Phil Spector

Back To Mono

(1958-1969)

 

By David Hinckley

 

Thanks to discreet back elevators and firmly polite attendants, guests attending the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s annual induction dinner at New York’s stately Waldorf-Astoria are well protected from fans, reporters and paparazzi. In the sweep from limo to table, the famous face cameras and notepads for no more than 20 feet corridor, and on January 17, 1990, as always, the parade is passing quickly: Bruce Springsteen, The Who, The Kinks, Simon and Garfunkel.

Then one guest stops. Short guy. Tux and shades. “Back to Mono” button.

The press, frankly, is stunned. This is not the under assistant West Coast promotion man. This is Phil Spector, rock ‘n’ roll Garbo. Pop culture Van Gogh. Recluse. Mad genius. A guy everyone wants on America’s team in the music Olympics, as long as their daughter doesn’t bring him home afterwards.

And here he starts chatting with a wall of reporters as if they were exchanging casual observations during a timeout at a Knicks game. What’s wrong with this picture?

Well, nothing. Spector jokes, bobs, weaves. He talks politics, boxing, rock ‘n’ roll. He’s funny, he’s quick. He plays the crowd as fluidly as he played guitar for the Drifters’ “On Broadway.” Then he says thanks, smiles and goes to dinner.

Another hit for Phil Spector.

When it comes to assessing great artists, Americans have a bad habit of mistrusting the art. We acknowledge its value, then start poking around its creator’s dark corners for the “real story.” It’s as if Renaissance Italians told Michelangelo that the Sistine Chapel was nice, but say, wasn’t he feuding with a major marble importer while he worked on the Pieta?

Fascination with trivia – some of it, granted, good trivia – has colored our thinking about Phil Spector for three decades. What we have here now, then, is the counterbalance: “Phil Spector’s Back To Mono (1958-1969).”

This music, 60 tracks plus the Christmas Album, is the real point. It is why we care about Phil Spector, and why we should.

Anyone who likes these records, from “To Know Him Is To Love Him” through “Black Pearl” and “Love Is All I Have To Give,” likes Phil Spector. He is the thread. Many of these songs and artists have been successful in other settings. But only Phil Spector put the pieces together into “He’s A Rebel,” “Walking In The Rain” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”

One revelation of this set is the number of songs Spector had a hand in writing. But whether he was collaborating with Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry or Vinnie Poncia and Peter Andreoli, or reworking diverse standards from “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” to “Unchained Melody,” he was weaving a single tapestry. No pop producer’s catalog surpasses that of Phil Spector, for timeless pleasure or cohesion.

Some fans would deify Phil Spector had he made only one record: “Be My Baby.” From the first crash of the snare drum to the last “Whoa-ho-ho-ho-ho,” “Be My Baby” painted rock ‘n’ roll’s definitive romantic fantasy for adolescent males. It’s so good they don’t even mind that in real life Phil got the girl.

This kind of admiration, however, has contributed to a major Spector myth: that he saw writers and artists as faceless, disposable tools, necessary only to serve the master.

No one will ever accuse Phil Spector of underestimating his own importance. But to capture the sounds in his head, he knew from the beginning he had to work with the best: the Carole King-Gerry Goffin, and Barry Mann-Cynthia Weil writing teams; the Righteous Brothers; Darlene Love; Ike and Tina Turner; and who’s-who of session players.

In fact, Spector would not have tolerated lesser talent, for in the years covered by these recordings his vision was moving at the speed of light and sweeping the whole horizon. He could create anthems for great anthems for great voices; “Today I Met The Boy I’m Gonna Marry,” “Just Once In My Life.” He could turn Lennon/McCartney’s “Hold Me Tight” into first-rate ‘50s-flavored pop for the Treasures. He satisfied Ronnie Bennett’s Frankie Lymon fantasy by having her remake the Students’ 1958 gem “So Young,” more wistfully and wonderfully aching than the original.

Or just put it this way: Could anyone else have gotten close to the records Phil Spector got out of the Ronettes?

While doing all this, Spector started haring words like “obsessive” and “perfectionist,” and there’s truth in both – though that truth has been so folded into the mad-genius legend its precise parameters may never be know. The story of Spector listening to a single note for 12 hours has been repeated so often it no longer much matters if he ever did.

And this brings us back to the American suspicion that unique artists must be a few trestles short of a bridge. By that reckoning, there cannot lie at the core of Phil Spector a guy who loved the right music, like rhythm and blues, and whose muse enabled him to remold it brilliantly. That’s not enough.

It’s more interesting to define him by his friendships with Lenny Bruce and Dennis Hopper than with songwriter Doc Pomus, Atlantic Records chief Ahmet Ertegun or Paul Case, overseer of Hill and Range Music.

It’s less interesting that he follows the Lakers and world affairs than that his theatrical sense of humor at times leads him to greet visitors as if they had entered a movie set.

