Spector had other, more meaningful obsessions in his life. Semiemployed as a court reporter, he was called to do stenotype when depositions were taken and legal papers filed in the Los Angeles courthouse during the interminable appeals case of Caryl Chessman, the convicted murderer who was sentenced in 1949 to die in the gas chamber. As Chessman’s decade-long Death Row bid to stay alive became more heated, and a public cause célèbre, the compulsive Spector, devouring reams of details about the case, took to defending Chessman fanatically. In Sill’s office, he’d try to talk everybody over to his side. “He was very liberal, which was unusual for a teenager in those days,” Sill said. “A lot of the kids around the place thought he was communist.”
Most pressing, however, was for Phil to park himself in the studio. Early in 1960, Sill signed a black singer, Kell Osborne, who sang in the high-pitched, sorrowful style of ex-Drifter Clyde McPhatter, whose voice Sill loved. Shunted to Phil to produce, Spector and Sill rehearsed Osborne for two months, then flew him to Phoenix to record him at Ramco. But when Osborne got off the plane, he was so nervous about making a record that he lost his voice. For five maddening days, Spector tried to coax him to sing. Finally two sides were cut, a remake of “The Bells of St. Mary’s” and a Spector tune, “That’s Alright Baby.” Back in L.A., Phil overdubbed with regular Sill sidemen, saxophonist Plas Johnson and bassist Ray Pohlman. The songs, released on Trey, were starkly, bizarrely opposite: the A side was mawkish, the other tough-teen rattling, on which Osborne sounded more like Eddie Cochran than McPhatter, fitted with booming drums and gnawing guitars.
The songs’ lack of airplay irritated Spector and prompted him to shift his sights. He was tired of the limited scope of the L.A. rock scene, which was still lowercase compared with New York and Memphis; where music gushed from a thousand geysers in those places, it seeped here. Indeed, Spector’s own group had been L.A.’s most viable product, and now that was gone. There was no shape or form to the local scene, no reliability to its structure, no broad power.
Lester Sill was Phil’s link to the bustle and glamour of the real power. Sill had taken him to New York a few times when he went there on business. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller would call Sill from their studio, and then meet with him when he got to New York. Then Sill would go over to Don Kirshner’s office at Aldon Music, the biggest publisher of rock-and-roll music, to find songs for his acts. Along for the ride, Spector felt like an industry scion.
“He saw all the activity going on,” Sill said, “because at the time the rock-and-roll business was really New York . . . the Brill Building, 1650 Broadway, Leiber and Stoller. Phil knew it, he saw it. He was so bright about how the business worked. And Spector by then had a certain amount of notoriety.”
Eager to use that as a lever, Spector bugged Sill all the time to find something for him to do back east. “He wanted to go to New York. He knew of my relationship with Mike and Jerry and he asked if something could be arranged with them.”
Knowing Phil was unhappy on the L.A. treadmill, Sill phoned Mike Stoller in the spring and obtained a position for Phil on the Leiber and Stoller payroll—Spector’s contract with Sill/Hazelwood would still apply to his work in L.A.—as a songwriter and as an apprentice producer. As Sill explained it to Mike Stoller, Spector would not be one to blend into the wallpaper.
“He’s strange, this kid,” Sill warned. “But you won’t believe how talented he is.”
Mike Stoller sent airfare for Phil Spector.
Kim Fowley hadn’t heard much about Spector since he saw the Phil Harvey band perform at the Rainbow Roller Rink. Fowley had now secured a job at Arwin Records, a small label owned by actress Doris Day and her husband Marty Melcher, which had just had its first hit, Jan and Arnie’s “Jennie Lee.” Fowley—“I was an office boy, quasi-publishing assistant, and song-plugger”—was looking to sign acts, having brought to Arwin Bruce Johnston and other remnants of the old Sleepwalkers—minus Sammy Nelson, now known as Sandy, who had notched a hit of his own in 1959 with a drum instrumental called “Teen Beat” and was signed to Imperial—and Johnston had begun recording with Doris Day’s son, Terry Melcher, as Bruce and Terry. Pondering people who could make Arwin big time, Fowley called soul singer Johnny “Guitar” Watson and then Phil Spector.
“Hey, man, I’m at Arwin now,” he told Spector. “If you want some studio time, we’ll back you. Or you can just come hang out here.”
