He's a Rebel by Mark Ribowsky

Author:Mark Ribowsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cooper Square Press
Published: 1989-03-18T05:00:00+00:00

Phil—clad in a scarlet-lined suit and vest, pin-tucked mustard shirt and matching handkerchief, gold watch fob dangling from his vest pocket, a pearl stickpin and pointy brown shoes with spats—landed in London to find that Andrew Oldham, and his business partner Tony Calder, had stirred the interest of the English press about his arrival. Newspaper reporters clamored for interviews with the American Mozart. “It was pure manipulation,” Calder said. “We told them, ‘Phil Spector’s coming but you can’t talk to him.’ And of course then everybody wanted to talk to him.” The first interview, by Maureen Cleave of the London Evening Standard, took place in the back of the limousine that carried Spector from Heathrow Airport to his hotel. Phil, who had not encountered this kind of media notoriety at home, reveled in it. “I’ve been told I’m a genius,” he said to Cleave. “What do you think?” Cleave wrote of him as a mercurial homunculus—“He walks like Chaplin, for every three steps forward he takes one back or to the side”—and a loner. “I’m the least quoted man in the industry,” Spector said. “I stick to my little bourgeois haunts and I don’t bother with the masses.”

The Ronettes had preceded Phil to England by two weeks. They appeared on the television variety show “Sunday Night at the Palladium,” and their month-long tour with the Rolling Stones was proceeding excellently. The Stones were received wildly by big, enthusiastic crowds, yet the band itself seemed to be more interested in the Ronettes. As both groups spent days together, and went to local clubs and parties, the real prize of the tour for the Stones seemed to be if any of them could get a Ronette into bed—although Ronnie was deemed off-limits. “She was always a no-go area,” Tony Calder remembered, “but I’ve got to tell you, I think everybody in the band was in love with Ronnie. She didn’t play around, and everybody presumed it was because of Phil. But we were all madly in love with all of them, because they were the Ronettes. I mean, the Stones were in awe of them. To them they were the stars, not Phil, because not everybody knew who Phil was yet. The Ronettes had a special magic right from the start, and everybody was after them.”

Yet so good were the vibes that by the tour’s end it was of minor importance that none of the Stones could bag a Ronette. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards tried with Estelle, Brian Jones with Nedra, but the girls thought the Stones were grimy and foul-smelling, their hair too long. Nondrinkers, they reeled from the band’s hard drinking and pill-popping, and they did not care for the Stones’ music. Still, they loved being in the spotlight so far from home, and for them the tour was lit with a neon glow.

Phil was lit up too in London. After a few days with Andrew Oldham, he was orbiting the earth, kept in the ionosphere by a nonstop ingestion of marijuana and pills from Oldham’s pockets.

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