He's a Rebel (10 page)

Providentially, Phil Spector met Sill during the March sessions at Master Sound for
The Teddy Bears Sing!
Cutting a master of a Duane Eddy record in another room, Sill overheard what Spector was doing in Bunny Robyne's studio. “I heard these great harmonic sounds, and that's when I saw him,” Sill said. “I didn't know who he was. He was with the two other kids, and Bunny briefly introduced us.” Spector knew of Sill's industry pull, and when he needed to make a move before the Teddy Bears' corpse was cold, he followed up on the brief encounter. He called on Sill at his N. Argyle Street office, saying “Mr. Sill, can I speak to you?” Sill quickly gave Spector a commitment, and in a matter of days, on April 24, he purchased one of Spector's songs for Gregmark Music, the Sill/Hazelwood publishing company. It was “Be My Girl,” the song written by Phil and Shirley Spector, though Shirley used the pseudonym Cory Sands.

The contract that Phil would sign with Lester Sill was colossal, surely unheard-of for an eighteen-year-old kid; a three-year pact with spiraling royalties totaling 6 cents per record; 1½ cents of that was for producing alone, a separation of power hardly ever acknowledged with a performing artist.

“Actually, I wasn't happy about the artist part—Phil is not a good singer—but he wanted it so we included it,” Sill said. “But I saw him right away as a producer, and I think that's what he really wanted to do.”

Spector immediately began going with Sill to Phoenix to observe Duane Eddy sessions. The studio there, Ramco Audio Recorders, was Lee Hazelwood's bailiwick, and by watching Hazelwood work there, one could ingest the process of making high art with crude implements. Towering and bony, Hazelwood had been a deejay in Phoenix when he found and began to produce Duane Eddy in the city's lone studio. Ramco was a hovel, accommodating no more
than one track of recording tape, but Hazelwood worked wonders with echo and tape delay and reverb—using an echo chamber that was once a water pipe. As a result, Eddy's guitar was so smooth that it seemed to vibrate in apple butter.

Eager to learn these techniques, Phil breathed hard on Hazelwood's neck. A temperamental man, Hazelwood answered Phil's questions and put up with his suggestions, but privately he told Sill not to let Spector in any more. “Lee was the angry young man, and the two of them clashed,” Sill said. But this potentially explosive situation was warded off because Lester gave Spector the go-ahead to make his own records.

Phil wanted to resurrect the sound he had invented. His head-clearing jazz respite over, and with the Teddy Bears idiom still viable and marketable, he was now ready to fly with it again.

“I always felt Phil thought he was folding the group only as a way of getting rid of the Shirley thing,” Marshall Lieb said. “The breakup of the group was not because we thought we'd failed. To Phil and me, it was like we made an arrangement to come back and do it in another way. I'm pretty sure I was supposed to be part of the new thing, but I was either away or in the studio with somebody else.”

Ironically, in fact, Marshall had started working with Elliott Ingber, cutting demos at Gold Star. Annette was still recovering from her accident—and a nonperson in Phil's mind, anyway. And Phil himself had made a break with the Teddy Bears' breeding ground. Drawn to Lester Sill's large family and his spacious home in Sherman Oaks, Phil had taken up quarters there, sharing a room with Lester's ten-year-old son, Joel.

Distanced by geography as well as inclination, his seamless hours in the studio the epicenter of his life, Spector's design for a Teddy Bearstyle revival came to be centered almost completely around the studio mixing board. When he went into Master Sound in the fall of 1959 to cut songs—under the name of the Spector's Three—the songs were an entirely synthetic product; a female session singer named Ricki Page, wife of a songwriter crony of Lester Sill's named George Motola, provided the female line, a high, nonverbal soprano that Spector filtered across the songs' musical image, embellishing his already-overdubbed vocals. Cloying and drippy, but convincing
enough as smoky white doo-wop, Spector reidentified his signature product with these songs the way he could not with the Teddy Bears.

With several Spector's Three tunes in the can, Phil now turned to selling the group as a human entity. For that, he brought Russ Titelman further into his circle. In the year that he had known him, Phil had provided Russ with a musical education. Spector sent him to Burdell Mathis, the same man who'd taught him the guitar, and had also taken Russ into the studio to do backing vocals on demos. Russ, who was a young boy when his father died, saw Phil through eyes tinted by idealization.

