He's a Rebel (32 page)

“You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' ” was not unlike “Walking in the Rain” in its dreamlike flow, but the emotion was rubbed raw. The slashing vocals and the massive chorus tore the top off the song, while the throbbing basses and tom-toms made the quiet passages a slightly surreal intimation of a molten heart. It was still white pop, but it was white pop cleaved by the forgotten pain and grieving of the blues. Over the radio, one could hear the embers burning.

“Lovin' Feelin' ” ran three minutes and fifty seconds, a good half-minute longer than the average record of the day. Phil, who would not cut one second of it, released it with the label reading 3:05, just in case program directors would be skittish. He need not have worried. The record messed up some tight radio schedules at first, before the ruse was discovered, but it demanded to be played. Five weeks after hitting the chart in mid-December it went Top 10,
and many black stations were playing it in rotation, a major breakthrough for a white act in the mid-sixties. Reflecting a revolution in rock tastes, teenagers bought the record in greater numbers than any of the earlier teen anthems. In England, Andrew Oldham genuflected to the record. When a British pop singer named Cilia Black put out a cover of “Lovin' Feelin' ” before the Righteous Brothers record was imported, Oldham took it as sacrilege. He and Tony Calder took out giant ads in the London music papers screaming attention to the Spector disc. In an ad placed in
Melody Maker
, Oldham wrote:

This advert, is nor for commercial gain, it is taken as something that must be said about the great new
PHIL SPECTOR
Record
,
THE RIGHTEOUS BROTHERS
singing
“
YOU
'
VE LOST THAT LOVIN
'
FEELING
”.
Already in the American Top Ten, this is Spector's greatest production, the last word in Tomorrow's sound Today, exposing the overall mediocrity of the Music Industry
.

In solidarity with Spector, in the ad Oldham used the term that had become the quasi-monogram of Philles Records and imprinted on some Philles album jackets, “Tomorrow's Sound Today.” In other ads, Andrew described the magnitude of the song by coining a new term, “Phil Spector's Wall of Sound,” and that catchphrase would come to have a life of its own, cribbed by music critics worldwide as the definitive description of Spector's work. Realizing the power of those words, Phil would eventually register them as a legal trademark.

The Righteous Brothers, with Phil to pitch them, went to England in January to do a tour. By mid-February, “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' ” moved ahead of Petula Clark's “Downtown” and became the No. 1 record on both sides of the water. On the American R&B chart, it was No. 3, behind only the Temptations' “My Girl” and Sam Cooke's “Shake.”

Although Phil had stopped etching the “Phil & Annette” legend on his records with “Baby I Love You,” he and Annette came together in several shaky reconciliations in 1965. During these interludes, Ronnie's name was never mentioned, and Annette dreamed that Phil had finally learned what was important to his soul. However, their arguments never ceased. Vinnie Poncia would be called up to the eighteenth floor and would step into guerrilla warfare.

“Things would be strewn all over the place and they'd be screamin' at each other,” Poncia said. “She'd say, ‘You better get him out of here, because I'm gonna kill him if you don't!' And he'd be threatening to kill her and it would get brutal. I'd go in there as a peacemaker and break it up but then they'd start again. Because Phil was just impossible to live with. He was way too involved with himself to give anything to anybody else. At one point Annette was a very normal human being. He made her a wreck. That's why both of them were in therapy all the time.”

“There were tremendous fights,” Danny Davis recalled. “Annette was no mouse. She was very tough and demanding of his time. She was very sweet and nice, but she changed too. I watched her change. But I tell you what, her change was fostered by Phil's actions.”

Phil told Annette he still loved and needed her, but the romance with Ronnie did not cool. Neither did he allow Annette to get any closer to him or his success. In June of 1964, two months after the release of their first album, the Rolling Stones flew over to begin their first American tour. Phil entertained them in New York and provided Andrew Oldham the use of his office; some nights Andrew slept there. Their first night in, Phil took Vinnie to have dinner with the Stones at the Astor Hotel, where they were staying—“He said, ‘Vinnie, you're not gonna believe what they look like' ”—but he would not let Annette near them. Early in 1965, when the Beatles were filming their second movie,
Help!
, in the Bahamas, Annette, at that time again separated from Phil, was invited by her friend Henry Grossman, a
Life
magazine photographer, to visit the set. When Grossman introduced her to the Beatles, they sang “Happy Mrs. Spector to You.” It was a thrilling moment for her, and she had to fight for it.

