by Mick Brown
In 1993 Jerry Wexler published his autobiography, Rhythm and the Blues. In tribute to their friendship, he sent a signed copy to Spector. In the book, Wexler wrote in detail about the death of his daughter Anita from AIDS, contracted from sharing a needle during a period of drug addiction.
On August 9, 1993, Spector replied to Wexler, congratulating him on the book, and saying how distressed he had been to read Wexler’s account of his daughter’s death. Wexler’s inscription had touched him so deeply, he wrote, that he felt the urge to mention the fact of the death of his own son Phillip—a subject he rarely discussed with anyone.
Spector wrote movingly of remembering, when he was about ten years old, his grandmother’s grief when one of her sons had died. To try and comfort her, he had reminded her that she had other sons and daughters who were still alive. Didn’t that make it any easier? “She looked at me with her loving and tear-filled eyes,” he wrote, “and said, ‘Phillip, it makes no difference how many children a parent has…. Aparent can never understand why they have to bury their child.’”
For himself, Spector wrote, it was important to get back into the studio as quickly as possible; it would be therapy, like the tears he shed for his loss. “Tears or the recording studio will never bring him back—but they may bring me back!” Unlike Wexler, he went on, he had no plans to write his own book, although two which he could write and to which he added every day would be simply entitled “Appointments” and “Disappointments.” Enclosed with the letter were possible titles and covers, Spector suggested, for two more. One was a postcard of a monkey dressed in a sweatshirt, wearing a Back to Mono button, with the title: “Everything I Am Today I Owe to Rock ’n’ Roll” the second a cartoon, with the caption “A Rat Always Knows When He’s in with Weasels.”
26
“You Don’t Tell Mozart What Operas to Write”
In August 1994, Spector received a telephone call from his friend Paul Shaffer, telling him to watch that evening’s edition of The Late Show with David Letterman. The French-Canadian singer Céline Dion was performing “River Deep—Mountain High” Shaffer, the show’s musical director, had labored to create an arrangement as close as possible to the original version, and wanted Spector’s opinion.
Céline Dion had recorded her first English-language album, Unison, in 1990, and scored a breakthrough U.S. hit with the Top 5 single “Where Does My Heart Beat Now.” She had gone on to enjoy a string of hit singles, and to win both an Academy Award and a Grammy for her recording of the title track to the soundtrack of an animated version of Beauty and the Beast. It was a measure of how divorced Spector had become from the music business that he had never heard of her. But watching her perform on Letterman he was sufficiently impressed to send a letter to Dion’s offices in Montreal, offering his services as a producer. Dion and her husband and manager René Angélil flew to Los Angeles to meet Spector and agreed to work with him. Spector confided to Karen Lerner that he “hated” Dion’s “screeching” voice, and that he was doing the project purely “for commercial reasons” to other friends he enthused that he was going to “Spectorize” the singer, just as he had Tina Turner thirty years before.
René Angélil and Dion’s record company Sony were not so sure. Spector had not been in the studio in more than fifteen years. Nobody knew whether he could be entrusted with an entire album. And fashions had changed. It had become common practice to employ a number of different producers, to bring out the varying facets of an artist’s identity. While Spector expected to take command of the entire album, Sony and Angélil wanted to divide the tracks between Spector and other producers, including David Foster and Jim Steinman. The choice of Steinman was particularly ironic. His reputation rested largely on his productions for Meat Loaf that were basically cartoon blowups of Spector’s Wall of Sound. Spector silently seethed at the affront but knuckled down to the project nonetheless.
The prospect of being in the studio appeared to re-energize him. “It was so exciting,” Paulette Brandt remembers. “You’d drive up to the house and all of a sudden you’d hear music playing again. And Phil changed. He wasn’t drinking so much. Everything was great.”
