Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (7 page)

Shirley Spector had been watching her brother's burgeoning career with growing interest and, some thought, a degree of envy. “I met her after Phil had his first hit,” Bruce Johnston says, “and it was like, all of a sudden the kid has the success that she thought she should have.”

While her own ambitions to be a singer had led nowhere, managing Steve Douglas had given Shirley a taste of the music business and a belief that she could prosper in it. She now proposed to Spector that she should manage the Teddy Bears. Bertha too weighed in, insisting that Phil had an obligation to share his success with his sister. Wilting under the two-pronged attack, he reluctantly acquiesced, and in January 1959 Shirley joined the group as they flew to New York for a television appearance on
Perry Como's Kraft Music Hall—
the first stop on a tour of one-nighters and sock hops in cities across the eastern seaboard.

On the flight to New York, Phil kept Annette amused reciting skits from his two favorite comedians, Jonathan Winters and Lenny Bruce, whose first album,
Interviews of Our Times,
had been released a few months earlier. “Phil idolized Lenny and knew every line there was,” Annette remembers. “There were things about Phil that were great. He could be great fun, and he was very bright. I was having to take schoolwork with me, and he would correct me on my English grammar. It was Phil who drummed into me that you always have to put that ‘ly' on the end of an adjective—so instead of saying ‘appropriate,' you say ‘appropriately.' I have Phil to thank for that. He and Marshall were very protective of me because I really was so young. They watched out for me. And I remember that they never, never, never ever made a pass at me.”

But what should have been a triumph quickly became an ordeal. Familiar with the fights that had always characterized the Spector household, Annette and Marshall Lieb had swallowed hard when Shirley appointed herself as the group's manager. Now their worst fears were being realized. Shirley and Phil argued constantly, “screaming fights,” Annette says. And Shirley quickly turned her temper on Annette herself.

“She could be sweet one minute, and then so mean the next. She always had me off balance because I never knew what she was doing or where she was coming from. I think that Shirley wanted to sing, too; in a sense she wanted to be me, and she resented me, even though it was my voice that had started her brother's career. She made my life pretty terrible, a living hell.”

Embarrassed by his sister's behavior, Phil constantly apologized. “I think he was very concerned about her, how irrational she was. But I remember one day saying to myself, ‘This just isn't worth it. I am going to lose my sanity over this,' because she was so exhausting as a human being and so neurotic, or that is how I perceived her to be.”

It was during this tour that an incident supposedly occurred that was to scar Spector for years afterward. One night, after a performance, some young toughs followed him into the men's room, held him down and urinated on him. In years to come, this story would become a central part of the Spector mythology, to explain his distrust of the world at large, his obsession with personal security and his subsequent use of bodyguards. Curiously, Annette Kleinbard says she has no recollection of the incident. “I don't remember that and I would have known that.” But it was a story that Spector himself would recount at various times over the years to friends and intimates.

It is hard to imagine Spector inventing a story that casts him as the butt of such abject humiliation, but his tendency to self-mythologizing was already becoming apparent to those around him. In a hotel in New York, the three Teddy Bears were astonished when Fidel Castro, newly installed as the revolutionary leader of Cuba and on an unofficial visit to the United States, stepped into the elevator behind them, accompanied by a phalanx of bodyguards in combat fatigues. “Phil,” Annette remembers, “was making faces at them behind their backs. He was a real prankster.” In later years, Spector would inflate this fleeting encounter into a personal meeting with Castro, at which the Cuban leader allegedly offered him a job as a translator.

Back in Los Angeles, apparently keen to exaggerate his growing importance still further, he told Kim Fowley that he had produced the Mystics' doo-wop hit “Hushabye,” and “Come On, Let's Go” by Ritchie Valens. When Valens's song “Donna” was a hit, Spector told Donna Kass that he had written the song for her. What is so mystifying is that Spector could easily be found out. On February 3, 1959, Valens died when the small plane carrying him, Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper crashed in Iowa. Watching the news on television, Donna Kass saw Valens's girlfriend Donna Ludwig, for whom Valens had written the song, weeping, and realized for the first time that Phil had lied to her. But by then, his relationship with Donna was all but over.

