He's a Rebel (39 page)

—
RONNIE SPECTOR

The Ronettes, who in 1964 were one of the most popular rock-and-roll acts in the world, could hardly book an appearance in 1966. Always the only real spigot of income for the group, their road dates
that year netted the three Ronettes under $10,000 each. As “family” with Phil, the act could have plodded on as a rock cliché for as long as Phil endured in that role himself. But when Nedra Talley married in March of 1966, it signaled the end of the bumpy road. The man she married, Scott Ross, had once been Murray the K's program director and then turned to religious broadcasting as a born-again Christian. For Nedra that meant new values and priorities. “I made a commitment to Christ and it turned my life around,” she said. “I didn't feel I could continue what I was doing and really grow in any way. Because of the tensions we had with Phil, I did not feel, career-wise, that we could go in the direction we needed to go in with Ronnie emotionally involved with him.”

The Ronettes sang together for the last time in January of 1967. It was an appropriate portent that in this new year—which would be rock and roll's apocalypse—Philles Records had gone dark.

Another symbol of foreclosure came from Larry Levine, who also chose January to change his status. With Phil not around, and Gold Star's antiquated facilities shunned by the new rockers, work had slowed to a near standstill. Seduced by Herb Alpert, whose records he engineered from the start, Larry accepted the job of chief engineer at A&M Records. A&M had recently bought the old Charlie Chaplin movie studio on Sunset and La Brea, and Levine supervised the construction of recording studios there. “By then Phil was out of it, so I didn't feel I was walking out on him,” Levine said. “I went to Stan and Dave and they said I should do it.”

At the Philles office, meanwhile, Danny Davis was still drawing paychecks for little more than turning on the lights. “It was ludicrous,” he said. “Philles was in the toilet, it was no longer a viable entity. We weren't sellin' records and he was gone. I was doin' things in my office that were just . . . a guy who had a lock on all the industry awards, who had a lock on every radio guy in the world, who knew everybody, and I was sittin' there doin' nothing. He was just carrying me. He would leave me notes about things to do. Those notes he left me, God, it was disgusting. ‘Call to get my car done.' ‘Change my tires.' ‘Call Minnesota Fats and tell him to come over.' I was like Sonny Bono, I was his gofer.

“And every time I wanted to leave he kept giving me more money. I was up to like a thousand a week. Everyone else was either fired or workin' on half-salary, but he didn't want me to leave. The
fact is, Phil was always good to me. We had a genuine affection for each other.”

But Danny began to worry that his industry clout might rust away in the Philles tomb. “He had taken my forte away from me, because he had no records to promote. It got to a point where if a Top Ten list came in on green paper, I would write, ‘Love the shade of green,' just to stay in touch with guys. I was doin' nothing for him and he just didn't understand that.”

Phil gave little thought to the hard realities of the business; just existing carried the pretense of influence. On that assumption, he began to reissue his old singles in compilation packages. In the spring of 1967 he sent out releases to the trade papers disclosing that he had signed Ike and Tina Turner to a new three-year deal; a new Ike and Tina single was to be out by June.
Billboard
ran this encouraging kernel of news in May with a headline reading “Spector Revives Push On Philles,” but long after June no record had materialized.

Phil's illusions did nothing to prevent his imprint on rock from evaporating. On January 16–18, the Monterey International Pop Festival, which drew 50,000 to an outdoor concert featuring Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, and the Jefferson Airplane, rang in the new ethos of the late sixties, the music and culture of psychedelic rock. By the summer, when the Beatles'
Sgt. Pepper
album came out and the country was at war with itself over Vietnam and the generation gap, rock and roll weighed in on the side of enlightenment, dissent, and drugs. Phil Spector sat out the fray. He made no records in 1967 and—frightened by the runaway excess and false catechism of drugs within the music industry—he had no use for the wanked-out lunacy all around him. On only two occasions did Phil come into contact with LSD, one of those indirectly. That was when he picked up the phone one night and on the other end was a weak-sounding Annette in New York. That evening she had gone to a downtown rock club where, without her knowledge, someone spiked her drink with acid. Completely disoriented, Annette, who never had taken the drug before, did not know where she was and freaked out, screaming that her hand was gone. Taken to a hospital, she called Phil when her head cleared.

