He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  But Paul Case loved Phil Spector and thought that he could be a fountainhead of hits for the company. When Phil went on about music and talked his big talk, Case leaned back behind his desk, puffed on his cigar, and nodded in agreement. The big-gun writers at Hill and Range came to know Spector as Case’s pet and realized Case would look kindly on anyone who could form a working partnership with Phil. Early on, Case fixed Spector up with his biggest gun, Jerome “Doc” Pomus. Pomus, with his partner Mort Shuman, boasted a vault-sized stock of hits, having written for Elvis (“Little Sister,” “His Latest Flame,” “Viva Las Vegas”), Dion and the Belmonts (“Teenager in Love”), co-wrote “Young Blood” with Leiber and Stoller for the Coasters, and in 1960 wrote “This Magic Moment” and “Save the Last Dance for Me” for the Drifters. Forced to walk with braces and crutches because of a degenerative bone condition, Pomus nonetheless was a bearlike, peripatetic figure on the New York jazz club scene, and the embodiment of carefree cool. When he met Spector, Pomus wasn’t sure whether the bug-eyed, elfin teenager was incredibly hip or simply disordered.

  “Paul Case told me he wanted me to meet this young fellow who Lester Sill sent to New York,” Pomus said, “and Phil paced the floor up and down. He kept looking at himself in a mirror and combing his hair with a brush. This went on and on and it was like a comedy act. Up and down, up and down. He was a very nervous kid, but he started getting friendly and after a while you got the feeling by what he said about music that there was a raw talent there.”

  Pomus lived during the week at the Hotel Forrest, just across Forty-ninth Street, and they continued their music discussions there. “Phil and I would talk all afternoon about songs. We’d sit around and go over old songs, ’cause he wanted to know about really old standards, the evergreens. And then we gradually started writing some songs in the lobby of the hotel because the lobby was great. Late at night everybody would be there. It was like one of those Damon Runyon-type hotels. We had a group that hung out. In fact, Damon Runyon, Jr., lived up in the penthouse. He was an editor on the New York Herald Tribune and his father lived with him there. And we had Joe Morgan, who was Duke Ellington’s press agent, and Johnny Mel, a professional gambler, and Artie Ripp would come in. He was George Goldner’s assistant at Gone and End Records. So this was our group, and Phil used to hang out in the lobby with us all night long.”

  Comfortable in the company of wolves, Phil was soon joining in on the pranks carried on by and among this motley fraternity. Huzzahs swept through the hotel the night Spector and Pomus set up Artie Ripp to believe that Elvis’s manager, Colonel Parker, was calling him from Memphis. “Artie Ripp was an obnoxious little shit,” Pomus said with a laugh, “and Phil and I worked hard to get him. We made him think the Colonel wanted to use Ral Donner—an Elvis soundalike that George Goldner had under contract—in the studio for $100,000 because Elvis had lost his voice. Now, George Goldner was a very hip, New York type of tough guy, and you can imagine the hell Artie Ripp caught after he woke Goldner up at three in the morning to tell him this bullshit story.” Phil knew he was accepted in the brotherhood when Artie Ripp began sending him bogus telegrams from his draft board. Phil, who lived in cold fear that he’d have to go into the army, would quake all day each time.

  By the time Phil was moved to leave Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s couch and find himself a place to live—a sparsely furnished, $100-a-month studio apartment on the first floor of an E. 82nd Street brownstone—he was a distinctly different-looking creature from the boy who’d come to town a month before. Spector arrived in a suit. Now, embraced by the New York industry heavies, he dressed his individuality in pants with mismatched legs, long, black, Zorro-like capes, and galoshes. The crowd at the Hotel Forrest could get hysterical about how he looked, but they did not begrudge him his eccentricity—they all were nutty there, that they agreed—nor did they believe Spector was going for attention any more than he was finding a way to frame, and live with, his peculiarities. Pomus could not get over how some of Spector’s nuttiest habits were so commonplace to the young man. “One thing he did was, he carried around this briefcase with him all the time. And in the briefcase was a loaf of bread, a hairbrush, and a pencil and paper. That was it. He’d break off a piece of bread and sit there eating and he was the happiest guy in the world. We used to put him on, ’cause he was so funny. But he was very smart and very politically oriented too. You couldn’t figure him out, whether he was putting you on.”

