More fortunate were those who by some twist of fate could step inside Spector’s circle. Marshall Lieb’s girlfriend, Sue Titelman, had a younger brother, Russell, who was in junior high school when he got to hear the acetate of “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” “We had a Magnavox 78-rpm phonograph,” Titelman recalled, “and Phil would play those demos on it. Sometimes they rehearsed in the living room, and I was completely fascinated, transfixed by the way Phil played guitar. And then when he was cutting the album, he’d bring over the stuff and play it, and say, ‘What do you think of this?’ Can you imagine? Here I was, a fifteen-year-old kid exposed to all of this.”
Lieb also was responsible for finding a younger guitar player named Don Peake. Phil, who now owned a truly princely guitar—a sunburst mahogany, hollow-body Gibson L-5 with a double F-hole and mother-of-pearl inlay—was amused by the guitar Peake had: a frayed, green, Japanese-made slab of knotholes. But Peake could play the daylights out of the thing. “Dig this guy,” Phil would say to friends who hadn’t heard Peake play, at which point Peake would blow everybody away.
There were others, too, whom Spector touched by proxy, by what “To Know Him Is to Love Him” meant to them as aspiring rockers. Elliott Ingber was one of those thousands of fifties’ teenagers with a guitar when his family moved to West Hollywood in the summer of 1958. He decided to go to Fairfax High as the song was burrowing its way into a generation’s subconscious. “I put up with Fairfax High very grudgingly,” Ingber said, “because I didn’t think it was hip at all. The main thing was, this guy had a hit record, his name was Phil Spector, and this girl who sang on the record went there.”
Ingber wanted badly to meet Spector, and introduced himself to Annette. “I told her I played guitar, the whole thing. She was the connection between me meeting him. Either that or she warned me not to get involved with him.”
Phil allowed Ingber into his scene, after the latter showed he was a comrade in arms, not a leech. “I knew what the blues scene was and so automatically we had a base level of communication, sort of unspoken . . . there weren’t many people around then who knew what the fuck that scene was. I mean, I didn’t know what Phil’s motivation was with ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him,’ but I knew he expressed himself with the odd chord change, the basic blues thing.”
When it became all too clear in the spring of 1959 that the Teddy Bears were goners, Phil had taken his frustrations out by playing jazz, doing the “Bumbershoot”/“Willy Boy” session. Now, straining to break out of a mold that had gone stale, he took a live gig as Phil Harvey. To form a band to go out with him, he turned to Elliott Ingber.
“He wanted to go out and do something on his own scene, and he figured I knew some people who could help him,” Ingber said, “and I got a guy, Larry Taylor, a guitar player. At the time, Larry and I were just startin’ out—Phil had to bring us up to a level where we could be on the same stage with him. Like, Phil showed me what a ninth chord was. That was a big deal, but it wasn’t to Phil, because the guy was a monster on the guitar. He was on top of it. He was fire. He could play ‘Guitar Boogie Shuffle’ like the record. I tell you, man, he and Michael Spencer, they’d have sessions over at Spencer’s house and they’d be playing things like ‘It’s Wonderful,’ way up tempo. That takes some real doing for any guitar player to play that shit and bring it out the way Spector could. He wasn’t fucking around. He was actually playing jazz.”
Spector rehearsed the Phil Harvey band at Ingber’s house on Stanley Street, teaching the ringing guitar harmonies of “Bumber-shoot” and other jazz and blues material to Elliott, Larry Taylor, and Larry’s brother Mel. The band was filled out with others of Ingber’s buddies, a pianist named Howard Hirsch and a drummer, Rod Schaffer.
Elliott had a much younger brother, Ira, who was only nine at the time. But he could still see something disturbing and adrift in Phil Spector. “He was this lost soul. My mother was a real mom to everybody, and I think Phil liked to be around us, as a family feeling. But he was a lost soul; he got pretty out there and unapproachable during that time.”
Esther Ingber thought so too. Though Phil seemed to want to be around her son and her home, she recalled that he was “a very, very cold person . . . one of those people that don’t show any affection.”