In need of someone to arrange the sessions, Spector might have been expected to once again call on his old friend and most reliable collaborator Jack Nitzsche. But Spector had still not forgiven Nitzsche for the farrago of two years earlier. Instead, he turned to the veteran Hollywood arranger Jimmie Haskell, who as the staff arranger for Liberty Records had salvaged the Teddy Bears album some thirty-five years earlier. Haskell had gone on to become one of the most prolific and successful arrangers in the music business, winning Grammys for his arrangements on Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water,” Jeannie C. Riley’s “Ode to Billie Joe” and Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now.”
Haskell was summoned to a meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he found Spector seated in the lounge with Marvin Mitchelson.
“Phil was drinking vodka, and he asked me, ‘What will you have?’” Haskell remembers. “I said, ‘If you don’t mind, Phil, I’d like some tea and cheesecake.’ He said, ‘Okay,’ and called the waiter over. And the waiter said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Spector, the kitchen’s closed.’ So Phil said, ‘Please call the captain over.’ And the captain came over; and Phil said, ‘This is my good friend and he would like some cheesecake and tea. Do you think you could possibly do that for me?’ And the captain said, ‘We can open the kitchen for you, Mr. Spector, of course.’
“And then Phil said, ‘I’d like you to arrange a session for me,’ and I said, ‘That’s great, Phil.’ He didn’t tell me the name of the artist. He just said ‘this girl.’ And he said, ‘I want you to call the guys.’ I said, ‘Phil, I usually use a contractor when there are a lot of guys.’
“He said, ‘You either call the guys or you don’t do the session for me.’ So I said, ‘Okay, Phil, I’ll call the guys.’ So he ticked off the people he wanted to use; the first names on the list were the Kessel brothers, Don Randi, Jim Keltner…I said, ‘Phil, these are all double-scale players.’ He said, ‘I don’t want to pay double scale.’ At that time it was probably around $250 for a three-hour session. These guys would have been charging around $500. But he said, ‘If they won’t work for single scale, I don’t want them.’ And that’s what he got. Don Randi said, ‘Well, if that’s what Phil wants in his old age, I’ll do it.’ One of the trumpet players said, ‘I won’t work for less than double scale, but can I come and watch the session?’”
At the end of the meeting, Spector called for the bill.
“The captain told him how much he owed. Then Phil asked him, ‘How many waiters are there here?’ The captain said, ‘Four.’ ‘So that makes five, including yourself?’ The captain said, ‘Yes.’ So Phil said, ‘Okay, add two hundred dollars for each person to the bill.’ I said, ‘Phil, how can you give a thousand-dollar tip to the waiters but you won’t pay over scale to the musicians?’ And he said, ‘You don’t understand, Jimmie. This room has been closed for remodeling for the last two months; these waiters have been out of work.’”
Outside, Spector invited Haskell to continue the conversation back at his home in Pasadena. “I got in his limousine beside him, and he had a giant bottle of vodka sitting there. He saw me look at it and he said, ‘I’m not as drunk as you think I am.’ We sat there talking for a while and then he said, ‘I’m going to go to the restroom.’
“After he’d gotten out, the driver turned around and said, ‘Mr. Haskell, I would advise you to take your own car; otherwise I don’t know when you’ll ever get home.’ I said, ‘Thank you.’ So I got in my car and followed them.
“On the way we stopped at his mother’s house. I got out of my car, and Phil said, ‘She’s going to hate me for waking her at this hour.’ He was up there for about fifteen minutes. This is two o’clock in the morning. He came back and said, ‘Yeah, she didn’t like the fact I’d woken her up. Sometimes I don’t think she likes me.’ So I followed him ou
t to Pasadena, and when I got there, there was a young lady to meet us. And she served me cheesecake and tea…’”
In June 1995 the Céline Dion sessions finally got under way at Ocean Way Recording studios. Haskell, who had last worked with Spector before he had developed his singular recording techniques, was surprised when Spector ordered the first run-through to be taped. “That was very unusual to me. But on that first playback I heard the Wall of Sound! He knew how to get it instantly! Six guitars all playing the same chord, all playing the same rhythm. But the strumming would vary just slightly, giving it a texture and depth. Also it’s very difficult to tune all six guitars perfectly, so you got variation within that—minute variations, but enough to create this symphonic wall of sound. It was extraordinary.”