  On weekends, Pomus took Spector to his house on Long Island, where his wife, Willie, cooked ethnic Jewish food that Phil inhaled. Because Pomus could not get around easily, he rented a red convertible. Phil would get behind the wheel and the two of them would go off on day-long jaunts through the city. For a time, Phil seemed joined at the hip with Pomus, and when he was with others he did a dead-on imitation of Doc’s raucous, saliva-rich manner of speech. After only a few weeks with Pomus, they had written a dozen songs—mostly the older man’s work—in the Drifters’ quirky, elegant style of rhythm and blues. When they were presented to Leiber and Stoller and Atlantic Records, Spector had yet more footing on the New York turf.

  Up at Leiber and Stoller’s office one day in the summer of 1960, Jerry Leiber wanted Phil—now on a $150 weekly salary—to meet a writer named Terry Phillips, who had just been added to Trio Music. When Spector came in, he was wearing a vest, he had his galoshes on, and he was toting an umbrella—even though it was a bright sunny day. Seeing him, Phillips laughed loudly.

  “What are you laughing at?” Spector asked.

  “Nothing personal, man,” said Phillips, “but you look like Jiminy Cricket.”

  Spector, acting deeply offended, told him: “You know, man, that’s not funny.”

  Jerry Leiber laughed, too, and immediately thought there was a kind of chemistry in the dialogue. “You two guys are gonna work together,” he said.

  Terry Phillips, born and raised in Brooklyn as Phil Teitelbaum, was nearly a negative image of Phil Spector. He had blond, teen-idol looks and in fact had once sung a song he’d recorded on “American Bandstand.” A tough kid who talked with his fists, he eventually passed his entrance exam to law school and was about to begin when Leiber, meeting him at a cocktail party, hired him as a writer. Phillips retained some of his nail-hard qualities, and when he started working with Spector, he perceived that Phil “saw in my eyes and my personality somebody who could not be intimidated, who if you bothered or annoyed me, I wouldn’t verbalize, I’d just break your jaw. Phil is very perceptive; he read this in me like in a second.

  “But on the other hand, he also sensed that I was open. I expressed what I felt and I was a guy who liked people. Phil wasn’t like that. He was very suspicious of people, very mature in the sense of business but wary of people. So, in me, he knew what I was, he didn’t have to be wary.”

  Leiber and Stoller were going to record Ruth Brown for Atlantic, and Spector and Phillips were asked to write material for her. “We sat down with his guitar, and that’s when I knew I was overmatched,” Phillips said. But Terry came up with an idea for a song smoldering with sexual references called “Change Your Ways” and in developing it, he learned what Phil could and could not do. “I was a lyric writer and Phil was like Jerry [Leiber], he could sit down at the piano or guitar and in two minutes, you threw out a line to him and something was happening. It was really amazing. Nobody could sit down and instantly have a direction like that . . . or if the direction was bad, throw it out and, three seconds later, have another approach.

  “Phil needed a collaborator, though. He was not a lyricist, and I think that was because his emotional nature did not allow him to express himself openly.”

  In writing that song, and a couple of others for Brown, Phillips said he and Phil “crossed a valuable bridge. I saw . . . there was a side to Phil that was absolutely terrific, and very nice if he saw you weren’t looking to use him or cut his balls off. He sensed in me a guy not trying to ride on his coattails, or engulf him. B
ecause the jungle drums had started to beat for him by then. It was before he did anything, but his ability was well known. Hill and Range had flipped out for him. Aaron Schroeder wanted him. Ahmet Ertegun [at Atlantic] pursued him. The goings-on between Phil and all these people were mysterious to me. There was so much inner stuff I never knew about.

  “Paul Case used to take Phil and me to dinner fourteen times a week, and I realized Paul would have me along only because Phil wanted it. I could live with that, because I understood I wasn’t as talented as Phil. Plus, it didn’t mean as much to me. It meant everything to Phil.”

  Beverly Ross firmly believed that she and Phil were still a team, because he made sure to keep that lifeline open by continuing to get together with her around the piano. But on Beverly’s end, the relationship was much more intense. In her mind, “I was really his only friend, and we got very attached to each other.” Beverly even thought their writing was uniting them in romance.

