Phil Spector interview before arrrest (Cut and Pasted) VERY LONG.
Robert J. Boyne
Phil Spector produced some of the greatest pop hits of all time, from
Be My Baby to Imagine. Notoriously eccentric in his heyday, his slow
retreat into self-imposed exile only multiplied the myths that
surrounded him: insane genius, tyrannical egomaniac, demented control
freak. The reality is no less extraordinary. In his first interview
for 25 years, he breaks his silence to Mick Brown
'I have not been well,' says Phil Spector, choosing his words
carefully. 'I was crippled inside. Emotionally. Insane is a hard word.
I wasn't insane, but I wasn't well enough to function as a regular
part of society, so I didn't. I chose not to.' He pauses. 'I have
devils inside that fight me.'
The classical music that has been playing throughout our conversation
ebbs and flows. Sibelius, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. Spector is
responsible for producing some of the greatest pop music ever made: Be
My Baby by the Ronettes; You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' by the
Righteous Brothers; River Deep - Mountain High by Ike & Tina Turner;
Imagine by John Lennon; My Sweet Lord by George Harrison. But he no
longer listens to those songs. The hi-fi equipment ranged in his music
room - his own wall of sound - is silent; the antique jukebox loaded
with his own hits is never played. Instead, Spector subscribes to a
satellite service that feeds classical music into his home on tap, 24
hours a day; balm for his troubled soul.
For 25 years Spector lived in a mansion in Beverly Hills. It was there
that he masterminded his conquest of the pop charts in the Sixties and
Seventies, and where he began his long, slow retreat into self-imposed
exile, secreted behind security fences and 'Keep Out' signs. Twelve
years ago, as if to put yet more distance between himself and the
music business on which he had apparently turned his back, he locked
the gates of the mansion and moved into a Thirties replica of an
18th-century Pyrenean chateau, high on a hill above the Los Angeles
suburb of Alhambra. 'I wanted a castle,' he says. 'And there aren't
many left.'
Spector lives here alone, with only his small staff for company. He
sits, hunched, a small figure on a large white sofa. His hands tremble
slightly. He is drinking something red that might be wine, or
cranberry juice, or who knows what else. He is wearing - the strangest
thing - a wristwatch that on the hour makes a whirring noise, like a
cuckoo clock, and speaks the time: 'It's three o'clock.'
'I am trying to get my life reasonable,' he says. 'I'm not going to
ever be happy. Happiness isn't on. Because happiness is temporary.
Unhappiness is temporary. Ecstasy is temporary. Orgasm is temporary.
Everything is temporary. But being reasonable is an approach. And
being reasonable with yourself. It's very difficult, very difficult to
be reasonable.'
He slowly shakes his head and falls back on the sofa. The music swirls
around us. And you find yourself thinking, reasonable? When was Phil
Spector ever reasonable?
I heard my first Phil Spector record in 1963: Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah by Bob
B Soxx and the Blue Jeans. There was, strictly speaking, no such
group: they were simply session singers whom Spector had assembled for
the occasion, their name a nod to the teenage sartorial craze of the
time. The song itself was taken from the 1946 Walt Disney movie Song
of the South. In its original form, it had been a slice of
happy-go-lucky, not to say mindless, cornball optimism. Spector turned
it completely on its head to create something that sounded like music
had never sounded before. The voices pleaded and preached, like a
gospel choir getting happy in an echo-chamber. The sound created by a
melange of instruments was so dense, so clotted, that as Spector now
recalls, there wasn't even room for a drum in the mix - unlike his
other recordings, where he would sometimes employ two or three drum
kits at a time. The effect was dark, incantatory, disturbingly sexual.
There was nothing reasonable about it.
Between 1961 and 1966 Spector's so-called Wall of Sound made him the
most successful pop record producer in the world, with more than 20
top-40 hits by such artists as the Crystals, the Ronettes and the
Righteous Brothers. In the words of the writer Tom Wolfe, Spector was
the 'first tycoon of teen', a man who dared to come on not only as if
he was Mozart but Salieri as well, part genius, part hustler, a
precocious, brilliant and demented visionary who would change the face
of pop music for ever.
When, in the late Sixties, musical fashion overtook his Wall of Sound,
Spector moved on to the biggest pop group in the world, the Beatles.
