Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (12 page)

Born in 1934, Kirshner was the son of a Harlem tailor, who had numbered Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington among his clientele. Tall and powerfully built, Kirshner won a sports scholarship to Upsala University in New Jersey, where he captained the basketball team, and might have made a career in the sport had it not been for a chance encounter at the Long Island resort hotel where he was working one summer as a bellhop. Swimming in the pool one day Kirshner overheard a younger boy playing the piano. Liking the melody, Kirshner offered to put some words to it. Together they sang the song for Frankie Laine, who was performing at the hotel, and who suggested they should make a demo. Borrowing $50 from his father and recruiting the hotel barman to sing, Kirshner recorded the demo and was able to place the song with a publisher.

At around the same time, he was introduced by a girlfriend to another aspirant songwriter named Walden Robert Cassotto. Cassotto not only wrote songs, he also sang, played the piano and acted. He had suffered from rheumatic fever as a child and his fragile health had inspired a burning ambition to become “the most important entertainer in the world” before his time ran out. Fancying he could spot a star in the making, and flushed by his own modest success, Kirshner suggested they should team up. Their first composition together was an advertising jingle for a local department store. Kirshner hefted the tape recorder on his shoulders so that Cassotto wouldn't strain himself. A second jingle for another store followed, this one sung by a girlfriend of Kirshner's named Concetta Franconero. From jingles, the pair progressed to pop songs. When Gene Vincent recorded one of their compositions, “Wear My Ring,” as the B-side of his hit “Lotta Lovin',” Kirshner and Cassotto pocketed a royalty check for $2,500. It was a revelation for Kirshner: a B-side earned as much as an A-side. In 1957, the partnership came to an end when Cassotto secured professional management and changed his name to Bobby Darin. (The friendship, however, remained intact: when Kirshner married his wife Sheila two years later, Darin was best man; that same week his record “Mack the Knife” went to number 1.)

Unsure where to turn next, Kirshner played some of his songs to Doc Pomus, who diplomatically suggested that he might try publishing instead. In the spring of 1958, he teamed up with a music-business veteran named Al Nevins; the pair took office space at 1650 Broadway and started trading under the name Aldon Music. Nevins was twenty years older, but it was the perfect partnership. “Al believed in me,” Kirshner remembers. “He was like a father. He let me pick the songs and he doled out the money.” Kirshner could neither read nor write music, and his own musical taste was more for sing-along standards and show tunes than rock and roll—more Lerner and Loewe than “Good Golly, Miss Molly.” But he had an intuitive understanding of what made a hit record, and he quickly recognized that to broach the teenage market he needed songwriters who understood the dreams and anguish of being a teenager themselves. The first people to walk through the door at Aldon were two songwriters, Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, with a mindless confection called “Stupid Cupid.” Paul Case at Hill and Range had already turned down the song, but Kirshner sensed it would suit his old friend Concetta Franconero, now better known as Connie Francis, who had already enjoyed two Top 40 hits. “Stupid Cupid” reached number 17. Sedaka and Greenfield's next hit was “Oh! Carol,” a love letter to Sedaka's high school classmate Carole Klein, sung by Sedaka himself. Klein also wrote and performed songs, under the name Carole King. And with her husband and co-writer Gerry Goffin she penned a riposte, “Oh! Neil.” Amused, Kirshner “schlepped out to Brooklyn” to sign the pair to Aldon, offering Goffin the incentive of $50 a week to give up his full-time job at a chemistry plant. Kirshner's investment was rewarded in 1961 when their song “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” recorded by the Shirelles, rose to number 1 in the charts.

By then, the Aldon team had been swollen by the arrival of two more writers—Barry Mann, who already had an established track record as a writer before signing with Aldon, and Cynthia Weil, an aspiring actress who had worked at a rival publishing house, Frank Loesser. Mann and Weil quickly became man and wife, and an enduring songwriting partnership.

By 1962, Kirshner had assembled a team of some twenty writers, aged between sixteen and twenty-six, working either singly or in pairs, who between them were responsible for a major percentage of the hits being generated out of New York. He had also started his own label, Dimension, releasing records by such artists as the Cookies, Carole King and Little Eva (who was actually King's babysitter).

