by Mick Brown
When Seider contacted Marty Machat, Machat told him that it was Spector, not Capitol, who had paid for the recording sessions, and therefore owned the tapes. Seider suspected that Machat was attempting to broker the recordings to Warner Bros. as a sweetener for Spector’s new deal with the company. “Marty told me ‘We’ll be able to make a deal with EMI and Capitol,’ or words to that effect,” Seider remembers. “Because that was basically how Marty operated. He didn’t push the envelope—he split the envelope, he opened it up, he burst it open. He was calculating that to avoid problems most companies will do whatever the artist wants, and that if you faced them down they’d capitulate. But I said, ‘Marty, you’re wasting your time, because as long as I am in the picture, I am going to tell John Lennon, and the answer is no, he is not going to allow this thing to take place.’”
In the end, it was left to Bob Mercer, the managing director of EMI in London, to recover the tapes some months later. Mercer had not been party to the original negotiations over the record, and the first he learned of a problem was when his accounts department told him they had received a bill from Warner Bros. for £90,000 for recordings with John Lennon. Spector, it seemed, had been charging the recording costs to Warner under his new contract with the company.
Mercer now took charge of retrieving the tapes, and eventually managed to track down Spector and make an arrangement for them to be collected from an office on Sunset Boulevard. Mercer contacted a colleague, Chan Daniels at the AR department at Capitol, EMI’s sister label. Daniels had once been in a group called the Highwaymen, who enjoyed a hit with “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” “Chan went down to the office on Sunset,” Mercer recalls, “and about ninety minutes later I got a call from him, quite definitely hyperventilating. He had gone over and presented himself at reception. The receptionist said he was expected and Phil would be out in a minute. She buzzed Phil, and Phil came out with an axe. Chan ran down twelve flights of stairs. In the end I had to send in a U.S. marshal to get the tapes.”
The John Lennon album Rock ’n’ Roll was eventually released in 1975, comprising five of the tracks produced by Spector and a further eight recorded by Lennon in New York. It was quickly forgotten.
At around the same time, the chapter of Spector’s marriage to Ronnie was closed with a final settlement. Ronnie was awarded $50,000 in community property and $2,500 monthly spousal support for three years. In return she was obliged to disclaim any interest in any of Spector’s business interests, as well as any interest in the three trusts. Spector was awarded custody of Donte, Gary and Louis.
On the back of each alimony check Spector would stamp a short expression of his enduring feelings for her, that Ronnie would be obliged to sign over or under when presenting the check to a cashier. The message was just two words: “Fuck off.”
20
“Let’s Take Five”
The chaotic tribulations of the John Lennon sessions had the effect of bringing the Kessel brothers, Dan and David, even more into Spector’s life. Before long, “Barney’s kids” had become his favorite hangout buddies, the sorcerer’s apprentices and protégés—the sons that Spector’s own adopted children would never be.
The Kessels were chalk and cheese: Dan was quiet, measured, pensive; David, three years younger, was a fiery extrovert and a martial arts enthusiast. The brothers had enjoyed the benefit of an eventful Hollywood upbringing. Barney Kessel and the boys’ artist mother Gail had divorced when the boys were young, and for a while Gail went out with the Hollywood actor Lawrence Tierney, “a two-fisted, macho kind of guy,” Dan remembers, who would occasionally take the boys on his lunchtime drinking excursions around Irish bars, often culminating in a brawl in which Tierney would see off all-comers. Barney’s second wife, B. J. Baker, was one of Los Angeles’s premier session singers (Hal Blaine called her “Diamond Lil”), and the brothers would often sit in on her sessions for the likes of Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, and Spector.
The first time Spector invited the brothers up to his house he greeted them wearing a .38-caliber pistol in a shoulder holster. “He asked David and I if we wanted to wear guns, too,” Dan remembers. “I said, ‘Well, I can wear a gun or not, it doesn’t matter.’ So then he asked if we wanted to do some target practice. We said ‘Sure,’ so we went into the backyard, and he had some old 45s that he’d set up on a tree off in the distance—they were records he didn’t like—and we shot them to smithereens. He was as impressed with our marksmanship as we were with his.”
