by Mick Brown
With Nedra and Estelle having retired from the business, Ronnie recruited two other singers to work as the Ronettes, but the project was short-lived, and she had no more luck as a solo artist until an introduction to Steve Van Zandt, the guitarist for Bruce Springsteen, led to her recording a Billy Joel song, “Say Goodbye to Hollywood,” with Springsteen’s E Street Band. In the summer of 1977, a promotional tour brought her to Los Angeles, where Harvey Kubernik met her in her hotel on the Sunset Strip. Afterwards he paid a visit to Spector. “I told him I’d just interviewed Ronnie. He said, ‘You interviewed Ronnie Spector. I was married to her. That’s the end of this conversation.’”
The Dion and Leonard Cohen albums had both been commercial failures—interesting failures, perhaps, but failures nonetheless. Spector had no interest in the music that now dominated the American charts: the solipsistic, Californian singer-songwriter musings of the Eagles and Jackson Browne; the numbing stadium rock of groups like Journey and Kansas; the increasingly bland and mechanical repetitions of disco.
At the age of thirty-eight, Spector might have been expected to feel even more estranged from the rude arrival of punk rock, but the opposite was to prove to be the case.
The Kessel brothers had made an early connection to the Los Angeles punk rock scene that was incubating at a Hollywood club called the Masque, with bands like the Bags, the Weirdos and the Germs. When a New York punk rock group called the Ramones made their Los Angeles debut at the Roxy Club in August 1976, the Kessels were in the audience, and they quickly became friends.
In fact, the Ramones were less a “punk” group than a cartoon of one. They dressed in a uniform of black leather jackets, ripped Levi’s and shaggy Beatle-esque haircuts, and each member affected the group’s name as a surname. They displayed none of the self-conscious “art” posturing of other New York bands of the period such as Television or Talking Heads, nor the working-class agitprop of British punk groups like the Sex Pistols and the Clash. The Ramones’ medium was dumb garage-band pop; a lineage that went back to? and the Mysterians and the Count Five, the Kingsmen and greasy-haired, street-corner doo-wop. Signed to Sire Records, a New York label run by an old acquaintance of Spector’s from the Brill Building days named Seymour Stein, the group released their debut album in 1976—a collection of comical three-chord teenage mantras like “Chain Saw” and “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue,” all played at breakneck speed and none lasting longer than two minutes. The album was over almost as soon as it had begun.
When the Ramones performed at the Whisky a Go Go early in 1977, the Kessels took Spector to see them. But it was Blondie, the group they were sharing the bill with—or more specifically the group’s Monroe-esque singer Deborah Harry—that caught his eye. After the show, he invited Blondie back to the mansion and expressed an interest in producing them, but nervous of Spector’s reputation, they turned down his offer.
Later that same year the Ramones returned once more to Los Angeles, where the Kessels produced two songs with the group at Gold Star for the brothers’ own label. At the end of the session, Dan Kessel played the songs over the telephone to Spector, and he invited them up to the house.
The journalist Roy Carr happened to be visiting, still in discussions about the film that was never going to be made, and Spector was at his most expansively entertaining, playing his old records, regaling the assembled company with stories and showing off his firearms. “They were just a bunch of kids from Queens,” Carr remembers. “Dee Dee was particularly dumb. He said something quite innocently which Phil took exception to. And Phil pulled this pistol out and pointed it at him. Dee Dee was shouting, ‘Okay, if you want to shoot me, shoot me. Phil Spector wants to kill me!’”
Spector seemed to “get” the Ramones immediately; their irreverence, their vitality, and the way they connected to an earlier, less self-conscious, era of rock and roll. “Phil just loved their music,” David Kessel says. “It was like, God, you mean there’s a rock and roll band around? The simplicity of the chords; the lack of improvisation. He understood that it was back to Buddy Holly. He thought they were the best rock and roll band in America.”
