Tearing Down the Wall of Sound

by Mick Brown

  The song became the next Ronettes single. But while Barry and Greenwich’s compositions flowed, this one stuttered, reaching only number 39 in the charts. (The throwaway instrumental on the B-side, “Big Red”—named in honor of Spector’s bodyguard—seemed to be part of Spector’s ongoing attempts at conciliation with Annette: she was credited as writer and therefore entitled to royalties.) In short order, Spector released two more singles sung by Ronnie under the name of Veronica, “So Young” and “Why Don’t They Let Us Fall in Love?”—the first song the Ronettes had recorded at Gold Star a year earlier—but neither troubled the charts.

  Spector seemed to have one obsession, and one obsession only. During the recording sessions he now insisted that Ronnie should sit with him in the control room, rather than fraternizing with the other singers and musicians. When they lunched with the producer Herb Alpert, Ronnie noticed that Spector put himself between her and Alpert, leaning in front of her whenever she spoke, apparently to prevent Alpert looking at her. In Be My Baby she recounts that when one evening during recording she and Nedra ducked out from the studio with Sonny Bono to pick up some hamburgers without telling Spector where she was going, he threw a fit, knocking over mike stands and strewing spools of tape over the studio. On another occasion, when she and Cher went dancing at the Purple Onion on the Strip, Spector tracked her down to the club and dragged her off the dance floor.

  In his constant progress back and forth between New York and Los Angeles, Spector had neglected his business affairs. In the autumn of 1964, Chuck Kaye resigned, complaining that his salary wasn’t enough to afford even a square meal. To replace him, Spector turned to a man named Danny Davis. Short, stocky and a spieler, Davis had once worked the Borscht Belt as a comedian before going into the record business as a promotions man. He worked for Big Top Records, where Spector first met him, promoting the Ray Peterson records that Spector produced for Dunes.

  In 1963, Davis went to work for Don Kirshner, as vice president of Kirshner’s Dimension Records. He had been there only a few months when Kirshner and his partner Al Nevins made a deal to sell Aldon Music to Screen Gems, the recording and publishing subsidiary of Columbia Pictures. Kirshner and Nevins were reported to have received some $2 million for the company. Nevins became a consultant to Columbia Pictures, while Kirshner was named executive vice president, responsible for all Columbia Pictures–Screen Gems publishing and recording activities. His team of Aldon writers dutifully followed him out of 1650 Broadway to new offices on Fifth Avenue, next door to Tiffany. Kirshner promptly folded Dimension Records, and Danny Davis found himself out of a job.

  The situation Davis inherited at Philles was growing increasingly parlous. Not only had Spector’s constant absences made his day-to-day business dealings more difficult; more significantly it was clear that he was losing his grip on the marketplace. The Ronettes’ first single, “Be My Baby,” had been an enormous hit, but successive releases had proved disappointing. While “Baby, I Love You” reached number 24, both “(The Best Part of ) Breakin’ Up” and “Do I Love You?” had barely scraped into the Top 40. Both singles by Veronica had vanished without trace, as had a single by Darlene Love, “Stumble and Fall.” It was to be her last for Philles.

  In desperate need of inspiration, Spector turned back to the reliable mother lode of Don Kirshner. It had been almost two years since he had worked with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and like other writers of the Aldon (now Screen Gems) family, the pair had struggled to find a place in the new musical order being shaped by the British Invasion, despite contributing “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” to the Animals. They jumped at the chance to work again with Spector, and over two weeks in the autumn of 1964 the three writers convened in Spector’s New York office, bent on fashioning a song that would restore the Ronettes to the charts.

  In October, Spector called Ronnie and his musicians into Gold Star to record “Walking in the Rain.” Barry Mann would later try to distance himself from the song, dismissing it merely as an imitation of the girl group style that came so easily to Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich—“I was just trying to sound adolescent.” But he was wrong. “Walking in the Rain” was the most gorgeous Ronettes song yet.

