Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (5 page)

“We were playing bar mitzvahs at the Brentwood Temple, house parties—the Jewish kids would have their chaperone dances, and the Catholic kids would have theirs—it was all dogshit,” Kim Fowley remembers. “In between times we'd be stealing golf clubs. We'd chase ambulances and fire engines, and when some rich guy's house went up in flames we'd go for the golf clubs because we could sell them in the ghetto. Black people wanted to play golf in the '50s. We'd go down to the black neighborhood, and all the other thieves would be there with the toasters and waffle irons.

“The bass players were always wandering in and out, and the guitar players were always the hardest to get. So Phil Spector would come by and play sometimes. But he was just a guy who knew the songs that everybody else knew. He didn't make an impression. Give him ten bucks, or don't give him anything so we can have more.”

Bruce Johnston, who would later go on to join the Beach Boys, has a slightly different recollection: “Phil talked a little funny—like a more masculine Pee-wee Herman. And he'd pull faces, like a little grimace now and then, which was kind of strange. But he was light-years ahead of any other teenage guitar player around. Our whole thing was wishing we sounded like the radio, and Phil's guitar playing did that, and it certainly didn't hurt with meeting girls and all that teenage stuff. I remember playing someone's house in Brentwood and Phil, who definitely didn't have movie-idol looks, with all the girls sitting by him as he played, because he had that radio sound. I remember that because they weren't sitting around me.”

Occasionally too Spector would play in a scratch group led by a sax player named Steve Douglas, who had been two years ahead of Phil at Fairfax. Douglas's group was managed, after a fashion, by Spector's sister Shirley, who still harbored her own dreams of being a singer, while working full-time as a secretary. Shirley affected a kind of brittle glamour, wearing her peroxide-blond hair in the style of Lana Turner and blowing plumes of cigarette smoke out of the side of her mouth. “She was a real nervous, speedy little chick, who didn't know how to stop talking,” Douglas remembered. “Phil would always show up late to rehearsal, or not show up at all, but he was a hell of a guitar player.”

Spector was now sucking up influences like a sponge, mastering the rudiments of songwriting and arranging, able to turn his hand to any number of musical styles, and by dint of his abilities and his application, moving toward the center of an extended group of musicians who would play a significant role in the burgeoning Los Angeles music scene. In the spring of 1957, he and Marshall Lieb appeared on a local late-night television talent show,
Rocket to Stardom,
broadcast on KTLA from an Oldsmobile showroom. Singing the Five Satins' doo-wop hit, “In the Still of the Night,” the pair won the competition.

“We all were moving, with our own ambitions,” Michael Spencer says. “But it was Phillip who was moving the fastest.”

But among some of his old friends there was the sense that he had no compunction about leaving them behind. “It was like Phil would go in and out of different social strata and just give up on what had been before,” Ron Milstein remembers. “When we finished our friendship it was as if we'd never even known each other. It was the cold shoulder.”

         

In the summer of 1957, Spector left Fairfax High without a backward glance. His feelings about his school years would be best illustrated by a curious vignette at the Class of '57 high school reunion, held ten years later at the Ambassador Hotel. Spector reserved a table at the back of the room and arrived with two bodyguards, who positioned themselves to prevent anybody else approaching him.

“It was pretty strange,” Ron Milstein remembers. “Most people went with their dates. Phil went with his bodyguards. But big deal, you know? We were all pretty much the same. But he was richer and stranger.”

Burt Prelutsky was by then writing a weekly column for the
Los Angeles Times.
Intrigued by Spector's behavior, he contacted him for an interview, seeking some explanation. “He basically said that he wanted everybody to get as close to him at the reunion as they had in high school,” Prelutsky says. “He was still very bitter. It was a question of, he was going to show us…” When Prelutsky's article appeared in the paper, he received a gift from Spector: an electric clock, with Spector's picture on its face, and the inscription “Thanks for giving me the time of day.”

Revenge would prove an impetus to Spector for years to come; the little guy rubbing the big guy's nose in it, repaying all the slights and taunts, real and imagined, that he'd had to suffer over the years. And damn the consequences. “You count your success by how many enemies you've made” would become one of Phil Spector's favorite maxims.