In 1969 he produced their valedictory album Let It Be, and went on to
produce solo albums by John Lennon and George Harrison. Then began the
long, slow retreat. In 1980 Spector produced his last album, for the
punk-rock group the Ramones. And then he vanished, seemingly
abandoning his old life as pop music's most celebrated producer for a
new one, as its most enigmatic recluse. Phil Spector has not given a
major interview in more than 25 years. His has been rock'n'roll's
greatest untold story.
'I don't like to talk,' he says, 'and I can't stand to be talked
about. I can't stand to be looked at.
I can't stand to be photographed. I can't stand the attention.'
Venturing out rarely for public appearances, he has allowed the myths
that surround him to multiply without correction or rebuke: Spector
the madman, the broken genius, unable to face the monumental weight of
his own legacy. But last year came the astonishing news that Spector
had returned to the studio to produce two tracks for a forthcoming
album by the British band Starsailor.
The prospect that Spector would even consider being interviewed was
remote; his agreement, when it came, frankly incredible. It was almost
to be expected, then, that the evening I arrived in LA there was a
message waiting for me at my hotel. Our appointment for the following
day had been cancelled. I was instructed to wait. For 24 hours I held
my breath, then the telephone rang. A car was waiting for me
downstairs, a white 1964 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, licence plate 'Phil
500'. A chauffeur swung open the door. Encased in leather and walnut,
hidden behind black curtains - a car that could tell stories - we
proceeded along the Hollywood Freeway, bound for Alhambra.
We turned off the freeway and the road wound upwards, and further
upwards still, ending at last at a set of high wrought-iron gates. We
drove through and pulled to a halt, the gates slowly closing behind
us. 'Mr Spector,' said the chauffeur, opening my door, 'likes visitors
to walk up.'
A flight of broad granite steps led up through an avenue of lowering
pines. The summit seemed to be wreathed in mist, out of which the
shape of the castle loomed, grey, turreted, imposing. I felt I was
being watched. I might have been imagining this.
The front door opened into a cavernous hallway, red-carpeted and
wood-panelled. Two suits of medieval armour stood sentinel. Spector
was nowhere to be seen. His assistant, a vivacious woman in her early
40s, guided me through the ground-floor rooms: the music room, John
Lennon's old guitar resting on a stand; the bar lined with framed
photographs of Spector with various music-business luminaries. In the
drawing-room a Picasso drawing hung on the wall beside an original
Lennon sketch. A uniformed maid brought iced water. The classical
music swirled around us. After 30 minutes the assistant's mobile phone
rang. Philip, she said, would be with us shortly.
He appeared at the top of the stairs, to the strains of Handel. A
small, slight figure, he was wearing a shoulder-length, curled toupee,
blue-tinted glasses, a black silk pyjama suit with the monogram PS
picked out in silver thread, and three-inch Cuban-heel boots. He
looked bizarre, yet at the same time curiously magnificent.
In his 1904 book 'A Study of Genius', the British physician Havelock
Ellis drew a correlation between genius and insanity. There were
those, he wrote, who were insane during a considerable portion of
their lives (William Cowper); those who were briefly insane (Dante
Gabriel Rosetti); and those who exhibited 'marked eccentricity not
amounting to insanity' (James Boswell). The 19th-century French
criminologist Césare Lombroso maintained that genius was linked both
to traits such as sexual excess, morbid vanity and excessive
verbosity, and to physical characteristics such as shortness of
stature and pallor. Another British physician, WR Bett, wrote a volume
on what he called 'the deformities of genius', citing Honoré de
Balzac's high blood pressure, Robert Burns's rheumatic fever and Lord
Byron's lameness.
These authorities would doubtless have been fascinated by Spector,
although none of them in their analyses of genius mentioned a tendency
to cheat at Monopoly and Scrabble, which was his habit as a child.
Playing against his friends, he would take paper money from his own
set to games. 'An extra $100 or $500 and I'd win every time. Same with
the x's and blanks at Scrabble.' He shrugs and laughs quietly to
himself. 'I just figured, shit, if it's all about winning I ain't
going to lose, because what's the fucking fun in that? And if you
don't like it, don't invite me over.'
Spector grew up in the Bronx, the younger of two children. He was nine
when his father Ben, a steelworker, succumbing to the pressure of
financial difficulties, ran a length of hose from the exhaust pipe to
the front window of his car and killed himself. The family moved to
LA, where Spector's mother Bertha worked all hours as a seamstress.
