Tearing Down the Wall of Sound by Mick Brown

Author:Mick Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307267726
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

17

The Lonely Bird in the Gilded Cage

Nik Cohn had much in common with Spector. The son of an academic, Cohn had been born in London but grew up in Ireland—an outsider, Jewish in a country of Catholics—the smallest and youngest boy in class, like Spector, disdained and put upon. As soon as he could, Cohn packed his bags for London and started writing. In 1965, at the age of eighteen, he published his first book, Market, a series of studies of street-market characters. The Daily Telegraph wrote that it begged comparison with Zola. Cohn went on to write a novel, I Am Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo, about a pop’s star meteoric rise and fall, and in 1968 he published Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom—the first serious literary appraisal of rock and roll’s short history. Written in an exhilarating and effusive firecracker prose, it was both paean of praise and epitaph to a golden age that Cohn considered was already at an end.

Phil Spector was the only figure in popular music who continued to exercise a fascination for Cohn—the music’s last authentic genius, he believed, a man who “superseded rock and roll.” Cohn duly approached him, expressing his desire to write his biography. Spector suggested he fly to Los Angeles to talk about it. Arriving at the Chateau Marmont, Cohn contacted Spector’s office and was told he would be collected from his hotel. A week later, George Brand turned up in Spector’s Rolls-Royce to ferry him to La Collina Drive.

In what was now an established ritual for any visitor to the mansion, Cohn was ushered into the sitting room and asked to wait—“a very long time.” Placed on a coffee table were three copies of an anthology of Tom Wolfe’s writing, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, each with a marker at Wolfe’s 1965 essay on Spector. The long wait, the carefully placed reference material—Cohn felt it was all designed to tell him something. “It was letting me know that I was not important. The placing of the Tom Wolfe piece was showing me that a better-known and greater man had trodden this path before me and I was bloody lucky to be there. Tom Wolfe had waited for an hour and a half. I could wait for two and a half…”

At length, Spector appeared, “a tiny, wispy figure, impenetrable shades…The whole idea was obviously intimidation, but what I felt from him was a terrified little boy. But I was something of an expert on terrified little boys, because I’d grown up as one myself.”

Over the course of the next four weeks, Cohn would make regular pilgrimage to La Collina Drive, to sit in the arctic semidarkness and talk. The mansion appeared all but deserted. Once he heard a woman singing in another room, a few bars of “Black Pearl.” He assumed it was Ronnie. Arriving on another day he glanced up to see a face looking down from an upstairs window, “like the first Mrs. Rochester.”

Spector regaled Cohn with stories of his childhood, his school days and how he had revolutionized and conquered the record industry.

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