“He was the male figure in my life,” Titelman said. “I remember Phil as always very unusual: a quirky, odd character. But what always superseded everything else about him, and what affected me, was that he was completely into his music. That was his whole life.

“It was amazing to me. I'd hung out with him and he'd always have the most incredible records. He'd play
The Genius of Ray Charles
or
Ray Charles at Newport
. He played Larry Williams, stuff you'd never hear. He'd have Hunter Hancock on the radio, Lowell Fulson, Jim Randolph . . . all this stuff most white kids didn't hear. He turned me on to all that.”

Titelman sang at the Spector's Three sessions. But his real use was on the outside. Russ was a dark and handsome teenager like Marshall, and Phil wanted him to front the touring group—which Spector wanted no part in. For one thing, Phil was now ready to accept that his pinched, adenoidal voice was inferior beyond the studio walls. For another, without Marshall as a buffer between him and people he did not know, his old insecurities resurfaced. His growth halted at around five foot six, his beloved hair thinned into snarly strands swept over gaps of bare scalp, Phil frankly came to see himself as a geek. “There was a time when he just didn't want to be seen any more,” said Lieb, who may have known him better than anyone. “I can remember him not being in love with Phil at that time. He wasn't happy with the way he looked.

“Phil always liked to appear on stage with us, because everywhere he went he had his best friend and a girl that everybody liked. And if he got in trouble with his mouth, which he often did on the road, I'd be there to say to his adversary, with an amp in my hand, ‘This is a very heavy piece of equipment and it could really hurt you if I crushed you with it.' On his own, I don't think he looked forward to that kind of thing happening.”

The ersatz Spector's Three were Russ, his girlfriend Annette Merar—a very pretty blonde, who was a grade ahead of him at Fairfax High—and another classmate, Warren Entner. Late in 1959, they went on a television show hosted by L.A. deejay Wink Martindale and lip-synched the first Spector's Three release on Trey Records, “I Really Do.”

This was a song born in cynicism, and it paid the price. Spector had been beaten in the evolution of the Teddy Bears' sound by another West Coast coed vocal group, the Fleetwoods, who had a No. 1 hit the previous spring with a trembling song called “Come Softly to Me.” In a roundabout irony, and an open theft in a bid for recognition, the lyric of “I Really Do” played with the same kind of “dum-dum, dooby-doo, dum-dum” riff of the Fleetwoods' song—which itself was derived from “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” Spector's rip-off failed, as did two other more original Spector's Three records.

Even so, Lester Sill could separate Spector from his chart performance. He gave Phil an arranger's credit on the label of the Trey records, the way Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller acknowledged their orchestra leaders, though Sill would not go as far as a production credit. Leiber and Stoller had earned the right to that high ground, and eighteen-year-old Phil Spector had no business standing on it. Sill believed in Spector, loved his drive and grasp of recording, tolerated his unorthodox ways. Although Spector continued to consume time and money in the studio, Sill did not get on him about it. “I'm tolerant when it comes to great talent,” said Sill, who did not even pretend that he could keep up with the young man in the studio. “Phil had complete control on his dates. He told us he had something and I said, ‘Let me hear it,' and that's when I knew about Spector's Three.”

Sill's house was now Spector's creative brewery. Lost in his art, shut out from the world, he walked around in a fog of words and music. Once, after a session, he went into the kitchen to make a sandwich and, thinking he was putting the salami back, left his wallet in the refrigerator instead. He looked all over the house before he found it. Sharing a bedroom with ten-year-old Joel, Phil soon had him copying music charts for him. The night still his refuge, Phil confined his work to the late hours. By day he hung around with Sill's other son, Mark, and his stepson, Chuck Kaye, delighting in a brotherly kind of bonding his own home could not have even let
him imagine. Lester Sill could reasonably think he was playing surrogate father; Phil rarely saw his mother and sister, and Lester could understand why Spector jerked away when his wife, Harriet, would reach out to touch him on the arm or shoulder. “She thought he didn't know
how
to be close to anybody,” Sill said.

A year after Donna Kass left his life, Phil's contact with the opposite sex was minimal, at a wistful distance. Sometimes after late sessions—Spector preferred the late evening hours for his work—he and Russ Titelman would drive for hours around the valley, and inevitably Phil would park in front of a house on Ventura Boulevard where a girl named Lynn Castle lived. Just like in a bad movie, he would wait until the lights went out in the house, then honk the horn for Lynn to come to the window. She would then climb out and get into the car. “We'd just drive around and they'd be kissing. Sometimes they'd drop me off and Phil would pick me up later,” Titelman recalled of the routine, which never seemed to get any more serious.