  Beginning with a thunderclap (from a sound-effects tape unearthed by Larry Levine), the song struck a perfect note of wistful longing. Spector’s production—the gently resounding chimes, a discreet horn figure, the celestial choir, and the way the sound effects of distant thunder joined seamlessly with the percussion—seemed to create a vast, echoing backdrop for Ronnie’s yearning vocal. She had never sung better, and would never sing better again.

  Spector was exultant and convinced it would be an enormous hit. He was crushed when it reached only number 23. Nor was Larry Levine consoled when he found himself nominated at that year’s Grammy Awards for Best Sound Effect for “Walking in the Rain.” “It was just a sound-effects tape! Can you imagine the dearth of nominees they had in order to make that a nomination? It was great to be nominated, but I felt so stupid.”

  For Spector, the failure of the record seemed only to vindicate his growing sense that the industry was turning against him. In January 1964 he gave an interview to the British music paper Melody Maker in which he prophesied that his sound would “die because of the natural animosity in the record industry on the part of DJs. I guess they get a bit resentful of a guy all on his own doing so well. But more than anything, I feel they’re jealous because I’m so young to have made so much money in a business they thought they knew everything about. They never seemed to believe what I always thought—that every record can be a hit if you concentrate on it enough.”

  As Philles’ West Coast promotions man, Sonny Bono was in a better position than most to realize that the Wall of Sound was beginning to crumble. Making his customary round of the local radio stations to promote “Walking in the Rain,” Bono had received the same ominous message. When he played the song to a usually reliable DJ at the L.A. radio station KFWB, the response was distinctly lukewarm. “He gave me a less than enthusiastic look—actually a grimace,” Bono would later recall. “‘You know, the thunder and the tricks and the Wall of Sound…it kinda sounds tired.’”

  Steeling himself, Bono telephoned Spector to recount the conversation. It was, he later recalled, “my fatal mistake.” There was an agonizingly long pause at the other end of the line that Bono recognized as his death sentence.

  Bono’s gaffe fueled the growing resentment that Spector had been feeling toward his gofer. After spending almost two years in Spector’s shadow, quietly watching and learning, Bono had begun making efforts to further his own and Cher’s careers. In the spring of 1964 he wrote a song called “Baby Don’t Go” and produced a demo of himself performing it with Cher. Bono played it to Spector in the hope that he would produce the song for release. Spector passed, but he did offer Bono $500 for half the publishing rights. Encouraged, Bono began producing records on the side for the Vault and Reprise labels. To Spector, it all smelled dangerously of disloyalty. The telephone call was the final straw. Spector now decided to dispense with Bono’s services. Rather than tell him personally, Spector instructed Danny Davis to deliver the coup de grâce by telephone from New York. Bono left without so much as a good-bye.

  12

  “The Last Word in Tomorrow’s Sound Today”

  At first glance, the Righteous Brothers presented a picture of Mutt-’n’-Jeff incongruity. Bill Medley was tall, dark and cadaverous with an undertaker’s pallor; Bobby Hatfield, short, fair, fresh-faced and button-nosed. But improbable as they might have looked, they were the blackest white singers Phil Spector had ever heard. Medley sang in a dark and throaty baritone; Hatfield, in a keening tenor, which reminded Spector of one of his favorite singers, Clyde McPhatter. Together, their sound was pure, impassioned storefront gospel—“righteous,” in the opinion of the black servicemen at the El Toro Marine base in San Diego where they often performed: hence the name. In 1962, they signed for a small Los A
ngeles label, Moonglow. Their first single, the exuberant “Little Latin Lupe Lu,” went to number 39 in 1963. “Koko Joe”—a cover of an RB hit for Don and Dewey that had been written by Sonny Bono in his days as an AR man at Specialty—and a third single, “My Babe,” written by Medley and Hatfield, both failed. All these records were made at Gold Star, and it was his old friend Stan Ross who first alerted Spector to the group. The Righteous Brothers had also performed on a bill at the Cow Palace in San Francisco with the Ronettes, where Spector himself appeared as “guest” leader of the band, quietly standing at the back of the stage, playing guitar.

