Tearing Down the Wall of Sound

by Mick Brown

  It was a platonic relationship, as if Spector had adopted the two young girls, taken them under his wing. “People would tell me how evil, crazy and uptight Phil was,” Linda says. “But I never had that feeling at all. To me he was only kind and caring.”

  One night, Linda and Catherine dropped acid and went to the Trip nightclub on the Strip.

  “We started getting very freaked out by it. We had to leave the club, and I said, ‘Let’s go up to Phil’s.’ We walked up there and got to the gates. It was all locked up. I’ve no idea how we got in, but somehow we did. We rang on the doorbell, but there was no answer; so we walked around the back, stroked the dogs—that everybody said would eat you alive, but we knew them—and walked into the kitchen. We started playing around, being silly, sliding up and down the banisters, waiting for Phil to come home. Which he did. He was a bit shocked to find us in the house and told us off. ‘You naughty girls, I could have killed you coming in.’ But I knew he wouldn’t. But he let us hang out there until we’d come down and we were able to go home. So he had that generosity of spirit. Obviously when you’re feeling like that, you won’t go somewhere you don’t think you’ll be welcome.”

  On another occasion Catherine was taken ill, and Spector invited both girls to stay, his staff taking care of her until she recovered.

  Catherine, who came from a privileged Philadelphia family, was struck by the incongruity of the surroundings, the nineteenth-century oil paintings and French provincial bedrooms. “It didn’t feel owned. It seemed like Phil was just passing through. The music room was his room. Everything else seemed like a stage set. When my mother came up one day, she said it reminded her of walking into one of her friends’ houses on the Main Line in Philadelphia.”

  Sometimes Linda would be woken up by Spector calling in the middle of the night, asking if she would come over. His biggest problem, she thought, was loneliness. “But I felt that way myself. I recognized in him a lot of myself. We’d both been wounded by life.”

  Just as he had with Beverly Ross in their long, rambling, nocturnal conversations, Spector would confide his feelings of unhappiness and insecurity to Linda. “His father’s death had obviously been the big thing in his life, which deep down he’d never dealt with, and which nobody had ever really helped him with. And he was this tiny little guy who’d been bullied at school. He felt insecure and inferior to the other guys who would always get the girl. So these were all the things that would pour out of him. And he’d say, ‘But look at me now!’ Like he’d got back at those people in some way. It was revenge in a way, a kind of satisfaction he felt. Phil definitely had a thing about that—this need to prove to everyone that he was cool and that he’d achieved something.”

  Sometimes, when restlessness came upon him, they would drive to another of Spector’s favorite hangouts, Canter’s on Fairfax Avenue. By dint of being one of the few places in Hollywood to remain open twenty-four hours a day, the family restaurant where Spector had whiled away his time after school, and where he’d worked as a busboy, had now become the early-hours gathering place of choice for music business scene makers and night owls. Spector liked to arrive around 2:00 a.m., holding court at a corner table, Emil and the nameless suits stationed in an adjacent booth. Spector, Catherine sensed, was never properly at ease in fancier restaurants where people sniggered and stared, but here, among “the dem and dose guys”—the schmoozers, hustlers and wiseacres—he felt comfortable. “He was a success in that restaurant.”

  One of his most frequent companions at Canter’s was the comedian Lenny Bruce. Spector had idolized Bruce since his years as a teenager, riffing on the comedian’s monologues while traveling with the Teddy Bears, and he had finally been introduced to him by Helen Noga—“Lenny,” says Noga’s daughter Beverly, “was another of my mother’s little babies.”

  Bruce’s irreverent shtick about religion, sex, politics—what newspapers called his “sick comedy routines”—had made him the most controversial comedian in America. His unapologetically confrontational style is illustrated in a story told by his former publicist Grover Sales, about an appearance at the San Francisco nightclub, Off Broadway, when the black comedian Dick Gregory happened to be in the audience.