Spector now started dating a girl called Lynn Castle, whom he had met through Marshall Lieb. Lynn was seventeen when she met Spector, and like Donna Kass before her fancied she could see in him qualities that most people missed. Lynn had spent her childhood in a Catholic boarding school, and Spector, she thought, was actually as vulnerable and unworldly as she felt herself to be.

“It was like you see in a movie, two lost souls. I felt that. Nobody could see what in the world I ever saw in him. He didn't look like anything that anyone with an eye for glamour would look at. But he was smart, he was sweet and he was funny. I didn't know about his bleakness and blackness, because I had bleakness and blackness too. But I could see his vulnerability. That's what I loved about him. Because he was fragile he was able to see my fragility. And he knew that what would make him feel okay would work for me as well. Water seeks its own level, and that's what happened.”

With the proceeds from “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” Spector bought his first sports car, a metallic blue Corvette. Late at night, he would drive to Castle's house in the Valley, tap on her bedroom window and climb in and sit on the end of her bed, playing songs for her on his guitar. “Sweet, sweet songs,” Lynn says. “I was absolutely crazy about him.”

The idyllic mood was somewhat dissipated on the rare occasions when she would visit him at the apartment on Hayworth, to be greeted at the door by Bertha with an arctic glare. Nowadays Bertha was often to be found in Wallich's Music City, demanding to know exactly how many copies of the Teddy Bears record they had sold. And she continued to exercise an iron grip on her son's life. “I was definitely not welcome around Bertha,” Lynn says. “The most I can remember is being at the door. I don't even know if I ever got to go in. I don't think anyone was good enough for her son. Bertha ran Phil.”

         

The Teddy Bears' new home, Imperial, was known primarily as an RB label. Its owner, Lew Chudd, had built Imperial's fortunes by tapping into the rich vein of talent in New Orleans largely overlooked by other companies. His major discovery was the exuberant Fats Domino—one of Spector's heroes—who enjoyed a string of hits in what was known as “the race market” until crossing over into the pop charts in 1955 with “Ain't That a Shame.” Chudd's next big success came with Ricky Nelson—whom Spector's mentor Barney Kessel produced for Verve. Nelson enjoyed a huge hit with a cover version of Fats Domino's “I'm Walkin'.” But by a strange oversight, Verve had neglected to tie Nelson to a contract, and Chudd quickly signed him to Imperial. Chudd was a pushy, abrasive man who employed a novel approach to keeping abreast of teenage trends. “He'd come down to Hollywood High and take the kids to lunch,” Kim Fowley remembers, “have a burger and fries and listen to what they talked about and what they played on the jukebox. He was the old man in the corner; he looked like a guy working in a tailor's shop. He ran his whole business based around his lunch.”

With the Teddy Bears hit still lingering in the charts, Chudd hurried the group back into the studio to begin work on an album. Lew Bedell had exacted his revenge, using his influence to make Gold Star unavailable. Instead, Spector found himself in unfamiliar surroundings, at Master Sound Studios. For the first time he also had the benefit of experienced session musicians at his disposal, including the bass player Red Callender and the drummer Earl Palmer.

Spector had written a handful of new songs, and in line with the conventional wisdom of the day Chudd decreed that the remainder of the album should be filled out with a grab bag of standards, including a Jerome Kern and George Gershwin song, “Long Ago and Far Away,” and the old chestnut, “Unchained Melody,” chosen to demonstrate the group's versatility and broad appeal.

But as the sessions wore on Chudd found himself experiencing much the same frustration that Bedell and Newman had felt watching Spector at work at Gold Star. After two weeks of positioning mikes, moving the group and musicians around the studio to capture the right sound and experimenting with echo, he had recorded only six of the required twelve tracks. Beyond impatience, Chudd called in his house arranger and producer Jimmie Haskell and instructed him to complete the album in one day.

“In those days the musicians' union allowed us to record a maximum of six songs in three hours,” Haskell remembers. “Chudd said, ‘I've got the session booked for tomorrow; call the musicians and finish up the other six sides.'” Whatever reservations Spector might have felt about being so brusquely pushed aside, he kept to himself. “Chudd was tough,” Haskell says. “Regardless of how forceful Phil could be as he got older, Chudd would have overwhelmed him. He loved to be talked back to, but nobody had the guts to do it.”