“He was incredibly angry, he just didn't believe it,” she remembered. “He said, ‘Don't worry, I'll take care of it.' He found out somehow who did it and I don't know what happened and I
don't want to know. But Phil really came through for me. He always treated me like gold after everything was over. When I had some trouble he was there for me.”

Phil's one personal experience with acid was just as terrifying for him. He took it under the guidance of a doctor, hoping he could better know what was at the root of his psyche. The problem was, he may have seen the answer all too clearly.

“He put himself under the influence of LSD prescribed by Dr. Kaplan and he told me that when he was under he saw his father commit suicide,” Danny Davis related. “Phil always said he hated his father for what he did, for taking the easy way out. The acid went right to the heart of that hatred, to the pain, and it horrified him. That's why he was against LSD or anything that was ingested. He didn't care about a little pot every once in a while but he was very much against the acid, because it made him confront what he didn't want to.”

Finally Danny decided that he could not go on. With four months left on his contract with Philles, he handed in a letter of resignation. Phil reacted badly.

“Don't think you can just get up and walk out,” he told Danny.

“What do you hope to get if you sue me, Phil?” Danny laughed. “All I have is a Mustang and a color televison set.”

Danny did not think anything of Phil's threat. Then, a few weeks later, he was served with legal papers. Phil was suing him for $250,000 for breach of contract. “Even Jay Cooper, Phil's attorney, didn't understand it,” Davis recalled. “Cooper thought it was a godsend that I was gonna leave and save Phil all that money.”

Coincidentally, at about the same time Phil became stuck in a legal row of his own, over
The Last Movie
. By mid-1967 expenses had swelled to over $1 million and the movie had not even been shot. At that point, Phil backed out of the project. Not only did Dennis Hopper sue him, so did Steven Stern, who still had not seen a dollar of his $71,000. Phil desperately needed someone to testify for him, to somehow prove he had reason to walk out. He realized he needed Danny Davis.

“He called and asked me would I bail him out of this thing,” Davis said. “I told him, ‘Listen, Phil, I'll do whatever you want, but
you're suin' me for $250,000. If you drop the suit, I'll come to your aid.' ” Phil agreed. He had to. “I mean, they were suin' him for millions, man. There were all kinds of monies that he had guaranteed. He had guaranteed the whole production. But when the above-and below-line figures came in at $1.2 million, Phil didn't want to live up to what he had said. It became a big imbroglio and there was all kind of heat from every quarter, from Dennis, from Steven Stern, from this one, that one. It looked very bad for him but with Phil it was ‘Man, Dennis, I'll show you,' and I was to be his big weapon.”

When Danny gave his deposition, Hopper's lawyers tried to prove that Phil had cared too little about the movie for it to have been made. “They said, ‘Isn't it true, Mr. Davis, that during the discussions about this movie, Phil Spector sat away from the crowd reading a book on the care and breeding of St. Bernard dogs?' And I said, ‘Yes, that's true'—which I understand was extremely damaging to Phil. But I said, ‘Wait, you don't understand . . .' because, once again, you try and explain Phil Spector. That was exactly the way he wanted it to appear, that he had no interest in the movie, when indeed he wanted to make the picture, but he wanted to make it look like there was nothing important about the picture. Understand?”

In the end, rather than try to figure out Spector, Hopper settled with him. Phil paid $600,000, according to Davis, toward the cost of the aborted movie, including Steven Stern's fee. Incredibly, Phil and Dennis remained friends, the court case having been like a poker game of crazed nerve and dare between men too abnormal for mere logic. Davis, his part of the deal done, was free of Phil's legal claw when he found his next promotion job—back again with Don Kirshner, at Screen Gems.

Elliott Ingber, who had not seen Phil since “Bumbershoot,” ran into him at Canter's Deli late in 1967. Elliott had moved far along the rock underground with Frank Zappa; writing songs in Zappa's bitingly satirical style, Ingber's “Don't Bogart That Joint” was a classic send-up of the drug culture. Observing Phil during his dormancy, ringed by bodyguards yet looking so alone, Elliott thought he had never seen anything sadder in his life. “He was weirded out,” Ingber recalled. “He was dressed in his black three-piece suit and Beatle
boots and a Tyrolean hat or something. It was like he was in a past life, but it was like no life.”

