by Mick Brown
He was too depressed even to go near the studio. The writing sessions with Barry and Greenwich had produced another song, “I Can Hear Music,” which Spector allotted to the Ronettes. But he was so uninterested that he passed the production over to Jeff Barry (the record went nowhere, although the Beach Boys would have a Top 30 hit with the song three years later). Another producer, Bob Crewe, was invited to record a handful of sessions with Ike and Tina Turner.
Jack Nitzsche had quickly put the disappointment of “River Deep” behind him and was in demand as a producer and arranger for artists like Lou Christie, Bobby Darin and Bob Lind, whose single “Elusive Butterfly” went to number 5 in December 1966. The musicians of the Wrecking Crew were now occupied on sessions for virtually every record of note that was coming out of Los Angeles.
For six years Spector had focused all his energies and dreams on one thing—the desire to transmute rock and roll, and the base metal of his anger, genius and monumental ambition, into art. He had taken on the music business on his own terms, and won. His vision had changed rock and roll forever, but in changing, it had left Phil Spector behind.
Throughout the making of “River Deep—Mountain High,” Dennis Hopper had been holding out to Spector a vision of a new future—film production.
Hopper had a reputation for being volatile, hard-drinking, temperamental and brilliant; a man who saw himself in the tradition of the great Hollywood hell-raisers such as John Barrymore and Errol Flynn. He had been a close friend with James Dean, acting alongside him in two films, the seminal “misunderstood teenager” movie, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant. Hopper idolized Dean, and Dean’s death in a car crash in 1955 seemed to throw him off balance. Shortly afterward, working on the set of From Hell to Texas, Hopper got into a fight with the director Henry Hathaway after Hopper’s insistence on improvising his lines required upward of one hundred retakes. He was fired from the film and effectively blacklisted by Hollywood for several years. He moved to New York, studied acting with Lee Strasberg and made a career in television shows, mostly Westerns, usually playing the part of brooding and misunderstood desperadoes, for which he seemed to be typecast. He also developed a serious reputation as a photographer, moving in New York art circles, photographing every contemporary artist of note, including Warhol, Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns, while at the same time assembling a modest collection of their works.
Hopper and Spector had been acquainted for two or three years. “We hit it off really well right from the beginning,” Hopper remembers. “Hanging out in Canter’s, chasing girls. Phil had been through some really bad trips—his father committing suicide; you don’t get rid of those things. And he’d been attacked, physically. You see all these rap guys running around with bodyguards nowadays—well, Phil Spector really needed bodyguards. There really were people after him. And when he put out ‘River Deep’ and they refused to play it, that was a disaster for Phil. They shot him down and Phil was really hurting after that.”
Hopper had been around Gold Star, chronicling the epic progress of the “River Deep—Mountain High” sessions (which he would remember with a haiku-like concision: “Long hours. A lot of big orchestras. Phil being a perfectionist. Ike doing nothing. It was fabulous”), and he would go on to shoot the cover photograph for the Ike and Tina Turner album of the same name. His primary ambition, however, was to direct films. With his friend Stewart Stern, the screenwriter for Rebel Without a Cause, he had come up with the idea for a film called The Last Movie, about a Hollywood film crew shooting a Western in a tiny Mexican village, and the chaos and confusion they leave in their wake. A parable of corrupted innocence, the film had been inspired by Hopper’s own experiences making the John Wayne film The Sons of Katie Elder in the Mexican town of Durango. Hopper had paid Stern to prepare a preliminary treatment by selling some of his paintings (Hopper had no cash). Jennifer Jones and Jason Robards expressed interest in starring. Enthused at the prospect of breaking into movies, Spector offered to produce the film and made an agreement with Stern to write the screenplay. He gave Hopper office space at Philles to work from, and began talking up his new career.
In June 1966—at the moment that “River Deep” was disappearing from the American charts—he gave an interview to Peter Bart of the New York Times, declaring that he had now “lost interest” in the record business, and was in need of “a new creative outlet.
