Tearing Down the Wall of Sound

by Mick Brown

  To look after their affairs, they turned to Klein’s former right-hand man, a lawyer named Harold Seider, who had resigned as chief counsel of Klein’s company ABKCO in 1971 and moved to California. Seider flew to New York and met the Lennons at the Bank Street apartment. Seider was shocked at the Lennons’ living conditions. “Talk about an embarrassment; it was in a cellar, two or three rooms, and in the back room no windows, nothing.” Lennon had shaved his head, and looked, Seider remembers, “like something that had come out of a German concentration camp.” Seider immediately found the Lennons new lodgings, in the Dakota apartment building on Central Park West.

  May Pang, a twenty-three-year-old Chinese-American, had once worked for Allen Klein, before becoming the personal assistant to Lennon and Ono. Her duties included assisting Ono on her art films Fly and Up Your Legs—“The idea was 365 legs for peace, like her bottoms thing. I’d be calling up people like Andy Warhol and Jacqueline Onassis, saying, ‘Hi, I’m from John and Yoko; we’d like to shoot you from your toes to your thighs.’”

  By the summer of 1973, according to Pang, Lennon’s indolence had reached a stage of virtual paralysis—“He really felt he couldn’t do it anymore”—and relations with Yoko were now at the breaking point. “It was awful. The two of them…it was hammer and tongs, chalk and cheese, whatever you want. It was just not there. I would be in the office; John would come in, talk to me; a minute later Yoko would walk in and say, ‘Where’s John?’ I’d say, ‘Didn’t you just see him?’ That’s how estranged they’d become.”

  In August 1973 Yoko approached May with an unusual request. She and John were not getting along, Yoko told her young assistant, and it was likely that before too long he would start seeing other women. Better, in that case, Yoko suggested, that John should have an affair with May. “I know you’d treat him right, so go out with him.” May was taken aback. Her relationship with Lennon was strictly professional; she liked him, but it had never occurred to her that she would like to have an affair with him. Lennon was apparently equally taken aback by Yoko’s scheme. “He told me he was shaving when Yoko said, ‘I’ve fixed it for you to go out with May,’” she remembers. “He said, ‘I almost slit my throat.’ He didn’t ask for it, and he didn’t expect it. But Yoko was pushing for it, and he finally said, ‘I’m tired of being miserable. If she says go for it, I’m going to go for it.’”

  Duly authorized, May and Lennon began a tentative affair. In the first week of September, Yoko left town for a feminist conference. Harold Seider was leaving for Los Angeles; without telling Yoko, Lennon and May left with him. They moved into Harold Seider’s apartment, until the producer Lou Adler offered to lend them his Bel Air home. (Adler and his girlfriend, the actress Britt Ekland, moved out to his beach house in Malibu.) Lennon, paranoid about his separation from Yoko becoming public, introduced May to everybody as “my nurse.”

  In the meantime, Harold Seider had been poring over the former Beatle’s accounts, and now delivered some bad news. Lennon’s earnings from the Beatles had been frozen in the ongoing court case over the dissolution of the group. He had been living on a £5,000-a-month stipend from the receiver, plus money borrowed from Allen Klein. And now, Seider informed him, Yoko had demanded $300,000 “security” money in his absence. The former Beatle was effectively broke. He was also facing another problem—a lawsuit from the music publisher and boss of Roulette Records, Morris Levy, alleging that Lennon had plagiarized his song “Come Together” from Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me.” Looking for a quick solution, Seider persuaded Lennon’s label, Capitol, to trump up an advance of $10,000 for Lennon to record an album of rock and roll standards, and as a way of settling the action with Levy negotiated a deal whereby Lennon would include a number of songs controlled by Levy on the album, theoretically guaranteeing him a royalty windfall.

  Lennon now contacted Spector to see if he would produce the album.

  “John told him, ‘I want to do an album of the songs I love,’” Pang says. “He said, ‘I just want to be the singer in a band; I don’t even want to produce.’ And Phil was like, ‘You’re giving me the whole thing?’ Because that had never been. It had always been co-productions before. John said, ‘Yup, I just want to be a singer in the band.’ And we were all thinking, this is trouble.”

