Phil was a splendid student. There was an American history teacher at Fairfax High, a Mr. Goetze, a chops-buster who sprang surprise quizzes on the first day of class. Most students dreaded Goetze, but Spector worshipped him and passed all his exams effortlessly. Phil was more than smart; he was clever, keen-witted, sharp as a whip, but it was all undirected, loose wheels looking for a direction. His guitar seemed to be the only funnel to consolidate his intellectual and artistic impulses.
Spector met Marshall Lieb at John Burroughs. Lieb was the son of an automobile dealer named Leonard Lieb and his wife, Belle, and he could not have been more dissimilar to Phil. Marshall was tall, muscular, and swarthy, as outgoing and popular as Phil was meek and insulated. But both boys were artistically inclined, they liked the same music, and they took their first guitar lessons together, from a session guitarist named Burdell Mathis across the street from a huge music emporium in Hollywood called Herb Wallace’s Music City. Unlike many parents in the neighborhood who thought Spector was weird, Leonard and Belle Lieb more than abided him, and even thought he could be a positive influence on their son.
“My parents liked him. They didn’t feel he was any kind of threat,” Lieb explained. “In those days, most of the kids in the neighborhood wanted to be bad guys, gangster types, as opposed to collegiate types. There were certain looks that we liked emulating that were less than Ivy League. So then Phillip comes along and he’s not real macho he-man, not visibly the troublemaker type, whereas I had more of that look.”
But Spector did have a problem with his mouth, and it could get him into trouble, Lieb mentioned. “Someone would say something to Phillip and he’d mouth right back. That would instigate a problem, and then it would be, ‘Marsh!’ and I’d have to turn around from what I was doing and go bail him out. I had a history of having a few little tussles from time to time, but I didn’t carry a chip on my shoulder like he did. He had a way about his answers that antagonized people. One time this guy in school was going to kick his butt, no matter what. A big ring of people got in there, Phil’s in the middle with this guy, and this guy’s gonna beat him to shreds, and he just sort of gave me his little kitten eyes, to help him, so I came to his rescue and got the thing broken up. I was really his first bodyguard, when you think about it.”
Family strife intensified in the Spector household during Phil’s high school years, when Bertha moved with her son to a smaller flat seven blocks away at 726 N. Hayworth Avenue—Shirley having moved out on her own, was in an apartment nearby—just north of Melrose Avenue and a block from Fairfax High School. It was there that an older, somewhat emboldened Phil became embroiled in arguments with his mother.
“As I remember, Phillip would have trouble with whatever her suggestions would be,” Lieb said. “It would be opposite of what he’d think. It was like ‘Can I go out?’ ‘No, you gotta stay home!’ And as soon as she’d leave, he’d be gone. A couple of times she hit him with her purse. He’d open a mouth on her and she would answer that and they would go back and forth. And she’d have some answer that he’d never agree with. I can remember times when she’d be chasing him around the apartment and he’d be hiding in places, like under his bed. I got phone calls in the middle of the night—‘Come over and help!’ And I would go over and sort of break the mood that was going on. Someone had to answer the door and stop shouting.”
But even when peace was restored, it was an uneasy truce. “The most vivid memories I have of them was just a lot of bitterness, a lot of intolerant conversation,” Lieb said. “I didn’t see a lot of endearment. I never really had a feeling of any kind of togetherness among the three of them.”
Spector never told anyone of his inner suffering. Unfamiliar with the feel of human warmth—the Spectors were not the hugging kind of family since Ben’s death—he shied away when he thought someone would touch him. But Spector was not a shut-in. He was drawn to the crowds of teenagers who cruised the wide strip of Fairfax Avenue, and the aromatic corridor of ethnic food shops along the avenue had a romantic appeal for him. He and Lieb were regular denizens at Canter’s Delicatessen—Spector could inhale a truly astonishing cartload of hot pastrami, though none of it ever padded his bony frame. They also belonged to a Fairfax High social club called the Chapparals and bowled at the Pan Pacific, an indoor mall.
Spector dated a few times, but to most girls he was spooky. His glaring eyes and ashen complexion kept them at a distance. It wasn’t until a pretty blonde girl named Donna Kass sidled up to him that he found himself in a relationship. Bright and chirpy, Donna was fifteen, a year younger, but where the other girls saw only Spector’s exterior, she saw much more.