He was particularly taken with the group’s lead singer. Tall and gangling, Joey Ramone (born Jeffrey Hyman) was Ichabod Crane in shades and tennis shoes. “Phil and Joey clicked immediately,” David Kessel says. “Joey had his rock and roll history shit together. And they had all that New York street-corner stuff in common. In L.A. you don’t care where the street corner is because even if it’s half a block away you’re still going to get in the car. Phil and Joey talked street corners, they talked doo-wop. The rest of the group were in shock.” As the evening wore on, Spector’s enthusiasm for working with the group seemed to grow.
“I remember he asked them how many records they’d sold,” Roy Carr says. “They didn’t know shit from Shinola, so Phil disappeared for about ten minutes and came back with this big computer printout and told them their sales figures. Obviously he was tapped into the Warner mainframe. And their sales were going down.”
Spector offered to sign the group on the spot. “He said, ‘I’ll give you $150,000 and you can have it tonight. I’ll get Marty to come over and sort it out.’ And he said, ‘Roy’s going to be your manager.’ I said, ‘This is news to me, Phil, thank you very much.’ Then the group turned to me and said, ‘What shall we do?’ I said, ‘Don’t ask me.’”
The Ramones turned Spector down. Instead, at Seymour Stein’s suggestion, he turned his attention to another Sire act, a power pop duo from Boston called the Paley Brothers—Andy and Jonathan. The brothers had recorded one, eponymous, album for Sire, and had already discussed the possibility of being produced by two of Spector’s former associates, Steve Douglas and Jack Nitzsche (whom Andy Paley remembers as being “totally obsessed with Phil”).
Paley was staggered to be awoken at 3:00 a.m. one morning in Boston by a telephone call from Spector himself, asking whether the brothers would be interested in working with him. It took Spector some minutes to convince a disbelieving Paley that he wasn’t a friend playing a prank. The brothers were on a plane to Los Angeles three days later. Paley passed the flight reading Elvis: What Happened?, a book by three of Presley’s former henchmen. Paley’s attention was particularly taken by a passage where Presley allegedly ordered one, Red West, to kill his karate instructor Mike Stone, suspecting that Stone had been having an affair with his wife Priscilla: “Mike Stone must die. He must die.”
After checking into their hotel the brothers were ferried up to Spector’s house. Sitting in the lounge waiting for Spector to appear, Andy Paley was staggered when a handsome, well-built man walked into the room and introduced himself as…Mike Stone.
Spector spent most of the next month rehearsing the brothers at his home, breaking off for the occasional excursion to clubs and restaurants. He had acquired a beaten-up VW van with darkened windows, which he loved to drive, he told them, “because nobody would realize anybody famous was inside.”
“He’d separate us off,” Andy Paley says. “‘Andrew, you go back to the hotel I need to work with Jonathan.’ Then a few hours later Jonathan would come back and say, ‘Phil took me to this movie; he didn’t think you’d like it.’ And then a few days later he’d say, ‘Andrew, I want you to stay behind’—and he’d take me off to a party, and say, ‘I didn’t think your brother would be into this…’ I could never really figure that out.”
At length, Spector rounded up some of his old musicians from the Wrecking Crew and took the Paleys into Gold Star. After all the preparation, the sessions lasted less than a week, and produced only a couple of tracks. “We’d get phone calls, Christmas cards,” Paley recalls, “but the record never came out.” Eventually, the Paley Brothers split up, and Andy Paley embarked on a new career as a producer.
An unexpected financial windfall arrived in the form of the teenage actor, Shaun Cassidy. The half brother of the pop idol David Cassidy, Shaun was the star of a television program The Hardy Boys, a
nd had recently signed with Warner Curb Records, a label owned by an entrepreneur named Mike Curb, who had started in the business hiring out musical instruments. Larry Levine would remember Curb as “a little nebbish,” who was occasionally seen hauling a keyboard into Gold Star for a Spector session. It was a period that Curb evidently remembered with some fondness. Looking for a song for Shaun Cassidy’s first single, Curb steered the young singer toward “Da Doo Ron Ron.”
To promote the song, someone at the label came up with the idea of featuring Spector in the video. The scene called for him to be shown seated in the backseat of a limo, pulling away from the sidewalk, pursued by a knot of screaming girls, as Cassidy turns to the camera and asks, “Who was that guy?” It was a reasonable question. “Frankly, I didn’t think any of Shaun’s fans would have a clue,” remembers Nola Leone, who was managing Cassidy’s affairs at the time. “But I thought it was kind of hip. And Shaun thought so, too.”