Spector was small and scrawny, a chronic asthmatic with watery eyes, a
receding chin and a whining, adenoidal voice: the outsider, 'always
different', who knew he was smarter than most, even if nobody else
did. His mother and elder sister alternately dominated and smothered
him. He used to dream of being strangled.
Music was his salvation; not the white-bread pop that dominated the
late Fifties, but jazz, rhythm and blues, and classical music. He took
guitar lessons, and in 1958 he enlisted two high-school friends,
called them the Teddy Bears, and wrote, produced and sang on his first
recording, To Know Him Is To Love Him. The title was borrowed from the
inscription on his father's gravestone. A sepulchral, haunting doo-wop
ballad, it went to number one in the American charts. Spector was just
17.
He made $20,000 on the record and was swindled out of $17,000 of it.
He would never make the same mistake again. 'I learnt a lot by being
in the Teddy Bears,' he says. 'I learnt I didn't want to be a singer.
I learnt about payola and distributors and manufacturing. I learnt
about the Mafia.'
Convinced that his destiny lay not in performing, but in writing and
producing, Spector headed back to New York. 'I wanted to be in the
background, but I wanted to be important in the background. I wanted
to be the focal point. I knew about Toscanini. I knew that Mozart was
more important than his operas; that Beethoven was more important than
whoever was playing or conducting his music. That's what I wanted to
be.'
He shoehorned his way into the Brill Building on Broadway, where teams
of writers worked in cubicles pitching songs for the pop market.
Spector was a minnow in the shark-infested waters of Tin Pan Alley,
but he was a quick learner. Early photographs show a sallow-faced
young man with suspicious eyes shielding big ambitions. He ran errands
and slept on couches, at the same time writing and producing minor
hits for such artists as Gene Pitney and Curtis Lee, and co-writing
the classic Spanish Harlem for Ben E King. He quickly earned a
reputation for being both brilliant and impossibly bumptious. He would
tell everybody he met that he was a genius. 'And they would agree with
me.' He laughs. 'I believed I was the best in the world.'
In 1960 he set up his own label, Philles, with a music business
veteran, Lester Sill. Financial backing came from a woman named Helen
Noga, who managed the singer Johnny Mathis. 'An Armenian-Italian
mafioso lady,' Spector remembers. 'She was the toughest woman I ever
met in my life. Toughest person I ever met. 'Bout 4ft 9in, 400lb, with
a mouth like a truck driver. She took a liking to me. All these people
loved me.' He smiles to himself. 'They saw money in me.'
The label had its first hit in 1961 with There's No Other Like My Baby
by the Crystals, and its first number one the following year with the
same group's He's a Rebel. Spector bought out Sill, and at the age of
21 became the youngest record-company boss in America, and a
millionaire.
More than just a producer, Spector was a visionary who approached
making records like a general waging war. In those days, pop's
infancy, the conventional line-up for a session was drums, bass,
guitar and piano. But Spector dreamt of a sound never before heard in
pop: huge, clamorous, monumental. He would assemble up to 30 musicians
and singers in the studio, who fought for elbow room: regiments of
bass players and guitarists, as many as four at a time; platoons of
pianists; battalions of drums; massed ranks of horns and strings.
'A Phil Spector session was a party session,' remembers the drummer
Hal Blaine, who played on all the Spector hits. 'Phil would have a
notice on the door of the studio, "Closed Session", and anyone who
stuck their head in he'd grab them and give them a tambourine or a
cowbell. There'd sometimes be more percussionists than orchestra. I
used to call it the Phil-harmonic. It was an absolute ball.'
Recording on rudimentary one- and two-track equipment, Spector would
'ping-pong' the music back and forth, building it up layer by layer,
pushing the recording needle into the red zone - then pushing it even
further to create a thunderous torrent of sound. He would spread the
voices on top like chocolate icing. Spector favoured black girls:
Darlene Love, Veronica Bennett of the Ronettes and Dolores 'La La'
Brooks of the Crystals - heartbreak voices, soulful and sexy.
The songs themselves might have been simple, almost banal - Da Do Ron
Ron, Be My Baby - but in Spector's hands they became epics, 'little
symphonies for the kids', in his phrase; mythic teen fables of desire
and need and pain, the ecstasy of a goodnight kiss, the agony of being
much too young to be married; innocent and knowing, neon-bright and
dungeon-dark all at the same time; delirious, feverish... mad.