Elliott tried to speak of his work with Frank Zappa, but Phil was indifferent. “Uh, that's good,” he muttered at intervals. “The only way I could relate to him,” said Ingber, “was the level I initially did, which was the guitar.”

“You play anymore, man?” Elliott asked him.

‘Nah, I don't play anymore,” Phil told him. “I don't even think I got a guitar anymore.”

“Well, come on down. We're playin' with Frank. I'll give you a fuckin' guitar.”

“Nah, man.”

Elliott then said good-bye and walked away, thoroughly bummed. If it was true that Phil Spector did not play and did not even
have
a guitar, that was the saddest thing of all.

One of the few people whom Phil permitted into his retreat was Gerry Goffin. Over the past year, Goffin's own life had turned upside down. He and Carole King wrote two huge hits, Aretha Franklin's “A Natural Woman” and the Monkees' “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” and started a new label, Tomorrow Records, on which they produced a New York band called the Myddle Class. Gerry not only watched the label fail, he also watched Carole fall in love with the band's bass player, Charles Larkey, which led to the couple's divorce. King and Larkey formed a short-lived band called the City, recording an album for Ode, and King later played piano and sang backup on James Taylor's
Sweet Baby James
LP before recording one of history's biggest-selling albums,
Tapestry
, in the early seventies. In contrast, Goffin moved to L.A. and fell into a personal hell of drugs, a failed singing career, and a lack of songwriting success. Both he and Phil were riders on the storm during rock's changing times, which brought them together. Covered in leather, Phil on his Harley-Davidson and Gerry on his BSA, they biked up into the Santa Monica Mountains and wound through the arid hills all day. They just rode, burning oil, two men with no idea where they were going.

One day Phil wound out with Ronnie on the back of the Harley, Gerry with his girlfriend on the back of the BSA. “I remember saying to him, ‘This is a little silly, man. We're gettin' older now, we're
not kids anymore. We re just riding around on motorcycles,' ” Goffin recalled. “Phil didn't say anything, but Ronnie said, ‘You're right.' ”

Nedra's marriage made Ronnie want more from her relationship with Phil. When Ronnie used to tell Darlene Love that she was going to marry Phil, Darlene would try to talk her out of it. “You don't want that, child,” she would say. “That's the last thing in the world you want to do.” But now Ronnie began to push the idea on Phil, and while he knew the financial dangers of another divorce, possessing her legally made sense. Small and meek, Ronnie was no Annette; she was a little mouse in his presence and it was hard to imagine that she would want more than he was willing to give in mariage. On April 14, 1968, they married, in a ceremony attended by Ronnie's mother, Beatrice. The other two Ronettes were not invited.

“Only then did Ronnie admit she had not been married all along,” Nedra Talley said. “It was like ‘Oh, I was only joking.' It's hard to come out of a lie, but there was a competition thing with Ronnie and me. That's part of being close. If I was married, she had to be. Or if I had kids, she had to. There was also pressure on Ronnie for family's sake. She had not been raised to live with someone. Every woman wants to know that you respect and love her, and that the ring makes it all right.”

Unlike what he had done to Annette, Phil tried to give Ronnie a great deal of attention after the wedding. Phil wanted children as much as Ronnie did, and when Ronnie did not conceive right away he had her take fertility pills. She was given the run of the house and the servants, and she thought it was neat that they bowed to her and said, “Yes, Mrs. Spector.” Ronnie also expected, because Phil told her, that she would be in the studio as his top recording concern. But in addition to not making any records, he told her she had no reason to leave the house, that she had everything there that she needed to be happy. In time, even if Ronnie wanted to go to the market, the bodyguards would intercept her at the door. If Phil decreed that she could go out that day, a bodyguard would drive her, keeping her under constant watch; if Phil said no, she would be turned back inside the house and the bodyguard would fetch her what she needed.