Spector, apparently happy to participate in any legend-building exercise, agreed to take part.
On the day of the shoot, Cassidy, Leone and the film crew presented themselves at the mansion to collect Spector before proceeding on to the location. Spector emerged holding a goblet filled with wine in his hand—“it looked like a chalice,” Nola remembers—executed a series of theatrical karate kicks, and then invited Cassidy and Leone inside the house to talk. Leone was alarmed when he steered them into the ground-floor powder room and locked the door behind them. For the next hour, he regaled his captive audience with a list of his accomplishments. “The gist of it,” Nola remembers, “was that he was the greatest producer in the world, that he should have produced Shaun’s record, and anyone could have had a hit with it because it was such a great song—just on and on and on. Every once in a while I’d say, ‘There’s a lot of people waiting—we should probably go.’ And he’d just ignore me. He said, ‘You be quiet; you’re lucky to even be here.’ It wasn’t that we were afraid; it was just very strange. And finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he opened the door and we went out.”
Spector was persuaded into his limo, and the party drove to the location. At the end of the shoot, Spector offered Cassidy a ride back to the mansion. What Nola Leone remembers as “a look of panic” registered in the young singer’s eyes, and he politely made his excuses and refused. Cassidy’s version of “Da Doo Ron Ron” would subsequently go to number 1.
People came and went, with vague plans of work, projects that would never come to fruition. Spector’s eccentricities had become a thing of legend, and any encounter could be relied upon to provide a suitably vivid anecdote. The ’60s English model Twiggy, who had enjoyed an improbable renaissance as a singer with an album called Please Get My Name Right, would recall in her autobiography visiting Spector with her husband, the actor Michael Whitney, for discussions about Spector producing her. Unsettled by the guard dogs, the looming presence of George Brand and being made to wait for almost two hours in the darkened mansion before Spector eventually appeared, Twiggy was finally undone when he began brandishing a gun. She fled, never to return. Annette Kleinbard, the voice of “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” had an even more disturbing encounter.
Kleinbard had long since lost contact with Spector. After the breakup of the Teddy Bears, she had changed her name, first to Annette Bard and then to Carol Connors, recording a number of singles before turning to songwriting, enjoying early success with “Hey Little Cobra,” which was a hit for the Rip Chords. In 1977 she co-wrote the theme for the film Rocky, “Gonna Fly Now,” which was nominated for an Academy Award. Connors was acquainted with Marty Machat, who suggested that she and Spector might possibly work together. Machat organized a meeting at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Spector had had his altercation in 1975 with a parking valet. Walking out after the meeting, Connors remembers, they passed a woman who took one look at Spector’s bristling hairpiece and let out a gasp of amused disbelief.
“She obviously came from Iowa or somewhere and she had never seen anything like it. But Phil just went off the deep end. ‘How dare she?’—ranting and raving. She was with some guy, who walked up to make something of it, and Marty was coming between them, trying to get Phil away from there. And the next thing I knew Phil had a gun in his hand. I don’t know if it came from his jacket, his shoe, his belt. I just remember that it was there, and it hadn’t been there before. I don’t know if Phil was going to fire the gun, but there was just this anger there, and then Marty was getting him into the car and away from the hotel. And I remember vowing to myself, ‘I will never be in Phil Spector’s company again as long as I live—ever.’”
For the past four years, Janis Zavala had been the one constant, stable presence in Spector’s life—although to most who knew Spector, she hardly seemed present at all. Self-contained and independent-minded, she continued to work at Screen Gems, with Spector’s old partner Lester Sill. She seldom visited the studio when Spector was working and seems to have largely absented herself when visitors came to the La Collina mansion. To some, it seemed as if she was Spector’s special secret. One day when Harvey Kubernik was visiting he walked upstairs and happened to bump into Janis on the landing. Kubernik fancied that he had come to know Spector well over the previous two years and had visited the house on several occasions, but he’d never even heard of Janis before, much less met her. Kubernik concluded that Spector deliberately kept her out of sight. “I think Phil was afraid that people would hit on her. It was his idea of being charming.”