3

“To Know Him Is to Love Him”

B
y the time he left Fairfax High, Phil Spector was in no doubt that his future lay in the music business. But Bertha insisted he needed a skill to fall back on. Spector had always taken a keen interest in law, following the progress of big murder trials in the newspapers, and when Marshall Lieb enrolled at Los Angeles City College, studying politics, Phil joined him there, training to be a court stenographer. Michael Spencer observed how attuned Spector was to the training. “Phil was physically sensitive; he had very fine fingers, and his dexterity was incredible. You'd sit with him and he'd be rapping his fingers, as if he was typing out what you were saying on the table, unconsciously practicing. He was always at a high-pitched level. There was very little that was contemplative. But that was Phil. Always buggy.”

The work often took him into the local court, transcribing routine criminal cases, and on one occasion he sat in on one of the endless series of appeals for Caryl Chessman, the so-called Red Light Bandit, who in 1948 was convicted on seventeen counts of robbery, rape and kidnapping. One of the kidnapping counts included bodily harm of the victim. Under California's so-called Little Lindbergh Law, in cases involving kidnapping with bodily harm the sentence was either life in prison without possibility of parole or death. The jury did not recommend mercy, and Chessman was sentenced to death in the gas chamber. Chessman became a cause célèbre, and a range of public figures, including Aldous Huxley, Marlon Brando and the evangelist Billy Graham, took up his case. Chessman spent twelve years fighting the sentence, before going to the gas chamber on May 2, 1960.

Growing up in a Jewish household had inculcated in Spector an early awareness of racial and political issues. Bertha was a staunch Democrat, who had organized block parties to support the Democratic Party's nominee Adlai Stevenson when he ran unsuccessfully for president in 1956. Spector became a fervent supporter of Chessman, railing against the injustice of the sentence and the inequities of the justice system with such fervor that some of his friends began to suspect he was a communist. But it wasn't simply a question of Spector sympathizing with the underdog; he saw himself as one.

While he enjoyed his experiences in the courtroom, Spector had no intention of allowing his studies to get in the way of his music. He had come a long way in the last two years, not only building up experience as a musician and a performer, but learning the craft of composition and arrangement, deconstructing the different elements that comprised the records he loved—the crisp slapback technique that the producer Sam Phillips conjured at the Sun Studios on his recordings for Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry's duck-walking guitar licks, the subtle interweaving of voices in doo-wop and the keening harmonies of the Everly Brothers.

It was now time to make his move. With Marshall Lieb and Harvey Goldstein, Spector had been rehearsing a handful of songs written in his bedroom, and in the early spring of 1958, he finally summoned up his nerve and walked into a small Hollywood studio called Gold Star and said he wanted to make a record.

Gold Star was run by two partners, Stan Ross and Dave Gold. Like Spector, Ross had been a student at Fairfax, going on to learn his craft as an engineer in a local studio, Electrovox, where his duties included recording performances off the radio by comics like Jack Benny and Eddie Cantor and then pressing them as shellac discs to give away as gifts and promotional items.

In 1950, Ross and Gold opened their own studio on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Vine Street, in premises that had previously been occupied by a dentist. By the standards of most Los Angeles studios, Gold Star was unprepossessing. The entrance to the studio was down a litter-strewn side alley. The surroundings were cramped and dingy, the carpet tattered. The singer-songwriter Jackie DeShannon would later joke that the bathroom was the best place for crabs in all Los Angeles. The main recording space, Studio A, was tiny—a mere 25 × 35 feet—with a low ceiling that made the room seem smaller. But what the studio lacked in size it more than made up for in atmosphere. The cramped dimensions of the room lent a powerful intimacy to the records made at Gold Star. It also had two echo chambers, built by Dave Gold, that were among the best to be found in any Los Angeles studio. Attempting to replicate the full, resonant sound of recordings made in the Columbia Studios in New York, Gold had made several failed attempts at building the chambers before finally coming up with the right design. Situated behind Studio A, the trapezoid-shaped chambers were lined with two-inch concrete walls. Each was fitted with a speaker, to input the sound of the recording from the control room, and a mike to record and feed it back. The recording engineer Larry Levine, who would work on virtually all of Spector's recordings between 1962 and 1966, recalls that crawling into the dark, tomblike space and simply hearing your own breath resounding in your ears could be a “terrifying” experience.