  Spector would arrive each night at the Adler house for rehearsals. He had developed a fleeting enthusiasm for amyl nitrate “poppers,” which gave a short and euphoric rush, but left his clothes, May remembers, smelling of “old socks.” He would often be wearing a holster, “sometimes one on either side, under his arm. He’d be waving these guns around, and John and I would look at each other thinking, Can this be? Surely George, his bodyguard, wouldn’t let him have real bullets in them.”

  Working on Lennon’s albums in Britain, Spector had been on foreign soil. Now he was on his turf, doing things his way, and he started to put the call out for musicians to play on the sessions. Lennon had requested that they use the drummer Jim Keltner and the session guitarist Jesse Ed Davis; in keeping with the “back to the roots” nature of the project, he expected to be working with a small group of musicians. When he and May Pang arrived for the first session at AM Studios, they were astonished to find a seemingly endless procession of illustrious session players filing into the studio, among them Hal Blaine, the guitarists Steve Cropper and Larry Carlton, and keyboardists Leon Russell and Barry Mann. “So many,” Pang remembers, “they were trying to figure out where they could all sit.”

  Spector arrived customarily late, accompanied by George Brand, and proceeded to spend the next four hours painstakingly testing sound levels and mike placement and laying down the backing track. Finally, at three in the morning, Spector declared he was ready to do the vocal. With May sitting beside him, Lennon completed his takes within half an hour.

  Among the troupe of musicians Spector had invited to the sessions were Dan and David Kessel, the sons of the guitarist Barney Kessel. Both in their early twenties, Spector had known them since infancy, from the times when Barney would bring them along to Gold Star sessions (Dan had played percussion on a Crystals session when he was eleven), and had always held a special fondness for the two brothers. They were like family. When Spector was in London, working with Lennon and Harrison, he had sent the boys postcards and souvenirs that he knew they’d get a thrill out of—Apple wristwatches, notes written on the Beatles’ stationery. Both played guitar, and Dan also played drums. On the first night of the Lennon session, Jim Keltner was late arriving. “Phil was running the song down, getting an initial balance, so I volunteered to play the drums,” Dan Kessel remembers. “He said, ‘Okay, let Hal play the fills; you just keep the time.’ So I go out there, sticks up. The other musicians were wondering who I was and what was going on. And Phil said, ‘Wait a minute; this is Barney Kessel’s son; and if Barney Kessel’s son says he can play the drums, he can play the drums.’” After a while Keltner turned up and took his place behind the drums. But at the end of the session Spector invited the brothers back the following evening. “He said, ‘And bring your instruments,’” Dave remembers. “We said, ‘Okay.’ And then he said, ‘You do play, don’t you?’”

  On the second night, Spector arrived at the studio dressed as a surgeon, in a white lab coat, with a stethoscope hanging around his neck—his pun on Lennon’s nom de plume of Dr. Winston O’Boogie. As he followed his customarily painstaking preparations, Lennon grew increasingly restive.

  Spector had developed a fondness for a new tipple, Manischewitz, a sickly sweet wine used in Jewish rituals such as Seder (the high sugar content made it potentially disastrous for Spector, a borderline diabetic). He was now drinking Manischewitz “slowly, but steadily,” Dan Kessel remembers, while Lennon was swigging vodka straight out of the bottle. “Anybody, at a certain point, you’ve had too much, but Phil was holding it better. The production was like this huge behemoth moving very, very slowly—John was waiting and waiting—and finally he cracked. He said, ‘W
hen are you going to get to me, Phil?’ And Phil said, ‘I’ll get to you, John…’ And John was like, ‘You’ll get to me! You’ll get to me!’ taking it as an insult, as if to say, ‘You may be the great Phil Spector, but I’m the great John Lennon, don’t talk to me like that.’ And really there was no insult intended. It was just two people who’d been drinking a lot. So it all got a little testy.”

  The argument was a portent of things to come. Over the next few weeks, the booze flowed and the mood grew increasingly sour.

