Tearing Down the Wall of Sound

by Mick Brown

  Spector seemed to be drifting. Attempting to capitalize on the current fad for disco (well, everybody else was), he made two new signings: a group called Calhoon and a New York singer named Jerri Bo Keno. He was so uninterested in Calhoon that he passed the production duties to the engineer Walt Kahn, who produced two singles that quickly vanished. Spector produced Jerri Bo Keno himself on a song prophetically entitled “Here It Comes (and Here I Go),” which he had co-written with Jeff Barry, but had no more luck.

  When he decided once more to conjure some of his former glory by recording Darlene Love, nobody was more surprised than Love herself. Love had never quite got over her bitterness toward Spector and the feeling that she had been hung out to dry. After leaving Philles she had worked as a backing singer with numerous artists, including Elvis Presley and Tom Jones, all the time dreaming of being able to resurrect her own solo career. Her break finally arrived in 1973, when she signed with Philadelphia International, which had supplanted Motown as the most energetic force in black music in America with acts like the O’Jays, Billy Paul, and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. Eager to get into the studio, Love was shocked when the label’s owners Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff one day announced that they had decided to invoke a clause enabling them to sell her contract to whomever they chose. It had been bought by Phil Spector. (Love would subsequently learn that the “agent provocateur” in the deal was Marty Machat, who was also Gamble and Huff’s lawyer.)

  At the end of 1974, a disgruntled Love presented herself in Los Angeles, where Spector played her the demo of a new song written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil—a paean to feminism entitled “Lord, If You’re a Woman.” Love thought it was “tripe.” In the studio, all the old resentments bubbled to the surface. No matter how acute their differences, Spector, she believed, had always respected her talent; but now, she would later write, he treated her “like a slave,” ordering endless retakes, seemingly just for the fun of it. Yet the tension seemed to inspire her performance. Out of her frustration and resentment, Love conjured a vocal of coruscating power, to match Spector’s driving, tumultuous production. The record was a glorious reminder that of all the singers Spector ever worked with, none had better served his vision than Darlene Love. But the relationship was too combustible to last. Love walked out on Spector at the end of the session, and would never work with him again, and it would be another three years before “Lord, If You’re a Woman” even saw a release.

  After almost twenty years living in the Hayworth Street home where Spector grew up, Bertha moved to a larger apartment a few blocks away on Sweetzer Avenue. She kept one bedroom for her son, reproducing it almost exactly as it had been when he had last lived at home, including the collection of old records that he had left behind, and that Phil insisted were filed in exactly the same order.

  To David Kessel, the more time he spent with Spector, the more apparent it became just how much his life had been shaped by his tempestuous family relationships, and how much his music had been born from paradox. Only an incurable romantic could have made the records that Spector did in the early ’60s with the Ronettes, the Crystals and the Righteous Brothers—shards of passion, brilliance and light, idealized visions of a happiness all the more poignant because it seemed that Spector could never attain it himself. He was the small child looking through the railings at a garden where the blossoms seem all the brighter and more sweetly scented because he was unable to pick them himself. The chaos and misery of his childhood had left a deep legacy, not of scars but of open wounds. If Spector’s records were perfect expressions of love, as David Kessel observed, their driving force was actually closer to pain and hostility. “With Phil, it was like, I’m going to shove this love up your ass. It was: What you’re hearing, isn’t that brilliant? He was getting back at all the people and things he had hostility for. The industry. Anybody that got in his way. His dad for dying. His mother. His sister. Everybody. With Phil, it was just like: Get out of here; I’m fucking taking over.

  “He grew up being the young guy having to fight two tough old broads. His mum used to say to him, ‘You just got lucky.’ Just totally belittle him. And then go out to her canasta club and say, ‘You know my son just had another number one record; my son’s the greatest this and the greatest that.’ A twisted relationship, in that way, and yet they had great love for one another, and he helped support her financially.