Spector was a huge fan of The Godfather (Al Pacino was one of his favorite actors: “Don’t you think he’s handsome?” he’d ask friends), and that night he entertained the Kessels for dinner, ordering in Italian food and, shoulder holster in place, putting on his Marlon Brando routine—“Come…eat at my table.” The evening passed trading scenes from the film—the fish wrapped in newspaper, the horse’s head in the bed…
The Kessels were unfazed by Spector’s enthusiasm for guns. For Dan Kessel it was “completely understandable” why Spector would wear a gun. “It’s for protection. It’s an insurance policy. But I never saw Phil do anything unsafe with a gun.”
But for Spector, wearing a gun seemed to be more than just “an insurance policy.” A gun gave him swagger, authority, machismo. It assuaged his insecurities, and made him feel he was somebody. Sometimes he would put in a call to Mo Ostin or Joe Smith at Warner, and turn on the speakerphone so the Kessels could listen in. To Dan Kessel it was “exhilarating to see him packing heat and talking to these top record executives, like he was Jimmy Cagney or Humphrey Bogart. He was tough with these guys and they were being nice to him. I was impressed.”
To David, Spector was “the epitome of the American pop-music hero; the epitome of achievement in the United States; the epitome of coming from humble beginnings, delivering the goods and becoming great.” Phil, David thought, “is a self-made man of the highest order.”
The Kessels were trying to make their own way as artists and producers, and they regarded Spector as a model and a mentor. David had studied law with a view to being a music business attorney, “but plugging back in with Phil on this level it was like, Forget all that stuff; this is what I want to do.” Spector would tell them, “I’m all the industry you need.” And for the two brothers just being around him was like a master class in music history and the record business.
Spector had a jukebox loaded with vintage rock and roll and RB—“My True Love” by Jack Scott; the Fireflies’ “You Were Mine” the Drifters, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Jessie Hill, the Olympics—and he would sit for hours with the Kessels, pointing out the finer parts of the songs, telling stories about where and how they were made.
“We’d discuss things like, what’s your favorite Johnny Cash song,” David remembers, “or the difference between Roy Orbison’s recordings on Sun and Monument. You talk about rock and roll, R and B, classical or jazz—all of it—and Phil was totally there. We’d try to out-encyclopedia each other: who was conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1932? Is there such a word as ‘irregardless’ in the English language? We only went home to sleep five hours a day.”
Dan Kessel remembers an occasion when the brothers tagged along with Spector to visit a woman friend at the Hotel Bel-Air. “David, Phil and I started getting into ‘Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?’ When Phil was in a good mood, he loved to do Ahmet Ertegun and Wolfman Jack imitations. He was spoofing on Wolfman Jack, ‘And that was Buster Brown…We havin’ us a good time; ain’t we havin’ us a good time?’ And the girl said, ‘Yeah, we’re having a good time!’ And Phil spun round, and gestured to David and me and said, ‘No, we’re havin’ a good time.’ He wasn’t being cruel, but it was funny.”
The Kessels, remembers one friend, “were like Phil’s kids.” He called them “Danny” and “Davey.” He liked them to dress uniformly in dark suits and black shirts. When they went out they flanked him “like bookends.” Along with George Brand, he would take them to res
taurants, parties and boxing matches. Spector was a big fight fan, and would often attend live bouts at the Forum and big-screen live broadcasts. Dan Kessel remembers he and his brother joining Spector to watch the “Rumble in the Jungle” fight in 1974 between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, which was shown at a theater in Beverly Hills. Spector had placed a substantial bet on Ali with a bookmaker in Nevada. Shortly after the fight, he took receipt of two suitcases loaded with $2 million in cash. When Kessel remarked, “That’s a nice chunk of change,” Spector replied, “Now I can afford everything on my chili dog at Pink’s.” Sometimes Spector would boost his entourage with his friend and sometime bodyguard Mike Stone, a martial arts expert who had been a pupil of Bruce Lee, and who himself worked as instructor to many Hollywood celebrities. Stone’s most famous client was Elvis Presley, and he would later become the karate instructor to Presley’s wife, Priscilla. Their affair would be one of the factors in the Presleys’ divorce. Spector took the Kessels to Las Vegas to see Elvis Presley performing at the Hilton International, calling on him in his dressing room after the show. (Stone wisely declined to join them on the trip.) “There was just Dave, me, George and Phil,” Dan remembers. “Elvis had the full Memphis mafia. It was very intense—the full Phil trip, and the full Elvis trip. They knew who each other were. They were like two panthers checking each other out. You could tell—mutual respect. It was definitely one of those moments.”
