Tearing Down the Wall of Sound

by Mick Brown

  In addition to the bowling parties, Spector also began to host regular Saturday luncheons at the castle, the guest lists made up of a revolving cast of music business friends and cronies: Bob Merlis, who handled press relations for Warner Bros.; Art Fein, who hosted a cable TV show called Little Art’s Poker Party; Marvin Mitchelson; the oldies DJs Dr. Demento and Huggy Boy. Invitees soon began referring to the luncheons as “the king and his court.”

  Spector insisted that on arriving, guests should make the laborious climb up the eighty-eight steps to be greeted at the front door. “Huggy Boy has to be nearly eighty,” says Denny Bruce, who attended on a couple of occasions. “He damn near needed oxygen when he got to the top.”

  Drinks and canapés would be served in the living room. “You’d sit around for an hour,” Bruce remembers, “and there’d be stories about Doc Pomus and people who take too much credit for things they’ve done in the music business.

  “Then finally, well, okay, lunch is served. And people would jockey for position next to Phil. If you were at the other end of the table you’d end up talking to Dr. Demento. Phil would sit on a slightly higher, velvety chair, just entertaining everyone. He’d do his imitation of voices—when John Lennon turned up backstage at Bangladesh, wanting to get in, and George saying, ‘Fuck you, John, you can’t just walk in like this. This is my show.’

  “I remember Billy Swan [the country artist and producer] asking, ‘How did you get the vocal sound on “My Sweet Lord”?’ And Phil would be more than happy to share that information. One of the reasons everybody loves Phil is: his storytelling is superb. Once the stories start rolling…hilarious. Phil is Everyman on so many levels; he loves sports, he loves the Lakers. And he was getting that camaraderie by having these gatherings. I think he wanted to prove that coming into the new decade he really was human.”

  His daughter Nicole had played a particularly important role in Spector’s renaissance. Over the years, his relationship to family had often been fraught and painful, but as Nicole blossomed into a mature, beautiful and intelligent young woman, so Spector’s bond with her deepened. It was as if Nicole was giving him a reason to make peace with himself and the world around him.

  Not unexpectedly, Nicole had developed an avid interest in rock and roll, and began to introduce her father to a new generation of bands. She had become friends with the English group Starsailor, and in the winter of 2001, when the group performed in Los Angeles, Spector invited them for lunch at the castle, and that same evening joined Nicole in the audience for the group’s show. Watching them perform, Spector grew progressively more exhilarated. He had not completed a record since the Ramones’ in 1979. Effectively, he had been out of the record business for longer than he had been in it. But he now apparently made up his mind that he wanted to produce Starsailor. James Stelfox, the bass player, would remember being taken aback by his full-frontal enthusiasm. “He was like: ‘Okay, so we’re going to do the record in Abbey Road, my guy is going to engineer it, and it’ll be great!’ We were a little surprised, since it was the first we’d heard about it. But, you know, Phil Spector is Phil Spector.” After discussions with the group’s label, Capitol, the deal was agreed, and at the end of January 2002, Spector sent out a circular letter to friends informing them that he would be producing Starsailor.

  Their new album, which I remixed, is already number one in England and came out in America last week. I think it will do very well here and that will be the beginning of a long and beautiful relationship. They are four poor boys from England. Sound familiar? I have much bigger plans for their second album, which I will be producing with them in the fall/winter after their present world tour, at Abbey Road in England where I recorded all the Beatles together and solo albums.

  He had recently seen the group perform at the Palace Theater in Hollywood, he wrote, “and they were sensational.”

  The letter was the characteristic mixture of showboating and self-mythologizing. In fact, Spector had had nothing to do with remixing Starsailor’s first album, Love Is Here, which had not been a number 1 record in Britain; it had stalled at number 2. But his joy at being back in the races was apparently unconfined. He e-mailed his old friend Bill Walsh. “He said, ‘Bill, can you imagine at our age! Recording rock and roll again!’ He was very excited about it.”

