The First Tycoon of
Teen
ALL THESE RAINDROPS
ARE HIGH OR SOMETHING. THEY don’t roll down
the window, they come straight back, toward the tail, wobbling,
like all those Mr. Cool snow heads walking on mattresses. The plane
is taxiing out toward the runway to take off, and this stupid
infarcted water wobbles, sideways, across the window. Phil Spector,
twenty-three years old, the rock and roll magnate, producer of
Philles Records, America’s first teen-age tycoon, watches … this
watery pathology … . It is sick, fatal. He
tightens his seat belt over his bowels … . A hum rises inside the
plane, a shot of air comes shooting through the vent over
somebody’s seat, some ass turns on a cone of light, there is a sign
stuck out by the runway, a mad, cryptic, insane instruction to the
pilot—Runway 4, Are Cylinder Lap Mainside DOWN?—and beyond,
disoriented crop rows of sulphur blue lights, like the lights on
top of a New Jersey toothpaste factory; only spreading on and on in
sulphur blue rows over Los Angeles County. It is … disoriented.
Schizoid raindrops. The plane breaks in two on takeoff and
everybody in the front half comes rushing toward Phil Spector in a
gush of bodies in a thick orange—napalm! No,
it happens aloft; there is a long rip in the side of the plane, it
just rips, he can see the top ripping, folding back in sick curds,
like a sick Dalí egg, and Phil Spector goes sailing through the
rip, dark, freezing. And the engine, it is reedy—
MISS!
A stewardess is walking back to the
back to buckle herself in for the takeoff. The plane is moving, the
jets are revving. Under a Lifebuoy blue skirt, her fireproof legs
are clicking out of her Pinki-Kini-Panty Fantasy—
“Miss!” says Phil Spector.
“Yes?”
“I, like I have to get off the
plane.”
She stops there beside his seat with
her legs bent slightly, at a 25-degree angle to her ischium. She
laughs with her mouth, yes yes, but there is no no in her eyes, you
little bearded creep, you are not very funny. Her face … congeals …
she looks at his suede jerkin. She says,
“Sir?”
“I, you know, I have to get off,” says
Phil Spector, “I don’t want to fly on this
plane. Let me—” but she will never figure out about the raindrops.
She is standing there hoping this is a joke. “—uh, I’m not putting
you on, I’m not putting you down, I’m not anything, all I want
is—you know?—just open the door and let me off. I’ll walk back. The
rest—everybody—I mean, go ahead, fly.”
“Sir, we’re already in a pattern. There
are seven aircraft, seven jet aircraft, behind us waiting for the
runway—”
By this time Phil Spector’s Hollywood
friends, in this nutball music business—there is one of them beside
him and a couple of them behind him, they are craning
around.
“Phil! What’s wrong,
baby!”
Phil turns around and says in his soft
and slightly broken voice: “Man, this plane’s not going to make
it.”
They all look around, they all look
like frozen custard in the seat lights.
“You know?” Phil says. “It’s not making
it.”
They all look around, the goddamned
noise is roaring off the wings, and Phil
sits there in that kind of doldrum fury he lives in, his beard, his
hair, his suede. O.K., we’re in a pattern, seven jets. But this guy
Phil Spector has just produced eight straight
hit records—you know? Eight hits!
This kid is practically a baby, twenty-three years old, f’r
chrissake, and he has made two million dollars, clear. The first
teen-age business magnate—living teen tycoon. Like he is programmed
into the Whole Life Bit—you know? He does A & R for Daddy God,
he’s lucky—you know?—and if he’s getting
off—
So the big chap behind with the moon
head and the little Seventh Avenue toy black hat says,
“Yeah, we wanna get off. There’s
something wiggy or something about this plane.”
“Yeah!”
“Yeah!”
The stewardess is looking around, and
here is her life being drowned by this little guy—he has a Fu
Manchu beard sticking out in front of his hair, his wispy locks are
combed back, coming down in back over his shoulders in a kind of
pageboy, like Bishop McCullough’s, the heir to Daddy Grace. He has
on a suede leather shirt, jerkin style. Somebody’s cone of light
lies in Miami saffron pools on his Italian pants. He looks
like—what kind of—
All this commotion. Yeah, says Phil
Spector’s pals. It’s wiggy. Off this flying cretin. Phil Spector
broods over the raindrops. The stewardess runs for the
cabin.