“Phil was not a handsome guy, not at all. He was very pale and had no chin. Not real masculine,” Kass acknowledged. “My mother used to say he was sick, but he wasn’t, he just looked like he was. But there was something so funny-looking about him that he was cute to me. My mother thought he was vile looking, but there was something very captivating there. He had these delicate hands, small, not stubby but very pretty. His hands looked like they would never have worked in a field. They were very white, with callouses from the guitar.
“My mother always felt Phil was crazy. She thought that someday he would wind up committing suicide. I didn’t see that then. He was a normal kid, he didn’t drink or use drugs, although he might have smoked a cigarette once or twice. Phil turned to music to show the world he could compete, but he was doing all right. He was the town crier in school, he danced, he was a cheerleader—but there was a genius about him that went beyond all that. Sometimes geniuses step one step beyond what the rest of us can understand. That’s what I saw in him.”
As her father had died recently, Donna was receptive to an older boy with the kind of quiet maturity Phil had. “I was crazy about him,” she said. “I had never really had a boyfriend before, and he was a very brilliant guy. God, he was brilliant. He was a great historian—he knew everything about Lincoln. He was intense and very inward, but he had a great personality, he was charming. Phil was just so different from everybody else. He was not the run-of-the-mill kid.”
But there was another side to him, a despair and an estrangement that became obvious to Donna whenever his family would enter his life. Their dates would always be at her house, where they’d play Ping-Pong and Phil would sit at the piano in the living room and play for her. “In the artistic sense, you sensed there was a soul of an artistic genius there. I mean, he could hear a song and play it right away, on the piano or the guitar. He was amazing/’ Donna knew little about his family, and she could tell he was keeping her away from it. Unfortunately, that was impossible.
“I think he was very frustrated,” Kass recalled. “They watched over his every move. If he would come to my house, they would call fifteen times: ‘Come home, come home.’ He was very, very angry about it. He was an angry person.
“We’d be on the phone talking for the longest time and his mother would come in and he’d want to hang up.”
It was as if the Spector women believed that little cherry-cheeked Donna Kass was trying to “steal” Phil from them. “I always felt they were in love with him or something. They treated him like he was a god. They protected him, and they wanted to protect him from me.” What hurt Bertha and Shirley the most, and likely intensified the arguments, was that Phil seemed not to return their idea of adoration. Indeed, Phil’s misery could be measured by his contrasting mood in the rare moments when he spoke of his father.
“Phil was very insecure, and the reason was his father,” Kass thought. “He told me his father died of a heart attack, but I found out that was not true. I don’t remember him ever telling me how he died, and I don’t know how I found out, but I think it was a horrible stigma. There wasn’t a whole lot of talk, it was fleeting, but what I remember was that it was with real kindness and real feeling.
“I imagine his father was a very kind, wonderful person. I bet Phil adored him. Phil had to get his brilliance and his sensitivity
from somewhere, and it was not from Bertha.”
The irony is that, even while chafing under Bertha’s wing, Phil was actually very much like her. It is possible that Spector didn’t even realize how much his own possessiveness mirrored hers. “He was very, very jealous,” Kass recalled. “I remember I once went to a friend’s cousin’s house to go swimming and I didn’t tell him, and somehow he tracked me down by calling all of my friends. He found out I was there and he called over and over, had me on the phone for hours, jealous of why I didn’t call and who I was with and so on.
“It was such a crazy thing. He was doing what his mother did to him. I was like fifteen, sixteen years old. He had no reason to ever be jealous, because everyone who ever came into contact with him, got to know him, adored him. But he didn’t believe it.”
