by Mick Brown
“He said, ‘You should have walked out.’ ‘I can’t walk out!’ I think he felt really bad because he could have gone on and on with Bill and Bobby. But that was it with Phil and me. Not only that. After that, Jack Nitzsche does a date for Lester Sill. So I was helping him out. He asked me to bring something down to Lester; I was working next door. So I dropped the music off. And Lester Sill goes, ‘Get out of here! And don’t you ever come down to my sessions.’ I didn’t understand what the fuck was going on. But Lester hated Phil at that point, and because he knew I was close to Phil…”
It would be more than twenty years before Randi worked with Spector again.
The farrago over the Righteous Brothers was not the only thing preoccupying Spector in the autumn of 1965. He had been asked to work as associate producer and musical director on The Big TNT Show, a televised concert modeled on The TAMI Show, which had aired the previous year and been so instrumental in breaking the Rolling Stones and introducing James Brown to a rock and roll audience.
Recorded on two days at the end of November at the Moulin Rouge Theatre, The Big TNT Show presented a curiously mixed bag of performers, reflecting the diversity of the pop charts at that time. Among them were the current heartthrobs of Sunset Strip, the Byrds; the English singer Petula Clark; the folksinger Donovan; country singer Roger Miller and RB acts Bo Diddley and Ray Charles. (Robert Marchese, the stage manager of the show, would enjoy telling the story of how Charles approached Spector during the recording. “Are you Mr. Phil Spector?” Charles asked. “Yes.” “Are you the Boy Genius?” “Yes.” “Are you the inventor of the Wall of Sound?” “Yes.” “Are you the guy who had over twenty hit singles in a row?” “Yes.” “Then, Mr. Spector, how come there’s no toilet paper in the bathroom?”) There was the odd spectacle of the folksinger Joan Baez singing “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” accompanied by Spector himself on piano. But the undisputed stars of the show were its closing act, Ike and Tina Turner.
Ike Turner was one of the unsung giants of RB. Guitarist, pianist, producer and bandleader, Turner’s career had started when he was eleven years old, playing piano behind the blues singers Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Nighthawk. He had worked as a disc jockey, arranged and played piano on what is widely regarded as the first proper rock and roll record, “Rocket 88,” a number 1 RB hit for Jackie Brenston in 1951; worked as a talent scout for Sun and Modern records, and produced and played on dozens of sessions for blues performers like Elmore James, B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf.
In 1959, in St. Louis, he discovered an eighteen-year-old singer named Annie Mae Bullock and recruited her as the vocalist for his group, the Rhythm Kings. He changed her name to Tina, and they married in a wedding parlor in Tijuana. Ike made his new bride the centerpiece of a live revue, featuring a full band and a trio of shimmying backing singers, the Ikettes, with Tina herself a vision of lust incarnate, prowling the stage like a lioness in heat, wig flying, legs pumping like pistons in heart-attack miniskirts. By the mid-’60s the Ike and Tina Turner Revue rivaled James Brown as the most thrilling act in rhythm and blues, and had enjoyed a string of hits on the RB charts with songs like “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” and “Fool in Love.” What they had not done, however, was break out of the “chitlin’ circuit” of black clubs and theaters into the mainstream.
Spector had seen the Ike and Tina Turner Revue more than once, and he loved them with a passion. “That word—revue…” he would recall later. “It means something symbolic; it has class. And the show was just mesmerizing; I said, God, if I could make a number-one record with her she could go on Ed Sullivan, she could go to Las Vegas; she could break the color barrier. I was just devastated by her.”
Most of all, he loved Tina’s voice. Barbara Alston, Darlene Love, LaLa Brooks and Ronnie Bennett—all had offered different expressions of the soulful voice that Spector so admired and loved to work with. But Tina was something else again—raw carnality, hurt, passion, power—she was “The Voice” incarnate.
For months, as he surveyed his crumbling empire, a single question had been gnawing at Spector: what next? Watching Tina Turner bring the house down on The TNT Show, he knew he had his answer.