Spector was elated to be back in the studio. It was just like the old Gold Star days—the recording session as performance, as theater—and Spector demanded an audience. The control booth was filled with old friends and new acolytes: the film producer Penny Marshall, the singer Chris Isaak and Spector’s old friend and rival Brian Wilson, who, after years of mental troubles, was tentatively making his way back into music. Spector had telephoned Andy Paley, who was writing with Wilson, and asked him to bring Wilson to the sessions.
“There was a big birthday party for Brian at a restaurant on La Cienega,” Paley remembers, “and when it was over I told him I was invited to something really special and I wanted to take him along. We drove over to Ocean Way and walked in, and Phil got up and hugged Brian and said, ‘Happy birthday. I’m so glad you could come.’ Brian was totally overwhelmed.”
Spector was back to his old wisecracking, playful self. When Ike Turner turned up, Spector introduced him with the words “This is Ike Turner, and we both wear one of these”—and pulled back his jacket to reveal a pager on his belt. The ubiquitous Rodney Bingenheimer appeared with his friend Brian “Kato” Kaelin. A likeable, goofy, aspiring actor, Kaelin had recently attained a kind of celebrity by testifying in the O. J. Simpson trial, in which Simpson had been acquitted for the murder of his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Kaelin, who had been living at Simpson’s home, had given crucial evidence about the timing of Simpson’s movements on the night of the murder. Spector, who had followed the trial with customary avidity, was delighted with his new acquaintance, and Kaelin quickly became the butt of endless jokes about timing, and “Where’s Kato, he’s my alibi.”
Over the course of a few days, Spector and Dion worked on three tracks, including the old Ronettes song “Is This What I Get for Loving You?” “Céline was so delighted with those tracks,” Paulette Brandt says. “She was sitting there, literally kicking her feet up in the air. She said, ‘It hits you right between the eyes.’
But the mood quickly began to sour. True to his traditional practice, Spector insisted on keeping Céline waiting for hours while he tinkered with the arrangements, and then working her late into the night—a fact that irked her husband and the representative from Sony. “Phil had a major crush on Céline,” one participant in the sessions remembers. “He was working her very hard, and they were wrapping her in cotton wool—‘Her throat can’t take it—she’s got to stop now.’ Phil doesn’t want to hear that at three in the morning. Céline herself was saying, ‘No, no I’m fine.’ Phil had gotten her voice in such a great place she wanted to keep doing it.” At length, the mounting tensions exploded into a blazing row between Spector and the Sony representative. “The guy from Sony was a typical schmuck executive idiot,” remembers David Kessel. “He was pulling all this ‘I’m with the label’ shit, and Phil told him to go to hell. And then Céline’s husband got a little irritated with Phil telling the record executive to shove it up his ass…”
René Angélil announced that Spector was off the project, and he and Céline left town, leaving two songs half finished, and only one—“Is This What I Get for Loving You?”—complete. Listening to this, one gets some idea of how magical the collaboration between Spector and Dion could have been. Set against the magnificent tumult of his production—the equal of anything he achieved in his heyday—Dion’s voice has never sounded more crystalline nor more emotive. It was the masterpiece Spector had been struggling to make for more than twenty years. Unaware of the rift, Jimmie Haskell continued to fax Spector over the next few weeks, imploring him to complete the tracks. But Spector never replied. “They were wonderful songs,” Haskell remembers. “A bit different from what Céline had become known for. If they were released at any time, they would be guaranteed hits.”