So they stop the plane, they break up
the whole pattern, they knock out everybody’s schedule, they turn
the plane around, take everybody off. They check Phil Spector’s
luggage for-bombs. Look at this beatnik’s hair in back there, and
they stare at Son of Bop in a leather jerkin, ten men in alumicron
suits bombarding him with corporate hate rays. But his pals keep up
this strange upbeat talk:
“Phil, baby, you saved my
life!”
“Phil, if you say it’s wiggy, it’s
wiggy.”
“You done it again, Phil, babes, you
done it again!”
“ … You say it’s
wiggy, Phil? I say it’s wiggy
…”
“ … I hurts, too, D’Artagnan, baby,
right here, same as you …”
“ … wiggy …”
“ … baby …”
“SO,” SAYS PHIL SPECTOR, “THEY GROUNDED ME.
THEY TOOK away my credit cards, they suspended the pilot, I don’t
know.” Spector is sitting in a little cream room in his office
suite at 440 East 62nd Street with his back to a window that is
practically on top of the East Side Drive. Twenty-three years
old—he has a complex of corporations known as Phil Spector
Productions. One of them is Mother Bertha Productions, named after
his mother, Bertha. She works for his office in Los Angeles, but
only because she wants to. The main organization is Philles
Records. Spector has produced 21 “single” Philles records since
October, 1962—and sold more than 13 million copies. All rock and
roll. His most recent big hit, “Walking in the Rain,” by the
Ronettes, went as high as No. 20 on the Cashbox chart and has sold more than 250,000 copies. His
latest record, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” by the Righteous
Brothers, rose from the 70’s to No. 37 with a “bullet” beside
it—meaning “going up fast.” He has produced seven albums. The first
teen-age tycoon! He is leaning back in the chair. He has on his
suede jerkin, his Italian pants, a pair of pointy British boots
with Cuban heels. His hair hangs down to his shoulders in back. The
beard is shaved off, however.
Danny Davis, his promotion man, is
talking on the phone in the inner office. A fellow sits across from
Spector with his legs crossed and a huge chocolate brown Borsalino
hat over his bent knee, like he was just trying it on. He
says,
“Phil, why do you do—”
“I’m moving the whole thing to
California,” says Phil Spector. “I can’t stand flying
anymore.”
“—why do you do these
things?”
Spector—without his beard, Spector has
a small chin, a small head, his face looks at first like all those
little kids with bad hair and reedy voices from the Bronx, where he
was born. But—an ordinary Phil Spector? Phil
Spector has the only pure American voice. He was brought up not in
the Bronx, but California. It meanders, quietly, shaking, through
his doldrum fury, out to somewhere beyond cynical, beyond cool,
beyond teen-age world-weary. It is thin, broken and soft. He is
only twenty-three years old, for godsake, the first millionaire
businessman to rise up out of the teen-age netherworld, king of the
rock and roll record producers—
Spector jumps out of the
chair.
“Wait a minute,” he says. “Just a
minute. They’re making deals in here.”
Spector walks into the inner office,
gingerly, like a cowboy, because of the way the English boots lift
him up off the floor. He is slight, five feet seven, 130 pounds.
His hair shakes faintly behind. It is a big room, like a living
room, all beige except for nine gold-plated rock and roll records
on the wall, some of Phil Spector’s “goldies,” one million sales
each. “He’s a Rebel,” by the Crystals, “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah,” by Bob
B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, “Be My Baby,” by the Ronettes, “Da Do
Ron Ron,” “Then He Kissed Me,” “Uptown,” “He’s Sure the Boy I
Love,” all by the Crystals, “Wait Til My Baby Gets Home,” by
Darlene Love. And beige walls, beige telephones all over the place,
a beige upright piano, beige paintings, beige tables, with Danny
Davis crowding over a beige desk, talking on the
telephone.