  “I thought that, but I don’t think Phil did . . . maybe not romance as much as . . . you just become attracted in a strong way when you’re so connected because of the art and the passion that you need to write. At that time, when you’re that young, you feel you’re influencing the world, and you attribute a lot of emotional things to the people around you. He was just so special, so creative . . . I cared for him a lot.”

  There were times when the emotional commitment was mutual, and at those times, Phil revealed himself to her as he did to few others. The agony of Ben Spector’s death, the conflicting feelings about Bertha and Shirley, all fanned out before her.

  “He said his father killed himself, and I knew it was a terrible blow to this little boy, this intelligent, high-IQ, sensitive child. Kids feel they’ve been betrayed when their parents kill themselves; they feel guilty all their lives.

  “Phil was very insecure. He was always trying to prove that he could win this or do that . . . maybe to his mother or maybe to his dad. It seemed like he still had a relationship with his dad. He sort of had a residual feeling of tremendous fondness and loss.”

  Phil also told her that Shirley had gone over the edge since he left L.A., possibly because he thought Beverly could understand the pain that brought him.

  “I had a retarded brother and I was always so filled with feelings of guilt: what could I do for him? And I told Phil about it, and I remember he said, ‘Yeah, my sister is crazy. She’s been in institutions.’ It was yet another albatross upon his head—that he could not help her. We just kind of commiserated as close friends would.”

  Phil kept that side of him to a minimum, though, and Beverly faced his wrath when he wanted to shut off the personal anguish—abruptly, he would snap out of introspection with a gush of sarcasm, or a flip remark about her brother that would hurt her. Deadening his inner pain often numbed his entire being. “It seemed to me that his nature was not to have any conscience,” said Ross. “He didn’t want to feel anything for anybody.”

  Working at Beverly’s place on a midsummer night, they were fiddling around with a riff. It grew out of an old song of Beverly’s called “The Widow’s Walk,” in which three quick notes kept repeating in a da-da-da, da-da-da pattern. After they began working on variations of it, Phil suddenly leaped to his feet.

  “I have to go over to Jerry’s; we have to talk over some business,” he said as he rushed out the door.

  Unbeknownst to Beverly, Jerry Leiber had given Phil the lyrics of a song he had written and earmarked for the Drifters, “Spanish Harlem.” With Mike Stoller out of town, he asked Spector to see if he could come up with a melody. Now the riff had given Phil a brainstorm, the three-syllable repetition, and when he got to Leiber’s West Side townhouse, he sat at the piano and played what he had. Mike Stoller had returned and happened to be in Leiber’s kitchen making himself a hamburger. Hearing the “da-da-da, da-da-da” hook, he came in and worked it into the centerpiece of the song, to be played on vibraphone from first bar to last. But Stoller begged off a writing credit—Spector had worked up a full melody, and Stoller gave him his due.

  Artie Ripp heard the song before most of the world did. Ripp was taking two young women up to his room at the Hotel Forrest one night when he saw Spector.

  “Phil, come on up,” he told him.

  Upstairs, Artie announced, “Okay, girls, now we’re gonna get crazy,” and instructed everyone to get naked.

  Slowly, unsteadily, Phil complied. But after peeling off his shirt and pants, he stopped.

  “He yelled, ‘Wait a minute!’ and he picks up the guitar and he sits on top of the television, which was the only place to sit because the girls were on the bed and the chair,” Ripp recalled. “So he sat on top of this Admiral console TV in his underwear and starts singing about Spanish Harlem.

  “Now here I am, lusting to jump on these crazy nymphomaniacs, and I look at him and I say, ‘Listen, Phil, we can sing later.’ But when I turn around a minute later, Phil is gone, with his guitar and his clothes, and I’m left with the two girls. I got the job done on both of ’em, but Phil got the hit. I don’t know at what point the song was at, but he may have gotten some idea for it in that room.”