Spector was a man possessed. He hired the best session musicians in
LA, and kept them waiting for hours while he tinkered obsessively to
capture a sound which only he could hear. Guitarists complained of
being ordered to play the same chord over and over again until their
fingers bled.
'I knew,' says Spector.
At a time when pop music was generally regarded as ephemeral junk,
Spector had the temerity to call it art. 'People made fun of me, the
little kid who was making rock'n'roll records. But I knew. I would try
to tell all the groups, we're doing something very important. Trust
me. And it was very hard because these people didn't have that sense
of destiny. They didn't know they were producing art that would change
the world. I knew.'
In a sense you could see these records as Spector's revenge against
all the doubters and disbelievers, 'the cigar-chewing fatties', as he
called them, who controlled the pop business and viewed him, the
teenage upstart, with contempt. In the outside world, he might have
been small, strange and put-upon. But in the studio Phil Spector was a
god shaping his own universe.
So you wanted immortality, I ask.
'Yes.' He nods vigorously. 'I think when Thomas Jefferson wrote the
Declaration of Independence he was thinking, people will remember
this. Gershwin may have said to himself, I'm not sure about this
American in Paris, but I think he said, this is something special. I
think Irving Berlin had an ego. I think he wanted to be number one.
And so did I.'
Spector says he doesn't like to talk about the past, yet this can't be
right because here, seated on the sofa, talking about the past, he
flames into life; names, dates and song titles come spilling out. Old
friends are saluted, old enemies trashed.
When I ask him about You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' by the Righteous
Brothers - to my mind, Spector's defining moment, greater even than
the same team's Unchained Melody - he appears to enter a reverie.
Written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, two of his best writers, and
recorded in 1964, the record was Spector's most Wagnerian production
yet - a funeral march to departed love. The guitarist Barney Kessel,
who played on the song, described Spector approaching the recording
'like he was going to invade Moscow'.
Eschewing the duo's usual practice of sharing the lead, Spector gave
almost the whole song to Bill Medley, leaving his partner Bobby
Hatfield to sing only a minor part. When a peeved Hatfield asked what
he was supposed to do while Medley was singing, Spector allegedly
snapped back, 'You can take the money to the bank.'
'That's true,' he says. 'It's also true that they didn't want to do
Lovin' Feelin'. They wanted to do rock'n'roll, ooh-bop-a-doo stuff.'
He shakes his head, as if to say 'Idiots.'
'I worked six months on that fucking record, over-dubbing and
re-overdubbing, and finally I had it down right where I thought it was
pretty good, but I was worried that nobody would get it. I played it
for a few people and nobody had heard anything like it. I didn't know
whether we'd changed the world or done something completely
catastrophic. So I had to go back to New York.
'I played it for Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. I put it on, the record
goes, "You never close your eyes", and Barry says, "Whoah, whoah,
wait. Wrong speed." I said, "What?" He goes, "Wrong speed, Phil."
That's the first comment I hear.
'So I immediately called Dr Kaplan, my psychiatrist, and I said, "Doc,
I have to see you right away. I just worked six months on this record;
it cost me $35,000 and the fucking co-writer thinks it's on the wrong
fucking speed. I called Larry Levine, my engineer, and said, "You
given me the right pressing?" I'm fucking paranoid. I didn't know what
to do. So I called Donnie Kirshner, the co-publisher, and said,
"Donnie, I got to play you this record." He said, "I hear it's a
monster." I said, "You've got the best ears in the business." So I
bring it over and put it on. He goes, "Boops, it's great, it's great,
it's great; what do you call it?" I said, "You've Lost That Lovin'
Feelin'." He said, "How many you got pressed up?" I said, "Half a
million." He said, "Bring Back That Lovin' Feelin' - that's your
title." That's the second opinion. So I call Dr Kaplan again.
'Then I call Murray the K, the biggest DJ in New York City. I said,
"Murray, I have this new Righteous Brothers record. I need you to play
it on the show, because it's a four minute and five second record;
there's never been a record this long before." And I'm lying on the
label; I put three minutes five seconds - I got in a lot of fucking
trouble for that. So he comes over and he listens to the record. This
is the last opinion of the day - five o'clock in the afternoon. And
he's listening and listening, and it gets to the middle section, and
he says, "That bass line, that La Bamba thing, what's that?" I said,
"That's part of the song." He said, "That's fucking sensational." I
said, "Well, yeah." He said, "That's how it should begin." I said, "It
can't begin that way, Murray." He said, "Make that the beginning." And
those are my three experts; the co-writer, the co-publisher and the
number-one disc-jockey in America all killed me. I didn't sleep for a
week when that record came out. I was so sick, I got a spastic colon;
I had an ulcer.'