With typical overstatement, Spector said, “No . . . I just did a deal with Leiber and Stoller. I’m going to New York any minute now to deal with ’em.”
In mid-May, just before he left, Phil dropped by Russ Titel-man’s place to say good-bye. He gave Russ a guitar, a snazzy Defender Telecaster model, in apparent gratitude.
“Hold this for me,” he said to Russ, as if giving himself a reason to return.
Eight hours later, Phil Spector was on Broadway.
Mike and Jerry had no idea that he was going to be such a manipulator.
—BEVERLY ROSS
When he landed in New York, Phil had no plan or itinerary beyond getting to 40 W. 57th Street. This was the location of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s office, and for Phil, having made no arrangement for lodging, it was the width and breadth of his world. After arriving at the narrow office building between Fifth and Sixth avenues, he ascended to the penthouse suite and appeared before his two new mentors—who, to his dismay, did not remember him from the sojourns he had made with Lester Sill. Indeed, Spector’s edgy, inscrutable manner made Leiber and Stoller uneasy.
Mike Stoller said years later: “He seemed very bright, a very sharp young man, witty and sarcastic. I sensed a rather angry young man. He dressed like a businessman, he wore a suit and tie, and he looked like a man on the make.”
Implying that he couldn’t afford to go elsewhere, Phil was allowed to crash that night on the couch at the rear of the office, and he would do the same in following days. The truth was, Spector had money in his pocket, but part of his New York music assimilation was to assume the guise of bohemian deprivation.
“He didn’t want a place to live,” Lester Sill explained. “He was happy where he was. I imagine he thought he was in Paris.”
“Phil wasn’t broke when he went to New York,” Marshall Lieb agreed. “Phil was good at camping out, he did that a lot. He did that because he truly liked that bag-lady lifestyle. That to him was how good music was made. He didn’t want to be too set, too comfortable. He wanted to be where if a song came to him at three in the morning, he could get up when everyone else was wasted and get started with it. And where better to do that than in the atmosphere of Leiber and Stoller’s office?”
And yet Leiber and S toller were too busy to think about figuring him out, or even to notice him much. Left to fend for himself, Spector looked around at a rock-and-roll bureaucracy he had studied from afar, and he was avid to dip his feet into the pond. Hanging around at the restaurants and other haunts where the music crowd congregated, he ran into many of the working and aspiring songwriters who covered the canyons of Broadway like locusts; but these were mainly scratching, clawing low-level types, in Spector’s mind inferior to him.
The first person of substance he found was a young woman named Beverly Ross, a staff writer at Hill and Range Music, the highly important rock-and-roll publishing arm of Chappell Music, the largest music publisher in the world. Spector was lunching at a Howard Johnson’s on Forty-ninth Street, across Broadway from the Brill Building, when another writer and Brill Building habitué made the introduction. Phil was in New York less than a week and was still carrying around the big, bulky valise he had arrived with. As Ross saw him, he looked every bit the waif.
“He told me he was sleeping on Leiber and Stoller’s couch, and I could believe he was stone broke and didn’t know where his next meal was coming from,” she remembered.
Tall, swarthy, and Italian-looking though she was Jewish, Beverly Ross was one of only a sprinkling of female writers to make it in a vehemently mal
e structure. Only a year older than Spector, her track record was also impressive; as a teenager she had written “Lollipop,” a No. 1 hit for the Chordettes in 1956, as well as songs recorded by Bill Haley and the Comets and Elvis Presley, and she had also recorded briefly for Columbia Records. Writing songs at the E. B. Marks publishing house with a lanky, rail-thin partner named Jeff Barry, she was then recruited by Jean Aberbach, the top man at Hill and Range. In 1960, Beverly Ross and Carole King at Aldon Music were the two top women writers in rock, and Ross was making a top-shelf $250 a week plus advances on royalties.
Spector was at once drawn to Ross as a career propellant. Hill and Range was the power in New York. Beginning as a pop music division beside Chappell’s catalogue of Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Jerome Kern, Hill and Range first published primarily bluegrass songs, and its biggest early seller was “Frosty the Snowman.” Then, when Jean Aberbach published the Elvis Presley catalogue, any writer hoping to get Elvis’s attention had to deal with Hill and Range. Leiber and Stoller’s access was a valuable chit: they produced records for the Hill and Range–owned label, Big Top, and when they began a publishing company called Trio Music, Hill and Range bankrolled it and took a one-half interest in it. As a prominent Hill and Range staffer, Beverly Ross had status and privileges that made Spector’s pulse quicken.