  In March 2002, as was his habit, Spector traveled to New York for the seventeenth annual induction dinner at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, held at the Waldorf-Astoria. The following month, his old friend Helen Noga died, at the age of eighty-eight. She was buried at the Forest Lawn Cemetery; Spector, inevitably, delivered the eulogy.

  Now, it seemed, Spector had decided to completely remake his life. While it had been years since they’d lived together, Janis had continued to function as Spector’s prop—the person who took care of his daily needs and effectively kept his life on an even keel. But relations between them had become increasingly strained, and in March 2002 Janis decided that she had had enough and stopped working for him. A month later, Spector fired his driver Morgan Martin, who had worked for him for the previous five years. Paulette Brandt was also let go. Paulette was crushed. It had been a long time since she had been “in love” with Spector, but she continued to love him. For years she had been unfalteringly loyal; now, without a word of explanation, he had cut her out of his life. Paulette saw it as just another example of Spector’s perversity. “Things had been running quite smoothly for the last couple of years, and I think that’s part of what upset him—things were too good. It’s like the Lenny Bruce cartoon ‘Thank You, Mask Man,’ where the people tell him there’s no more need for him because the Messiah has returned. And then Mask Man says, ‘Well, I’ll make trouble because I’m geared for it.’ And I think that’s a lot of what Phil’s problem is. Things were getting boring for him. Everything was going smoothly, no problems. So then he let everybody go, and then this whole thing happened.”

  With Janis and Paulette now gone, Spector took on a new personal assistant, Michelle Blaine, the daughter of the drummer Hal Blaine. Spector had known Michelle as a child, but the acquaintance had been renewed two years earlier, when Hal Blaine was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Blaine had injured his foot and was unable to attend the ceremony, and Michelle collected the award on his behalf. Michelle was working in film production, and married with six children. She quickly became what one observer describes as “the go-to person”—the sole intermediary in all of Spector’s dealings with the outside world.

  At the end of August 2002 Spector flew to London to begin work with Starsailor, taking with him Nicole and his bodyguard and aide-de-camp Jay Romaine. It was—though nobody actually used the word—an audition. Starsailor would not commit themselves to Spector producing an entire album until they were sure he was the right man. But Spector had no doubts about the outcome: he told the Kessels that it was “the Beatles all over again.” In search of a talisman, Spector had told Starsailor that he wanted to use the engineer who had worked with him on the Lennon and Harrison albums, Phil McDonald. But McDonald had long since retired from the music business and was now working as a masseur. Instead, Starsailor suggested a young engineer named Danton Supple, who had recently been working with Coldplay.

  Spector spent a week with the band working at Metropolis Studios, recording two tracks, “Silence Is Easy” and “White Dove.” He was in good spirits, cracking jokes, regaling the band with stories: cranking the playback up to his preferred deafening volume, he blew two speakers that had not needed to be replaced in years.

  The results were so impressive that Starsailor had no hesitation in deciding that Spector should take on the rest of the album.

  Returning to Los Angeles, Spector now made the decision to fire Jay Romaine. For the past four years, Romaine had served much the same function as George Brand had fulfilled for so many years—not simply a bodyguard, but a companion and watchdog. When Spector ventured out for an evening’s carousing, Romaine would usually be with hi
m, keeping a watchful eye. But when Spector moved into the castle, relations between the two men began to sour. And now that he was sober, he had less need of someone to act as his minder. For most of his life Spector had surrounded himself with people—secretaries, bodyguards, lovers, flunkies—who could look after him and keep him out of the worst kind of trouble. But now, with the departure of Jay Romaine, he had let the last of them go.