And yes, part of this is his own doing. Because he seals off his non-musical life, his image is largely shaped and reinforced by a relative handful of public moments, like his 1989 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Spector looked unsteady that night. When he spoke, he sounded disconnected. Others on the same stage have given a similar impression, but this was Phil Spector and thus it made bigger news, even when his friends insisted the problem was nerves, the kind you get when you’re saying thanks to people you were never sure liked you much in the first place.

What doesn’t always get mentioned is that two years later, Spector stole the show with a calm, insightful, hilarious speech inducting Ike and Tina. Or that he gave a pretty good talk in 1990, too – though he did walk around the block that night before he delivered the message.

Stepping up to induct the Platters, he started with the speech that hadn’t come together the year before: his own acceptance. “I never realized people considered me a vital force in the industry,” he said. “I’ve been a rebel for 20 years.”

Then he started to talk about rap music. “A lot of people are frightened by it,” he said, and skipped back to his teenage years in Los Angeles listening to Hunter Hancock, a white DJ who played black music. This reflected a widespread shift in white teenage tastes, from the Crew-Cuts to The Platters, and when white adults saw what was happening, they panicked. “No one had the faintest idea” what this new music was about, Spector said, “so they wanted to throw it off the air.”

His point – that this frightened reaction actually underscored the power of music and the power of artists to convey ideas – sneaked up so swiftly most of the crowd missed it. But far from being out of touch, Spector was showing how clearly he understood both past and present, by closing the circle on the Platters, rap and himself.

The power of music also explains how and why the songs in this set fit together into a picture of Phil Spector. There are too many love songs, too much hope and too much vulnerability not to think those are also the ideas and elements which make up Phil Spector. Yes, that is the cloth from which most popular music is cut. But the themes in Spector’s work ring too consistent and too distinctive to be accidental.

This is a man who took the title of his first hit from his father’s tombstone and engraved a valentine to his wife, “Phil+Annette,” in the runout grooves of a dozen Philles 45’s.

Those are the acts, as this is the music, of a romantic – a person who doesn’t see the world as perfect, but clutches the fierce, defiant hope it can become better and maybe he can help.

It took Spector only two records, once he had a label of his own, to have the Crystals cut Man & Weil’s “Uptown.” A year before Bob Dylan wrote “Blowin’ In The Wind,” this song took AM radio listeners to parts of town where the American dream wasn’t working: “He gets up each morning and he goes downtown/Where everyone’s his boss and he’s lost in an angry land/ He’s a little man.” But the song also offers hope: “Then he comes uptown each evening to my tenement/Uptown where folks don’t have to pay much rent/And when he takes my hand/There’s no man who can put him down.”

“You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” conversely, confronts the romantic’s bleakest nightmare, the death of love. But for all the dark nights in Phil Spector’s life during the ‘60s – and since he co-wrote “Lovin’ Feelin’” some of those night are probably embedded right in the song – his hope shone as brightly in 1969, when he co-wrote “Black Pearl,” as it did in 1961, when he helped write and create the Rose of “Spanish Harlem.”

Black Pearl and Rose are fascinatingly similar: shaded flowers to whom the singer offers sun. That Spector helped bring to life a rose which was Spanish and a pearl which was Black reflects a human rainbow pop music did not always acknowledge so sympathetically. But mostly, each song reflects a faith kept by the thread which binds them: Phil Spector.

Phil Spector was born in the Bronx on December 26, 1940. When he was 13, his widowed mother Bertha moved Phil and his sister Shirley to Hollywood, where he met rock ‘n’ roll. One story is that Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line” inspired him to buy a guitar, but unlike most aspiring rockers of the ‘50s, he soaked up everything: classical, jazz, pop, R&B, rockabilly, rock.

By the mid-‘50s, rhythm and blues had mixed with pop and country to form rock ‘n’ roll. By the late ‘50s, this new hybrid had become so powerful a worried music industry tried to dilute it by weaning fans from Elvis and Little Richard to Fabian. Some pop historians say the ploy worked, too – that the post-Elvis, pre-Beatles years of 1959-1964 became rock’s lost weekend.

Cute theory. Just wrong. Those years were among rock ‘n’ rolls richest, and it’s no coincidence that Phil Spector arrived in the ball game on July 4, 1960, flying from Los Angeles to New York on American Airlines’ first commercial cross-country jet. He was 19 years old.

He didn’t come in as a rookie, since he had had No. 1 hit in 1958 with “To Know Him Is To Love Him.” Still, when he left L.A., he assured his mother he had a backup plan if music didn’t work out. He would use his court stenography experience – he had transcribed the Cheryl Crane/Johnny Stompanato murder trial, among others – to land good steady work at the United Nations.

The minute he claimed his luggage, of course, he plunged into music. Within a week he had met Pomus and Case, and by summer’s end he had written “Spanish Harlem” with Jerry Leiber.

Spector clearly understood both the art and value of networking, which also helped him hurdle forward as a producer. Case set him up at Hill and Range’s Dunes label. His L.A. friend Lester Sill used him at Gregmark. Ahmet Ertegun had him produce several Atlantic legends, including Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker, as well as the original “Twist and Shout,” by the Top Notes.