  Tony King, who as a young promo man working for Decca had been responsible for looking after Spector on his first visit to London in 1964, was now working for Apple, and arrived in Los Angeles with the unenviable job of keeping an eye on Lennon. King was shocked at the change that had come over Spector in the years since he had last seen him. The charming, funny and thoughtful man who’d led the Ronettes singing in the Strand Palace Hotel, who’d sent King sweaters as a gift of thanks, had vanished. “He’d lost that boyish, mischievous personality that I first encountered. There was this slightly wild side to him, that made you feel you had to be careful.”

  King sensed that Spector was “suffering from having been big, and no longer being as big as he was, but still wanting everybody to think he was. So there was all this grandiose posturing going on—very L.A. Very Phil-insecure—a lot of challenging remarks, putdowns, which I found very uncomfortable to be around.”

  King was staying with an old friend, the English songwriter and musician Mike Hazelwood, whom Lennon had invited to play guitar on some of the sessions. King made a point of keeping away from the studio, but he began to suspect something was amiss one evening when he noticed Hazelwood packing a bottle of vodka into his guitar case, like a gunman packing his piece before a showdown. “I said, ‘What’s that for, Mike?’ And he said, ‘These are pretty wild sessions; they get pretty out there.’”

  Elton John came to town, and one night King took him to visit the studio. “We went in and Phil was running around, spieling like a madman. John was trying to keep the situation under control, because by this stage Phil was the mad one and John didn’t want Elton to think there were two madmen there. Elton was looking at me, kind of ‘Is this okay?’ We stayed for a respectable amount of time, and when we left Elton looked at me and said, ‘Is it always like that?’ We were both glad to get out.”

  In an attempt to lighten the mood, Spector took to turning up at the sessions in an assortment of fancy dress. The doctor’s outfit was followed by a priest’s cassock and then the dark glasses and white cane of a blind man. One evening he surprised everyone by walking into the crowded studio with an accordion strapped over his shoulders, playing a wistful and note-perfect version of Al Jolson’s “The Anniversary Song”—a staple of Jewish weddings—concluding to a thunderous burst of applause.

  Paulette Brandt, Spector’s personal assistant, had a friend who happened to be dating Chuck Berry, one of Lennon’s heroes. As a surprise treat, Paulette arranged for Berry to come to Spector’s home to meet Lennon. But Spector insisted on playing his music so loudly that nobody could talk, and after a cursory exchange of pleasantries, Berry left.

  The interlude did nothing to ease the mounting tension between Spector and Lennon. “Phil wanted control,” May Pang says. “That’s basically what it came down to. And he kept holding John at bay—like, It’s my show, not yours. It was an ego trip. Fucking with John’s head. It was unbearable, because I could see the pain in John from this.” One night, Spector arranged to meet at Gold Star to do some vocal overdubs. Lennon arrived, only to pass the evening with Gold Star’s boss Stan Ross, waiting in vain for Spector to turn up. “We kept phoning saying, ‘Where are you?’” Ross remembers. “And Phil’d say, ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’ And an hour later it’d be the same thing—‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’ At the end of the evening I said to John, ‘It’s been a pleasure and I’m sorry we couldn’t do anything.’ He said, ‘He’s a prick.’ Next day I called Phil and asked him, ‘What happened?’ He said, ‘Oh, I had problems and couldn’t leave.’ So tell us! But that would be too simple for Phil.”

  At one stage in the evening, Lennon had a heated telephone exchange with Yoko back in New York and smashed the receiver against the mixing board, causing some minor damage. Spector later offered to pay Ross for the repair, but Ross decided to keep the desk in its damaged state, “as a souvenir.”

  On another night, Lennon became so drunk that Spector was obliged to abandon the session altogether. With George Brand’s help, he bundled Lennon into a car to take him back to Lou Adler’s house.

  “They got John upstairs into the bedroom,” May remembers. “John was going, ‘Come on, Phil, I love you’—in a drunken, melancholy way. And George was sitting on top of him. In John’s mind, I think he thought he was getting into some kind of three-way sex situation. He couldn’t tell what was happening. So he freaked out. They brought me upstairs and I was in shock to see that they’d tied John up. He was screaming at me. ‘This is it!’ I said. ‘What did you guys do?’ They said, ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be okay, just let him sleep it off.’