“Art,” he mused, “is a game. If you win that game too regularly it tends to lessen your motivation,” adding that to carry on making records “would just be playing for public approval, not for what suits me.”
The Last Movie, he declared, would be in the tradition of the directors he most admired, Truffaut, Kubrick and Fellini.
Asked whether his lack of experience in film would be a hindrance, Spector declared that if anything it would be an advantage. “It’s helpful to come to something fresh. That’s why I want to make my next career in movies. I’m not fresh to records anymore.” Filming on The Last Movie, he said, would begin in September. He confidently predicted it would win first prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
While Hopper and Stern set to work on the project, flying down to Durango to scout locations, Spector moped in his mansion, unsure where to turn next. As a film producer, he was finding out, there wasn’t really that much to do. He invited Tony Hall, the Decca promotions man in London who had been so instrumental in the success of “Lovin’ Feelin’” and “River Deep,” to come and stay. Hall and his wife had never been to Los Angeles before. They were met at the airport by a Cadillac and driver and taken to Spector’s mansion. “It was extremely weird. Phil eventually appeared, greeted us and promptly disappeared again, saying he’d see us later. We waited, and eventually, at about three a.m., he came back and said, ‘I’ll show you the town.’ He insisted on driving—this tiny little figure in this huge Cadillac. He took us to some really sleazy hamburger joint—all very odd—then drove us back at around five a.m. We didn’t see him again for days. We hadn’t got a rental car, we were unable to go anywhere. It was like being in prison. Periodically he would poke his nose around the door and say hi, and on one occasion he drove us down to see Gold Star, because I’d asked to see it. But half the time—and I later discovered this from other people—he was hiding in one of the other rooms in the house.” After five days, thoroughly bemused, Hall and his wife cut short their visit and left.
Lynn Castle was another visitor. Castle had always harbored her own ambitions to be a singer and songwriter, but in the years since she and Spector had dated she had made her living as a hairdresser, the “hot scissors” for half of the Los Angeles rock fraternity, including Sonny and Cher and the Byrds. She was a close friend of Jack Nitzsche and Lee Hazlewood. In 1966, she recorded her own composition, “Rose Colored Corner,” along with a song called “The Lady Barber,” which Hazlewood produced and released on his LHI label. Castle was striking-looking, with luxuriant brunette hair that she wore in a twist, adorned with a rose; she wore miniskirts and knee-high boots. It was a look that Nancy Sinatra would adopt when she released her single “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” which Hazlewood wrote and produced.
Castle had not spoken to Spector in some five years, and was astonished one night to receive a telephone call completely out of the blue—“I was so happy to hear from him,” she remembers—in which Spector launched a tirade of abuse at her. Castle was deeply shocked, but rationalized the outburst as an extreme symptom of Spector’s old jealousies. “I think his feelings were hurt because I was such close friends with Jack and Lee. I said to him, ‘Why are you saying all this?’ It was so mean, and so sad. And I just hung up on him.”
A few months later Castle was out carousing with Jack Nitzsche. “Jack was drunk and it was: ‘Okay, what are we going to do tonight? Let’s go see Phil!’ So we were out there, howling behind that iron gate: ‘Phillip!’ And he opened up for us.”
It was the first time Castle had been inside the mansion. “And my God, talk about the
Little Prince…All that stone, all that huge emptiness, and this endless dining room table. And there was little Phillip—my God, he looked so lost. And I thought, Who would want this? What are you doing here? What is this big lonesome? I mean, do you like this? Because I would never want to be here. It’s too big, too cold, too lonesome. Is this just a thing about you’re strong and you’re powerful and you can live in a big frigging castle? Like, who gives a shit? Does that actually make you feel big about yourself? It was like somebody who feels so insecure and frightened inside. It made me so very sad.”
For a while after that, Castle and Spector would sometimes talk on the phone. “And I’d hear him on the other end of the line, he’d be hollering out, ‘Yeah, go and get that, bring that here.’ As if there was somebody else with him. But you’d never hear a voice answering him. Like, who are you talking to, Phillip? Who’s there…? And it felt like there was nobody there.” And then she stopped hearing from him altogether.
