I loved them. I thought they were a tremendous expression for myself. I think they resented being an expression. —PHIL SPECTOR on the Righteous Brothers Phil had seen the creative weight of rock shifting westward as early as the autumn of 1964—the last important thing he did in New York was playing the funky guitar break for Leiber and Stoller on the Drifters’ “On Broadway” in 1963. To prep himself for resettlement in the hip new L.A. rock community he fully intended to serve as headmaster, he leased an appropriately regal castle. It was one of those ego-assuring Lotus Land fantasies in wood and brick: a five-bedroom, twenty-one-room Italian-style house with a swimming pool, nestled off a hushed side road in Beverly Hills. The house and the leafy grounds at 1200 La Collina Drive, only minutes from the action on Sunset, had once been part of the enormous Woolworth family estate, which was now subdivided into tracts. Other houses on the land had been made from the servants’ quarters and the horse stables.
