He's a Rebel (30 page)

Stepping back from Philles, Phil used the other labels both as a haven and a cudgel, trying to find a new path without pressure while at the same time smiting the industry and even his trail of hits. “At this time, Phil had grown tired a little bit of his sound,” Poncia said. “He was getting turned off with the teenybopper stuff. The Jeff and Ellie thing, that wasn't his music. Phil would never have written a song like ‘Da Doo Ron Ron.' With something like that, he would tap the source for whatever it was and when it ran out it was ‘next.' We were starting to get into some different kinds of songs, we'd come in with different angles, and he was happy with that.

“Phil knew what the power of Philles was, but he always had the idea . . . See, this is when he felt rejected by a business that he thought he gave so much to. So he did this other thing for a while and said, ‘Fuck everybody.' And then too, in order to bring in Danny Davis and make it a viable working situation, he wanted to offer Danny a situation too.” This would come about months later, when Phil opened yet another off-label, Phi-Dan Records; co-owned by Spector and Davis, it was a minor vehicle designed to feed off the reputations of both men, though Phil would have little to do with any product on the label.

However, Phil gave up the safe harbor of releasing inadequate material on cheesecloth labels when all of the records he made failed and a priority was to deliver a record with the appeal of “Be My Baby.” Clearly, the timing of the Philles retreat could not have been worse. As Spector receded, the Beatles captured the imagination of the restless baby-boom generation, flooding the charts with as many as six Top 10 hits at once. The Merseybeat was in full bloom across the United States, on a rising tide with the rhythmic, pounding hooks of Motown. Spector had little voice in this important period of change. As the hot summer of 1964 was called to arms by Martha and the Vandellas' “Dancing in the Street,” the Ronettes, “Do I Love You” rose to only No. 34. The one new Philles release was the Crystals'
“All Grown Up”—and this record may have appeared more out of spite than art. Phil had cut the Spector-Barry-Greenwich tune a full year before. Then, when Jeff and Ellie recorded it with the Exciters, Phil—still smarting over “Chapel of Love”—put out his record, leading Jeff and Ellie to kill theirs. And while he won the round, the ploy was harmful to him. The Crystals' song, a mediocre Spector artifact, was gone in an eye blink, a whisper at No. 98.

The cool breeze of autumn rejuvenated Phil. He returned to the reliable lodestone of meretricious emotion, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. For this, his timing was perfect. Fairly drifting in Don Kirshner's television jingle world, their biggest recent hit was Eydie Gorme's “Blame It on the Bossa Nova.” Kirshner wanted to keep his writers content and in the rock-and-roll elite, and that “Philly” was coming back to him made Kirshner believe in the prodigal son. Spector was so serious about his revival that he earned his one-third interest. For days, three titanic composing talents sat with each other around a piano, soldering viscous, romantic chords into a Ronettes ballad called “Walking in the Rain.”

Phil cut the song in a minimal style, smothered in soft, salacious echoes and only horns and a triangle bell sticking out of the quietly massed arrangement. Given the literal imagery of the lyric, Larry Levine suggested using sound bites of thunder and rainfall, which he had in the special effects drawer in the Gold Star office. Normally, Phil would have gone for such effects only if he could create them musically, but Larry blended the taped clangor as he would have an instrument, not obliterating any other sound. Thunder booming and drops falling around her, Ronnie's gauzy, quavering plea for someone with whom to share the rain was every bit an operetta.

“With ‘Walking in the Rain,' ” Vinnie Poncia said, “he went back to goin' for the jugular again.”

Phil had been going to release a Darlene Love song written by Poncia and Andreoli, “Stumble and Fall,” and had already assigned it the catalogue number Philles 123. But he was so eager to unveil “Walking in the Rain” that he gave it that number. Released within days in early October, it climbed rapidly and blanketed the airwaves but, oddly, it stopped at No. 23, surely the lowest chart ranking for a song everyone assumed was a monster hit.

Phil was certain that the song would serve him well, and he did not
wait for the chart's verdict. He was moving again now, pushing with the old confident swagger, and he was working on a record he wanted to hit people across the eyebrows. Satisfied that he had taken the Ronettes to a higher level, but fearful that the girl-group thing was dying, he had already cast his fate in a whole new direction.

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Alan Betrock,
The Girl Groups
(New York: Delilah Books, 1982), 90.

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Bono's explanation of his parting with Spector skirted any mention of being fired as well as any other specifics. “When ‘I Got You Babe' came along, that was the end of my and Cher's connection with Phil,” he said.