“I was kind of a queen bee up there,” Ross said, “and I had an open budget for demos.”
Beverly saw a lot in Phil too, though when they spoke at the Howard Johnson’s she recalled that “He had a shifty way of looking down at the floor, like he was afraid to make eye contact. . . . But he was very personable and very funny. He had an incredible sense of humor. He was funny and charming to the point where he could win anybody over.” Later, when she took him up to the Hill and Range office and Spector took out his guitar, she was hooked. “He was the best guitar player I’d ever heard.” Loosely planning to write together, Beverly foresaw a traditional, long-standing connection. “I took him up and introduced him to everybody,” she said, “because they didn’t know him from a hole in the wall. He had that one hit but now he was just a kid writing with Beverly. He used to borrow five dollars from me because he was broke, and I opened my heart to him. I wanted to trust somebody and have a new partner as dynamic as Jeff.”
When they began collaborating, in one of the little piano cubicles at Hill and Range or at Beverly’s W. 45th Street apartment, Phil was cast in the unlikely role of junior partner. “I don’t think I ever found his strength as a writer,” Ross said. “I was strong in melody and I needed a lyric writer and he wasn’t it. One day he came up and we were real chummy and friends and we were all excited about our ideas, and he played me some terrible song he’d written called ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ I said, ‘Uh, gee . . .’
“I don’t know, there was something strange about it. When you write, it’s with great passion, you give everything you have, and you expect the other person to do as much. Yet it struck me as peculiar that Phil seemed to hold back, as though there was always something subliminal that he wasn’t sharing with me, or that he was thinking of something else. I used to ask myself: is it that he’s not a good writer, or was he insecure working with me, or what?”
Even so, Phil had an innate wisdom about music; it was uncanny how his instinct could get a song on the right track. “He could find interesting chord changes in raw material, or an interesting hook. Like he’d start playing a couple of chords on the guitar and I’d throw a melody at him and he’d say, ‘Let’s not go that way, let’s go this way.’ He was great at directing a song a certain way or shortening phrases to make it better. What he was was a great editor.”
The union came up with a number of songs, mostly in the bubblegum-blowing idiom, with titles like “Planet Love,” “Don’t Believe Everything You Hear,” and “Bandit of Love.” Beverly thought they were good enough to book a demo date, and she and Phil went into Associated Sound Studio on Seventh Avenue and Forty-seventh Street, a drafty hall known for turning out cheap, quickie demos. Phil played guitar, Beverly the piano, and they both sang. And Phil employed his California overdubbing style, bouncing tracks around the studio while recording over them. In the booth, Nat Schnapf, who owned Associated, looked quizzically at Beverly. “Neither Nat or I had ever seen that done before,” Ross said. “Nat thought Phil was out of his mind. But I liked to overdub also. I liked that fat echo, that lively sound. I knew what Phil was after. He was ingenious with the things he did.”
A few days later, Beverly took Phil to a recording session held by a lesser Hill and Range writer/producer at Bell Sound, on Fifty-eighth Street. This was the studio where Leiber and Stoller had done many of their Drifters sessions, yet as brilliant a guitarist as Spector was, they had not given Phil a gig or done much of anything with him. “Phil would say he was with Leiber and Stoller, but it was a misnomer,” Ross said. “Leiber and Stoller were hot as hell, they were very busy. They had Ben E. King, the Drifters, the Coasters, this one, that one. With Phil, I just think they were trying to be nice to Lester, patronizing Lester by letting this who-is-this kid hang around. It wasn’t until they saw he was working with me that they accepted him and gave him a chance.”
At the Bell session, Phil sat next to Beverly in the booth—but only until he felt he was needed. “This producer was a middle-aged guy and of course Phil and I were arrogant kids. This guy was fumbling around with the artist, who was all upset, and Phil just got up, right out of the booth, and went in and took over. Everyone was shocked, and the producer walked away with his tail between his legs.