“Sure, Sal,” says Danny, “I’ll ask
Phil. Maybe we can work something out on that.”
Spector starts motioning thumbs
down.
“Just a minute, Sal.” Danny puts his
hand over the mouthpiece and says,
“We need this
guy, Phil. He’s the biggest distributor out there. He wants the one
thousand guarantee.”
Phil’s hands go up like he is lifting a
slaughtered lamb up on top of an ice box.
“I don’t care. I’m not interested in
the money, I’ve got millions of dollars of money, I don’t care who
needs this animal. I’m interested in selling records, O.K.? Why
should I give him a guarantee? He orders the records, I guarantee
I’ll buy a thousand back from him if he can’t sell them; he sells
them, then after the record dies, he buys up 500 cut rate from
somebody, sends them back and cries for his money. Why should we
have to be eating his singles later?”
Danny takes his hand away and says into
the mouthpiece:
“Look, Sal, there’s one thing I forgot.
Phil says this record he can’t give the guarantee. But you don’t
have anything to worry about … I know what I said, but Phil says …
look, Sal, don’t worry, ‘Walking in the Rain,’ this is a tremendous
record, tremendous, a very big record … What? … I’m not reading off
a paper, Sal … Wait a minute, Sal—”
“Who needs these animals?” Phil Spector
tells Danny.
“Look, Sal,” Danny says, “this man
never made a bad record in his life. You tell me one. Nothing but
hits.”
“Tell him to go to hell,” says
Spector.
“Sal—”
“Who needs these animals!” says
Spector, so loud this time that Danny cups his hand around the
receiver and puts his mouth down close.
“Nothing, Sal,” says Danny, “that was
somebody came in.”
“Joan,” says Phil, and a girl, Joan
Berg, comes in out of another room. “Will you turn the lights off?”
he says.
She turns the lights off, and now in
the middle of the day the offices of Philles Records and Mother
Bertha Productions are all dark except for the light from Danny
Davis’ lamp. Danny crowds into the pool of light, hunched over the
phone, talking to Sal.
Phil puts his fingers between his eyes
and wraps his eyebrows around them.
“Phil, it’s dark in here,” says the
fellow with the large hat. “Why do you do these
things?”
“I’m paying a doctor $600 a week to
find out,” says Phil, without looking up.
He sits there in the dark, his fingers
buried between his eyes. Just over his head one can make out a
painting. The painting is kind of came-with-the-frame surrealist.
It shows a single musical note, a half note, suspended over what
looks like the desert outside Las Vegas. Danny has to sit there
huddled in his own pool of light talking to this animal on the
telephone.
“This is a primitive country,” says
Phil Spector. “I was at Shepheard’s, the discotheque, and these
guys start saying these things. It’s unbelievable. These people are
animals.”
“What kind of things,
Phil?”
“I don’t know. They look at, you know,
my hair—my wife and I are dancing, and, I mean, it’s unbelievable,
I feel somebody yanking on my hair in the back. I turn around, and
here’s this guy, a grown man, and he is saying these, unbelievable
things to me. So I tell him, like this, ‘I’m going to tell you this
one time, that’s all—don’t ever try that again.’ And the guy—it’s
unbelievable—he shoves me with the heel of his hand and I go
sprawling back into a table—”
—Spector pauses—
“—I mean, I’ve studied karate for
years. I could literally kill a guy like
that. You know? Size means nothing. A couple of these—” he cocks
his elbow in the gloom and brings up the flat of his forearm—“but
what am I going to do, start a fight every time I go out? Why
should I even have to listen to anything from these animals? 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.”
Not born with culture! If only David
Susskind and William B. Williams could hear that. Susskind invited
Phil Spector to the Open End television
program one evening “to talk about the record business.” Suddenly
Susskind and “William B.,” station WNEW’s old-nostalgia disc
jockey, were condemning Spector as some kind of sharpie poisoning
American culture, rotting the minds of Youth and so forth. That was
how it all hit Spector. It was as if he were some kind of old
short-armed fatty in the Brill Building, the music center on
Broadway, with a spread-collar shirt and a bald olive skull with
strands of black hair pulled up over it from above one ear. There
was something very ironic about that. Spector is the one record
producer who wouldn’t go near Broadway. His setup is practically
out in the East River, up by the Rockefeller Institute. The
Rockefeller Institute, for godsake. Susskind and Williams kept
throwing Spector’s songs at him—“He’s a Rebel,” “Da Do Ron Ron,”
“Be My Baby,” “Fine Fine Boy,” “Breakin’ Up”—as if he were astutely
conning millions of the cretins out there with this stuff. Spector
didn’t know exactly what to tell them. He likes the music he produces. He writes it himself. He is
something new, 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 it
himself. He liked the music.