Spector had other, more meaningful obsessions in his life. Semiemployed as a court reporter, he was called to do stenotype when depositions were taken and legal papers filed in the Los Angeles courthouse during the interminable appeals case of Caryl Chessman, the convicted murderer who was sentenced in 1949 to die in the gas chamber. As Chessman's decade-long Death Row bid to stay alive became more heated, and a public
cause célèbre
, the compulsive Spector, devouring reams of details about the case, took to defending Chessman fanatically. In Sill's office, he'd try to talk everybody over to his side. “He was very liberal, which was unusual for a teenager in those days,” Sill said. “A lot of the kids around the place thought he was communist.”

Most pressing, however, was for Phil to park himself in the studio. Early in 1960, Sill signed a black singer, Kell Osborne, who sang in the high-pitched, sorrowful style of ex-Drifter Clyde McPhatter, whose voice Sill loved. Shunted to Phil to produce, Spector and Sill rehearsed Osborne for two months, then flew him to Phoenix to record him at Ramco. But when Osborne got off the plane, he was so nervous about making a record that he lost his voice. For five maddening days, Spector tried to coax him to sing. Finally two sides were cut, a remake of “The Bells of St. Mary's” and a Spector tune, “That's Alright Baby.” Back in L.A., Phil overdubbed with regular Sill sidemen, saxophonist Plas Johnson and bassist Ray Pohlman.
The songs, released on Trey, were starkly, bizarrely opposite: the A side was mawkish, the other tough-teen rattling, on which Osborne sounded more like Eddie Cochran than McPhatter, fitted with booming drums and gnawing guitars.

The songs' lack of airplay irritated Spector and prompted him to shift his sights. He was tired of the limited scope of the L.A. rock scene, which was still lowercase compared with New York and Memphis; where music gushed from a thousand geysers in those places, it seeped here. Indeed, Spector's own group had been L.A.'s most viable product, and now
that
was gone. There was no shape or form to the local scene, no reliability to its structure, no broad power.

Lester Sill was Phil's link to the bustle and glamour of the real power. Sill had taken him to New York a few times when he went there on business. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller would call Sill from their studio, and then meet with him when he got to New York. Then Sill would go over to Don Kirshner's office at Aldon Music, the biggest publisher of rock-and-roll music, to find songs for his acts. Along for the ride, Spector
felt
like an industry scion.

“He saw all the activity going on,” Sill said, “because at the time the rock-and-roll business was really New York . . . the Brill Building, 1650 Broadway, Leiber and Stoller. Phil knew it, he saw it. He was so bright about how the business worked. And Spector by then had a certain amount of notoriety.”

Eager to use that as a lever, Spector bugged Sill all the time to find something for him to do back east. “He wanted to go to New York. He knew of my relationship with Mike and Jerry and he asked if something could be arranged with them.”

Knowing Phil was unhappy on the L.A. treadmill, Sill phoned Mike Stoller in the spring and obtained a position for Phil on the Leiber and Stoller payroll—Spector's contract with Sill/Hazelwood would still apply to his work in L.A.—as a songwriter and as an apprentice producer. As Sill explained it to Mike Stoller, Spector would not be one to blend into the wallpaper.

“He's strange, this kid,” Sill warned. “But you won't believe how talented he is.”

Mike Stoller sent airfare for Phil Spector.

Kim Fowley hadn't heard much about Spector since he saw the Phil Harvey band perform at the Rainbow Roller Rink. Fowley had now secured a job at Arwin Records, a small label owned by actress Doris
Day and her husband Marty Melcher, which had just had its first hit, Jan and Arnie's “Jennie Lee.” Fowley—“I was an office boy, quasi-publishing assistant, and song-plugger”—was looking to sign acts, having brought to Arwin Bruce Johnston and other remnants of the old Sleepwalkers—minus Sammy Nelson, now known as Sandy, who had notched a hit of his own in 1959 with a drum instrumental called “Teen Beat” and was signed to Imperial—and Johnston had begun recording with Doris Day's son, Terry Melcher, as Bruce and Terry. Pondering people who could make Arwin big time, Fowley called soul singer Johnny “Guitar” Watson and then Phil Spector.