  “Phil and George left, with John upstairs screaming every awful thing you could imagine. Everything he wanted to say about Yoko was just coming out. It was just anger at everybody, Phil, Yoko, everybody.”

  In desperation, May summoned Tony King to help. By the time King arrived, Lennon had broken free of his ties and was standing at the front door, bellowing, King remembers, “like a mad bull. I got him in the house and he was a mess, sobbing, saying, ‘Why did they do it, how could they do that?’ Then all of a sudden he started fighting me. We were rolling around on the floor. Finally I got him where I was laying on top of him with his arms pushed out to the side, my face six inches away from his, and he was in some kind of blackout. He looked up and saw my face, and he said, ‘I didn’t know you were that strong, dear…’ We both ended up laughing. And that broke it. The house was just a wreck; windows broken, Carole King’s gold records were all over the floor, bent out of shape; Lou’s collection of silver-handled walking sticks were scattered everywhere. The next day we went off to breakfast, and John just kind of laughed it off. He said, ‘Well, that was a funny night, wasn’t it.’ I thought, All right for you to say—I’ve got to repair the bloody house.”

  That night, Spector arrived at the studio wearing makeup, to cover the black eye Lennon had given him in the struggle.

  In November, the sessions were evicted from AM after Jerry Moss, the head of the company, received reports that Spector had been waving a pistol around. The circus moved to another studio, the Record Plant.

  It was there that Spector discharged a gun into the ceiling. “We were doing ‘You Can’t Catch Me,’” May Pang remembers. “Mal Evans [the Beatles’ former roadie] was around, and I remember Phil’s mother was in the control room. A very nice, well-dressed lady. And suddenly there was this pop! Everybody went, ‘What’s that?’ and crouched down—including his mother. I went for the door, and in the anteroom outside, Phil was holding a gun and Mal was reaching over saying ‘Give me that.’ John was cowering with his hands over his ears. He was saying, ‘Phil, if you’re going to shoot me, shoot me; but don’t fuck with me ears, I need them to listen with.’ They’d been playing around and Phil kept hitting Mal with his hand, and he’d hurt his nose. Mal had complained, and Phil being Phil—‘Oh yeah? I’m going to show you’—had pulled out the gun, and as he pulled it out, it went off. My thought was, Did he always have the safety off? The next day John and I were having dinner and Mal came by and said, ‘Here’s the bullet from last night.’ What bullet? Because all this time John and I thought they were blanks…”

  In December, Ronnie returned from New York for a court appearance as part of her ongoing divorce proceedings from Spector. In a display of solidarity, Lennon and May accompanied Spector to court, along with Spector’s old friend and bodyguard Emil Farkas. Farkas had not seen Spector in more than four years. “He called
me out of the blue,” Farkas remembers. “He was frantic. He had to go to court and he wanted someone to be with him, so I went. I felt sorry for him. He ranted and raved. He was so crazy, the judge said, ‘Mr. Spector, if you don’t shut up, you’re going to jail.’ Phil had this big-time lawyer with him. He went up to the judge and said, ‘You have to understand Mr. Spector is a genius in his own way, and you sometimes have to overlook things because of that.’ The judge said, ‘Well, tell your genius to cool it.’” Embarrassed, Lennon and May walked out. It was the death knell for the rock and roll album.

  A few days later, Lennon reportedly received a call from Spector saying the sessions for the album would have to be canceled; the studio had burned down. Alarmed, Lennon phoned the studio, to be told that nothing had happened at all. A week later, Spector allegedly called again, telling Lennon, “I got the John Dean tapes!” When Lennon asked what he was talking about, Spector replied that the “house was surrounded by helicopters. They’re trying to get them!” The penny dropped: what Spector was telling him, Lennon surmised, was that he had the tapes of the rock and roll sessions, and would not be handing them over.

  Lennon and May Pang left for New York, leaving Harold Seider to settle the matter of the tapes.