SPECTOR, WHILE STILL IN HIS TEENS, SEEMED TO
COMPREHEND the prole vitality of rock and roll that has made it the
kind of darling holy beast of intellectuals in the United States,
England and France. Intellectuals, generally, no longer take jazz
seriously. Monk, Mingus, Ferguson—it has all been left to little
executive trainees with their first apartment and a mahogany
African mask from the free-port shop in Haiti—let me tell you!—and a hi-fi. But rock and roll! Poor old
arteriosclerotic lawyers with pocky layers of fat over their ribs
are out there right now twisting with obscene clumsiness to rock
and roll. Their wives wear stretch pants to the seafood shoppe. A
style of life! There have been teen-agers who have made a million
dollars before, but invariably they are entertainers, they are
steered by older people, such as the good Colonel Tom Parker steers
Elvis Presley. But Phil Spector is the bona-fide Genius of Teen.
Every baroque period has a flowering genius who rises up as the
most glorious expression of its style of life—in latter-day Rome,
the Emperor Commodus; in Renaissance Italy, Benvenuto Cellini; in
late Augustan England, the Earl of Chesterfield; in the sal
volatile Victorian age, Dante Gabriel Rossetti; in late-fancy
neo-Greek Federal America, Thomas Jefferson; and in Teen America
Phil Spector is the bona-fide Genius of Teen. In point of fact, he
had turned twenty-one when he made his first clear million. But it
was as a teen-ager, working within the teen-age milieu, starting at
the age of seventeen, that Phil Spector developed into a great
American business man, the greatest of the independent rock and
roll record producers. Spector’s mother, Bertha, took him from the
Bronx to California when he was nine. California! Teen Heaven! By
the time he was sixteen he was playing jazz guitar with some group.
Then he got interested in rock and roll, which he does not call
rock and roll but “pop blues.” That is because—well, that is a
complicated subject. Anyway, Phil Spector likes this music. He
genuinely likes it. He is not a short-armed fatty hustling nutball
fads.
“I get a little angry when people say
it’s bad music,” Spector tells the man with the brown hat. “This
music has a spontaneity that doesn’t exist in any other kind of
music, and it’s what is here now. It’s unfair to classify it as
rock and roll and condemn it. It has limited chord changes, and
people are always saying the words are banal and why doesn’t
anybody write lyrics like Cole Porter anymore, but we don’t have
any presidents like Lincoln anymore, either. You know? Actually,
it’s more like the blues. It’s pop blues. I feel it’s very
American. It’s very today. It’s what people
respond to today. It’s not just the kids. I hear cab drivers,
everybody, listening to it.”
And Susskind sits there on his show
reading one of Spector’s songs out loud, no music, just reading the
words, from the Top Sixty or whatever it is, “Fine Fine Boy,” to
show how banal rock and roll is. The song just keeps repeating
“He’s a fine fine boy.” So Spector starts drumming on the big
coffee table there with the flat of his hands in time to Susskind’s
voice and says, “What you’re missing is the beat.” Blam
blam.
Everybody is getting a little sore with
Susskind reading these simple lyrics and Spector blamming away on
the coffee table. Finally, Spector says the hell with it and, being
more … hip … than Susskind or William B. Williams, starts cutting
them up. He starts asking Williams how many times he plays Verdi on
his show—Monteverdi?—D. Scarlatti?—A. Scarlatti?—that’s good music,
why don’t you play that, you keep saying you play only good music,
I don’t hear you playing that. Williams doesn’t know what to say.