According to Spector You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' is now the most
played and programmed song in the history of music, beating Always by
Irving Berlin and the Beatles' Yesterday. 'I'm just saying this
because McCartney and I have a little thing going with each other.' He
gives a snickering laugh. 'I'm just giving it a little
boom-boom-boom.'
Spector's wristwatch speaks. 'It's four o'clock.'
'Timing,' he says, 'is the key to everything.
'OK.' He jabs a finger at me across the table. 'You ask me what's my
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.'
OK. 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 Spector breaks up in laughter.
This is the unexpected thing about him, just how funny he is. The
scabrous comedian Lenny Bruce was one of his closest friends - he once
described Bruce as 'my Socrates'. Spector recorded him and supported
him through his last days from when Bruce was being harassed by the
authorities until his death in 1966 from a drug overdose (or, as
Spector put it at the time, 'an overdose of police'). And you suspect
he is still keeping Bruce's lines warm.
'Profanity,' he declares, 'is the last refuge of the inarticulate
prick.' And, 'In a world where carpenters get resurrected anything is
fucking possible.' As long as you've got the timing right. Timing - he
says it again - is everything.
In the early Sixties in America, pop music was dominated by a handful
of major companies.
A small independent might have regional success but would have to
kowtow to a major for national distribution. Spector changed that. He
controlled everything himself: finding the artists, co-writing the
songs, production, publicity, quality control. Because he had made the
sound, and the sound was what sold, he was - uniquely for a producer -
bigger than his artists, strutting like a tyrant, all capes and Cuban
heels. 'He was the first of the anarchists/pop music millionaires,'
the writer Nik Cohn observed. 'At last, in him, odium equalled money.'
'We played the part,' says Spector. 'Did it all, did it all. I just
felt I didn't fit in. I was different. So I had to make my own world.
And it made life complicated for me, but it made it justifiable. Oh,
that's the reason they hate my fucking guts; I look strange, I act
strange, I make these strange records, so there's a reason to hate my
guts. Because I felt hated. Even when the music became big I never
felt like I fitted in. I never did all the drugs and the parties. I
didn't feel comfortable. I always preferred the studio. Going out was
always the big ordeal. Too hard. It was like being in front of an
audience.'
Fame, success, the recognition he had always craved, all of it was
'scary. I felt powerful. But it was frightening because you always
think of losing it, every minute of the day. You look at poor people
all the time. You think of yourself as poor all the time. You're
remembering yourself as poor all the time. You never quite accept it.
Guilt, all the time.'
Spector had by now married Veronica Bennett, the stunningly beautiful
lead singer of the Ronettes. She would later write in her
autobiography, Be My Baby, of how Spector kept her a virtual prisoner
in his mansion. When she toured with the Ronettes, she recalled, he
would call each night and tell her to leave the receiver on her pillow
so he could hear the sound of her breathing until morning. But
couldn't that be love? He bought her a sports car and a custom-made
mannequin of himself to ride in the front seat beside her. Perhaps it
was obsession.
According to Bennett, he would replay the film Citizen Kane endlessly
in the darkness of his mansion, weeping at the final scene where
Rosebud, the sled, is incinerated. Citizen Kane is a film about
wealth, hubris and spiritual failure. Like Spector, Orson Welles was a
prodigy - he made Kane when he was 26 - a genius who refused to
compromise, and who bent the world to his vision. And as much as the
film was a study of power and the isolation it brings - the plutocrat
locked in his mansion of Xanadu - it was also a portrait of Welles's
own worst fears, the decline of early promise and brilliance. Spector
regards it as the greatest film ever made, and returns to it
constantly throughout our conversation. At one point we are talking
about Lenny Bruce. The great tragedy of Bruce, Spector once said, was
that he was remembered for all the wrong reasons - as a junkie, rather
than a wise, fearless and funny man. Did Spector ever worry, I ask,
that a similar fate might befall him, remembered not for his
brilliance but as...