What Spector did not need, however, was her husband. Ike Turner’s years on the road had earned him a reputation for being suspicious, truculent and volatile. He was particularly possessive of Tina. With Danny Davis in tow, Spector visited Turner at home and spelled out his plan. He would record Tina, and he would give her a number 1 record that would transform her and Ike’s career, break them out of the RB circuit into the mainstream and make their fortune. His only stipulation was that Ike himself would have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
“Ike was a doll,” Spector remembers. “Because he was interested in Tina, other women. He was not interested in drugs at the time. He’d never had a drug in his life. He was a gun-carrying black man who grew up in the South; who had to make it on his own; who pistol-whipped his band; who had them on time…like that. Whose revue was spot-on. Whose Ikettes moved. Who had to compete with Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, B.B. King, Bo Diddley, James Brown and all those people. He had to grow up, top-book himself…You ever think why the black artists of the ’40s called themselves what they did: the jazz artists? They couldn’t get booked. They called themselves Count Basie; Duke Ellington, Nat ‘King’ Cole. To shove it up the white promoters, y’know? You call me King Cole. You call me Count Basie. They had to sleep, of course, in the barn; but they always kept that Count, King…They started it all.
“But Ike was easy to deal with. I had no problem with him. See, when you’re going straight ahead, you have blinders on. Everybody dealt with Ike like Ike Turner! I didn’t deal with Ike like Ike Turner.”
Danny Davis would remember it differently. Spector, he would later recall, was “scared to death of Ike.”
But Turner accepted Spector’s request unhesitatingly. “Phil said he wanted to produce a record on Tina and would I agree to let him do it,” he recalls. “He said he didn’t want me to interfere. Well, why would I interfere? My attitude was, if you think that you can do it, then take a shot…”
Ike made only one stipulation. While he agreed that he would have nothing to do with the record, his name must appear on it.
Ike and Tina were contracted to Loma Records, the RB subsidiary of Warner Bros. Spector paid $20,000 to lease their contract to Philles, and in the first weeks of 1966 set about planning the record that would decide his future.
One by one, Spector’s options had closed down. The Righteous Brothers had gone. The Ronettes had ground to a halt. The glory days of Philles were a fast-receding memory. Spector knew this was his last throw of the dice. For the last three years, his success had been built on a kind of incremental gigantism—from “He’s a Rebel” to “Be My Baby” to “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’”—each bigger, bolder, more ambitious and grandiloquent than the last. Spector didn’t do small. Now, like a beleaguered general, he marshaled all his forces for the last stand.
In search of a song that would do justice to his ambitions he turned back to the writers with whom he had enjoyed his greatest run of success, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. In the two years since they’d last worked with Spector, Barry and Greenwich had enjoyed a string of hits at Red Bird. But now Red Bird had folded, and their marriage with it; they divorced in December 1965, just a few weeks before Spector approached them. But despite the emotional upheaval in their own lives, despite the lingering ill feeling over “Chapel of Love,” Greenwich and Barry agreed to Spector’s request. As a gesture of conciliation—and in a demonstration of his own pressing need—rather than insist they come to Los Angeles, Spector flew to New York and together they began to work on new material. “It was like vomiting it out,” Greenwich told the writer Ken Emerson. In less than a week they had produced three new songs.
Was “River Deep—Mountain High” the best? Certainly it was the most idiosyncratic. In the heyday of their collaboration, all three w
riters would sit around the piano, swapping ideas and themes. But now friendship had given way to estrangement. According to Greenwich, each arrived at the writing sessions with a different part: Greenwich provided the melody of the verse; Spector provided the melody of the chorus; and Barry most of the words. Even before it was recorded, the effect was an awkward fit; two quite separate songs that seemed to have been plucked from opposite corners of the room and forced to dance together—although the stop-start tempo made dancing almost an impossibility. And what the hell was the song about anyway? In a self-conscious attempt to get away from the “silly little songs” he had written for the Ronettes and Crystals, Barry had contrived a tortuous lyric using the childish devotion to ragdolls and puppies as metaphors for adult love. “Lyrically, we just all jumbled, jumbled on the chorus,” Greenwich recalled. “When you think about ‘River Deep—Mountain High’ that lyrically says a lot about where we were coming from at that time. It was also a big sound, almost a desperate sound—but exciting! It breaks out: freedom!”