“Donny,” as he was universally known, was a brash man with a high opinion of himself. His partner Al Nevins was suave, with epicurean tastes—he affected an ascot and collected rare cognacs. Kirshner, according to one producer, “was a bit of a slob. He'd sit around the office with his shoes off and his feet up on the desk. He was the sort of guy who'd invite you out to his mansion in New Jersey for a dinner party and order in pizza. But he had the greatest ears in the business. That man could sit and listen to somebody play eight bars of a song and he could tell you whether it was a hit or not, and he was right so often it was frightening. He was phenomenal.”

In his suite of offices at 1650 Broadway Kirshner had fashioned a production line of hits. His writers worked in small cubicles furnished with a piano and a desk, cutting their demos in an office studio, often congregating at the end of the day to compare notes and tunes, while constantly vying against each other for “Donny's approval and largesse.” “It was fun servitude,” Kirshner says. “You'd come in every day, and I didn't have expensive offices. I couldn't afford it. You'd hear these songs coming through the wall.”

While only a few years older than his young protégés, Kirshner had the paternalistic manner of a much older man. “They were like my kids.” He was a straight arrow who disapproved of drinking and abhorred drugs of any kind, and who would go home each evening to New Jersey and his new wife Sheila.

There wasn't a writer at Aldon who wasn't Jewish. Just as it had been the Jewish entrepreneurs and moguls of Hollywood who had shaped America's view of itself through the movies, and the Jewish songwriters of the '30s and '40s—Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, George and Ira Gershwin—who peddled America's dreams, so Kirshner's writers too were “normal Jewish kids,” as he put it, whose songs both shaped and reflected the conservative dreams and aspirations of most American teenagers, with their time-honored themes of infatuation and heartbreak, summer romances, the first kiss, dreams of wedding bells and living happily ever after. Two of his songwriting teams—Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and Gerry Goffin and Carole King—were married couples, although barely out of their teens, and seemed to be living out the dream themselves.

Almost from the moment he set foot in New York, Spector had targeted Kirshner as a man to be cultivated and made a point of visiting the Aldon offices to pay homage.

Compared to his clean-cut team of writers Kirshner thought “Philly,” as he called him, was “an oddball,” with his off-center garb, his twitchy mannerisms and his hipster locutions—“he talked like a foreign count or something”—which Kirshner suspected he'd plundered from Ertegun.

“Phil had quirks that nobody liked,” Kirshner remembers. “He was a practical joker. He would work at being different and eccentric. I'm sitting with some fairly normal Jewish kids who were going to go home, get married, this and that. And he was walking in with capes, shoes up to your eyeballs or whatever, which stand out in any crowd. Phil had to compensate for his size, his looks, by being different.”

But Kirshner was nothing if not a pragmatist. He had heard Spector's work, recognized his potential and quickly took him under his wing.

“I would walk the streets with Phil. There were times we'd stay at the office till two, three in the morning and then I'd take him home. I remember when his grandfather died, he was really depressed because he'd already lost his father, and he came out and stayed at my house in New Jersey. So I would be the father figure, the mentor. But with Philly, it was mostly business. I didn't like to be uncomfortable or eccentric, or if he made a nasty remark or a wisecrack. I thought he was cute, eccentric, charming, all of the above. But I also got to know that Philly was a user and pretty manipulative. To me, Philly was not an overwhelming friend, but a business associate we made a lot of money with.”

As one mutual friend put it: “Both of them had their magnificent egos.” Relations between the two men were often strained, but the mutual advantage to be gained from the partnership overruled any personal reservations. It was a marriage of convenience that would provide Spector with many of his greatest hits and Kirshner with an unbroken stream of royalty payments for years to come.

Spector was drawn to Kirshner because he had the lock on the teenage market, the best stable of songwriters, and wielded the kind of power that Spector hoped to one day have himself. “Phil needed my writers,” Kirshner says. “And he respected me for my knowledge of wedding the right song to the right artist. He knew that if he picked my brains and took my songs he would be a notch above everybody else.”