  “Spotting Greg, Lenny peered at the audience for an unnerving interval: ‘Are there any niggers here tonight?’ Gregory stiffened like a retriever, with the rest of the audience. In 1962, nobody had ever heard that word onstage, not in a white nightclub. Lenny began a mock soliloquy: ‘Ohmygod, did you hear what he said? “Are there any niggers here tonight?” Is that rank! Is that cruel! Is that a cheap way to get laughs? Well, I think I see a nigger at the bar talking to two guinea owners, and next to them are a couple of wops, one kike, two greaseballs, a square-head, three gooks, one frog, two limeys, a couple of sheenies, two jiga-boos, one hunkey, fonky boogie—bid ’em up! Bid ’em up! Six more niggers! I pass with two dykes, four kikes, and eight niggers!’”

  The once-frozen audience now gave way to hysteria, the sweet laughter of liberation only Lenny could unloose: “Now, why have I done this? Is this only for shock value? Well, if all the niggers started calling each other ‘nigger,’ not only among themselves, which they do anyway, but among the ofays. If President Kennedy got on television and said: ‘I’m considering appointing two or three of the top niggers in the country into my cabinet’—if it was nothing but nigger, nigger, nigger—in six months ‘nigger’ wouldn’t mean any more than ‘good night,’ ‘God bless you,’ or ‘I promise to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God’—when that beautiful day comes, you’ll never see another nigger kid come home from school crying because some ofay motherfucker called him a nigger.”

  “Gregory turned to me: ‘This man is the eighth wonder of the world. You have to go back to Mark Twain to find anything remotely like him. And if they don’t kill him, or throw him in jail, he’s liable to shake up this whole fuckin’ country.’”

  A year later, Gregory published his book Nigger, dedicated to “Dear Momma—Wherever you are, if you ever hear the word ‘nigger’ again, remember they are advertising my book.”

  Gregory’s remark about death or jail was to prove prophetic. Between 1961 and 1964 Bruce was arrested half a dozen times on obscenity and drug charges. He was banned from entering Australia and the U.K., and blacklisted by any number of nightclubs in America that refused to run the risk of prosecution by having him perform. By the time he came into Spector’s life, he was bankrupt, terminally depleted by his struggles against the law and a heroin addict—a man who was giving a passable impersonation of someone fighting for his life, and losing.

  The record producer Denny Bruce (no relation), who was then playing drums for Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, remembers accompanying Zappa to a meeting with Spector and Bruce in Canter’s in the autumn of 1965. (Like Spector, Zappa idolized Bruce, thought he was “a saint.” Zappa’s manager, Herb Cohen, had once run a nightclub, Cosmo Alley, which was busted for obscenity when Bruce performed there in 1959, and Cohen and Zappa later released a double album by the comedian, The Berkeley Concert, on their Bizarre label.)

  Expecting to meet the sharp-suited, wisecracking legend, Denny Bruce was shocked to be confronted by a bloated, ashen-faced figure in a stained sweatshirt and jeans. “It was like he was in jail. And his whole conversation was: ‘You know, the Fourth Amendment…’ Not one joke. Nothing.”

  In many ways, Bruce was the embodiment of the hipster Spector himself had always yearned to be; the towering, uncompromising iconoclast who had taken on the system. While Spector had fought against the short-armed fatties of the record industry, the legion of uncomprehending straights, and earned only their opprobrium, Bruce had taken on the establishment in a more profound and dangerous way—and paid a far higher price. He was a true martyr to his genius, just as Spector fancied he was a martyr to his.

  Bruce became a frequent visitor to the La Collina house. Politics, history, society—these were the stuff of
Lenny’s shtick, and his travails had made him unusually well versed in law—all subjects that fascinated Spector and on which he was also well informed. “They’d sit there and chitchat for hours,” Emil Farkas remembers, “intellectualizing about how America was going down the drain because there was no freedom and you couldn’t get up and say what you liked, et cetera, et cetera. Phil felt that both of them were on the same page—Phil was antiestablishment, anti-cop. It was the whole era. And he loved the fact that Lenny had the balls to stand up to anything and anybody, to tell people they were full of shit. Phil loved that, because that’s the way Phil wanted to be himself. The difference was that Phil didn’t have the balls to get up on the podium and speak his mind, so he could live that vicariously through Lenny.”