“Phil was so pissed that I went, he almost screwed up my whole trip,” Annette said. “He told Murray the K, who was also there, to spy on me and try to keep me off the set but he couldn't.

“Phil didn't want me to do anything, or find any happiness, or be a part of anything. He had detectives on me when we were separated. I know because I read the detective reports. A private investigator was tailing my ass to see what I'm doing when
he's
the one who's screwing around.”

Phil recorded “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' ” while he was
separated from Annette. “He wrote ‘Lovin' Feelin' ' for me, he told me that to my face,” she related. “He said, ‘This song is for you.' ” That cut Annette like a knife. Gorgeous as the record was, the lyric was a harsh censure of blame for a failed love; not one word of it accepted blame.

“He has no right to tell me I lost the loving feeling,” she said, “because he's the one who never had it.”

Knowing there was no hope for them, Annette moved into an apartment removed from him and the memories, on Broadway and Sixty-eighth Street. Phil returned to the penthouse. Even so, there was still talk about reconciliation. “He never said yes and he never said no, he just left me dangling.” She gave it one last chance when she went to L.A. with Phil one time, hoping the change of scenery would evoke old feelings. It didn't. “We fought our asses off,” she said, “and I walked out one morning at 6
A.M
. and got on a train—because he got
me
afraid to fly—and went back to New York alone.”

Finally Annette spoke the word they had avoided. She asked for a divorce.

“First he said if I wanted a divorce, I had to go get it. But after some more time, he said he would arrange it. I had a lawyer and we made a settlement and Phil was very generous, but I felt I deserved it. He had his best year with me; he never before or after had a year like he had in 1963.”

Late in 1965, Phil went to Tijuana on an overnight charter to obtain a Mexican divorce. The settlement gave Annette $100,000 in alimony spread out in weekly payments over five years.

“I never asked for royalties or anything. I only wanted his love—and that was the last thing in the world he was capable of giving.”

In the months following his unpleasant departure from Philles Records, Lester Sill hit bottom. His production companies and talent scouting underfinanced and withering in a new world of rock, his royalty vein to Duane Eddy and then to Spector broken, Lester closed up shop. The man who tilled the rock soil with Leiber and Stoller, Phil Spector, Herb Alpert, and a dozen more was repaid by none of them. There was no work and no money. Being locked in legal battles with a stubborn Spector over the $60,000 severance pay was a major strain.

“I remember my lawyers deposing him, chasing him all over
the place, and I was in real bad trouble,” Sill said. “I was busted, I was really broke and on my ass.”

Aware of this, Phil wanted to turn the screw. “You know what he did? Shows you where his mind was. I owed money to Gold Star for my own projects. I owed 'em about $1,500 and I couldn't pay them. So Phil wanted to pay that and take over the bill, so he could sock it to me because I was suing him. It would be my debt to
him
. Stan Ross and Dave Gold told him they wouldn't do it.”

Eventually Lester did get the money held hostage by Phil, but by the time the lawyers were paid it was only a moral victory. Still hurting, Lester was finally offered a job, by Don Kirshner at Screen Gems, where Chuck Kaye had landed. Called in to quell the writers' discontent and resign them to Kirshner, “I had to pay my own way to New York, that SOB,” Sill said. Not sure if he wanted to take a long-term position, he signed two one-year contracts with Screen Gems. He wound up staying with the company for twenty-one years.

Only now was Spector getting exposure in his own country as a prime representative of the rock generation, though at times it could be as the butt of the straight world's smug derision. He appeared on David Susskind's television show,
Open End
, and was set on by Susskind and an elevator-music deejay, William B. Williams, both of whom held rock in contempt. Making a point, Susskind dryly intoned the simple-minded lyrics of “A Fine, Fine Boy,” which mainly repeated the title over and over. As Susskind read aloud, Phil began tapping his hand on a coffee table. “What you're missing,” he pointed out calmly, “is the beat.” When Williams boasted that he played only “good music,” Phil asked him how often he played Verdi. In conclusion, after enduring the ambush, Phil informed his attackers that he didn't have to come on television and put up with insults. “I could be home making money,” he said.

Phil also appeared on Johnny Carson's “Tonight” show, a guest along with Ella Fitzgerald. At one point she asked him what his top act was and he said it was the Righteous Brothers. Ella confessed that she had never heard of them. A testy Phil replied, “They never heard of you.”