Back in Los Angeles, Spector began rehearsing Tina at the mansion. “I remember her coming home and saying, ‘Well, this guy is really different,’” Ike Turner says. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘You can’t vary his lines…he doesn’t want you to vary his lines.’ Phil didn’t tolerate any improvisation at all. I mean, Tina was real trained before he met her—anyone who has been around me a lot can sing. But he really put her through it.”
In February, Spector gathered his troops at Gold Star and the assault began. It would require five sessions and more than $22,000 to complete. The first two sessions were spent merely preparing the musicians and establishing the shape of the backing track. Word quickly spread through Hollywood that Spector was working on something truly special, the ne plus ultra of the Wall of Sound, and the control room filled with onlookers. Rodney Bingenheimer, the teenage “scene maker” of the Sunset Strip, arrived with Brian Wilson. Jack Nitzsche, who was also recording with the Rolling Stones, brought Mick Jagger. Dennis Hopper moved around the room, taking photographs.
For the third session, on March 7, Tina Turner arrived at Gold Star to find herself confronted by twenty-one musicians, an equivalent number of backing singers and a gallery of gaping onlookers. She was so intimidated by the crowd and the atmosphere of feverish expectation that she was unable to sing, and the session was abandoned.
A week later, she returned to the studio, this time with Ike. As she went through take after take, Spector pushing her remorselessly toward his vision of perfection, the temperature rose and the sweat flew. “We were a little more naïve about things then than we are now,” Larry Levine says. “After a couple of hours of this, Tina said, ‘Do you mind if I take my blouse off when I sing?’ Well, Phil looked at me and I looked at Phil, and we didn’t mind. I don’t know how Ike felt about it. We just had one light lit on the wall so she could see her music. But to watch her was fantastic. What a great body. I don’t think Ike was too happy, but I don’t recall ever seeing Ike happy. I seem to recall he and Phil had some words about something or other—probably money.”
Over two more sessions Spector added strings and mixed the record. When all was finally done, spent but exhilarated he turned and embraced Jack Nitzsche. “Jack said that he and Phil looked at each other and they both smiled because they knew this was as good as it was ever going to get,” Denny Bruce remembers. “I think they both knew that things had now run their course; they’d had an incredible run, but it had come to an end.” But, finally, it was all too much. In trying to surpass himself, Spector had actually outreached himself. The sound was titanic, huge and echoing, an unstoppable hurricane, but like a hurricane it left destruction in its wake. Turner’s vocal, monumental itself, was buffeted and bruised in the tumult of the arrangement. The wildly colored threads of melody were twisted and bent until their shape and color were all but lost. It was the simulacrum of all Spector’s grandiosity, his overarching ambition; it was all his passion, his thirst for revenge and his madness. It was a record that swept you up into its peculiar psychosis and left you stunned and exhausted in its wake. You could be enthralled by it, moved by it, but you could never love it.
“River Deep—Mountain High” was released on May 14, 1966. Billboard featured it among its top 60 picks, describing it in the curious demotic of the trade: “Exciting dance beat production backs a wailin’ Tina vocal on a solid rock tune penned by Barry and Greenwich.” On May 29, the record entered the Billboard charts at number 98. The following week it crawled to 94. A week later, to 93. By June 18 it moved up to 88. The following week it dropped out of the charts altogether. Spector’s biggest production had become his biggest failure.
After the death, the inquest. For Ike Turner, the failure of the record was a simple case of the institutionalized racism of America in general, and the music business in particular. “If Phil had released that record and put anybody else’s name on it, it would have been a huge hit. But because Tina Turner’s name was on it, the white stations classified it as an RB record and wouldn’t play it. The white stations say it was too black, and the black stations say it was too white, so that record didn’t have a home. That’s what happened to ‘River Deep—Mountain High.’”