Gold Star was used primarily as a demo studio—a place where publishers and songwriters would record a rough cut of a song to sell on to interested parties. But the studio occasionally produced a freshly minted hit. “Tequila,” a honking instrumental by the Champs, went to number 1 in 1958; and in February of the same year—just a couple of months before Spector walked into the studio—Gold Star had produced a song that would become a classic of the rock and roll era—Eddie Cochran's “Summertime Blues.” The song had been recorded as a demo at one of the regular Wednesday afternoon sessions booked by a local music publishing company, and performed by a scratch group including a shipping clerk and a librarian, with Cochran on vocals. “Summertime Blues” would almost certainly have been one of the records that Spector would have heard on the radio that spring as he sat in his bedroom, writing songs and dreaming of making a hit record himself.

When Spector first walked into Gold Star, Stan Ross was unimpressed. “He was just this nervous, shifty little kid,” Ross remembers. “He told me he'd just graduated from Fairfax; we're alumni! Then he said he was going to have a hit record.” Just like everyone else, thought Ross. Nonetheless, he allowed Spector to visit the studio a couple of time and watch him at work but told him that if he wanted to make a record himself he would have to pay the standard rate—$15 an hour, plus the cost of the tape. For a two-hour session—around $40—Spector could make his record.

Spector turned to his mother for a loan. He could not have chosen a worse time. Just a few weeks earlier Bertha had been involved in a car crash that had left her unable to work, and she was now involved in litigation against the other party. Nevertheless, she was able to provide $10. Marshall Lieb came up with a further $10, and Harvey Goldstein also contributed to the cause. The remainder would come from an unexpected and, it would transpire, particularly serendipitous source—Donna Kass's friend Annette Kleinbard. Kleinbard was just sixteen, two years younger than Spector. He complained to friends that he found her “irritating,” but they did have one passion in common: music. It seemed that whenever Spector saw Annette, she would be singing. He liked her voice, but he also saw something else in her—an opportunity to get his record made.

“He came up to me one day,” Kleinbard recalls, “and said, ‘Do you have ten dollars?' I said, ‘I don't have ten cents.' So he said, ‘Well, if you can get together ten dollars, you can cut a record with us.'” Kleinbard begged the money from her parents. “I was a belligerent child and very precocious. I kept saying, ‘If you give me ten dollars, we're going to have the number-one record in the world, and I am going to buy you a beautiful mansion, and a racehorse'—because my father had once been a jockey.”

Over the next few days, Spector rehearsed the group on a song he had written called “Don't You Worry My Little Pet”—an upbeat rock and roll song that was influenced by two of his current favorites, Buddy Holly and the Crickets and the Everly Brothers. And on May 20, 1958, the four teenagers walked into Gold Star, ready for their big moment. Sitting at the controls, Stan Ross watched with amusement as Spector scuttled between the studio and the control booth, adjusting microphones, playing piano and guitar, organizing the four-part harmonies and doing his best to give everybody the impression he knew what he was doing.

“Don't You Worry My Little Pet” evinced a raw and spontaneous youthful energy, but nobody apart from Spector was really convinced the song was any good. Stan Ross would later dismiss it as “a piece of crap,” and even Annette Kleinbard thought it was “dreadful.” But it was a calling card. Through another friend, Spector effected an introduction to a small, independent label, Era Records, run by Lew Bedell and Herb Newman.

Stooped and balding, in an earlier life Bedell had been a television host and comedian; he was a man, according to Stan Ross, who “only knew pratfalls. His big question, about everything, was: ‘Whaddya think?' He could never make up his mind about anything.” Newman had worked at Liberty Records, where his cousin, Si Waronker, was president, before joining forces with Bedell in 1955 to found Era. The label enjoyed an early number-one record with Gogi Grant's “The Wayward Wind,” followed by a number of middle-of-the-road pop and country hits. But by 1958, Bedell and Newman were making concerted efforts to break into the rock and roll market, setting up a second label, Dore—named after Bedell's son.