To Dan Kessel, Spector was “fundamentally just too rock and roll for some people, including most so-called rock and rollers. Some people just don’t get Phil. They don’t know when he’s being funny, or being playful. They can’t keep up with his energy, his mind, his personality. So they say, ‘Oh, this guy’s crazy.’ I never once thought that.”
Behavior that others might have regarded as crazy, reckless, irresponsible, the Kessels simply regarded as “Phil pushing the envelope.” “He liked that we were pretty fearless,” says Dan. “Whether it involved the possibility of violence with armed gangs in different ethnic neighborhoods, or being able to drive over one hundred miles an hour around the Hollywood Ranch Market and on through the narrow alley behind Gold Star at four a.m. We never lost our cool, regardless of what was happening. To David and me it was all a giggle.” Over the next seven years they would play on all of Spector’s sessions, help him with preproduction, be privy to his business deals and be his most constant companions. Spector dubbed them “the Three Musketeers.”
On April 11, 1974, Rolling Stone magazine ran a story headlined “Phil Spector in Mystery Mishap,” stating that Spector had been involved in a serious car accident “on or about February 10, somewhere between Los Angeles and Phoenix.” Spector, it was reported, had suffered multiple head and body injuries and burns and had undergone surgery. No other details were available. “The complete shroud of mystery—rare in the music business but common with Spector—has prompted some cynical speculation that there may not have been an accident after all, that Spector merely wanted to get away from it all, or that he’s having cosmetic surgery, possibly a hair transplant.” A “friend” of Spector, Pauline Elliot [actually his former personal assistant], was quoted as rejecting that suggestion as “silly. He has plenty of hair, all his own.”
The report was an intriguing compound of fact and myth. Spector had not been involved in a car crash driving between Los Angeles and Phoenix. Nor was he having cosmetic surgery or a hair transplant.
Speculation raged that Spector, seemingly apprehensive about his new deal with Warner Bros., and the farrago over the John Lennon tapes, had spread the story of the accident to buy himself some time.
In fact, Spector had been involved in a car crash, which almost killed him. Driving his Rolls-Royce along Melrose Avenue in Hollywood late one night, he was involved in a head-on collision with another vehicle. Spector was catapulted through the windshield. He was rushed to the hospital and required extensive plastic surgery for facial injuries. He would be picking tiny shards of glass out of his face for years to come.
When finally he re-emerged in public he was sporting a collar-length shock of gray frizzy hair. “I said, ‘What’s with the gray hair?’” David Kessel remembers. “And he said, ‘I want people to think I aged ten years in the accident.’ A few days later, he dyed it gold. He had the gold hair and he’d started wearing a cape. Then he started wearing a cross. He said, ‘I need it to protect myself.’ I guess he felt bad after the accident. But he was just doing it to be ridiculous.
“He also told people he’d lost his hearing in one ear—which he hadn’t. He said, ‘If you really want to have fun, get on this side of me which everybody thinks is deaf now and listen to what they say about me. And if you hear anything interesting, let me know.’”
By the spring, Spector was finally ready to begin fulfilling his contractual obligations to Warner Bros. It was indicative of his state of mind, and his uncertainty, that for his first production he should turn to the past. Cher had come a long way since the days when Larry Levine would move her to the back of the crowd of session singers gathered around the mikes at Gold Star to prevent her voice drowning out everybody else. After “I Got You Babe,” she had enjoyed hit records under her own name, and she and Sonny Bono had gone on to become America’s favorite television couple with their own variety show The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. But now the couple was mired in an acrimonious divorce, and Cher had signed a solo contract with Warner Bros.