Spector’s domestic life was a secret to everyone, which seemed to throw his public one into even sharper relief. If the private Spector was “a sweet, humble man,” as one friend maintains, when he stepped out of the mansion, and on to the public stage, it was as if his personality would change. The “Phil Spector Show” would take over—the big limousines, the bodyguards and hangers-on, the tantrums, the insults, the drunken scenes. It was as if Spector felt he needed to put on a mask to impress people and to hide the truth about the vulnerable, insecure—and frightened—man he really was. It was a paradox that Janis Zavala evidently found harder and harder to reconcile.
Gradually, she seemed to play a less important part in his life. She was seen at the mansion less and less, and then not at all.
In the eighteen months since their visit to the La Collina mansion, the Ramones had produced two more albums, with diminishing returns. And by the beginning of 1979, working with Spector had begun to seem a decidedly more attractive proposition. Seymour Stein negotiated a deal and on May 1, 1979, the Ramones presented themselves at Gold Star.
Under guitarist Johnny’s guidance, the Ramones had traditionally spent as little time on recording as possible—regarding the studio as a mere pit stop in the more lucrative, and diverting, round of touring. (The story has it that the group would be given $100,000 to record an album, budget the recording at $60,000 and split the balance between them, reasoning “Why spend more? We’re not going to sell more.”)
But from the outset, Spector made plain that things would be done his way. To augment the group, he called on the keyboard player Barry Goldberg, drummer Jim Keltner, saxophonist Steve Douglas, and the Kessel brothers playing guitars. It was clear to everybody that the only member of the Ramones he was really interested in was singer Joey. “I think in Phil’s mind, the Ramones were basically Joey with a backing group,” Roy Carr says. “He looked on Joey as a male Ronnie Spector.”
The recording of End of the Century would take little more than three weeks—a blink of the eye by Spector’s normal standards, “but in Ramones time,” Joey would remember later, “it was interminable.” The rest of the group had neither the patience nor the proficiency to abide by Spector’s traditional routine of wearing his musicians down by having them play the songs over and over again. When he devoted almost an entire session to having Johnny Ramone play the opening chord to “Rock ’n’ Roll High School,” Johnny walked out. When Spector ordered him back into the studio, the
distracted guitarist snapped back, “What are you going to do? Shoot me?”
When Spector turned his attention to Joey’s vocals, coaching the singer long into the night, the others were left largely to their own devices. Marky and Dee Dee immersed themselves in the nightlife of Los Angeles (so enthusiastically in Dee Dee’s case that the Kessel brothers would later be obliged to overdub his bass lines), while Johnny fretted in his room at the Tropicana Motel, according to David Kessel, “bored and out of it. It was like: Joey’s in the studio with Phil, the other two are out getting wasted and I’m sitting here twiddling my thumbs. Johnny was used to being in control, and he didn’t have any control with Phil. No way in the world was Phil going to take orders from Johnny Ramone. Everybody was bitching and uptight and ornery. And of course Phil is Mr. Congeniality, so there was a lot of shouting…”
The ultimate symbol of Spector’s disregard for the rest of the group came with the recording of “Baby, I Love You”—the third time Spector had recorded the song. He had originally wanted the group to record the Bob B. Soxx song, “Not Too Young to Get Married,” but according to David Kessel, Joey “begged” Spector to be allowed to record the Ronettes hit instead. “He said, ‘You’re going to make me Ronnie Spector? Go for it, please…’ Phil said, ‘Yeah it’s my song, I’ve got the publishing, but do you really want to do this?’ But Joey begged him. ‘If I’m working with Phil Spector, we’re doing a Phil Spector song.’”
Considering the others superfluous to requirements, Spector took Joey into the studio on his own, used his own musicians and, a first for the Ramones, added strings. A disgruntled Johnny would later reflect that the song was “the worst thing we’ve ever done in our career.” But it would give the group their only Top 10 single.