'Maniacal?' Spector gives a thin smile. 'Yeah. That's why I say now,
let the art speak for itself. If the art's maniacal, I'm maniacal.' He
pauses. 'Orson Welles spent his whole life chasing money, and then he
ended up being 300lb doing wine commercials. He never lived up to the
genius that he was because he never made that commitment to what he
wanted to be. He was caught up in being a playboy, a movie star, maybe
being a senator. I made a commitment to what I wanted to be. I let the
art speak for itself.'
Spector made his last great Philles recording in 1966: River Deep -
Mountain High with Ike and Tina Turner. It was his most extravagant,
most impassioned recording yet. The record did go to number one in
Britain, but American DJs ignored it, and in the States it barely
brushed the charts. By now, the writing was on the Wall of Sound.
Spector's metier was the 45rpm single, but that was fast giving way to
the album as the pre-eminent vehicle of pop. The new generation of
artists no longer wanted a producer with big ideas; they had big ideas
of their own. By the time of River Deep - Mountain High, Spector's
operation had ground almost to a halt. Its failure floored him. He
folded Philles and retired to his mansion to brood. His career as a
record producer appeared to be over.
It was the Beatles who saved him. In 1969, in the midst of breaking
up, they approached him to salvage the tapes of Let It Be. Paul
McCartney was reportedly incensed when Spector applied his
grandiloquent techniques to the title song, dressing it in strings and
choirs. (There are rumours that McCartney now plans to issue a
remastered version of the recording with Spector's flourishes
excised.) But the album was a critical triumph and sold millions.
Revitalised, Spector went on to produce George Harrison's All Things
Must Pass, and four albums with John Lennon, including Imagine.
Spector's countenance becomes mournful when he talks of Lennon. He
loved him and misses him, he says, as he loved and misses Lenny Bruce,
and his own father. Lennon was 'the brother I never had. I just loved
him. And we just loved each other. He loved the way I worked. He loved
the way I thought. Perfect marriage. Just perfect.'
The last album they made together was Rock'n'Roll, recorded in 1974.
Lennon had been thrown out of the matrimonial home by Yoko Ono, and
had moved to LA. He was drinking heavily, and so was Spector. 'It got
a little out of hand,' he remembers, 'because it was the first
vacation either of us had taken since we'd started our careers. We
partied and invited too many people to the party, everybody from
Warren Beatty to Elton John. It wasn't healthy and it wasn't good.'
The sessions ended in disarray. Spector says they both knew it was
over. 'I didn't want to work any more and neither did John.' They made
a pact to reunite in the future and make a record with Elvis - the
record that would save Elvis from himself. And then Elvis died. 'We
called each other on the phone,' Spector remembers. 'We were shook
up.'
Lennon started recording again, but without Spector. Spector himself
continued to work fitfully. He recorded albums with the veteran rocker
Dion and with Leonard Cohen, albums that were events simply by virtue
of Spector's presence at the controls. But he had lost interest. His
eccentricities had by now become a thing of legend. The electric fence
around the mansion; the bodyguards; the scenes in restaurants. Cohen
described Spector, the control-freak, as 'out of control'. Dee Dee
Ramone recalled that when the Ramones first met Spector to discuss
working together on the album End of the Century, his first words
were, 'My bodyguards want to fight your bodyguards.'
Spector had taken to wearing a pistol - a different one, it was said,
according to his wardrobe, and stories multiplied about him
brandishing it in the studio. 'He was a good shot,' said Dee Dee. 'I
saw him hit a fly at 50 yards.'
It didn't matter if these stories were true. The myths swirled and
eddied about him, and in the end they closed over his head like a
shroud. By 1980 he had done it all. He had shaped the defining sound
of a generation; he had worked with the greatest rock group of them
all. Finally, there was nowhere left for him to go. On December 8,
1980, Lennon was shot dead. Phil Spector turned away from the world,
and closed the door behind him.
Spector said he needed a break. While he vanished upstairs, I walked
in the garden. From here, on top of the world, you could see the sun
shining on the roofs of the houses in the valley below. But among the
trees, the unkempt lawn and flowerbeds, all was shadows and
melancholy. Inside, a buffet lunch had been spread out in the
dining-room. Spector's PA and I ate, the classical music playing
around us. At length, Spector returned. He looked at the food and
shook his head. 'Let's go in the other room.'
'I'm not addicted to applause,' Spector says, 'because I live a life
of reclusiveness.' He pauses. 'My friend Doc Pomus [who wrote hits for
Elvis and the Drifters], when people used to say, I hear Phil
Spector's a recluse, he would say, not recluse, reckless, baby!