“The producer just didn’t know how to handle this artist, who was black, and Phil’s favorite artist in the whole world was Ray Charles; he was mesmerized by Ray Charles, he loved him, he’d put on a Ray Charles tape and play his guitar to it. So he related to the artist in there and he put this other producer down who didn’t know what he was doing. I remember that Phil changed the lick on the piano, changed the guitar, had a whole new drum sound, made the singer do another thing . . . and just ran the session.
“There was a lot of gossip about it, which Phil probably loved. He had the nerve and confidence to do something like that, and it was where he first showed me his incredible lack of conscience and lack of concern for others.”
Eventually, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller got around to using Phil on dates, at $41.40-an-hour union scale. For Phil it was a frustrating chore. Weaned on jazz peaks and flourishes, Leiber and Stoller’s lock-jawed precision in the studio inhibited him. This was a completely alien way of recording for Phil. Atlantic’s engineer, Tom Dowd, had been working with an eight-track recording machine since 1957, the second such machine in existence next to the one in Les Paul’s basement studio in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The sound that came through it was bell clear and could define the mob of instruments that Leiber and Stoller put to work, including multiples of guitars and pianos, tympani, strings, triangles, and Latin percussion. They also cut fast, four sides to a session. This demanded that musicians be good and economical, and inured to Leiber and Stoller’s strict precepts. Spector, surrounded by career musicians, was lost.
“In those day, Jerry and Mike would sit down with me and the group by a piano for two or three days and drill the melody and the vocals and the backgrounds,” Tom Dowd said. “They had lines, counterlines, dialogue, dialect, then they’d come in and fly it live. So if they said, ‘Hey, Phil, play on this date,’ he wouldn’t have been in their faces during the rehearsals. And because he wasn’t tuned in to what they wanted, he was just playing to defend himself. When he was sitting in with somebody like Eric Gale or George Barnes beside him, when he was given a part he just made sure he wasn’t screwing up any other part. He’d stop playing and you’d say, ‘Why didn’t you play there, Phil?’ And he’d say, ‘I couldn’t do what I wanted because it doesn’t fit, the other things around me don’t complement it.’ And then he’d come slide in the booth like ‘I don’t belong here,’ and kinda slink down like Don Kn
otts.”
Worse, some of the musicians were not kind to him. Spector had no reputation among this hard-boiled crowd, and as an outsider his unsolicited ideas—and even his musicianship—were sneered at. Gary Chester, who did a huge amount of drumwork in New York, remembered Spector playing right next to him on a number of sessions. “I asked him to move, to get away from me because his time was so bad,” said Chester. “So he moved over by Charles Macey, a great guitar player, and Charlie threw him the hell away from him completely.”
Still, Spector was in the lane now, heading somewhere. All around town, on his own fuel, he was leaving his trail. Shuffling constantly between the two buildings where American pop music took form, he became soldered to 1619 Broadway—home to Don Kirshner’s Aldon Music and Aaron Schroeder Music—and to the Brill Building.
The Brill, squatting over Jack Dempsey’s restaurant, had its own mythic lore, its eleven floors of piano cubicles and sheet music a museum of Tin Pan Alley and Big Band history. But when Phil Spector strode under its brass-grill archway and through the mirrored art-deco lobby, he had business in mind. Beverly Ross had provided the entrée to glad-hand the Vienna-born Hill and Range hierarchy: owners Jean Aberbach and his brother Julian, and their cousins Freddie and John Bienstock. All except John Bienstock had been longtime song-pluggers at Chappell Music, and while none of the cousins knew anything about rock and roll, Jean’s wisest move was bringing Paul Case with him from the Chappell stable to be General Professional Manager at Hill and Range. Tall and urbane, his full head of silver hair at once marking his presence among the industry elite, the Iowa-born but very Jewish Case presided over the commerce of song publishing: extracting the best material from the writers and getting them played through his network of promo men in every corner of the land. Cajoling and stroking his writers, Case kept the conveyor belt going with competition that was cannibalistic. “People were taking things from each other, and you had a hard time knowing who you could trust,” Beverly Ross said. “You’d trust somebody one day and it turned out they would undercut and undermine you the next day. It was a lot of politics and unfairness in the end. For example, I thought Paul Case was a misogynist. Women would be put in their place by Paul, if not in front of you then behind your back as soon as you walked out of the room.”
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