For his part, Kirshner recognized Spector's talent as a producer, and his potential as a hit-making vehicle for his writers' songs. “I wasn't interested in Phil as a writer. My writers were superior to him. But he was a great interpreter of songs. I knew he could capture the essence of a hook in a record and fortify the hook, fortify the drum sound. What he would add to a great song would be a Top 10 record. But what Phil did not like—what he didn't like with anyone—was that I was in a position of power.

“Philly always wanted to be numero uno. And because he had a similar drive to what I had, he resented any authority figures, which I clearly was. If I'd said Phil you're not having my songs, he'd have been finished. So whether he liked it or not, he had to be nice to me. No different if I was pushing to have a song with Wexler and Ahmet, I had to be nice to them. So it was a fact of life. No different than a doctor you use; he may have a lousy bedside manner but you need him. If he's gonna give you the chemo you gotta be nice to him. So it was almost a love-hate thing.”

It was on one of his periodic visits to Aldon that Spector first heard “I Love How You Love Me,” a composition by Barry Mann and Larry Kolberg—who combined songwriting with his full-time job as a liquor salesman. The song was earmarked for the teenage singer Tony Orlando, who had enjoyed his first hit earlier that year with another Aldon song, “Halfway to Paradise,” written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King. But Spector persuaded Kirshner that it was better suited to a female singer and would be perfect for the Paris Sisters.

Mann and Kolberg, who had scribbled the lyrics in five minutes on a restaurant napkin, envisaged the song as upbeat and cheerful. But Spector had other ideas. He flew out to Los Angeles for the sessions, determined to make a record of a richness and majesty that would surpass anything he had achieved before. At Gold Star, he gathered the Paris Sisters around the piano, working on the vocals over and over again to get precisely the right balance between the voices, slowing down the tune to a tempo more befitting a prayer than a song (when Kolberg first heard the record he likened it to “a funeral dirge”). With the arranger Hank Levine he then spent days crafting a lustrously silken string arrangement.

But it was the mixing that was to prove the most time-consuming process as Spector became obsessed with effecting exactly the right marriage between voices and strings. He was staying at Lester Sill's home, and would take the tapes back each evening, listening to them incessantly in the privacy of his room. “He would wake me up at three or four in the morning, listening to it over and over again at a very low level,” Sill remembered. “He must have remixed the strings on that song thirty times; then listened to it for another four or five days before he was sure it was right. Then finally when the record was pressed he listened to the pressing for another two or three days before he gave it an approval. I've never seen anyone more meticulous about mixing, about recording or mastering than Phil, of all the producers I've worked with. And it was really part of him, he became part of what he was doing, I mean, really his whole life was into it.”

“I Love How You Love Me” was, in many ways, an echo of “To Know Him Is to Love Him” sonorous and sweet, but also deeper, warmer and more richly textured—the first true precursor to the Wall of Sound. While Mann and Kolberg had written the song as a simple and affecting celebration of love, Spector's production seemed to carry within it the premonition of heartache, as if this was a love too good to be true. If “To Know Him” had been an elegy disguised as a love song, this was a love song disguised as an elegy. It was almost as if Spector couldn't produce a love song that didn't also carry the fear of loss. “I Love How You Love Me” entered the Top 40 in October 1961, rising to number 5.

When Annette Kleinbard first heard the song she was shocked by its resemblance to the hit she had made with the Teddy Bears three years earlier. “I was driving in my car, and my first thought was ‘Is that me?' Before she'd sung more than five words I knew that it was Phil's record. I'd never heard of the Paris Sisters, but I knew it would be a huge record and I wept, because it felt like Phil had taken my voice and passed it on to somebody else. It was just the most beautiful record, but I loved it and I hated it at the same time. Because I had been struggling to make it on my own and never could do it on that level and was so beside myself that Phil had done it. But Phil knew—he knew what he wanted, and he was a genius. He just had a lock on the heart of the kids of America, of the world.”