  “At La Collina there was a circular driveway around the fountain. On one occasion she spent two days just driving around and around the driveway, pestering him for no real reason, honking her horn to try and get Phil to come out; and he wouldn’t come out. She finally did it long enough that she had to get a new set of tires—and she had the bill sent to him. Phil was furious: He said, ‘That’s my mum…’”

  Spector’s difficult upbringing had hardly prepared him for a family of his own—particularly one that had been assembled on a series of whims in a desperate attempt to salvage a marriage that was now behind him. While he cared for the children, according to one friend, “Phil was at a total loss as to how to be a father.”

  His nocturnal hours meant he was seldom around to interact with them in a normal way. Maids took care of the children’s domestic needs. But for the most part the faithful George Brand acted as their surrogate father. Brand’s role in Spector’s life went far beyond that of bodyguard; he was friend, companion, minder—at times almost a paternal figure. When Spector ventured out in company, Brand would usually sit quietly at another table, like a watchdog, ready to step in if things got out of hand, to protect Spector from others or—more usually—from himself. When Spector drank too much, as nowadays he increasingly did, George would come over and whisper quietly in his ear—“It’s time to go home now, Phil” and Spector would usually accede.

  Dan Kessel remembers an evening in 1974 when Brand’s presence was sufficient to prevent what might have otherwise been serious trouble. “We were in La Trattoria on La Cienega Boulevard. There was a couple sitting next to us at an adjacent table. They’d obviously just seen the film Lenny and were discussing it, very passionately. And this was kind of like tearing the scab off an emotional wound for Phil. Phil asked if we could move, but there were no other tables available. Eventually he said something to the guy like ‘Excuse me, sir, would you mind please not discussing the Lenny film? You’re going on and on about him and everything you’re saying about him is wrong and you really don’t know what you’re talking about and it’s breaking my heart.’ And the guy said, ‘Who the hell are you to tell me what to talk about?’ Things got really heated up, really tense and then some tough-looking Italian guys materialized out of the woodwork and there were a lot of threats about fighting on both sides. George was packing and I know those Italian guys were packing, but just when I thought there was going to be a bloodbath, the other guy said to Phil, ‘You’re crazy, you know that? I could have you all killed in a heartbeat.’ So George helped diffuse the situation and got the restaurant manager to give us a private table in another room, which is what we had requested in the first place.”

  Brand had little time for the celebrities and hangers-on that Spector liked to have around. He treated the La Collina home as if it were his own. If Spector was entertaining, George would often curl up to sleep on the French embroidered love seat in the main hallway, or even on the floor, sometimes dressed only in his shorts. “People would walk by, give a shocked glance, then just keep going on to the powder room at the end of the hallway,” one visitor remembers. “No one ever mentioned it.”

  George didn’t ask questions, or raise objections or make a fuss about anything that wasn’t his business, which was most things. If Spector got lonely and didn’t want his guests to leave, which was sometimes the case, then that was Spector’s business, not George’s. Sometimes the drink would be flowing, and the stories going on and on, and the guest would be yawning, wondering if the evening was ever going to end; and they might say, “It’s really time I was going now, Phil, and could
you please unlock the door…” and Spector might get agitated and jumpy and start issuing threats—you know the guard dogs are trained to kill, the fence is wired?—and if anybody raised an objection, George would be the soul of polite obduracy—“I’m sorry, but it’s Mr. Spector’s instructions…” And the night would go on until even Spector grew exhausted and at last everybody could go home…

  A petite and vivacious brunette, Devra Robitaille was in her early twenties when she came to work for Phil Spector in June 1975. Robitaille had been born and grown up in London. Her father, Martin Slavin, was a respected composer and arranger, who had written numerous film scores as well as working with pop singers like Frank Ifield and Helen Shapiro. Her mother was a lyricist. Devra herself had trained at the Royal Academy of Music and played classical piano to concert standard.

  When Devra was twenty, her family moved to Los Angeles, and Devra started work in the music business. Ironically, her first job was working for Spector’s old partner Lester Sill at Screen Gems. She worked at Jobete Music, Motown’s publishing arm, where she met and married a Motown engineer, Robert Robitaille, before moving on to Warner Bros., where she worked in the recording-royalties department. One day she picked up a phone call from Spector—a query about recording budgets. He teased her about her English accent, they got talking, and before long she became his main liaison person in the company. He invited her to Gold Star to watch the Cher sessions, where Devra joined the chorus of backing singers. In June 1975, a report in Cash Box magazine announced that she had been appointed as “Administrative Director” of Warner-Spector. “A glorified title,” she says, “for personal assistant.”

