Tag Archives: Phil Spector

From I Went To Your Wedding To Death Of A Ladies’ Man

As a teenager in L.A. in the early 1950s, Harvey Phillip Spector was glued to the sounds of the AM radio dial. He loved Patti Page singing “I Went To Your Wedding …”¹

“I Went to Your Wedding,” written by Jessie Mae Robinson in 1952, became a hit for Patti Page, whose recording of it entered the Billboard chart on August 22, 1952, lasting 21 weeks and reaching #1 on the chart. A country music version by Hank Snow peaked at number 3 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart the same year.

Twenty-four years after Patti Page’s rendition of  “I Went to Your Wedding” was the top pop song in America, it became the starting point for the  Leonard Cohen – Phil Spector collaboration that resulted in the “Death of a Ladies’ Man” album.  The following excerpt is from What Happened When Phil Spector Met Leonard Cohen? by Harvey Kubernik:²

Cohen and Spector first met late in 1974, when Cohen was in Los Angeles for a rare club appearance – a two-night gig at the Troubadour. After the last show on the second night, Spector hosted an informal reception for Cohen at his home – a Spanish-style mansion in the grand, excessive Southern California tradition.

Cohen was brought to Spector’s attention, and vice versa, by Martin Machat – who had independently become lawyer and business manager for both men. Machat took Spector to see Cohen perform. Throughout Cohen’s 90-minute show, Spector sat quietly, very still, immediately impressed (he later said) by Cohen’s mystery and his technique (or maybe the mystery of his technique…or the technique of his mystery…)

The two men got on well at the post-Troubadour reception, and kept in some sort of loose touch thereafter. Late in 1976, when Cohen visited Los Angeles again, Spector invited him to be his houseguest. The first night, the two worked out a new version of Patti Page’s “I Went to Your Wedding”; by breakfast, they’d co-written two new songs – Cohen the lyrics, Spector the music (picked out on the piano). The seed was sown for what ultimately became Death of a Ladies’ Man.  [emphasis mine]

Cohen’s own version of the story follows:³

After the [Troubadour] concert, Phil invited us to his house. The house was freezing due to the air conditioning, it was four degrees. He locked the door so we couldn’t leave. I said “Listen Phil, if you lock us in here, we are going to get bored… So as long as we are locked up we might as well write some songs together.” So we started that very night. We wrote songs together for about a month, it was fun. Phil is really a charming guy when you are with him alone. I would write the words, then he would work on the melody, then I would revise the words to better fit the melody. We would exchange ideas. But in the studio when other people were around he was a totally different man.

Phil Spector and Leonard Cohen spending a night together reworking a 1952 Patti Page hit song – scarey thought, eh?

Of course, one has to wonder how the album would have turned out if Messrs. Cohen and Spector had chosen a different tune from among those favored by the teenaged Spector, say “Work With Me Annie” by Hank Ballard & the Midnighters,  the Chordettes’ “Born To Be With You,” or “Sixty Minute Man” by the Dominoes.⁴

Patti Page – I Went to Your Wedding (1952)

Other Posts Featuring Death Of A Ladies’ Man

• “We Were Drunk & Stupid” – Leonard Cohen On Death of a Ladies’ Man
• Revisiting A 1998 Tribute To Leonard Cohen
• Pete Townsend Joins Leonard Cohen, Art Garfunkel, Mike Randle In The Girl-Boy-Girl Album Cover Club
• Two Leonard Cohen Memories
• The Leonard Cohen Bomber Jacket Photo, Warner Bros., Phil Spector, & Death Of A Ladies’ Man

1. From Phil Spector, The Musical Legacy: Part One by Harvey Kubernik (Goldmine, February 20, 2011) [↩]
2. The Los Angeles Phonograph, January 1978. Found at Speaking Cohen. [↩]
3. Comme Un Guerrier by Christian Fevret (Throat Culture magazine, 1992). Found at Speaking Cohen. [↩]
4. Phil Spector, The Musical Legacy: Part One by Harvey Kubernik (Goldmine, February 20, 2011) [↩]

Warner Bros. Releases The Bomber Jacket Photo & The Death Of A Ladies’ Man Album

Dominique BOILE has sent a followup to The Sunday Leonard Cohen Pictorial – The Bomber Jacket Photo that includes the two pages of media information that were originally sent with the photo¹  (click on images to enlarge) and this comment:²

This is the official promotional photo sent by Warner Bros. Records in October 1977 for the promotion of “Death Of A Ladies’ Man.”