  Spector was galvanized—not only by the Brothers’ singing, but also by the prospect they offered of a way out of his impasse. Shooting the messenger had not altered the harsh truth that Sonny Bono had delivered to Spector. The Wall of Sound—more specifically, the girl group sound—was getting kind of tired. And even Spector was beginning to recognize it. Jack Nitzsche would later recall how recording the Ronettes’ follow-up to “Walking in the Rain,” “Born to Be Together,” Spector had taken him to one side and told him, “It’s all over. It’s over. It’s not here anymore.” “The enthusiasm was gone,” Nitzsche said. “We had done it so many times. The musicians were changing. They didn’t want to work overtime for a deal. Everybody. It just wasn’t the same spirit anymore. The spirit of cooperation started to change. And for Phil as well. It was a combination of things, and it just stopped being so much fun. The Beatles were coming…”

  The Righteous Brothers provided a vision of redemption. Not only did they have precisely the kind of soulful voices Spector loved, but the fact that they were white men, he reasoned, would make them easier to sell to radio, television and a pop audience increasingly enamored of British pop groups. However, there was a downside to all this: Spector had grown used to working with artists he could easily manipulate and control; the Righteous Brothers had opinions of their own. Furthermore, they were already contracted to Moonglow—the best Spector could do was arrange a deal leasing them to Philles, rather than signing them directly, as he would have wished. But these, he believed, were just minor obstacles. Only later would they become major ones.

  The deal that Spector signed with Moonglow’s boss, R. J. van Hoogten, gave him the rights to record and release the Righteous Brothers on Philles in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, while Moonglow retained the rights for all other territories.

  In search of material for his new signing, Spector turned back to Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, sending them copies of the Righteous Brothers’ Moonglow recordings. A new hit from the Motown group, the Four Tops, was rising up the charts at the time, the deliciously romantic “Baby I Need Your Loving.” “[The Righteous Brothers] were singing Sam and Dave kind of stuff,” Barry Mann later recalled. “We thought, Well, it would be great to do a ballad. We loved ‘Baby I Need Your Loving’ and it was kind of an inspiration…”

  Sketching out a preliminary verse and chorus, the two songwriters flew out to Los Angeles, where Spector joined them in their suite at the Chateau Marmont to develop the song. The tune that Mann and Weil had written was in the same medium tempo, and with all the heart-clutching, anthemic quality of the Four Tops’ song—and more. Cynthia Weil’s lyric took the Four Tops’ theme of yearning and transmuted it into loss, starkly declaring in its opening lines the evidence of a dying love—“You never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your lips…” Even the title was a respectful nod to the song’s original inspiration: “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.” Spector loved it but suggested that the tempo should be slower still, and added a masterstroke—a dramatic middle section, measured by a bass riff modeled on “La Bamba.” With the change in tempo and the addition of the new section the finished song was almost twice as long as Mann and Weil’s original demo—almost twice as long as any pop song of the time. But Spector refused to change a note. As autumn turned to winter, he prepared to make the biggest record of his life.

  Despite his deepening involvement with Ronnie, and the acrimonious way in which their marriage had ended, Spector had been unable to let go of Annette. He had never admitted his infidelity, and he pleaded with her for them to get back together again, telling her that he would even drop the Ronettes from their contract if she would return to him. But for Annette it was impossible. “I just said, ‘No way.’ It devastated me.”

  By early 1964 she had moved out of the apartment on Sixty-second Street, but Spector would occasionally drop by to see her in her new home—“If I’d had a shred of self-respect at that point I would never have let him in the door”—and they spoke frequently on the phone. With his professional associates, he would wear his customary face of cocksure bravado and self-confidence. There were few people to whom he would dare to confide his fears, but Annette was one of them. Sometimes she would answer the telephone at three or four in the morning to find him on the other end of the line in California, anxiously seeking reassurance that he had not lost his gift, or his position, at the summit of the pop music hierarchy.

  “It would be: ‘Okay, the Beatles are number one, and the Stones are number two, but am I before Bob Dylan or after Bob Dylan?’ And I’d say, ‘No, you’re definitely number three and Dylan’s number four’—even though I didn’t really think so. He never talked about Dylan’s lyrics or his music. But always these conversations about where Phil fit in.”