On Phil’s fifteenth birthday, December 26, 1955, Bertha and Shirley had taken him to see Ella Fitzgerald perform at a nightclub in Hollywood. In the band backing her was an Oklahoma-born jazz guitarist named Barney Kessel, whose work on the instrument riveted Phil. Almost a year later, in October, Phil was reading Down Beat, the weekly jazz magazine, when he saw an article about rhythm guitarist Sal Salvador, who played in the Stan Kenton band. In the article, Salvador mentioned some rhythm guitarists he favored, including Howard Roberts but not Barney Kessel, who Phil came to learn had also played in the bands of Oscar Peterson, Charlie Parker, and Bob Crosby. So offended was he by the omission, Phil wrote in protest to the magazine’s Chicago offices. His letter sounded so knowledgeable that Down Beat ran it on the Letters page of its November 14, 1956, issue. On a page that regularly carried correspondence from luminaries such as Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie, and Nat King Cole sat the name of fifteen-year-old Phil Spector. The letter read:
Just finished reading your article entitled “Garrulous Sal” in the Oct. 3 issue and am a little disappointed that when naming his favorite guitarists Salvador left out the name of Barney Kessel, who in my opinion holds the title of the greatest guitarist.
Salvador mentioned Howard Roberts, a very fine jazz guitarist from the West Coast, and also mentioned the state of California, where Kessel is most well known, yet he failed to say a word about the man whose style of guitar is copied so much but never equaled and is a favorite among jazz fans everywhere.
This I cannot understand. Maybe you could ask Salvador, who I think is also a fine guitarist, just why Kessel does not rate. Sure wish you would ease my pain and have a story about Barney in one of your future issues.
After the letter ran, Shirley Spector—who, like her mother, would have run through brick walls to aid Phil in his musical reverie—called Kessel’s record label and found out where he was recording. She went to the studio and told Kessel that her little brother, Phil, was crazy about jazz guitar and loved Kessel’s records, and would he meet Phil. Kessel, who recognized the name Phil Spector from the Down Beat letter, was shocked to learn that he was just a kid, and he agreed.
Bertha took such a meeting very seriously. Phil had said he wanted to become a jazz guitarist, and she was going to have to finance this cockamamy avocation that she knew nothing about. Already she had given him every available dollar she had so he could buy the guitar, music sheets, and books he wanted. But now both she and her son had to know the details and realities of a career in music. Calling Kessel, she arranged to meet him at a coffee shop called Dupars on Vine Street in Hollywood. There, all three Spectors squeezed into a booth with Kessel. Phil was awestruck meeting his idol—“He was very, very soft-spoken,” as Kessel remembered—and Bertha did most of the talking. She asked Kessel about the hard realities for a boy like Phil in jazz.
“I remember telling her that if he did have talent, I thought it was a wise move to direct it more into the pop field,” Kessel said. “Because there were so many great jazz artists who were not making a living in jazz. Jazz had fallen very far from grace, and guys were not able to sustain themselves. You couldn’t go out and play jazz on the road anymore; it was all rock and roll. I said that he should get into the pop field and write songs and get involved in publishing and maybe work as an apprentice in a record company; to find out how to mix sessions and get involved in the multidimensionality of the whole thing, but from that standpoint.”
The kid took the the advice to heart, as did his sister. Shirley had finished high school in L.A., at Fairfax, and there she had met a classmate named Steve Douglas, who played the saxophone. Douglas now had a fledgling band. Shirley talked him into letting her manage the group for him.
After several years in Hollywood, making little headway in show business, Shirley Spector’s adolescent beauty had taken on an embalmed veneer; she had a hard, brassy kind of look, her hair teased and sprayed into cotton candy and her fingertips sporting long, long fingernails. A cigarette was perpetually stuck on her bottom lip, Bogart-style. Shirley was Hollywood all the way, but with a New York crustiness, convinced she knew all the answers. Her voice was piercing as a blaring siren and she was pushy in a bulldozing way. She obviously felt well suited to the show biz world, but now her outlook was as a hype maker, and she threw herself into booking Steve Douglas’s band into gigs at frat house dances and in bowling alley lounges.
