But when the deal went down, Spector’s records were Spector’s records. Ronnie Bennett, lead singer of the Ronettes before she married Spector in 1966, recalled “how fanatical Phil was about every detail of what went on in the studio.” Spector controlled every aspect of the Ronettes’ classic singles, “Walking in the Rain,” “Baby I Love You,” and “Be My Baby,” which provides the title for Ronnie’s memoir of her life with Spector. Both in the studio and when the Ronettes performed live, Spector insisted they follow his orders concerning clothes, hair style, movement, and vocal inflection.
Spector’s desire to dominate Ronnie wasn’t limited to music. The scenes of violence and abuse recounted in Be My Baby are overwhelming. Right before Ronnie summoned the courage to break out of the marriage, Spector threatened to kill her and told her mother: “I’m completely prepared for that day. I’ve already got her coffin. It’s solid gold. And it’s got a glass top, so I can keep my eyes on her after she’s dead.” After the divorce, he made the first $1,300 alimony payment in nickels.
Ronnie Bennett wasn’t the only one with that kind of story to tell. Almost every female singer of the early sixties had, at the very least, suffered through a series of difficult romantic relationships. Tina Turner accepted Ike’s beatings in part because she preferred them to life in the cotton fields where she had grown up. “Cotton, I hated it,” said Tina, “picking cotton and chopping it, the sun was so hot. I dreaded those times. That’s the only thing that made me change my life. I knew I couldn’t do that. As a child, I knew the beginning of hate and can not do and don’t want to do and will not do.” Ike may have provided an alternative to Nutbush, Tennessee, where Tina grew up as Anna Mae Bullock, but the price of the ticket was high. You can hear it in Tina’s voice on “A Fool in Love.” After the deep gospel moan that opens the record, Tina and a female chorus engage in a wrenching call and response on a situation that Ronnie would have understood: “You know you love him / you can’t understand / why he treat you like he do when he’s such a good man.” About all you can say is that if Phil Spector and Ike Turner are the working definition of a good man, we’re in a world of hurt.
Not even Motown, determined to avoid the slightest hint of anything white Americans could stereotype as “niggerish” behavior, avoided the problem. Sharing none of Spector’s tendencies toward violence and disrespect, the Gordy family did its best to provide a positive model. While there’s no question that Berry Gordy, Sr.’s mantle as family patriarch passed down to his son, women were deeply involved, as equals, in the family’s decision-making process. Before Berry Gordy, Jr., could borrow the $800 he needed to found Motown from the credit union the family funded with required donations from all members, he had to convince the family council he was worth the risk, and that required the support of his mother and sisters. Women made the financial decision that made Motown happen.
But none of that could save Tammi Terrell. Briefly married to boxer Ernie Terrell, who once fought Muhammad Ali for the heavyweight crown, Tammi embodied Motown’s ideal of the (black) “girl next door.” The duets she recorded with the young Marvin Gaye—“If I Could Build My Whole World Around You,” “You’re All I Need to Get By,” “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing”—told a story of fresh and innocent love, and helped Motown establish a presence in the teen magazines. When Tammi collapsed into Marvin’s arms on stage during a performance at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, the magazines presented her hospitalization as part of a tragic romance.
Real life was quite a bit different. One of many singers attracted to her vibrant energy, James Brown remembered Tammi as “a kid that people ran too fast and took advantage of.” Others who knew her described her romantic life as a nightmare of violence and abuse. The problem, according to Marvin Gaye, who never actually had a sexual relationship with his fantasy partner, was that “Tammi was the kind of chick who couldn’t be controlled by men.” And when men feel control slipping away, they often resort to their fists. Although no legal charges were ever filed, almost everyone who knew her believes the “brain tumor” that finally killed her—she underwent eight brain operations in the year and a half after her collapse—resulted from physical battering. “Tammi was the victim of the violent side of love,” Gaye said. “At least that’s how it felt. I have no first-hand knowledge of what really killed her, but it was a deep vibe.” Although no one at Motown has ever publicly admitted it, the vocals on the “comeback” albums released by “Marvin and Tammi” to capitalize on Tammi’s “recovery” and the revitalization of their fantasy romance were actually sung by Valerie Simpson. Tammi Terrell died at age twenty-four.
Closer to the chaos of the blues than the gospel celebrations their records suggested, the experiences of Ronnie Bennett, Tina Turner, and Tammi Terrell point out the unresolvable tension between the gospel energy of their best records and their blues experiences as women in a world where Spector could oversee the Crystals’ horrifyingly beautiful “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)”; Courtney Love’s devastating mid-nineties cover hammered home the horror and let the beauty be. With the possible exception of the great records he made with the Righteous Brothers and Tina Turner’s 1966 classic “River Deep Mountain High,” there wasn’t much real call and response between Spector and his singers. In the end, that left Spector himself isolated and blue. When Spector’s musical genius passed over the borderline into paranoid silence and isolation, no one was in a position to call him back.
8
SAR and the Ambiguity of Integration
Always a realist, Sam Cooke shared James Brown’s belief that success predicated on the goodwill of white Americans couldn’t be trusted. That was why he went out of his way to keep his connections with his original audience. And it was part of the reason why, in the last years of his life, Cooke developed close friendships with Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, the two black men who accounted for many of white America’s worst nightmares. Moments after the then Cassius Clay stunned Sonny Liston to win the heavyweight championship, he called on Cooke to join the celebration in the ring, introducing him as the world’s “greatest rock and roll singer.” Depending on how you looked at it, it either was or was not a long way from the Copa, where earlier that year Cooke had donned a tux to sing not only “Bill Bailey” and “Tennessee Waltz” but movement standards “If I Had a Hammer” and “This Little Light of Mine.”
Cooke’s politics were complicated. Even as he endorsed the movement’s demand for the removal of all barriers keeping blacks from full participation in the public world, Cooke resisted the idea that, once the walls came tumbling down, blacks would abandon their homes and rush inside. A dedicated desegregationist willing to enter the mainstream to replenish his supply of dollar bills, Cooke insisted that any meaningful concept of integration required an equal amount of white movement toward the black world.
For years before he met Malcolm and Ali, Cooke had willingly used his performing skills to support King’s goals. Jerry Butler recalls how Cooke supported student protestors in the South by forcing whites to enter traditionally black spaces, a situation that highlights the difference between integration, which assumes a white norm, and desegregation, in which cultural exchange can flow both ways. In 1959, Cooke forced promoters in Norfolk, Virginia, to open black seating areas to whites attending his performance. Butler assigns soul singers a place “at the vanguard of the movement” and stresses that “Young people like us, we were at A&T in Greensboro and Johnson: that whole corridor of black schools that starts at Baltimore. The entertainers would go in with the kids because we knew better than anybody that it wasn’t about money. It was about color. ‘Cause we had the money!” Cooke expressed his commitment to desegregation in a column published in numerous black newspapers in 1960: “I’ll never forget the day I was unable to fulfill a one-night singing engagement in Georgia because I wouldn’t sit in a Jim Crow bus and because no white taxicab driver would take me from the airport to the city—and Negro cabdrivers were not permitted to bring their cabs into the airport. . . I have always detested people of any color, religion or nationality who have lacked courage to stand up