Phil Spector, the Wagner of the girl groups, the guy who wrote and produced Tina Turner’s masterpiece “River Deep, Mountain High”—when he was the perhaps the second worst guy working with her—who butchered the Beatles, who produced Lennon and Harrison and Leonard Cohen and The Ramones, and held nearly all of them at gunpoint—who was played by Al Pacino kind of realistically, and whose collection of wigs rivaled his sonic prowess, this is a guy worthy of a very long sentence. I’m talking about the sentence you just read, but also the other kind of sentence, the one that ended with him convicted—sans wig, that’s what they do to you—for murder. Wave those guns around enough and you could get in trouble. He held The Ramones hostage while drinking a goblet of Manischewitz. He put a gun in Leonard Cohen’s mouth and said, “I love you, Leonard.” Leonard replied, “I hope you love me, Phil.”
“The first time you got felt up, you were listening to one of my records.” Al Pacino’s Spector says this to Helen Mirren, who plays his lawyer, who wonders why he can’t act the same way he acted with John Lennon. He actually acted like a mobster with John Lennon—check the footage in the Netflix doc “Above Us Only Sky.” By the time Cohen’s Death of a Ladies’ Man came out, stolen from Cohen and released without his consent, though there are great songs—I love the title track, among others, and Spector wrote the music--but the sound is shitty. And great sound was supposed to be his thing. Back to mono, whatever. Maybe back to the drawing board, or back to the criminal justice system. He died in prison. He is back to mono forever.
How did I end up in this guy’s story? It was when he was brandishing the guns but not in serious legal trouble, not yet. It was May, 1992, the month of the riots. George Bush, The Elder, was clinging to the White House. I was 19, about to transfer to Sarah Lawrence. I was in line to see Branford Marsalis at the Village Vanguard. This wasn’t just any gig, but his final gig before joining Jay Leno. Yes, folks, that was about to happen, and he was replacing a legend who stayed in the ring too long named Carson. Doc Severinsen had that gig for 30 years, and when he was doing it, that’s all he did. No more Vanguard gigs for him, and, so we thought, no more Vanguard gigs for Branford after this one. He’d be in Cali forever. NBC’s gain was our loss.
So I’m being chatted up by the guy behind me. It’s the spectre of Spector. I knew that Paul McCartney wrote a letter of protest to EMI about his corny ass arrangement of “The Long and Winding Road,” and I always felt I should take McCartney’s side on that one. And I think, smart ass that I was (was?), that I said something to this future convicted murderer about it. I softened it by naming some of the many records of his that I loved, which is a long list, but, again, I was 19, and I said, “What were you thinking?” His answer to me was that the guy who shot John Lennon wanted to shoot him first. (I tried not to let my facial expression show which would have been the greater loss.). He was fully the Al Pacino Spector by then. In fact, it’s hard to remember it without thinking of Al Pacino. Then came an invitation.
“Hey, kid,” he said. “Do you want to see something interesting?”
Was this going to be his response to my question about his arrangements for Let it Be?
“I’m going to talk Branford out of doing Leno.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know him?”
“Not yet. Come backstage after the show. Watch and learn.”
I did go backstage and watched Spector try the same intimidation tactics he used with John Lennon. But that was 20 years earlier. He hadn’t produced anyone in over 10 years. And he was not going to talk Branford out of anything. You know how The Roots are bringing amazing music to that show? Branford did it first. He had complete creative control, and jazz musicians were even getting couch time. He was under no obligation to laugh at Leno’s jokes. I never liked Leno, but I loved Branford.
Branford lasted about two and a half years on that show. His brother Wynton thought he would lose cred by playing with Sting. Spector thought he would get sucked into television and never come back. (And many of us shared this concern with the man with a million wigs and even more alibis.). Branford was not ruined by the Tonight Show. He wasn’t ruined by The Grateful Dead, either. He tried a gig on the industry side at Sony Music for a while, too, and he signed the avant-garde tenor player David S. Ware. He tried to make great things happen from the inside.
Phil Spector never produced another record. He just kept pushing the Back to Mono brand. McCartney eventually released a Beatles album from the Let it Be sessions called Let it Be… Naked, with all the Spector arrangements removed. Time had a way of going on, until Spector did time, then reached the end of it.
As the years went on, I developed more of a taste for orchestral music, from the understated to the bombastic. I love the strings on Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter. I love Wagner’s Tristan overture and Mahler symphonies, with all their overwrought and sublime ironies. I loved listening to Debussy’s La Mer and seeing the sea, even when I was also hearing the whole tone and pentatonic scales. I love Jonny Greenwod’s arrangements, for Radiohead and the movies. It’s not the orchestration, it’s what you do with it. It’s a long and winding road out there, and discerning listeners will keep separating wheat from chaff. There’s a wall of sound—a wonderful place to be—and then there’s the guy who built it, and who destroyed a lot of other things, too. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.
The Village Vanguard became a place where, on the right nights, I not only heard beauty from the bandstand but got into some serious conversations with the musicians. And I every time I was there, I was always deferential to the turf I was on. It was hallowed ground, and I got into the jokes that were going around, including the puns and wordplay that often emanate from the musical brain. I never saw anyone like Spector try to pull anything like that at the Vanguard ever again. Who the hell was that guy? Would he be locked up one day?
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He Hit Me, and it Felt Like a Kiss
Max Gordon died in 1987, and his widow Lorraine took it over for many years until her recent passing, There were many other people watching--I take it I was not the only person invited by Spector--so it was hard to hear. But the expression on Branford's face said it all. It was like, "Man, are you for real?"
Instant Karma, indeed