  “It was like the old drunk who insists he’s all right to drive,” says Denny Bruce. “Like, ‘Hey, I’m okay now.’ ‘Well, are you sure you can drive?’ ‘Yup, I’m okay now, I’m okay; just give me the fucking keys…’”

  In October 2002 Spector returned to London to resume recording with Starsailor, this time in the company of Nicole and Michelle Blaine. The sessions had now transferred to Abbey Road Studios, the scene of Spector’s earlier triumphs with Lennon and Harrison.

  But while the earlier sessions with Starsailor had gone without a hitch, it quickly became apparent that all was not well with Spector.

  “It was almost as if he wasn’t there at all,” one participant remembers. “Sometimes you couldn’t get through to him, like he couldn’t hear you. It was as if he’d been given something to make him normal for that first week, but then he’d lapsed back into something else. He was kind of really distant; like he was overmedicated. Sometimes he could be the nicest bloke in the world; you’d sit with him telling you stories and laughing our heads off. But other days he was not himself at all.”

  Musically, too, Spector seemed to have run out of ideas. “Silence Is Easy” had established a distinctive motif with its echoing drum sound and characteristically thunderous mix—pure Spector brilliance, the band thought. But now it seemed that every song Spector touched came out sounding very much the same. “The tracks weren’t anything near like what the band wanted. Phil was about overlaying and overlaying and capturing a moment; but they were musicians saying, ‘I can hear bum notes.’”

  Nor were matters improved by Michelle Blaine, who some around the sessions thought was behaving more like Spector’s manager than his assistant, offering her thoughts on how the music should sound and, in the words of one participant, “generally throwing her weight around.”

  After five laborious and anguished weeks, the band’s manager, Andrew Walsh, and Jeff Barrett, the AR manager for their record label Capitol, asked for a crisis meeting with Spector and his business manager, Allen Klein. Klein flew over to London. When Michelle Blaine walked in expecting to join the meeting, Klein pointedly told her to leave the room. Mortified at having to sack the most famous record producer in the world, Walsh and Barrett announced that the band was unable to work with Spector and the collaboration was over. Spector was stunned. He told Harvey and Barrett, “You’ve got big balls…”

  The five weeks’ worth of recordings at Abbey Road were scrapped, and the band went on to produce the album themselves, with Danton Supple. “White Dove” and “Silence Is Easy” would both subsequently appear on the record—although Spector’s mix of the latter song was replaced with a new mix by the New York–based “mixmaster” Michael Brauer, which featured more guitar, brought the vocal further forward and speeded up the track. The drum sound, however, could only be Spector.

  The album, entitled Silence Is Easy, went to number 2 in the British charts, and the single of the same name went to number 8.

  Disconsolate, Spector returned to Los Angeles. His comeback was over. “He was pissed off, blaming the group, and saying ‘They don’t know what they could have had,’” one friend remembers. “He was broken-hearted.”

  29

  “It’s Very Difficult, Very Difficult to Be Reasonable”

  It was barely two weeks after his return to Los Angeles that Spector’s white Rolls-Royce arrived to collect me from my hotel on the Sunset Strip and ferried me down the freeway to Alhambra; that I climbed the eighty-eight steps to the door of the castle to be greeted by Michelle Blaine; that I sat in the living room, waiting for Spector, and that he appeared at the top of the wooden staircase to the strains of Handel, dressed in his black silk pajama suit with the initials PS picked out in silver thread, his blue glasses, his shoulder-length wig, his three-inch Cuban heels—looking bizarre, yet curiously magnificent.

  “I always wanted to live in a castle…,” he said, “and they don’t have many left…”

  He sat, hunched, a small figure on a large white sofa. His face was pale, his skin looked like parchment, and his hands trembled.

  For the next four hours he talked almost without pause. He was bombastic, funny, furious and melancholic by turns. His wristwatch made its whirring call, like a cuckoo clock, announcing the hour. “It’s two o’clock.”