Haskell was given the songs, wrote the arrangements overnight and convened in the studio next day with the group and musicians. The six tracks were dispatched inside the requisite three hours. “But I can tell you this about those sides. They were somewhat on the sterile side. Phil took the time to get a certain sound, and when you do six songs in three hours you get a sterile sound. It can work, and when you have a good vocal on top of it you can have a hit record—but not this time.”

Nor was it altogether Haskell's fault. Spector's new songs were largely derivations of a formula established with “To Know Him,” but none achieved anywhere near that song's heart-stopping effect. Released as a single, “Oh Why”—the song that had already been rejected by Lew Bedell—reached only number 98. And
The Teddy Bears Sing
would quickly vanish without trace.

The album's most enduring legacy is the cover art—an unintended masterpiece of high kitsch, which shows Lieb and Spector, dressed in their sweaters stitched by Bertha, handing stuffed teddy bears to Kleinbard, who affects an expression of theatrical “Who, me?” coyness. According to the album's liner notes, “Annette, the sixteen-year-old lead voice of the trio is a straight ‘A' student and had her mind set on psychology as a profession before ‘To Know Him' hit.” While “Phil's biggest problem is not to forget the tunes that keep running through his mind. He never steps out of the house without a pencil and notebook. It is not uncommon for him to interrupt a date, dart out of a movie, or wake up in the middle of the night to jot down a new song that pops into his head.

“The Teddy Bears,” the notes went on, “are a good example of how today's teenagers have a chance to become famous in the record field…In no other field of creative or industrial endeavor can the youngster express himself for so many and reap the lucrative rewards.”

For the members of the group, the words must have seemed bitterly ironic. The contract that the Teddy Bears had originally signed with Era Records entitled the four members of the group to one and a half cents for each record sold. With the sales of “To Know Him Is to Love Him” around 1.4 million, they were theoretically entitled to a grand total of $21,000, split four ways. (Annette Kleinbard remembers her remuneration as “disgusting.”) As the writer of the song, Spector would have been entitled to considerably more. In later years, he would claim that, in all, he was owed some $20,000 on the record but received just $3,000. It was a lesson he would never forget.

By now the group was in a state of terminal decline. Shirley Spector's behavior was becoming ever more volatile and irrational, what Annette described as her “Jekyll and Hyde” mood swings ever more pronounced, a portent of the mental illness that would soon overwhelm her. When she drew up a contract formalizing her appointment as the group's manager both Marshall and Annette refused to sign it. Tired of apologizing for Shirley's behavior, tired of Annette and frustrated over the failure of their recordings, Spector allowed the Teddy Bears to dwindle away. In September 1959, Annette was driving her new MG sports car along a twisting road in the Hollywood Hills when she lost control, plunging into a ravine. She was critically injured, and spent three months in UCLA hospital, undergoing extensive facial surgery. Spector was not among her visitors.

         

Even as the Teddy Bears were gliding slowly toward extinction, Spector had been casting around for his next move. As part of his Imperial contract, he recorded a guitar instrumental called “Bumbershoot,” and for a brief period led an instrumental group called the Phil Harvey Band, comprised of a loose aggregation of musicians who would gather at Michael Spencer's home. Spencer's parents often traveled to Palm Springs at weekends, and his Sunday afternoon gatherings were famous, bringing together musicians, writers, and what passed as bohemia among the Fairfax alumni of West Hollywood, invariably culminating in frantic jam sessions, led by Spencer on the piano. The circle included Steve Douglas, the sax player who had been briefly managed by Shirley Spector; Mike Bermani, who played drums for Duane Eddy; Don Peake, who would go on to play guitar with Ray Charles; another guitarist, Elliot Ingber, who would later play with Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention and Captain Beefheart's Magic Band, and the bass player Larry Taylor, later of Canned Heat. The Phil Harvey Band did little else but rehearse, although they did play one gig at a venue called the Rainbow Roller Rink, appearing on the same bill as Ed “Kookie” Byrnes, who had become a teenage cult hero through his appearance on the hit TV show
77 Sunset Strip.
Bruce Johnston was in the audience. “Phil must have had four guitars up there beside himself,” he remembers. “They were tuning their guitars for at least half the set before they played the first song. They played two songs and left the stage.” “Kookie” Byrnes, throwing handfuls of his trademark comb into the audience, got a bigger ovation.