Spector’s devotion to his old friend Lenny Bruce was so intense that, according to Ronnie, he hung a blow-up poster of the comedian in the master bedroom. Spector, she would later complain, often fell asleep before she did, and she would lie awake with the image of the haggard, puffy-eyed Bruce staring down at her from the wall.
Spector regarded Bruce as his closest friend, “like a teacher or a philosopher…like a living Socrates.” But for all his good intentions, Spector’s attempts to resurrect his friend’s flagging career and spirits had come to nothing. Bruce had become increasingly lost to the world in a stupor of heroin and depression. In Spector’s words: “Lenny had a nail tied to his foot and was going around in circles.” He now passed his days poring over law books, fighting adversaries real and imagined. Occasionally he would turn up at Spector’s offices on Sunset Strip, bearing an armful of documents to be typed and photocopied by Spector’s obliging staff, and Spector continued uncomplainingly to put his hand in his pocket whenever Bruce needed anything. Dennis Hopper had known Bruce when the comedian was first starting out, long before he had attained national notoriety, when Hopper himself was working as a contract player at Warner Bros. “I went into this strip club. The regular comic had been taken sick. Lenny’s mother had been a stripper, and handled strippers, so Lenny got up and performed, and they yanked him off the stage—in a burlesque house—because he was just too dirty.” Hopper would often spend time with Bruce and Spector, in Canter’s or in the mansion. “Phil was wonderful with Lenny,” Hopper remembers. “He got very involved with helping him. But this was a side that people didn’t see. There was this idea that Phil was a monster, but the truth is he was the most generous, the kindest guy.”
In April 1966, Bruce was fined $260 and given a one-year suspended sentence and two years’ probation for a narcotics violation—possession of heroin—which had been hanging over him for more than three years. The sentence was a mere slap on the wrist—anybody else might have expected a jail term—but it did little to ease his paranoia and anxiety.
At the end of July, Spector telephoned Michael Spencer asking whether he would like to meet Bruce.
“I said I’d love to. Phillip said, ‘Well, Lenny’s strange: I’m going to have to call him,’ then he calls me back to verify it’s me and not the police who are harassing him. So about five minutes later Phil calls me back and says it’s okay.” Spector drove Spencer and a couple of friends to Bruce’s house in the Hollywood Hills. “So Lenny leads us into this little study, and there was yellow paper from legal pads strewn all over the floor. I picked up a piece of paper to see what it was. And it was one word in the middle. Pick up another piece of paper. One word. He was so disassociative at that time, so out of it, he would just write one word and throw it on the floor. That’s what he was doing at that time. He had a tape he wanted to play Phil of some routines he said he’d been working on. And he was spewing out venom so fast it was impossible to understand what he was saying on this tape. Phil stood there listening, and after about five minutes it became too oppressive. So we excused ourselves. As we were leaving, Phillip said, ‘I’m sorry, Lenny can be weird.’”
Four days later, on the evening of August 3, John Judnich, a friend of Bruce’s who was staying at his house, walked into the bathroom—Bruce’s favorite sanctuary—to find Bruce lying on the floor dead, his trousers around his ankles, a hypodermic syringe in his arm. Bruce had evidently been fixing while seated on the toilet and toppled forward. He had died of a morphine overdose. He was forty years old.
The moment Spector heard the news on the radio, he summoned Danny Davis and drove as fast as he could to Bruce’s house. The scene was crawling with police, reporters and television crews. Spector was horrified. His friend’s death had become a media circus. Pushing his way through the crowd he somehow managed to get into the house, where he began shouting at police “You killed him!”
Outside, Spector went from one photographer to the next, offering to buy up any pictures they might have taken of Bruce’s body, to spare his friend the final indignity of public exposure.