  He had always wanted to win, he said. And from childhood he knew he was smarter than most. “That’s how I figured I’d get by. I cheated. People ask me today, ‘Do you play computer games?’—the guys at the studio. I don’t play if I can’t win. I don’t play anything if I can’t win. And I’m never going to win against a computer, so what the fuck do I want to play for? To lose? So those guys playing, they’re morons. When I was a kid everybody used to get ecstatic winning at Monopoly, or Scrabble. I just figured out, Shit, if it’s all about winning…so I just went out and bought another Monopoly game, took the money and hid it in my pocket, and then go to people’s houses and add an extra one hundred or five hundred and I’d win every time. I’d beat Nicole playing Monopoly when she was twelve years old. Beat the shit out of her! I don’t care! I ain’t going to lose at some fucking board game with dice. Scrabble, I would take the ‘X’s and the blanks and when somebody turned their head I’d put a blank tile on my rack. I’d always have to win. Because I’m not going to lose, so don’t invite me over! Because everybody takes winning so seriously—I beat your ass at Scrabble, Phil. Oh yeah, so try again. If you can’t win, don’t play. What’s the fucking fun in losing? Where’s the joy in that? The breakfast of champions is the opposition.”

  He laughed—once more the small and furious boy, delighted to be putting one over on the world.

  “I like the idea of winning. I’ve made art that wasn’t successful; and I didn’t enjoy the art as much as when it was successful. What’s so great about making a record or a movie and it not being a hit?”

  Where, I asked him, did this need to succeed come from?

  “I don’t know. It’s about seeing success around you and wanting to work with the best and bring out the best in those around you. I know a lot of people who like to work with mediocre people and feel they’re the most important. I like to work with the best—geniuses. It brings out the best in me.

  “It’s very hard in the business today to find extremely talented young people. But it was very hard to find extremely talented people thirty years ago too; I was fortunate I fell into the Stones, John Lennon, rest his soul, people with extraordinary talent—Tina Turner. Timing is the key to everything.”

  He jabbed a finger at me across the table. “Okay. You ask me, ‘What’s your name?’ And then you ask me, ‘What do you do for a living, and what’s the most important part of what you do for a living?’ Go ahead! Just for the conversation.”

  “Okay. What’s your name?”

  “Phil Spector.”

  “And what do you do for a living?”

  “I’m a record producer.”

  “And what’s the most important—”

  “Timing—” and he broke up in laughter.

  “So that is the key. For some reason, if you say ‘lucky’ about people, people say, ‘Oh, you’re demeaning their talent.’ No—there’s an element of luck in everything. But I call it timing.”

  It was timing that took him into Gold Star Records in 1958, with “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” Luck that took him to Lew Bedell at Era Records; luck, timing and maybe something else too that had gotten “To Know Him Is to Love Him” played on American Bandstand. “I learned a lot by being in the Teddy Bears,” he said. “I learned I didn’t want to be a sing
er. I learned about payola and distributors and manufacturing. I learned about the Mafia. I did American Bandstand, The Dick Clark Show. If you broke your record in Philadelphia, it became a national hit. And if Dick Clark played you on national TV, well…that’s where payola started.” He paused and gave a sly smile. “Everybody around Dick Clark went to jail, except for Dick Clark.

  “But that’s where black music broke,” he went on. “The black disc jockeys started taking on their names—Rosco, Big Mama—and for fifty dollars you could get them to play your record and it meant something. They would have a record hop and charge a dollar, and eight thousand kids would show up. No overheads. The groups would come for free and lip-synch, so it was eight thousand dollars’ profit. It was an incredible time.”

  “And that’s when you decided you wanted to be a producer,” I said.

  “I wanted to be in the background—but I wanted to be important in the background. I knew about Toscanini. I knew that Mozart was more important than his operas. That Beethoven was more important than whoever was playing his music. I knew that the real folk music of America was George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin. Those names were bigger than the music. That’s what I wanted to be.”

  I asked how had he educated himself musically?

  “Just by listening. By going downtown and buying the sheet music.” He paused.