Shirley Spector may have felt the cold breath of her brother’s alienation more than most. As the primary cause of the Teddy Bears’ demise, Shirley worried endlessly that Phil would cut her out of his music, even his life. Shirley, and Bertha, still made a habit of checking Phil’s whereabouts closely, and when Shirley found out how attached he had become to the Ingbers, she imposed herself on the household as well. “It was like Shirley and her mother wouldn’t trust Phil,” Esther Ingber said. “They loved him, but you can smother someone with kindness too.”
Esther Ingber barely knew Phil’s family, yet she would be the recipient of a hail of phone calls from Shirley in particular, each one more distraught than the last, and they would go on for hours. It was as if Shirley could find no one else to relieve herself of a terrible burden, and Esther would be supportive. “She would say she was proud of her brother and I would tell her she had every right to be. Phil was the closest thing to her, and Shirley was hurt that they weren’t close. All she could do was cry about it.”
When Phil saw how torn up Shirley was, his way of reassuring her was not verbally—open expressions of love would have had to be extracted from him, like rotting teeth—but to ask her to write a song with him. Out of the collaboration came a tune called “Be My Girl.”
Phil’s idea for the Phil Harvey band was to sell hot jazz to rock audiences with a flourish of hip show-biz kitsch. The gig was at the Rainbow Roller Rink out in the valley, a roller-skating palace that was converted into a concert hall at night. When the band came out on stage the whole bunch was clad like gangsters—wide-lapel, double-breasted suits with ankle-length overcoats and snap-brim hats pulled down over their faces.
Kim Fowley, who with Bruce Johnston had gone on from the Sleepwalkers to Kip Tyler and the Flips, happened to be in the audience that night. He recalled it as a kind of rock-and-roll predestiny, with Spector a visionary far ahead of his time:
“What a brilliant idea. He had the ‘Untouchables’ concept. What Brian DePalma did in a movie in 1987, Phil Spector did in 1959. These guys came out and did this amazing . . . it was like Duane Eddy with Miami Vice, or Scarface. It was brilliant, a little too heavy for the little girls . . . but the visuals, the sound, it was black shit, Duane Eddy shit, all the elements. It’s too bad he never took that anyplace.”
“The gig wasn’t a howling success,” Elliott Ingber agreed. “It was okay, but Phil couldn’t go to point B with it.”
As it was evident to Spector, he ended the Phil Harvey band and flitted on. “He was here and gone,” Ingber said. “I only knew him a month to six weeks: a three-week rehearsal shot in getting a band together, and then two weeks after that. He was spaced out on the Phil trip, and then he was gone.”
Though he would cost Lou Chudd many thousands of dollars with little return, Spector’s value was high around the time of the initial Imperial release. Not long after, knowing the Teddy Bears were about to break up, Phil tried to make a deal for himself as a solo act.
He needed to go no further than his first stop—the Hollywood office of Lester Sill.
Perhaps the most ubiquitous and well-connected figure in the West Coast rock scene, Lester Sill had his hands in many pots; beginning in the late forties as a promotion man for L.A.’s Modern Records, he later managed the enormously successful Coasters, he co-owned his own labels, and with Lee Hazelwood he was now managing and producing Duane Eddy. Sill had an eye for talent on both sides of the control booth glass. In the early fifties, he discovered a pair of Fairfax High kids, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and guided them as a writing/producing team. In the late fifties, the duo’s profusion of Latin-flavored R&B hits with the Coasters and then the Drifters, and the songs they composed for Elv
is Presley movies, had made them an industry sensation and power. They were in New York now, highly sought independent producers whose names appeared on the labels of their records.
Still a publishing partner with Leiber and Stoller, and with immense goodwill on both coasts, Lester Sill had extraordinary latitude. He and Lee Hazelwood produced Duane Eddy’s country-influenced guitar records for Jamie Records in Philadelphia—a label owned by Dick Clark and the top two men at Universal Distributing, Harold Lipsius and Harry Finfer—and they co-ran a small record company called Trey, which although it had no appreciable talent, was being distributed nationally by Atlantic Records, the New York R&B label for which Leiber and Stoller did most of their work.
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 perfor
mance. 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.
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