Reckless!' Spector smiles to himself. His wristwatch whirs into
action. 'It's five o'clock.'
For years he did... nothing. He was incapable of action. Paralysed.
Projects came and went, unfulfilled. What could possibly interest him?
Disco? 'Terrible.'
Michael Jackson? 'The most depressing, heinous thing. I mean, starting
out life as a black man and ending up as a white woman, what's that
all about?'
Rap music? 'Like the c got left off at the printers.'
Kurt Cobain? 'When Kurt Cobain died somebody phoned me from Time
magazine and said, "I haven't been this upset since John Lennon died."
I said, "You don't know the difference between Kurt Cobain and John
Lennon?" He said. "No, what's the difference?" I said, "That's too
bad, because Kurt Cobain did." ' Spector falls back on the sofa. 'It's
all been done! It's all been done!'
How did he pass the time - the weeks, the months, the years? 'I
studied languages...' The sentence peters into silence. 'I don't
remember. I don't think it was a particularly good time.'
He was mostly alone. Spector had no gift for relationships. 'Those
records, when I was making them, they were the greatest love of my
life.
I lived for those records. That's why I never had relationships with
anybody that could last.' He pauses, bewilderment flickering in his
face. 'That's why I can't figure out why they have so little
significance for me today.'
Spector married his first wife, Annette Merar, when he was 22. The
first Philles records had the words 'Phil + Annette' inscribed on the
run-out grooves, but the practice stopped when he signed the Ronettes
and started courting Veronica Bennett. They married in 1968, but the
marriage was dissolved in 1974, amid mutual allegations of his
controlling behaviour and her alcoholism. Spector cannot bring himself
even to mention her name, referring to her simply as 'my ex-wife'.
In 1988 Bennett filed a lawsuit against him, claiming that the group
had not been paid royalties on the licensing of old Ronettes records
for film and CD release. In June 2000 she was awarded $2.6 million,
but in October last year the case was overturned in Spector's favour
when an appeal court judge ruled that the original 1963 contract gave
Spector unconditional rights to the recordings.
Notwithstanding his victory, the very mention of the case drives him
close to fury. 'Not to get on a dissertation about ex-wives and shit
like that, but wife and marriage isn't a word, it's a sentence; and
wives last through our marriage, ex-wives last for ever, and all that
other bullshit. But she can still get up 40 years later and sing Be My
Baby and get applause. I made her famous, and she resents that. "Oh,
but he's a control-freak..." If you come down to what people really
hate about Phil Spector, it's that he controls everything. But it's
funny, you hear such negative shit about me but there isn't anyone in
this business who has touched me who hasn't achieved some sort of
success with me. There isn't anyone who hasn't made money.' He laughs.
'Not that that means anything, but it's interesting.'
The couple adopted three children, whom Spector sees 'occasionally'.
Another relationship, about which he will say nothing at all, produced
twins: Nicole, who is now 20, is a student in New York; her brother
Philip died when he was 10 years old. Spector says he is not looking
for sympathy, but it was a difficult time. His closest friends - Lenny
and John - all the people he could talk to, had passed on. 'So I just
sort of struggled along alone. I wasn't well enough to function as a
regular part of society, so I didn't.'
Spector talks of his psychological problems with remarkable candour,
struggling, it seems, to find some explanation for all the phobias,
the irrational behaviour, the need for control, for approbation. He
first started seeing a psychiatrist in 1960, he says to get out of the
military draft. He never stopped, but therapy was never enough.
'There's something I'd either not accepted, or I'm not prepared to
accept or live with in my life, that I don't know about perhaps; that
I'm facing now.'
His mother and father were first cousins, he says. 'I don't know,
genetically, whether or not that had something to do with what I am or
who I became. I would say I'm probably relatively insane, to an
extent.' He pauses to think on this. 'To an extent. I take medication
for schizophrenia, but I wouldn't say I'm schizophrenic. But I have a
bipolar personality, which is strange. I'm my own worst enemy.'
For years he couldn't face being with people, and he couldn't face
being with himself. He suffered from chronic insomnia, night after
night, going crazy. 'You don't sleep, your mind starts playing tricks
on you. It's a terrible situation... I couldn't stand the way I was
any more.'