Spector tells Susskind he didn’t come on the show to listen to
somebody tell him he was corrupting the Youth of America—he could
be home making money. Susskind—well, ah, all right, Phil. Everybody
is testy.
Making money. Yes! At the age of
seventeen Spector wrote a rock and roll song called “To Know Him Is
To Love Him.” He took the title off his father’s tombstone. That
was what his mother had had engraved on his father’s tombstone out
in Beth David cemetery in Elmont, L.I. He doesn’t say much about
his father, just that he was “average lower middle class.” Spector
wrote the song, sang it and played the guitar in the recording with
a group called the Teddy Bears. He made $20,000 on that record, but
somebody ran off with $17,000 of it, and, well, no use going into
that. Then he was going to UCLA, but he couldn’t afford it and
became a court reporter, one of the people who sit at the shorthand
machine, taking down testimony. He decided to come to New York and
get a job as an interpreter at the UN. His mother had taught him
French. But he got to New York, and the night before the interview,
he fell in with some musicians and never got there. The hell with
stenography. He wrote another hit that year, “Spanish Harlem.”
There is a rose in Spanish
Ha-a-a-a-a-ar-a-lem. And then—only nineteen—he became head
of A & R, artists and repertoire, for Atlantic Records. By 1961
he was a free-lance producer, producing records for the companies,
working with Connie Francis, Elvis Presley, Ray Peterson, the Paris
Sisters. All this time, Spector would write a song and run all
phases of making records: get the artists, direct the recording
sessions, everything. Spector could work with these hairy goslin
kids who make these records because he was a kid himself, in one
sense. God knows what the music business biggies thought of Phil
Spector—he already wore his hair like Salvador Dali did at that age
or like an old mezzotint of Mozart at the Academy or something. And
he was somehow one of them, the natives, the
kids who sang and responded to this … music. Phil Spector could get
in one of those studios with the heron microphones, a
representative of the adult world that makes money from records,
and it became all one thing—the kids comprehended him.
Spector had an ideal, Archie Bleyer.
Bleyer was a band leader who founded a record company, Cadence
Records. Spector formed a partnership with two other people in
1961, then bought them out and went on his own as Philles Records
in October of 1962. His first big hit was “He’s a Rebel,” by the
Crystals. Spector had a system. The big record companies put out
records like buckshot, 10, maybe 15 rock and roll records a month,
and if one of them catches on, they can make money. Spector’s
system is to put them out one at a time and pour everything into
each one. Spector does the whole thing. He writes the words and the
music, scouts and signs up the talent. He takes them out to a
recording studio in Los Angeles and runs the recording session
himself. He puts them through hours and days of recording to get
the two or three minutes he wants. Two or three minutes out of the
whole struggle. He handles the control dials like an electronic
maestro, tuning various instruments or sounds up, down, out, every
which way, using things like two pianos, a harpsichord and three
guitars on one record; then re-recording the whole thing with
esoteric dubbing and over-dubbing effects—reinforcing instruments
or voices—coming out with what is known throughout the industry as
“the Spector sound.”
The only thing he doesn’t keep control
of is the actual manufacture, the pressing, of the records and the
distribution. The only people around to give him any trouble all
this time are the distributors—cigar-chewing fatties … and—well, to
be honest, there is a lot that gives Phil Spector trouble, and not
so much any kind of or any group of people as much as his … status.
A Teen-age Tycoon! It is too wacked out. He is betwixt and between.
He identifies with the teen-age netherworld, he defends it, but he
is already too mature for it. As a millionaire, a business genius,
living in a penthouse 22 stories up over the East River, with his
wife, Annette, who is twenty, a student at Hunter College, and with
a four-room suite downstairs on the ground floor as his office, and
a limousine, and a chauffeur, and a bodyguard, and a staff, Danny
and Joan Berg and everybody, and a doorman who directs people to
Mr. Spector’s office—well, that makes Phil Spector one of them, the universe of arteriosclerotic,
hypocritical, cigar-chewing, hopeless, larded adults, infarcted
vultures, one meets in the music business. And so here in the dark
is a twenty-three-year-old man with a Shelley visage, a suede
shirt, a kind of pageboy bob and winkle-picker boots, the symbol of
the one, sitting in the dark in this great beige office, the symbol
of the other, in the middle of the day, in the dark, tamping his
frontal lobes with his fingers in the gloom.