  But now that Spector was a man of substance he could do more than just idolize Lenny. He could help him. He took up Bruce’s cause, writing a stream of letters to the government, law enforcement agencies and lawyers, pleading on his friend’s behalf. He made his offices and staff on Sunset Strip available for Bruce whenever he wanted to use them, and would write out checks when he needed money—which was often. He would drive miles out into the boondocks to support his friend whenever Bruce could find a club willing to book him. He produced an album, Lenny Bruce Is Out Again, which was released in October 1965, and financed a fifteen-day residency at the Music Box Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, where Bruce played to largely empty houses. Some regarded Bruce as “an expert leech,” but Spector helped his friend generously and uncomplainingly, and Bruce’s appreciation was genuine enough.

  One night Spector took his young friends Catherine and Linda to meet Bruce at his house in the Hollywood Hills, prepping his young friends en route. “He was saying, ‘Don’t mention the FBI, don’t mention the police; Lenny’s got some problems and we don’t want to make him all sad,’” Catherine remembers. “It was obvious that Phil idolized him, and that this was a special thing we were doing. It felt like he was giving us a special gift.”

  At the house, Bruce answered the door and ushered them inside. Catherine was shocked. “I come from a nice middle-class home where my mother always had things looking nice. But this place…there were dishes in the sink, mattresses on the floor, everything filthy. I couldn’t understand it. He was living there with his daughter. She was about the same age as me, close enough that I identified and felt so sorry she had to live like this. But Lenny had such a gentle heart and was blazingly intelligent. And he and Phil behaved very lovingly to each other. They were clearly good friends.”

  For two hours they sat around talking, Bruce disappearing from time to time—presumably, Catherine thought, to fix. When finally he began to nod out, Spector told them it was time to go. As they left, he embraced Bruce and kissed him tenderly on the cheek.

  14

  River Deep, Mountain Low

  Number 1 for three weeks, seven weeks in the Top 3, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” had brought Phil Spector the biggest hit of his career, at a time when he needed it most, and for a while the momentum it generated seemed unstoppable.

  As a reward for their efforts, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil might have expected Spector to gift them with the follow-up. Instead, he turned back to another favored songwriting partnership, Goffin and King. Their collaboration, “Just Once in My Life,” closely modeled on “Lovin’ Feelin’” with its lavish orchestration and opening section sung by Bill Medley, reached number 9 in May 1965. A third single, “Hung on You,” stalled, until disc jockeys flipped the record and began playing the B-side—an impassioned version of the standard “Unchained Melody” sung entirely by Bobby Hatfield. The record reached number 4 in September.

  But all was not well between Spector and the Righteous Brothers. Spector’s ploy of appending his name to “There’s a Woman”—the “piece of shit” composed by Medley and Hatfield that had appeared on the B-side of “Lovin’ Feelin’”—thus entitling himself to a third of the songwriting royalties, still rankled. And Medley was proving to be a far more independent-minded figure than Spector was used to dealing with.

  From the moment “Lovin’ Feelin’” had begun its rise up the charts, Medley had been agitating with Spector to release an album to capitalize on the single’s success. But Spector balked at producing one without another couple of hits to include. When Larry Levine weighed in on Medley’s behalf, Spector relented, agreeing to let Medley, who fancied himself a producer (he had overseen a handful of songs by the pair at Moonglow), bring the project to fruition.

  The result was distinctly mediocre but successful enough to persuade Spector to relent once more when Medley began demanding to produce more tracks for a second album. Just Once in My Life…, released in May 1965, contained only two productions by Spector, the single of the same name and “Unchained Melody.”