In late January of 1965, with “Lovin' Feelin' ” scaling the chart, Phil released the follow-up to the Ronettes “Walking in the Rain.” A Spector-Mann-Weil song called “Born to Be Together,” it was an
unexpected flop, reaching only No. 52. Unhappily, this abrupt reversal came on the heels of a profile of Spector by “new wave” journalist Tom Wolfe in the Sunday magazine of the
New York Herald Tribune
. The piece, titled “The First Tycoon of Teen,” was a broad-brush, not-entirely-factual caricature that made Phil out to be a kind of music Man of La Mancha reeling against the windmills of the rock establishment in a suede shirt, Italian pants, and Cuban heels. It helped establish Phil Spector as a major nutcase, but one who was singularly qualified as avatar of the recalcitrant new rock millennium. “Every baroque period has a flowering genius who rises up as the most glorious expression of its style of life,” Wolfe wrote. “And in teen America Phil Spector is the bona-fide Genius of Teen.”

Phil's life—minus any mention of Ben Spector's heavily cloaked suicide—was laid before America, how he sprang from the rock generation's desire to possess grown-up money and power without bowing to the grown-up world. “He is something new,” Wolfe concluded, “the first teen-age millionaire, the first boy to become a millionaire within America's teen-age netherworld. It was never a simple question of him taking a look at the rock and roll universe from the outside and exploiting it. He stayed within himself. He
liked
the music.” Now, having dragon-slain the rock establishment, Spector had no conciliatory words for his chosen enemies.

He branded industry people and rip-off record distributors as “animals” and “cigar-smoking sharpies,” but neither was he comfortable with practically anyone in his world. Said Spector: “I find this country very condemning. I don't have this kind of trouble in Europe. The people of America are just not born with culture.” And: “I even have trouble with people who should never say
any
thing. I go over to Gristede's to get a quart of milk or something and the woman at the cash register has to start in. So I tell her, ‘There's a war in Viet Nam, they've fired Khrushchev, the Republican party is falling to pieces, the Ku Klux Klan is running around loose, and you're worrying about my hair.' ” And: “You know what I'd like to do? I'd like to do a recording session in the office of
Life
or
Esquire
or
Time
, and then they could see it. That's the only chance I've got. Because I'm dealing in rock and roll, I'm, like I'm not a bona-fide human being.”

Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil had been responsible for Phil's return to prominence, and shared with him one of rock's seismic moments
when “Lovin' Feelin' ” shook pop to its foundations. However, they also felt Spector went back on his word to give them the follow-up to “Lovin' Feelin' ” when he instead renewed old ties with Gerry Goffin and Carole King and gave it to them. Promises aside, Phil believed that Goffin and King's bouncier style of introspection was a perfect Righteous Brothers recipe.

“Phil invited us to his apartment and told us we had the song,” said Goffin. However, Gerry and Carole were lost in the wilderness of Don Kirshner's boob-tube preoccupation. “Working for Phil again was in our best interest at the time,” Goffin said.

The first Spector-Goffin-King song was “Just Once in My Life,” composed with almost no aid from Phil. It was crafted and produced in the same densely sumptuous style as “Lovin' Feelin',” with a near-identical Bill Medley intro and blended harmonic hooks, and it went to No. 9 in early May.

The Righteous Brothers' saucy vocal cords were a secure and prosperous headrest for Phil. With a catchy hook and the big-band dramatics, their blue-eyed soul flowered into a concerto. When their next single, the Spector-Goffin-King “Hung on You,” did not explode up the charts, deejays flipped the record—the public's thirst for the Righteous Brothers' fervent vocals had ruled out any more sham B sides—and began playing their cover of “Unchained Melody,” which was a solo by Bobby Hatfield. Hatfield's wild, hungry emotion and wide octave range tingled a million spines and rammed the song to No. 4 in mid-September. The Righteous Brothers were so hot that even as the Philles records came out, R. J. Van Hoogten released four Bill Medley-produced songs for Moonglow: “Bring Your Love to Me,” “You Can Have Her,” “Justine,” and “Georgia on My Mind.” Phil hated that these clinkers were on the market at the same time his Righteous Brothers records were, but the distributing run was small. Even so, riding the comet's tail, all four charted, way down the list.