His own musical ambition having grown by giant steps by 1957, Phil Spector came to believe that he should be on the same kid rock circuit with bands of his own. He was now spending long hours in Marshall Lieb’s living room at 404 Gardner Street, sitting at Belle Lieb’s Hobart piano trying to hash out original songs, his horizon expanding as he was drawn to other capable young musicians. Spector walked into the music room at Fairfax High with his guitar one day and heard a kid named Michael Spencer playing jazzy licks on a piano. Spector joined in on guitar, and the two became fast friends, marveling at each other’s grasp of music. Spencer, whose father was a well-to-do accountant, lived in a large house at 201 S. Highland Avenue, between Third Street and Beverly Boulevard—in the kind of high-tone neighborhood Phil was rarely invited to enter—and it became his Taj Mahal. The two boys jammed around Michael’s piano. Phil was intrigued by Spencer’s classical music background—he told Michael his prime musical influence was Richard Wagner—and how it could be made to fit into mainstream pop. The Spencers had rows of jazz, classical, show, and R&B albums, and the most monstrous hi-fi system in West Hollywood: huge, six-foot-high Patrician Electro-Voice speakers stood like grain silos in the corners of the living room, and the amplifier had a time-lag feature that could reverberate any kind of music to make it sound as if it were being played live in a concert hall. Spector tried it with everything from Sibelius to Gershwin to Larry Williams, playing along on guitar. Beginning with disjointed little riffs, maybe two-note fragments, song ideas would become concepts. Spector was aglow with enthusiasm, his drive furious.
Spencer recalled Spector as “very quiet, very sensitive, a little mouselike creature without a lot of confidence—but when Phillip was playing music, he had a tremendous aggression.”
Spencer thought he knew why: “It was perhaps a desire to be independent from his mother. Phil was overly dependent on Bertha when we met, very coddled by her, smothered really. The relationship they had was extremely intense, because they were both very emotional people, and Phil’s aggressive personality burst out of there, as a way of compensating for being dependent so much of the time.”
Spector, Lieb, and Spencer began taking gigs around Los Angeles and ran into bands making the same scene. One was called the Sleepwalkers, a group from Union High School. The rivalry between Fairfax and Union was fierce, and it carried over to the two bands. Spector took to talking himself up, and it was a technique that came easy to him. Without batting an eyelash, Spector told the Sleepwalkers’ drummer, Sammy Nelson, that he had produced several hit records that were on the charts. When Nelson told this to his skeptical bandmates, Bruce Johnston and Kim Fowley—the latter the son of actor Douglas Fowley (“Doc” on television’s “Wyatt Earp”) and the grandson of composer Rudolf Friml—they went to a
record store to check the records, seeing if Spector’s name was anywhere on them. It wasn’t, but Spector had already thought of that: he knew he’d be safe because producer’s credits were never given. Still, the Union High bunch was not fooled.
“I guess they lied a lot over at Fairfax,” Fowley said.
Having sung with a black L.A. vocal group called the Jayhawks, Fowley was not overly impressed with Spector’s unnamed band.
“The Sleepwalkers were much more creative than whatever Spector was doing,” he insisted. “Both of us played biker parties, bar mitzvahs at the Brentwood Temple, then we’d run across the street and do the Catholics’ lonelyhearts club crap at the CYO. But when those guys played, we’d be out stripping cars in the parking lot and giving beer to kids our age and younger. We got wallflowers to let us use their houses; we’d give ’em money, set ’em up in a hotel with hookers, and we’d have our own house parties. Or sometimes we’d roll queers in Hollywood for beer money.”
Spector’s group was arrow-straight, clean-nosed Fairfax boys. In time, it grew to include various configurations built around Phil and Marshall and the doo-wop and Everly Brothers songs the two would choose for their gigs. Spector was always looking for people who could sing with him. He joined a Fairfax High music club called the Barons, and out of its ranks he plucked what became a rotating carousel of strong-throated singers to take on gigs, which usually paid less money than what it cost in gas to get there in Marshall’s old Dodge. Among the singing partners were Spector’s next-door neighbor, Steve Gold, as well as kids named Steve Price, Donnie Kartoon, Bart Silverman, and Harvey Goldstein. None but Phil played an instrument well, and Spector would play guitar and sometimes piano if Mike Spencer wasn’t around, at which time Marshall would do a turn on guitar. One gig, by far the most profound for these nice Jewish boys, was at El Monte Legion Stadium, where they managed to place themselves in one of the shows hosted there by Johnny Otis himself. This was in the middle of black and Mexican ethnic L.A., a hotbed of purebred R&B, and while they played to a lukewarm response, Phil and Marshall had a giddy exhilaration simply standing on the hallowed ground of Johnny Otis’s stage.
He's a Rebel Page 3