  For Devra, working for Spector was “like Alice stepping through the looking glass. There was something compelling and charismatic and utterly amazing about him. And there was something almost frightening about the man, too. It was almost a thrill; you were never quite sure what you’d get. But I liked him so much because he was so interesting.”

  Spector would summon her to the house to talk about business and the minutes would stretch into hours as he held forth on everything—the rock business, politics, human nature, “how come the sky is blue…Just sitting there in the dining room at La Collina, they were some of the most amazing times in my life. It was an education. And then all of a sudden he’d start screaming, ranting and raving and he’d storm out of the room and slam the door, and I’d be left sitting there, not knowing what to do. Should I go or should I stay? Sometimes he’d leave me sitting there for hours.”

  To Devra, Spector’s life was as unfathomable as his character, a series of Chinese boxes. When he stepped out of the room, she had no idea where he went, or what he did. He could have been leading an entirely separate life in a different part of the house—perhaps two lives—and Devra wouldn’t have known. The mansion and its occupants were a riddle. There was George—“a sweet man,” Devra remembers—who would materialize at Spector’s shoulder as if summoned by telepathy. Sometimes Devra would glimpse a dark-haired woman whom she later discovered to be Janis Zavala, but Devra was never sure whether Janis was a secretary, a lover or a friend. Spector never explained. There were the children, Donte and the twins, who clearly lived there, but who, to Devra, seemed almost to belong somewhere else.

  “It was not like the world I came from. In my world everybody talked to each other and knew what each other did and understood each other. Here everything seemed vague. I’d arrive and Phil would put me in the dining room; and I’d sit there waiting to take dictation or whatever. And then he’d go off, and I’d hear voices in the kitchen and he’d come back and shut the door. And he wouldn’t say anything to me, like ‘Oh, I was just talking to Janis in the kitchen,’ or ‘The kids are eating,’ or anything. He’d just sit down. And then he and I would talk and laugh and interact. Then sometimes he’d disappear and I would be dismissed. And other times, he’d disappear and I hadn’t been dismissed, and I’d sit there for hours, wondering what was going to happen and what I was supposed to do. Nothing was ever explained. It was always a games condition.”

  People were drawn into Spector’s circle—the singer Ronee Blakely, the basketball player Magic Johnson, the actor Harry Dean Stanton—and just as suddenly vanished. “And you were never sure whether it was because Phil had grown tired of them or because they’d got tired of him—because he was nuts and it was all a big game that was fun for a while, but then, Jeez, I don’t want to be around this anymore…”

  Sometimes Devra would be summoned when Spector had gatherings at the house, “trotted out like a little ballerina,” and he would ask her to perform. “‘Ooh, you should hear how good Devra is…,’ and he’d sit me at the piano, and I’d find myself playing Bach and Beethoven for all these luminaries. And after I’d played my little thing, he’d smile and say, ‘Isn’t she great?’ and put me away again, stick me back in the corner and I’d have to be quiet.”

  Devra’s first major job as Spector’s “administrative director” was organizing the sessions for a new project—an album with the rock and roll singer Dion DiMucci. Spector felt a particular affinity with Dion. They were of the same generation, and had grown up within just a few miles of each other in the South Bronx. In the late ’50s, while Spector was enjoying his first success with the Teddy Bears, Dion and his group the Belmonts were on the charts with the doo-wop hits “I Wonder Why” and “Teenager in Love.” As a solo artist, Dion had gone on to make tough rock and roll records like “Ruby Baby” before losing his way with drugs. In 1968 he enjoyed a comeback hit with “Abraham, Martin and John.” Reinventing himself as a folksy singer-songwriter, he began performing in concert halls and coffeehouses, recording the memorable “Your Own Backyard,” about his struggle with heroin addiction. Signed to Warner Bros., he had made four albums, which moved Bruce Springsteen to describe him as “the real link between Frank Sinatra and rock and roll,” but his career was in the doldrums when Spector told Mo Ostin that he wanted to produce him. “Mo was astonished,” Dion’s manager Zach Glickman remembers. “Warner were about to write Dion off.”