  To make matters worse, relations between the Brothers themselves were also deteriorating. Medley’s growing self-importance was a cause of concern not only to Spector but also to his partner Bobby Hatfield. Hatfield had never quite got over being relegated to the secondary role on the pair’s greatest hit, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” and as Medley flexed his muscles in his studio, Hatfield began to feel even more the junior partner. Emboldened by his own starring role in “Unchained Melody,” Hatfield now threatened to sever the partnership altogether and go solo.

  Spector, suddenly alarmed at the prospect of seeing his greatest asset evaporate before his eyes, suggested a compromise—an album for the Christmas market, entitled Back to Back, that would give both singers equal solo prominence and that would also include their own compositions. Medley would produce his own songs; Spector would produce Hatfield’s.

  It was during the recording of the album that matters became ever more vexatious. Suspicious of R. J. van Hoogten’s accounting, the Brothers had ordered an audit of Moonglow’s books, which revealed that van Hoogten had allegedly shortchanged them by some $28,000 on royalties owed for their earlier recordings. Meanwhile, van Hoogten was pursuing his own argument with Spector. Under the original contract between Philles and Moonglow, Spector had the rights to release Righteous Brothers recordings only in America, Canada and the U.K. Van Hoogten planned to capitalize on the Brothers’ success by releasing their recordings in other territories, but now alleged that Spector had failed to turn over a number of masters.

  Van Hoogten dispatched a letter to Spector, alleging breach of contract and terminating his agreement with Philles, at the same time instructing the Righteous Brothers to cease all recording with Spector forthwith. Convinced that they could make it without Phil Spector, and seeing an opportunity to escape their obligations to both their paymasters, Medley and Hatfield filed lawsuits against both van Hoogten and Spector, claiming that because van Hoogten had breached their Moonglow contract, his contract with Spector was no longer enforceable.

  Desperate to bring the proposed Christmas album to completion, Spector attempted to persuade the Brothers to return to the studio, but they declined, letting it be known that they were being courted by a rival company, MGM. Spector promptly riffled through the tapes of unreleased material produced by Medley and came up with six songs that he slapped on the album, Back to Back, which was released in December.

  Medley and Hatfield were furious. In January 1966, an item in Billboard announced that the pair had signed for MGM. Spector immediately filed suit against MGM. In late January, the Righteous Brothers went into the studio to cut their first single for MGM, “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration.” The song’s writers were Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Forgetting how he had overlooked the writers after “Lovin’ Feelin’” and stung by what he perceived as a massive betrayal, Spector pleaded with Mann and Weil to withdraw the song—but to no avail. In May, “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration” went to number 1. The Brothers enjoyed only two more Top 40 hits for MGM before fading away. It would be a further eight years of struggle, breakup and reconciliation before they were back in the Top 10.

 
For Spector, not even the $600,000 he extracted in settlement from MGM could assuage his fury at his prize assets deserting him. He would never forgive them. Three years later, in 1969, talking to Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone, he would dismiss the Brothers as “a strange group in that they really were non-intellectual and unable to comprehend success. They couldn’t understand it and couldn’t live with it and accept it for what it really was. They thought it was something that could be obtained very easily and once it was attained, it could be consistently obtained…

  “I just think it was a great loss, because the two of them weren’t exceptional talents, but they did have a musical contribution to make. I loved them: I thought they were a tremendous expression for myself. I think they resented being an expression. I think now if they had it to do again, they never would have left.”

  Even those closest to Spector felt the depth of his hurt. Don Randi was not only one of the mainstays of the Wrecking Crew; he regarded himself as Spector’s friend. Like all of the Crew, Randi played on a variety of sessions around town. When he was called in by MGM to play a Righteous Brothers session, Randi was happy to be reunited with Hatfield and Medley, and with the paycheck.

  “And about a week later I got a call from Phil. ‘Why did you work for them?’ ‘Why did I work for who?’ ‘You know who I’m talking about…Bill and Bobby.’ He said, ‘How could you do that? They were my artists!’ I said, ‘Phil, I work for who I want. If you want me to work exclusive to you, I’ve got a price and I’d be glad to do it.’