  Now, as Spector worked with Mann and Weil at the Chateau Marmont on the new song for the Righteous Brothers, Annette flew out from New York to see him, staying with him at Brynmar, the modest, Spanish-style house that Spector rented in the Hollywood Hills. One night he played her a tape of the song-in-progress. Annette thought it was wonderful. “And then Phil told me that he’d come up with the phrase ‘You’ve lost that lovin’ feeling’ and that it was written for me. It wasn’t nice when he said that. Because he was totally another woman’s man. I just remember at five in the morning I bolted up and said, ‘I’m out of here.’ I grabbed my stuff, and I went back to New York on the train that day.”

  Apparently unperturbed, Spector pressed on with his preparations for the sessions. For the first time since “He’s a Rebel,” two and a half years earlier, Jack Nitzsche had told Spector that he was unavailable. Nitzsche had begun to see a world beyond Phil Spector. When the Rolling Stones recorded some sessions at the RCA Studios in November, he was invited to sit in on keyboards, beginning a relationship with the group that would flourish over the next few years. Working with the Stones was a liberating experience for Nitzsche. He told Bill Wyman that they were “the first rock and roll band he’d met that were intelligent,” and he relished the freedom to experiment and the way the Stones followed their own instincts in the studio. “The great new thing about them was, they’d record a song the way they had written it,” Nitzsche said. “If it didn’t work, nobody thought twice about making it a tango! They tried every way possible. Nobody had the big ego thing about keeping a song a certain way. That changed me. That was the first really free feeling I had in the studio.” Over the next two years, Nitzsche would become something of a “sixth Stone” in the recording studio, playing piano and harpsichord on songs including “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Play with Fire” and “Let’s Spend the Night Together.”

  Nitzsche had also accepted an offer to work as the arranger on The TAMI Show—TAMI stood for Teenage Awards Music International—a television special that brought together the cream of American and British Invasion performers, including the Stones, the Beach Boys, the Supremes and James Brown. When Nitzsche told Spector he was unable to arrange the Righteous Brothers session, a disgruntled Spector accused him of “a lack of loyalty” (notwithstanding the fact that he agreed to make a cameo appearance on The TAMI Show himself). Instead, he was obliged to take on another arranger, Gene Page.

  When Spector first played “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” to the Righteous Brothers on the piano in Gold Star, they were unimpressed. They were used to singi
ng frenetic, gospel-tinged rhythm and blues; this sounded like a dirge. Furthermore, they were used to singing in unison: Spector wanted Medley to take the first two verses solo, with Hatfield only joining him when the song was more than halfway through.

  “Bill really didn’t want to do it,” Larry Levine remembers. “He was the vocal one. He said, ‘This is not right, because we’re an act; we sing everything together, but Bobby sings almost nothing in this; it’s all me.’ They really weren’t impressed. And I remember saying to Bill, ‘How could you not be excited by this? This could be a number-one record, a smash, and you’re not excited!’”

  But not even Spector could have guessed that what he was to conjure over the next two weeks in Gold Star’s Studio A would be his greatest record ever, a work of epic grandeur that would become the most played pop single of all time.

  From the first magisterial incantation of Bill Medley’s deep, rich baritone—sounding as if it were echoing across a storm-tossed sea, to the measured beat of distant chiming bells—“You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” is a record that stops the heart. For the first two verses Medley beseeches and coaxes, laying bare the depths of his desolation. From the far distance, a choir, strings and the rattle of tambourines bear witness to his suffering, the verse punctuated by a bass note of almost funereal sorrow. Now the song builds teasingly to the second, glorious chorus, a storm no sooner conjured than it subsides into the middle section, as hushed and heartfelt as a prayer. A momentary respite, for now—fully two minutes, three seconds into the song—Bobby Hatfield’s voice enters, as if from the wings, to engage in a furious call-and-response with his partner, each, it seems, urging the other to further extremes of despair. Now the fatalistic anguish of loss becomes a desperate plea for reconciliation and redemption—“Bring back that lovin’ feelin’”—a plea that finally drifts into a far-distant silence, leaving you stunned in its wake. A masterpiece of chiaroscuro, of searing emotional light and darkness, of pain and catharsis, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” is the very summit of the producer’s art.