The first song to come from her sessions with Spector was “A Woman’s Story,” a song written by Spector with his friend Nino Tempo and Tempo’s sister April Stevens; a dark lamentation in which a prostitute looks back over a life in which she’s “seen every room with a bed inside it.” Spector filled Gold Star with a cast of musicians that exceeded even the heydays of the ’60s—no fewer than nine guitarists and four keyboard players, along with brass and half a dozen percussionists, marshalling them to produce a funereal backbeat over which Cher intoned with a lugubrious fatalism.
The next song, a reworking of the Ronettes’ “Baby, I Love You,” was an even more telling indication of Spector’s mood. That he should have chosen to revisit one of his greatest hits was a sure sign of how much he was now looking over his shoulder; that he should have stripped the song of all its original joyfulness and exuberance, rendering it as a plodding dirge, seemed almost willfully perverse.
But to David Kessel, that seemed to be precisely the point. “Phil loves the fact that he’d achieved, but what he always hated was everyone’s waiting for him to slip on a record. It was as if he’d trapped himself by being so brilliant. He wasn’t allowed to just go in the studio and make a record. He’d say, ‘Why can’t I just make a record like anybody else, and you either like it or you don’t?’ And I think at the Cher point he’d kind of given that up and decided he was just going to make the records he wanted to make.”
Toward the end of the sessions, proceedings were enlivened by the arrival in the studio of David Geffen. The callow teenager who had once loitered around Gold Star, watching Spector in awe and amazement and dreaming of one day following in his footsteps, was now a major player in his own right. Geffen had swiftly progressed up the ladder from being an agent at William Morris, to managing artists—Crosby, Stills and Nash and Joni Mitchell among them—to founding his own record label, Asylum, in the process shaping the “soft-rock,” singer-songwriter genre that now dominated the American charts. In the course of Cher’s traumatic breakup with Sonny Bono, Geffen had become her lover, confidant and de facto manager. Spector had always regarded him as an irritant, believing that Geffen’s early hero worship was just a way of getting close, to see what he could learn. Geffen, for his part, had never forgotten the slight of being told to “sit with the chauffeur” all those years ago. His first client as a manager was the rarefied Laura Nyro, whose music combined a deep affection for ’60s girl group RB with performances of operatic intensity. Spector was much taken by Nyro and approached Geffen, wanting to produce her, but Geffen turned
him down. When Geffen moved into the old Philles offices on the Sunset Strip it reaffirmed Spector’s feeling that Geffen was trying to walk in his shoes. And as Geffen’s power and standing in the record industry grew, and Spector’s waned, so the old animosity grew more intense.
“Phil hated the fact that David was so powerful, because David had no musical talent whatsoever,” says Geffen’s brother Mitchell. “David can’t even sing in key; his genius was to take the most heavyweight creative people in the whole world and convince them that he was important to them. And that must have galled Phil to the very end, that David was the king in a business where Phil was the real genius on the music side. Here’s this little pischer come along and he’s the richest man in Hollywood. It’s gotta hurt.”
Now, as the Cher session wore on, Geffen committed the cardinal sin of making comments and suggestions about what Spector should be doing in the studio. Without warning, Spector suddenly turned from the recording console and punched Geffen, knocking him to the ground, and screaming “Get out of here, you fucking faggot.” “Everybody was astonished,” David Kessel remembers. “And Cher just said, ‘Oh Phillip, behave yourself.’ And he went back to work. But that’s Phil’s thing. ‘Don’t tell me what to do; don’t tell me how to make a record. Just don’t.’”
Spector had intended to produce a complete album with Cher, but the sessions would provide only one more song, a duet with Harry Nilsson on another familiar song, “A Love Like Yours.” In the years since writing the ill-fated Modern Folk Quartet song “This Could Be the Night,” Nilsson had gone on to enjoy phenomenal success both as a writer and performer with a series of highly regarded albums, providing hits such as “Everybody’s Talking” and “Without You.” He was now busy squandering his talents on drink and drugs. He arrived at Gold Star carrying his own case of wine, prompting David Kessel to tease, “You’re gonna stay for fifteen minutes?” and spent the session methodically working his way through his supply and snorting coke. “Even Phil told him he was drinking too much,” Kessel remembers.