One of the beige phones rings and Danny
answers. Then he presses the “hold” button and tells Phil Spector,
“It’s the Rolling Stones, they just got in.”
Spector comes alive with that. He gets
up on his ginger toes and goes to the telephone. He is lively and
he spins on the balls of his feet a little as he stands by the
phone.
“Hello, Andrew,” he says. He is talking
with Andrew Oldham, the manager of the Rolling Stones. And then he
puts on a Cockney accent. “Are you all in?” he says.
The Rolling Stones; all right. The
Rolling Stones, English group, and Andrew Oldham, are like him.
They grew up in the teen-age netherworld and made it, and they all
want to have it all, too, the kids’ style of life and the adult’s …
money … and not cop out on one side or the other, larded and
arteriosclerotic. God! Phil Spector’s British trip! That was where
suddenly he had it all.
Phil Spector is here! The British have
the ability to look at all sorts of rebel baddies and alienated
thin young fellows and say coo and absorb them like a great soggy
lukewarm, mother’s poultice. The Beatles, Beatlemania, rock and
roll, suddenly it is all absorbed into the center of things as if
it could have been there all along if it only asked. Phil Spector
arrives at London Airport and, Santa Barranza, there are
photographers all over the place, for him, Phil Spector, and the
next morning he is all over the center fold of the London Daily Mirror, the biggest newspaper in the
Western World, five million circulation: “The 23-year-old American
rock and roll magnate.” He is in the magazines as the “U.S.
Recording Tycoon.” Invitations go out to come to the receptions to
meet “America’s outstanding hit maker, Phil Spector.” And then he
lands back at Idlewild and waiting are, yes, the same bunch of
cheese-breath cabbies, and he takes a cab on back to 440 E. 62nd
St. and goes into his beige world, the phones are ringing and it is
all the same, the same—
“Cigar-smoking sharpies,” says Phil
Spector. He is in a livelier mood after the talk with Andrew
Oldham. “They’re a bunch of cigar-smoking sharpies in record
distribution. They’ve all been in the business for years and they
resent you if you’re young. That’s one reason so many kids go broke
in this business. They’re always starting new record companies, or
they used to, the business is very soft right now, they start a
company and pour all their money into a record, and it can be
successful and they’re still broke, because these characters don’t
even pay you until you’ve had three or four hit records in a row.
They order the records and sell them and don’t pay you. They don’t
pay you because they know they don’t have to. You start yelling for
the money and they tell you, ‘Whattya mean, I have all these
records coming back from the retailers and what about my right to
return records, and blah-blah.’ What are you going to do? Sue
twenty guys in twenty different courts in the United
States?
“They look at everything as a product.
They don’t care about the work and sweat you put into a record.
They respect me now because I keep turning out hits, and after that
they become sort of honest … in their own decayed
way.”
Where does a man find friends,
comrades, anything, in a world like that? They resent his youth.
They resent his success. But it is no better with the kids. He is
so much more mature and more … eminent … they all want to form “the
father thing” with him. Or else they want to fawn over him, cousin
him, cajole, fall down before him, whistle, shout, stomp, bang him
on the head, anything to get his attention and get “the break,”
just one chance. Or one more chance. Spector can’t go near the
Brill Building, the center of the music business, because the place
is crawling with kids with winkle-picker shoes cracking in the
folds, who made one hit record five years ago and still can’t
realize that they are now, forever, in oblivion. They crawl all
over the place the way the small-time balding fatty promoters and
managers used to in the days when A. J. Liebling wrote about the
place as the Jollity Building. Phil Spector steps onto an elevator
in the Brill Building, the elevator is packed, and suddenly he
feels this arm hooking through his in the most hideously cozy way
and a mouth is closing in on his ear and saying, “Phil, baby,
wait’ll you hear this one: ‘Ooh-oom-bah-ay,’” and Phil Spector is
imprisoned there with the elevator inching up, “vah ump nooby poon
fang ooh-ooh ayub bah-ay—you dig that, Phil? You dig that, don’t
you, Phil? Phil, babes!” He walks down the hall and kids sneak up
behind him and slip songs, music, lyrics into his coat pocket. He
finds the stuff in there, all this ratty paper, when he gets home.