Bedell was sufficiently impressed by Spector's first effort to offer the group a “lease of master” agreement, effectively giving Era control of the master recording for a nominal amount. At the same time Bedell agreed to underwrite the recording of three more songs, with the promise that if the songs did well, a more binding agreement would follow.

On July 3, 1958, the four members of the as-yet-unnamed group convened in Bedell's office to sign the agreement. This gave Era “all right, title and interest of whatsoever kind” in, and “exclusive and perpetual ownership” of, each of the four masters.

In return, Era undertook to pay an advance of $40 for each of the masters (recoupable against royalties), with a royalty rate of 3 percent of the net retail cost of each record. In other words, Spector, Lieb, Goldstein and Annette Kleinbard would receive around one and a half cents for each copy sold, to be divided between the four of them. As songwriter, Phil would receive an additional royalty for the license of his copyright.

There was one further hurdle to be overcome. Because all the members of the group were legally minors Era had to obtain a court order approving the signing under the so-called Coogan Law, which protected underage performers.

In the meantime, Bedell and Newman arranged for more studio time at Gold Star. By now, the group had decided on a name, the Teddy Bears, apparently suggested by Harvey Goldstein and inspired by the Elvis Presley hit of the day, “Let Me Be Your Teddy Bear.” But ironically Goldstein was not with the group when, in mid-July, they walked into Gold Star to resume recording. A few months earlier, he had volunteered for the U.S. Army Reserve, a term of service that would prevent him from being drafted into the military proper, and he had been summonsed for two weeks' basic training at Fort Ord in northern California.

The song the Teddy Bears were scheduled to record was a ballad called “Wonderful Lovable You,” another Spector song that Bedell had chosen as a possible B-side for “Don't You Worry My Little Pet.” Bedell and Newman had dropped by the studio to keep an eye on their new investment. But after two hours, most of which Spector spent experimenting with his guitar sound and attempting vocal overdubs on Gold Star's rudimentary two-track equipment, the session was abandoned. A few days later, Bedell and the Teddy Bears reconvened in the studio. Bedell had now decided the song needed a solid backbeat, and Spector had called in his old friend, the drummer Sandy Nelson. But again, things went far from smoothly. Marshall Lieb would later recall that Nelson was so befuddled by the tempo of “Wonderful Lovable You” that Lieb had to instruct him when to hit the downbeat. At length, Bedell left in exasperation, telling Stan Ross that if the song wasn't completed in two hours, he was to terminate the session. With time running short, Spector pleaded with Ross to be given the chance to record another song instead. Ross relented.

For weeks, Spector had been working on a slow, torchy ballad, loosely modeled on the Chantels' hit “Maybe,” which had been rising up the charts through the spring of 1958. At first glance, the lyric of the new song appeared to be just another lament of unrequited teenage love and devotion, but for Spector its inspiration cut far deeper than that, to the abiding source of all his pain and unhappiness. Pondering on the epitaph on his father's gravestone—to know him was to love him—Spector had only to shift the tense from the past to present—“To Know Him Is to Love Him”—to write a memoriam disguised as a pop song. Annette Kleinbard had no idea of the song's original inspiration. “Phil told me, I love your voice and I want to write a song for it—not for me, because he was going out with Donna, my best friend, and I just wasn't interested in Phil in that way.” When he first sang the song to Annette over the telephone, interrupting her in the middle of her school homework, she was unimpressed. “I thought it was really awful, but that was a lot to do with Phil's voice. He was a great producer, but not a great singer.” Nor did Stan Ross have any inkling of its potential as Spector hastily set about arranging the song in the studio: “Annette sang it live, then Phil and Marshall did the oo-badda-oo-badda background sounds, and they overdubbed that, with Phil playing guitar. Sammy put the backbeat in. And that was the record. It was Phil's baby completely. I thought it was a good song, but I certainly didn't think that a ballad like that, done the way they'd done it, could be a hit. We cut it in about an hour. All told, it probably cost one hundred dollars to make.”