At first Spector played human sponge, absorbing the ways in which talent and instinct can be parlayed into success. “To Know Him Is To Love Him” suggests Spector already understood the value of a simple lyric, a catchy intro and a great hook. Ray Peterson’s “Corrine, Corrina” or the Paris Sisters’ “I Love How You Love Me” proves it. Listen to Curtis Lee’s “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” to hear how Spector converted ideas to music: From the first note a party is straining to break out, and when the bass rips off the title line, it does. Less than six months off the plane, Spector was routinely creating great radio hits.

His one tune with Gene Pitney, “Every Breath I Take,” deserved better than its modest 1961 chart success, and got it 22 years later when the Police borrowed the title, the ambience and even the rhythmic pattern (“Dip-dip-do-do-op-bop”) for the mega-hit “Every Breath You Take.”

If Spector was planting seeds during those first whirlwind months, however, he wasn’t waiting to see what grew. He wasn’t waiting for anything, because by mid-1961 he had the vehicle he wanted: Philles Records. Philles began with Spector and three partners. Within nine months Spector bought them out and in July 1961 – two years after he flew to New York and just six months after he turned 21 – he stood alone.

Philles developed so rapidly that in its early months Spector was still freelancing at other labels: In 1962 he produced the Top 10 “Second Hand Love” for Connie Francis at MGM. He also had time, Doc Pomus told writer Peter Guralnick, to develop a circle of friends and become one of its crown jesters.

He was moving too fast to stay in a single circle, though, and he sometimes left bad feelings behind when he moved on. Still, the artistic results from this period make a good case for letting impatient and talented youth cut its own trail.

Once he was rolling, Phil Spector raised all the stakes in pop production, forcing other artists and producers to improve just to stay in the game. The Rolling Stones’ Andrew Loog Oldham was a Spector admirer. Spector spurred the Beach Boys and the Beatles, which created the mild irony of a great singles producer inspiring two of rocks’ great albums, “Pet Sounds” and “Sgt. Pepper.” (On the other hand, Spector produced a great rock album himself and it’s right here: “A Christmas Gift For You.” There are more ambitious concept albums, but none more pleasurable. Darlene Love’s “Christmas” can summon snow in July.)

In critical shorthand, Spector’s music is sometimes reduced to the phrase “wall of sound” which captures much of the spirit, but has two flaws: It ignores his flexibility (listen to “I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine”) and falsely suggest he filled every second with a maximum of noise.

In fact, the “Wall of Sound” was both more complex and more subtle. Its components included an R&B-derived rhythm section, generous echo and prominent choruses blending percussion, strings, saxophones and human voices. But equally important were its open spaces, some achieved by physical breaks (the pauses between the thunder in “Be My Baby” or “Baby I Love You”) and some simply be letting the music breathe in the studio. He also knew when to clear a path, as he does for the sax interlude and Love’s vocal in “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Gonna Marry.”

More than anything else, Philles releases reflect a man absolutely sure of his musical sense: letting Love’s gospel rooted “No! No! No!” burn a fiery ending onto “He’s A Rebel”; letting an exotic guitar set the scene for “Uptown” without giving away the song’s secrets before the hook arrives.

The music business is always about selling records, but, with Spector it was also about art, and trite as the sounds, it’s nonetheless true that hundreds of No. 1 hits do not hold a fraction of the power and durability of “Walkin’ In The Rain,” which reached No. 33.

In fact, it’s tempting to think Spector issued some records because he just plain liked them. The Alley Cats “Puddin N’Tain” was a ‘50s sound in a 1963 market, the group’s manager Lou Adler asked for a favor, so out it came. As an updated ‘50s R&B group harmony record, “Puddin N’Tain” was irresistible. It reached No. 43.

On the other hand, Spector never released Darlene Love’s “Chapel Of Love” at all – apparently sensing it was too R&B for radio, but unwilling or unable to recast it into the bouncy pop style with which The Dixie Cups soon took it to No. 1.

Spector shut down Philles in 1966, it is often said, because he felt crushed by America’s indifference to Ike and Tina’s “River Deep, Mountain High.” The truth is more complex, rooted deeply in the fact that industry changes were making independent singles harder to distribute. It’s no coincidence that the late ‘60s saw a measurable decline in great three-minute singles, while the industry turned to selling albums.

But even after he had closed down this segment of his career, this extraordinary six-year burst, Spector sneaked back long enough to leave with “Black Pearl,” an exclamation mark for his decade. Only then did he move on – to “My Sweet Lord,” “The Long and Winding Road,” “Imagine” and more.

Which is another chapter. This set covers what we know today as “Phil Spector Records,” three-minute singles in pure monophonic gold. This music blows away the clutter around Phil Spector in the same way he stripped rock ‘n’ roll to its essence. The wall of sound wasn’t a barrier. It was a backdrop against which the music came into clear, brilliant focus. Spector did the work; all we have to do is turn up the volume.