Or he is leaving the Brill Building and he feels a great whack on
the back of his head and wheels around and there are four kids in
the singing stance, their heads angled in together, saying, “Just
one bar, Phil—Say wohna love boo-uh ayyay bubby—” while the guy on
the end sings bass with his chin mashed into a pulpy squash down
over his collar bone, beh-ungggh,
beh-ungggh.
STATUS! WHAT IS HIS STATUS? HE PRODUCES “ROCK
AND ROLL,” and, therefore, he is not a serious person, and he won’t
join the Young Presidents or whatever the hell kind of organization
jaycee geniuses would join for their own good.
“Phil,” says the man with the hat, “why
don’t you hire a press agent, a P.R. man—”
Phil is tamping his frontal lobes in
the gloom. Danny Davis is hunched up in the little pool of light on
his desk. Danny is doing his level best for Phil.
“Jack? Danny Davis … Yeah … No, I’m
with Phil Spector now … Right! It’s the best move I ever made. You
know Phil … I’m in the best shape of my career … Jack, I just want
to tell you we’ve got—”
“A press agent?” Phil says to the man
in the hat. “In the first place, I couldn’t stand to hear what he’d
say about me.”
“———Got two tremendous records going,
Jack, ‘Walking in the Rain,’ the Ronettes, and—”
“In the second place,” Phil says,.
“there’s no way my image can be bought.”
“———And ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’
Feelin’” by the Righteous Brothers,” says Danny. “ … Right, Jack …
I appreciate that, Jack …”
“The only thing I could do—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—”
“ … Absolutely! … If there’s anything
we can do for you on this end, Jack, let us know. O.K.? Great, Jack
…”
“ … and I even have trouble with people
who should never say anything. 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 …’”
America’s first teen-age tycoon, a
business genius, a musical genius—and it is as if he were still on
the corner on Hoffman Street in the Bronx when the big kids come by
in hideous fraternity, the way these people act. What is he now?
Who is he in this weird country? Danny talks in the phone in the
little pool of light, Joan is typing up whatever it is, Phil is
tamping his frontal lobes.
ANOTHER AIRPLANE! IT LEVELS OFF, AND THE MAN
IN THE seat by the window, next to Phil Spector, lights a
cigarette, pure as virgin snow. Phil Spector sits there with his
kind of page-boy bob pressed down in back and a checked shirt and
tight black pants. The man with the cigarette keeps working himself
up to something. Finally, he says, “If you don’t mind me
asking—have I seen you on television or something? What’s your
name, I mean, if you don’t mind me asking?” Phil Spector presses
back into the seat but his head won’t disappear. Then he says, “I’m
Goddard Lieberson.”
“Gottfried Lieberman?”
Marvelous! Reassuring! Nobody ever
heard of Goddard Lieberson, either. Who the hell is Goddard
Lieberson! He is the president of Columbia Records, all those nice
straight cookie jar “tunes” William B. Williams would go for, very
big—and who the hell knows who he is?
“I’m the president of Columbia
Records.”
The man sucks on his cigarette a
moment. A skinny ash, all limp, hangs out.
“Well—you must be kind of
young.”
Phil Spector lies back. Then he
says,
“I was only kidding. I’m Chubby
Checker. That’s who I really am.”
“Chubby Checker?”
Who the hell is Chubby Checker? Yes!
Who the hell has anybody ever heard of? It’s
like the last time when he said he was Paul Desmond. Who the hell
is Paul Desmond? Or Peter Sellers’ cousin. Or Monsieur Fouquet, of
the de Gaulle underground. Or … who the hell is anybody? Phil Spector tamps his frontal lobes and closes
his eyes and holds his breath. As long as he holds his breath, it
will not rain, there will be no raindrops, no schizoid water
wobbling, sideways, straight back, it will be an even, even, even,
even, even, even, even world.