The association of the photo with “Death Of A Ladies’ Man” explains why the head shot bears the logo of Warner Bros., the company that first released the album, rather than that of Cohen’s own  label, Columbia Records, which did later pick up the album.

Moreover, the Warner Bros. involvement, it turns out, was more a cause than a consequence of the Phil Spector – Leonard Cohen collaboration that resulted in “Death Of A Ladies’ Man.”  The following excerpt is from Gods, Gangsters and Honour by Steven Machat, whose father, Marty Machat, was, until his death, Leonard Cohen’s manager:

In 1977, my father was confronted by a big problem that was threatening his relationship with Phil Spector. Dad had negotiated Phil a label deal with Warner Brothers that involved Spector getting a huge advance before he delivered his future product. Unfortunately, Spector had failed to deliver the product and Warners wanted their money back.

Machat Senior came up with the answer: stick two of his top clients in the studio. My dad would then give the album to Warners to keep them happy, clear the debts, and keep both clients happy. But this involved two of his most problematic clients. Not just Spector but Leonard Cohen,  who, like Phil, could not buy a pop hit in the US. Nevertheless, Death of a Ladies’ Man was born.

Even a cursory knowledge of the horrors that attended the creation of “Death Of A Ladies’ Man” may shift how one views this publicity photo of Leonard Cohen to an edgier perspective. This summary of the Cohen-Spector releationship by Susan Nunziata, writing in the Nov 28, 1998 edition of Billboard, is more benign than most such descriptions:

Of note was Cohen’s collaboration with Phil Spector on the album “Death of a Ladies’ Man”. The almost unimaginable combination of Spector and Cohen has been well documented. Spector’s obsession with guns, his heavy drinking, his tendency to surround himself with menacing henchmen, and his penchant to threaten musicians. The now infamous stories of Spector holding a gun to Cohen’s neck as a sign of his unswerving affection and his obsessive possessiveness of the master tapes, to the extent that Cohen was prevented from hearing the mixes before the album was released, are now legendary. The sound and style of Ladies’ Man were in such contrast to Cohen’s previous work that it came as a great disappointment to him.

In Gods, Gangsters and Honour, Marchat offers a more pointed quote  by Cohen about Spector:

The man is crazy. We were drunk and stupid. I do not wish for this album to see daylight.

Now when you  check the photo, doesn’t  Leonard look a little dazed and more than a bit uneasy, like someone who has been flinching way too many times lately?

Leonard Cohen “Touch[es] His Toe In The Mainstream”

This tempestuous history is – unsurprisingly – recast in the official media information sheets.

The Leonard Cohen data is standard Cohen boilerplate, although one wonders which demographic the “Death Of A Ladies’ Man” PR folks at Warner bros. were pursuing by pointing out, as part of a three paragraph publicity blurb, that he graduated from McGill and was “the recipient of an honorary LLD from Dalhousing College (Halifax, Nova Scotia).”

On the other hand, the second page, which deals with the Cohen-Spector collaboration,  is a PR masterpiece.  I’ve underlined some of the more startling revelations. such as “it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where Cohen leaves off and Specter begins, so closely did the two mesh talents and ideas on this album.”

And, while “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On” may be funny, I suspect few who heard it – other than those whose salaries were paid by Warner Bros. – found it to be “as wry as they come.”

The final paragraph alone could serve as the basis for a dozen doctorate dissertations:³

Cohen has said that with this album [Death Of A Ladies' Man] he’s hoping to “touch his toe in the mainstream.” No doubt, it’s a place where he’s always belonged.

To which Cohen fans can only reply “Run, Leonard, run away from the mainstream.”

1. The photo atop this post is from Dominique [↩]
2. Dominique also affirms that the name of the photographer and the date of this picture are not given. [↩]
3. Of course, at a place like University Of Chicago, the placement of the apostrophe in “Death Of A Ladies’ Man” could generate post-graduate papers in a quantity that would approximate the number of “Death Of A Ladies’ Man” albums sold in the eastern half of the US. [↩]