For Jeff Barry it was hubris, the inevitable consequence of Spector pushing himself further and further forward, at the expense of the artist and the song. Spector, Barry told Richard Williams, “has a self-destructive thing going for him, which is part of the reason that the mix on ‘River Deep’ is terrible. He buried the lead and he knows he buried the lead and he cannot stop himself from doing that. If you listen to his records in sequence, the lead goes further and further in, and to me what he is saying is: ‘It is not the song I wrote with Jeff and Ellie, it is not the song—just listen to those strings. I want more musicians, it’s me, listen to that bass sound…’ That, to me, is what hurts in the long run.”
For others, the record’s failure was a matter of revenge. The “Tycoon of Teen” had become too arrogant, too overbearing, too complacent for his own good. There were stories that Spector now considered himself too important to glad-hand with the foot soldiers in the radio stations and trade magazines, that he was “too busy” to give interviews; rumors that he had been informally blacklisted by DJs, because he refused to deliver the usual blandishments in cash or kind to have his records played. The industry had turned on him.
“Phil antagonized some people,” Jack Nitzsche would later reflect to the writer Harvey Kubernik. “Phil had a way to always bring up the idea that he had more money and that was power, which it probably was. He had thirteen hits in a row without a miss. Around ‘River Deep—Mountain High,’ people started to want him to fail. That’s how it is with sports and everything. You get too good and people don’t like it, too successful and people don’t like it. There was no competition for Phil in those days.”
“Phil was an abrasive character,” Larry Levine says. “And to a large degree he grew into the character that he was portrayed as by the media. He started to enjoy being that. A lot of people envied him, and a lot of people were waiting for him to fail—hoping for him to fail. So it didn’t take much to push it over that edge, to the degree that Cash Box and Billboard both came out with only a B-plus for the record, which was effectively the kiss of death. But I always felt, and I still feel, that Phil tried to take that record to a place where the available technology couldn’t go. It just wasn’t enough for what he wanted to do. But that had a lot to do with Phil’s personality too. He wasn’t content to do what he’d done before. Phil was always looking to move on to the next plateau, until there just wasn’t a plateau there to move on to.”
In later years, Spector would attempt to make light of the failure of “River Deep.” Talking to Rolling Stone, he would explain that the record “was just like my farewell. I was just sayin’ good-bye and I wanted to go crazy, you know, for a few minutes, that’s all it was. I loved it and I really enjoyed making it, but I didn’t r
eally think there was anything there for the public.” Talking to New Musical Express a decade later he would go further still, arguing that had he been egotistical the failure of the record might have affected him. “But I’m not egotistical. I am an egomaniac. My ego is so high you just can’t beat me down.”
But in truth, he was devastated. When Catherine and Linda visited him at the house, he cried as he told them how sure he had felt that “River Deep” would be a big hit. “It was the only time I ever saw him really depressed,” Catherine recalls. “He said, ‘I was sure people would love it; I just don’t understand it.’ More than upset, he felt betrayed by the American public.”
In Britain, the story could hardly have been more different. The record quickly climbed the charts, and by the middle of July it had peaked at number 2. But its success seemed only to inflame the hurt and anger Spector felt at the American industry and public. In a fit of self-righteous pique he took out ads in Billboard and Cash Box, invoking the name of the American general who during the War of Independence had plotted to surrender the fort at West Point to the British: “Benedict Arnold Was Right.” And they hated him even more.
Then Phil Spector closed the door of his mansion, and disappeared from view.
15
Marriage in Purgatory
The brave face that Spector put on the failure of “River Deep—Mountain High” was just that—a face. The failure of the record left him spent and exhausted. The manic energy and drive that had propelled him for the past three years now drained out of him.
“With Phil, it was as if they’d given him the ball, and one day he woke up and the ball had gone,” Tony Calder reflected. “The minute he went cold, the business buried him, they killed him. He’d had the success and he’d crapped on everybody. He’s just fucking died…push him down in his own shit. It’s human nature…”