According to Davis, the next morning a police lieutenant arrived at Spector’s offices and presented Davis with a manila envelope. Inside was a sheaf of glossy 8 × 10 pictures—the official police shots of Bruce lying dead on the bathroom floor. “They could make one helluva album cover,” the policeman told Davis. “The price is five thousand dollars.” Davis immediately phoned Spector, who instructed him to buy them.
Bruce was buried two days later. Spector paid for his funeral, and delivered the eulogy at a memorial service held on August 21 at the Eden Memorial Park Cemetery in Mission Hills, where cemetery officials had tried to block the service after advertisements appeared urging mourners to bring box lunches and noisemakers.
Already depressed by the failure of “River Deep,” Spector went into a state of almost theatrical mourning for his friend, locking himself away in his study and playing Bruce’s recordings over and over again.
The Ronettes had been invited to tour with the Beatles. (The group would play their last ever concert on August 29 at Candlestick Park, San Francisco.) Ronnie was beside herself with excitement at the prospect of renewing her acquaintance with the group that had now become the most successful in the world. But Spector forbade her to join the tour, giving the excuse that he wanted her in Los Angeles to concentrate on more recording. Her cousin Elaine took her place. Spector made no move to take Ronnie into the studio, but in the autumn she rejoined the Ronettes for a tour of U.S. Army bases in Germany. By Ronnie’s account, whenever they booked into a hotel, a message would be waiting for her to call Spector, and they would talk deep into the night, Ronnie often falling asleep with the phone line open, awaking in the morning to his voice on the other end of the line. Ronnie thought it was impossibly romantic. Her sister Estelle told her it was Phil’s way of making sure she didn’t spend the night with anyone else.
The tour was to prove the Ronettes’ swan song. As a recording act they were clearly a spent force. Nedra had been seeing an English disc jockey named Scott Ross, and they now made plans to marry and have a family. Both would shortly become born-again Christians, and Ross would train for the ministry. Estelle was also in a relationship, with the Ronettes’ tour manager, Joe Dong. And Spector, it was clear, had no interest in attempting to revive the group’s fortunes as a recording act. By Christmas 1966 the Ronettes were no more. Only Ronnie remained, freed from the encumbrance of her sister and cousin, confident that Spector would now concentrate his attentions on making her what she had always dreamed of being—a solo star.
In January 1967, apparently at a loss to know what to do next, Spector stirred himself to go into the studio once more to record Tina Turner, calling on his old allies Jack Nitzsche and Larry Levine. “I’ll Never Need More Than This” was one of the songs left over from his writing sessions with Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich a year earlier. Where the melody of “River Deep” had been as complicated as algebra, this had a hook that recalled the glorious simpl
icity of Barry and Greenwich at their best. But the production was overblown, gusty with echo (Turner sounded as if she were singing from the far end of the Grand Canyon), almost a parody of the titanic excesses of “River Deep.” “We were trying to copy a sound, which turned me off a little bit because we weren’t going on to something new,” Larry Levine would recall. “We were coming back to what we’d done.”
The record was never released.
Within a year, the music business had changed beyond all recognition. The Wall of Sound was obsolete; girl groups, a thing of distant history. There was no place for Phil Spector. His muse—anger, frustrated genius, revenge, the need to prove himself—had fled. Spector would make no more records in 1967; the closest he came to Gold Star was a large picture that he acquired from the Beat artist Wallace Berman, to whom Spector had been introduced by Dennis Hopper—a collage of Spector himself standing behind the control board of Studio A, with his arms outstretched, like an Old Testament prophet. The picture took pride of place in the living room of the mansion.
With no product to work, Danny Davis grew bored and distracted. “I was getting $800 a week, but I’d go into the office every morning and there’d be nothing to promote, no records,” Davis later recalled. “Instead there’d be a list on my desk, from Phil, of maybe fifteen things to do that morning.
1) Call the garage to have my mother’s car serviced.
2) Call Minnesota Fats and see if he wants to shoot pool at my home this weekend.
3) Call Shelby and see if they can get four new tires for my car, etc., etc.
“Never anything to do with records.”