  Mindful of Spector’s reputation, Dion was bemused when Spector instructed him to come to the mansion alone for their first meeting, specifying that the singer should wait at the corner of Sunset and Doheny, where a car would collect him. “Dion thought it was because Phil didn’t want him to know where he lived,” says Glickman. “I think it was just Phil being considerate. He didn’t want Dion to get lost.”

  Over the course of a couple of weeks, Spector did his customary prepping at La Collina Drive, choosing and rehearsing songs. And at the end of August 1975 he assembled his troops in Gold Star.

  Spector would arrive at the studio each night armed with his supplies—a caseload of Manischewitz, a sixteen-ounce plastic tumbler with a bendy straw—and drink methodically through the session. People talked of there being “two Phils”: the “private Phil” who could be sweet and intelligent, considerate and thoughtful, and the “public Phil,” who could be arrogant, mean and confrontational. And the difference between them was usually drink. Being drunk gave Spector the license to act out the role of the rock and roll eccentric people expected him to be—or, at least, that he thought they expected him to be.

  He would drink in jags. Long periods would pass without him drinking at all; followed by intense bursts, usually when he was recording, when it seemed he was seldom sober. Dan Kessel thought that for Spector drinking served as “an insular cushion during grueling hours of hard work”—a way to cope with the pressures and responsibilities of creativity, of being Phil Spector; a way of keeping things “groovy and under control,” as Kessel puts it. “Being in perpetual Alexander the Great mode can be very taxing, physically, emotionally and otherwise, and drinking can help you to stay the course. And making records you can get away with it up to a point where you couldn’t if you’re a surgeon or an airline pilot.”

  In the old days, Spector would never tolerate drinking or drugs in the studio; drug-taking among his
musicians was still something he abhorred. Dan Kessel would remember him calling time on a session and sending everyone home when he discovered a couple of musicians trading cocaine in the studio. But drinking was another matter, at least for Spector himself. There had barely been a recording session in the past five years when he hadn’t ended up loaded, even if he didn’t start that way.

  Drinking brought out the best and worst in him. One or two drinks and he would be dazzling, the riffs, skits and wisecracks crackling like lightning, the ideas and enthusiasm flying like sparks off a generator. Three or four and he could be foul. “Phil could be a lovable drunk,” remembers Devra Robitaille, “but he was more often an ugly and hateful one.”

  He would sometimes drink to a point of insensibility, and awake feeling so full of shame and remorse that he would be unable to face anybody for days.

  Gold Star’s co-owner, Stan Ross, who had known Spector longer than anyone and who was engineering the Dion sessions, was alarmed at his old friend’s escalating rate of consumption and the effect it had on him. “Drinking changed Phil, and I didn’t like that. I can’t handle anybody with alcohol, and he’d get stinko. Not only would Phil drink a lot, but he wasn’t sociable. He’d sit there with his Manischewitz, the worst wine you could drink, drinking it by the bottle. You’d say, ‘Don’t you offer anybody else anything?’ But no. It was his own thing. And his skin would stink from the smell of it—that smell people get when they drink a lot and perspire. One night, I said to him, ‘Phil, you stink.’ He said, ‘Nobody told me that before.’ Maybe nobody had dared to tell him, but it was the truth.”

  Dion had trouble accustoming himself to Spector’s mercurial mood changes, his imperious manner and his way of ordering people around in the studio. Dion considered himself an artist, and felt that Spector was not showing him the proper respect. When he confided his worries to his manager Zach Glickman, Glickman suggested he should talk to Spector’s friend Nino Tempo, who was working as arranger on the sessions. “Nino told him, ‘Just tell Phil how you feel. Say you’re here to make a record, you’re a respected artist and you want to be treated as such,’” Glickman remembers. “So Phil listened to what Dion had to say, and after that it would be ‘Okay, you cocksucking motherfuckers…and Mr. DiMucci.’”