  In early October, Paul Case finally put Phil Spector to work for Hill and Range. Ray Peterson, the country singer who had a big hit with Jeff Barry’s “Tell Laura I Love Her” in 1960, had broken with RCA Records after five years and begun a label with his manager, Stan Shulman. The label was called Dunes, after the Las Vegas hotel where Peterson did a four-month run every year, and Shulman made a deal with Hill and Range to be distributed as a subsidiary of Big Top Records. Shulman then took an office in the Brill Building, four stories below the Hill and Range penthouse offices. As it turned out, Peterson, crippled as a result of polio, had met Spector in Los Angeles in 1959, and the two had hit it off.

  When Leiber and Stoller—Shulman’s first choice to produce Peterson on Dunes—were booked solid, Spector moved in.

  “He’d gotten real friendly with all the guys at Hill and Range,” Beverly Ross said. “Mind you, he had the run of the place because I had brought him in there, and he was really feeling his oats. He was spending a lot of time in Stan Shulman’s office with Paul and the other guys, and there’d be a lot of loud talk and laughing all the time. These were very macho guys, and Phil charmed ’em all, and he convinced them to let him produce.”

  “He was bitching and bugging us about it,” John Bienstock recalled. “He said we didn’t need Mike and Jerry, that he could do it himself. He was a confident little kid.”

  Contracted by Shulman to do a session for $150, a royalty cut, and a label production credit, Spector had no idea that he was stepping into a tempest of discord between Peterson and Shulman. The manager, a constantly sweating, cigar-chomping ex-Marine, could become carried away with his domination of Peterson. “Stan used to do things like knock me down stairs and throw me on my head and beat me up,” Peterson said. “I had braces on my legs and I weighed ninety-eight pounds, and he would insult me, tell me I looked like a queer on stage, the way I held the microphone. Once he put me in the hospital with internal bleeding, but I told people I slipped in the bathroom. Stan was sick, obsessed with the power he had over me—in fact, he told me about the Svengali story. Stan would lock me in my room. I’d have to practice for five, six hours a day in front of a mirror so I’d learn how to walk, so people wouldn’t feel sorry for me.”

  Peterson became a boffo performer because of it, but his relationship with Shulman was on a slow, curdling boil. Spector did not like Shulman and, as with many music people, had not a whit of respect for his expertise. Recently Shulman had turned down “Hello Mary Lou,” a song written for Peterson by Gene Pitney, a hugely talented writer/singer managed by Aaron Schroeder. Ricky Nelson then took the song to No. 1. “Stan always had two lead ears,” Peterson said.

  Still, Spector grabbed the chance to get in the studio with a major artist. He and Peterson decided to cover the old Joe Turner blues song, “Corinna, Corinna”—Phil
had been turned on to Turner by Doc Pomus, and Peterson had been doing the song in his act. Phil then went back to Beverly Ross. “He said, ‘Let’s write a song for the B side,’ ” she recalled. They came up with a tune called “That’s the Kind of Love,” but Beverly had a foreboding feeling. “I already smelled that he was being dishonest with me, because he barred me from the session.”

  When Spector and Peterson went into Bell Sound, it was with four songs—“That’s the Kind of Love” not among them. “I had thousands of songs I could’ve done,” said Peterson, “but I didn’t have to go through thousands with Phil. He was a tremendous judge of music.”

  Phil insisted on only one song, and it became the B side of “Corinna, Corinna.” It was “Be My Girl”—thus guaranteeing that Phil and Shirley Spector would enjoy a royalty windfall.

  The Spector/Peterson version of “Corinna, Corinna” was considerably softer than the grit of the Joe Turner record. Arranged by Robert Mersey, who had worked on numerous sessions for Leiber and Stoller, Spector used violins for the first time—and, later, he confided to Beverly Ross that he had been “scared shitless” by the challenge of going from small rhythm sections to a full orchestra—and he sought a sweetness of sound that bordered on icky. “Phil had a new thought for the song,” Peterson recalled. “It had always been done gutteral and funky. I did it as though I was singing to a little girl, not a lover.” Spector and Bell engineer Eddie Smith balanced out and mixed the vocals and the instrumentation so that the background was broad and dreamy, but Peterson’s vocal intimately close to the ear. And, amazingly, Spector cut it in record time for him. Vocals sung right over the orchestra, everything was done live, and in just two takes, inside of half an hour.