The realisation that he was not normal, he says, 'petrified' him, but
what scared him more was the effect his condition might have on his
daughter Nicole. 'Even if she genetically was well, I worried that as
she grew up, by seeing me as an example she would become unwell
herself, and be attracted to men like that - manic depressive, or
psychotic, or cuckoo. And I wanted to have a healthier relationship
with her than I could have as a neurotic, sick person. I wanted her to
look up to me and say, this is what a reasonable man is like.'
Finally, he sought help. Always 'terrified' of drugs, he began taking
medication that would moderate his moods and help him sleep. He 'waged
war' with himself. 'I just told myself that I would beat it. That I
would beat my own brain. And over a slow, slow period of time, and
every day getting up saying no, you're not there yet, and months and
years going by...' He pauses. 'It's been very slow, very difficult.'
He could not, he says, have entertained even the possibility of this
conversation six months ago. Six years ago? 'Absolutely not.' Sixteen
years ago? 'Maybe under false pretences, but probably not. I wouldn't
have even thought of it. I was completely... another person. I'm a
completely different person than I was three months ago, six months
ago, nine months ago.'
Even now, he says, it's difficult; talking about the past, meeting
people from the past. It is only now that he is beginning to bring his
old friends back into his life. 'A lot of my enemies are dying off,
which is a shame, because they define me in many ways.'
So who are his closest friends?
He thinks for a moment, and laughs. 'My attorneys.'
It is largely thanks to Nicole, he says, that he is now, after more
than 20 years, making the first tentative steps back into the studio.
Last year she took Spector to a Stairsailor concert in LA. He was
impressed, an introduction was made and in October he flew to London
to produce two tracks for their forthcoming album. There is talk of
him working with the Australian band the Vines and with Coldplay.
Timing, again. For years, he says, nothing in music has interested
him, but now he feels the inkling of something in the air, like the
Sixties all over again. 'That's all it is, a feeling. I never thought
about anything I did before. I didn't think, why the Ronettes, why the
Righteous Brothers, why John Lennon? I just did it. So I don't think,
why Starsailor? Why Coldplay? It just feels OK. And I haven't had that
instinct in me for years and years and years.'
One wonders why now, at the age of 62, when most people are
considering retirement, Spector feels the need to come back. But
retirement is what he has done for most of his life, and it has not
made him happy. 'I'm suffering a little bit from acute boredom and
restlessness. But not crazy anxious. Not desperate.'
He talks about wanting to change things, as he changed them in the
Sixties; to shake up the business, to make a difference. But this is
all vague. You sense that what this is really about is self-esteem and
survival. Damn the myth, Phil Spector wants to go back in the studio
because the studio is where he always belonged. 'It's where I feel
comfortable, where I feel reasonable.' He stops for a moment. 'Really,
I'm not even sure what I want to do. I just know that what I do is
better than what anybody else does.'
Outside, the night is closing in. His wristwatch speaks. 'It's six
o'clock.' 'I don't know what to say any more,' he says. He is tired of
talking about himself, the past. It is time to wipe the slate clean.
'Listen.' He leans forward. 'People tell me they idolise me, want to
be like me, but I tell them, trust me, you don't want my life. Because
it hasn't been a very pleasant life. I've been a very tortured soul. I
have not been at peace with myself. I have not been happy.'
But then what is happiness? It's not a good woman, says Spector, or a
good man. It's not money. It's not hit records. 'Happiness is when you
feel pretty fucking good and you've no bad shit on your mind.' He
pauses. 'Good health, bad memory, that's about happy.'
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Robert J.
--
Robert J. Boyne.Sutton Group West Coast Realty.North Vancouver/British Columbia.Cell. 604-644-6973.
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" I have the good sense to know that unheard songs are often sweeter".
Email - a-great...@shaw.ca
Home page - http://www.realtor-lower-mainland.com
SavoyBG
>Spector made his last great Philles recording in 1966: River Deep -
>Mountain High with Ike and Tina Turner. It was his most extravagant,
>most impassioned recording yet. The record did go to number one in
>Britain,
Not quite.
It only got to # 3.
Bruce Grossberg
Roger Ford
That must be the "Record Mirror" or "Melody Maker" chart.
It got to #4 in NME 16 July 1966
ROGER FORD
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"Spam Free Zone" - to combat unwanted automatic spamming I have added
an extra "b" in my e-mail address (mari...@bblueyonder.co.uk).
Please delete same before responding.Thank you!
Robert J. Boyne
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It made it to #1 at my house in the UK. (grin).