan Am flight 101 from Heathrow airport, with Phil Spector in tow. He had originally planned to take an earlier flight but, paranoid as ever, had changed his arrangements to travel with the group, trusting to the fates that no plane carrying the biggest pop group in the world could possibly crash.
Dressed in a short overcoat and a corduroy Beatle cap, Spector followed the Beatles down the gangway of the plane at John F. Kennedy International Airport into a furnace of adulation. The only problem was, it wasn’t for him. Spector’s visit to London had consolidated his position at the top of the music business tree. He had cemented friendships with the two biggest groups on the British music scene, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who would soon follow their British rivals to America.
Spector was thrilled at the music, the breath of fresh air it carried. But he could little have imagined that the impending British Invasion was to prove the harbinger of his decline.
A week before their arrival in America, the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” went to number 1 on the Billboard charts. On February 15, their first American album, Meet the Beatles, also went to number 1, where it would stay for the next eleven weeks. In the last week of February, to meet the burgeoning demand of Beatlemania, half a ton of Beatles wigs were shipped to America, quickly followed by 24,000 rolls of Beatles wallpaper. The torrent had become unstoppable.
Spector’s initial response to the phenomenon was to attempt to capitalize on it. Sonny Bono had been pestering him to give his girlfriend Cher a chance to record. Spector now hurried her into the studio to record a “tribute” to the Beatles’ drummer, “Ringo I Love You,” hastily scratched together by Spector and two New York songwriters he had recently begun working with, Vinnie Poncia and Pete Andreoli. Rather than using Cher’s name, Spector released it under the pseudonym Bonnie Jo Mason. Nor did he wish to sully the name of Philles. The record was released on a subsidiary label, named in honor of his wife Annette—a gesture, according to Vinnie Poncia, that was intended to “anesthetize the situation between them,” but which, given the abysmal quality of the record, must have seemed more like an insult. It was a relief to all parties when the record sank without trace.
In the months following his return from London, Spector made several attempts at reconciliation with Annette. His triumphant visit to Britain had reinvigorated his self-confidence, temporarily banishing his worries and self-doubts. “He was very happy about his reception there,” Annette remembers. “You could see his attitude changing with all the recognition and success.”
On his journey to London, Spector had been shadowed by a powerful and imposing presence that went by the name of Red—or “Big Red,” as Spector called him. Red would be the first in a succession of bodyguards that Spector would hire over the years, partly for protection, but mostly it seemed as a demonstration of his rising status and power. “Phil wanted to be Elvis and Frank Sinatra combined,” one friend remembers. “Those were his heroes. And he wanted that kind of persona, the cool, aloof thing, the entourage—all that protected crap.”
Spector’s flamboyant appearance—the hair, the elevator shoes, the ruffled shirts—had always drawn stares, and sometimes insults, but now with bodyguards at his side, he seemed almost to relish the prospect of confrontation, safe in the knowledge that if anybody caused trouble he had muscle on hand to deal with it.
“In 1965, you walk into a Hollywood restaurant looking like Phil Spector, there would be silence,” Denny Bruce says. “Like, what the hell is that?! Which is why he’d have bodyguards. He would stand there with shades on, a P. J. Proby billowing shirt, a vest, two guys behind him. He’d walk over to somebody who’d laughed out loud, and it would be: ‘What’s so funny?’ He antagonized people. And he enjoyed that attention.”
“Phil thrived on being different,” Nedra Talley says. “He didn’t want to just be a little Jewish boy. So he developed a look, but with that look he got a lot of harassment. People would be calling him faggot and all kinds of things, and he’d just have to swallow it. But when he had his bodyguards with him, it got to be that he would pick fights. We’d be in a restaurant and he’d walk out first, and it would be just like a magnet where people would be drawn to say something to him. Then Phil would say something back to them, and just when it was getting ugly he would step back and his two guys would step out from behind and handle the situation. It was like a trap.”
Like LaLa Brooks, Nedra sensed that Spector’s braggadocio was actually compensation for a much deeper underlying insecurity. Spector, she thought, was “a tortured soul.” He had told the Ronettes the story of how when touring with the Teddy Bears he had been set upon in a lavatory and pissed on.
“When he told us that, something inside of me went out to him. I loved that song, ‘To Know Him,’ and the thought of this little guy who was too small to defend himself getting pissed on for just trying to do his thing, it broke my heart. So I always thought that, with the bodyguards, Phil was just getting his own back.”
But, to others, it seemed that Spector never quite knew when to stop. On one occasion, he even instructed his bodyguards to beat up Larry Levine, after an argument at Gold Star. “I walked out of the studio,” Levine remembers, “and he sent these guys out to hit me—a couple of young gorillas. They didn’t know what to do; they obviously weren’t going to hit me. It was just another way of exhibiting power.”
After the run of successes they had provided for the Crystals and the Ronettes, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry had fallen out with Sp
ector. The cause was a song called “Chapel of Love,” which the three partners had written together in the autumn of 1963. It was a song that returned to one of Barry and Greenwich’s perennial themes—marriage and happy-ever-after—with an infectious, sing-along melody that seemed to lodge in the brain and wouldn’t let go. Spector recorded the song with both the Ronettes and LaLa Brooks, but apparently unconvinced, decided not to release either version.
Barry and Greenwich, meanwhile, had been in discussions with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller about joining forces in a new label that Leiber and Stoller had set up called Red Bird. Their first signing was a trio of girls from New Orleans called the Dixie Cups—the perfect vehicle, Greenwich and Barry reasoned, for “Chapel of Love.” “We always believed in that song,” Ellie Greenwich would later tell Alan Betrock, “and we called Phil and asked him, ‘Are you putting it out?’ He said, ‘I don’t know…I don’t think so…no, no, never coming out…’ So we said, ‘We’re thinking of doing it,’ and he said, ‘No, no, you can’t do that.’ He always wanted to have total control over everything he had to do with. I don’t know how happy he was that Jeff and I were going to do something on our own on the production level without him. He wasn’t totally thrilled, but he didn’t stop it.”
Released in April 1964, “Chapel of Love” quickly went to the top of the American charts, replacing the Beatles’ “Love Me Do” and remaining there for six weeks.
With Barry and Greenwich out of the picture, Spector started casting his net for other songwriters. He contacted his old friend Paul Case at Hill at Range, who introduced him to Vinnie Poncia and Peter Andreoli. At a meeting at Spector’s office, Poncia and Andreoli ran through a number of song ideas. When they mentioned a title they were working on “(The Best Part of ) Breakin’ Up,” Spector stopped them and told them they had a deal.