When the album, Falling into You, was released the following year, it contained nothing produced by Spector. But to add insult to injury the album did include a version of “River Deep—Mountain High”—produced by Spector imitator Jim Steinman. Asked to comment on the album by Entertainment Weekly, Spector replied by dispatching a vitriolic 800-word letter in which he praised Céline Dion herself but attacked her management and record company for wanting only to record Whitney Houston–and Mariah-rejected soundalike songs. He continued: “You don’t tell Shakespeare what plays to write, or how to write them. You don’t tell Mozart what operas to write, or how to write them. And you certainly don’t tell Phil Spector what songs to write, or how to write them; or what records to produce and how to produce them.” Since he had paid for the recordings himself, he added, he intended to release them himself, so that people could compare them to Dion’s recordings.
But the Spector recordings would never see the light of day. While it was true that he had paid the studio and musicians’ costs, and theoretically owned the backing tracks, he did not own the rights to Céline Dion’s vocals. In an attempt to retrieve the material, Sony agreed with ABKCO to pay Spector all the recording costs and assume clear ownership of the masters. Draft agreements were exchanged between the two parties, but negotiations broke down and the agreements were never signed.
Looking back, Paulette Brandt wondered whether Spector had ever really intended the tracks to be released at all, or whether the whole exercise wasn’t just an enormous put-on. “I don’t think Phil ever really thought it would happen. I think he did it for kicks, and to show the people he’d invited that he still had it. It was basically a very expensive show for all his friends.”
Falling into You became the best-selling album of 1996, topping the charts in eleven countries, and was voted Album of the Year and Best Pop Album at the Thirty-ninth Annual Grammy Awards ceremony. It went on to sell more than 25 million copies worldwide.
The experience of the Céline Dion sessions threw Spector back into a deep trough of depression; once again he began drinking heavily. Henry Diltz ran into him one night at a party at the home of a record producer in Beverly Hills. In the years since Spector had produced Diltz as a member of the Modern Folk Quartet, Diltz had stopped performing music professionally and established a reputation as one of the preeminent photographers in rock music, shooting countless sessions and record covers for such artists as the Doors; Joni Mitchell; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and Jackson Browne. He had not seen Spector for years and watched in bewilderment as he reeled around the party, “drunk and very cantankerous. There were musicians there eager to shake his hand and talk to him, and he was just putting them down, withering comments, so they’d withdraw their hands and shrink into the background.
“He had a couple of guys with him. Big guys. And he took great pride in getting them to show their piece. He called one of them over and said, ‘Show ’em…,’ and the guy got out his .45. A gun that would blow a hole in a house. Harry Dean Stanton and Kato Kaelin were there. And Phil said, ‘Come on, Henry, we’re going to this club.’ This was about three in the morning. And they opened it up for him. And we were sitting in the back room, and Harry Dean Stanton had his guitar, and Phil had him playing ‘Goodnight Irene’ and we were singing harmonies, over and over. Phil was walking around, playing the producer—‘Play it again, Harry…’
“At about five in the morning, I
said, ‘I’ve got to go. I have to drive my kids to school.’ And Phil said, ‘No, no—you can’t leave, because it’ll change things.’ He didn’t want to change the chemistry, the balance in the room. He didn’t want anyone to leave, because he liked it just the way it was.”
Those close to Spector noticed a pattern. He would drink to a point of near insensibility, and was prone to furious rages. “Phil could out-scream anybody I knew,” says Paulette Brandt. “I’ve never heard anybody being able to maintain yelling at somebody for ten minutes straight, but he could do that. When you see Phil screaming with bulging red eyes, it’s like seeing Satan.”
Drink was not a pleasure, but an anesthetic, an escape from the despair over the death of his son that continued to enshroud him. More than once his housekeeper would find a drunken Spector, sitting on Phillip’s bed, sobbing.
The incipient mental problems that had incubated for years began to become more obvious. Always a fitful sleeper, he suffered from raging insomnia. The years of buffeting his ears with music at full volume seemed to have had absolutely no effect on his hearing. Spector, it seemed, could isolate the sound of a single raindrop in a storm. “Whenever he went away, he always gave hotels a lot of problems,” Paulette says. “He could hear the wind through the dumbwaiter shafts, so he was continually calling maintenance because he couldn’t sleep.”