Not long after, Beverly Ross found out about the omission of “That’s the Kind of Love” from the session. “I was heartbroken over it,” she said. “I had a screaming, hysterical fight with him about it. But when you confronted Phil like that, he would just cringe and walk away, before he could feel anything.”
But before long, he was back. “He still wanted to be my friend. He said, ‘I could never match you, Bev. I’ve looked for people like you all over this business and I could never match you.’ He didn’t want to burn down any bridges, but I later felt this was the beginning of his terrible two-facedness. I was just too naive and trusting, and I believed him.”
On October 27, just weeks after the Peterson session, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller went into Atlantic’s new studio on Sixtieth Street, built by Tom Dowd, to record songs with Ben E. King, who had quit as the Drifters’ lead singer for a solo career. King recorded four Drifterish tunes, his own “Stand by Me,” the Spector/Pomus “Young Boy Blues” and “First Taste of Love,” and the Spector/Leiber “Spanish Harlem.” Originally intended as a B side, “Spanish Harlem”—an extraordinary piece of beauty that used the Latin baion beat of “Save the Last Dance for Me” and the piercing, frontal strings that created crossover soul on “There Goes My Baby”—was the first side to be released from the session.
Before Christmas and his twentieth birthday, Spector took to the studio twice more. Leiber and Stoller turned over to him Houston-born reggae singer Johnny Nash, who recorded on the ABC-Paramount label. At Bell Sound, and again with Robert Mersey as arranger, Spector cut two string-laden Drifters-style songs he’d written with Terry Phillips, “Some of Your Loving” and “A World of Tears,” and a cover of “A Thousand Miles Away.”
The second job was for Stan Shulman and Dunes, to record Curtis Lee, a vegetable picker Ray Peterson had discovered singing in a Yuma, Arizona, nightclub. Lee came to New York with four middling songs he had written with L.A. songwriter Tommy Boyce. Spector’s ears heard them as white doo-wop, but not with Lee’s squeaky voice as the focal point. Instead he brought in a black quartet, the Halos, who recorded for Seven Arts Records and worked background sessions all over town. For $250 per Halo, Stan Shulman received four strong sides; the best was “Pretty Little Angel Eyes,” which bridged the tail end of doo-wop and the new era of dance records.
Spector wanted to use a different studio for the session. He had come upon Mira Sound Studios, which sat in the rear of a forlorn building on W. 47th St. called the Hotel American. Pimps ran in and out of the building and rats had to be rousted from the studio, but the walls were thicker there, and the fat echoes seemed to squish off the plaster like ripe tomatoes. Phil hadn’t had as thick a live echo—or “blur,” as he called it—since Gold Star, and the engineer at Mira Sound, Bill MacMeekin, was a visionary in his own right; among other measures, he was the first engineer to put a separate microphone on a bass drum rather than over the entire drum kit, isolating a pounding backbeat not heard before on vinyl. Hunting for a chamber he could send the music through, Spector put a microphone on an outside stairwell. Pleased with the result, he vacated Bell.
Spector, arranging himself and again cutting in haste, recognized that Lee could not carry a tune and turned loose the Halos to pump life into “Angel Eyes.” “We came in and he gave us lyric sheets and told us to do what we felt,” recalled Arthur Cryer, the Halos’ bass man and leader. The Halos’ churning and shifting riffs—“We stole all those bomps and ha-ha-has from the Spaniels and Cleftones,” Cryer said—made the song infectious.
Early in 1961, Phil Spector had no less than four works on the charts: “Corinna, Corinna,” which was about to peak at No. 9 in Billboard and No. 7 in Cash Box, “Some of Your Loving,” “Pretty Little Angel Eyes,” and “Spanish Harlem.” The last, backed with another Spector-Pomus song, “First Taste of Love,” had been released on the last day of 1960 and was now scrambling up the ladder.
Beverly Ross had heard “Spanish Harlem” back in November when Phil played an acetate of the song in Freddie Bienstock’s office. She heard the familiar riff that she had worked on with Phil the night he ran out, and her heart sank. She knew she’d been had. Now the grapevine was abuzz with talk about Spector’s hard upward thrust and she knew that he was not concerned about taking her on his ride.
“He’d done that song and then he suddenly was writing with some guy named Terry Phillips, and I didn’t know from where this Terry Phillips sprang,” she said. “It wasn’t like Phil said anything about breaking off, he just started avoiding me. He started gaining power—and he wanted people to be influenced by him.” And yet, against all hope, she didn’t want to believe Phil would never write with her again.
Phil, meanwhile, was informing people that he had produced “Spanish Harlem,” which in its glory and power dwarfed the songs he had produced. He took no official credit, he implied, out of deference to Leiber and Stoller’s preeminence. Hearing this kind of scuttlebutt, Tom Dowd would bellow, “Horsefeathers!” since, in fact, while Phil had attended the session at which it was cut, he had neither played on it nor had any real input.
“I seem to recall him leaning against a wall or something,” Ben E. King said.
Doc Pomus heard the poop too and would chuckle about it. “Phil always told a lot of stories, but here’s the reality: what actually happened, what Phil wished could have happened, and what he says happened.”
As the calendar ran out on 1961, to Phil Spector, spread all over the canyons of New York music but in his mind owned by nobody, only one reality mattered: he was omnipotent.
He had to find himself but I’ll tell you one thing. He was complete when he walked in. He was like Minerva coming out of Jupiter’s head. He had it all in him. I don’t think he had to learn too much. All he had to do was implement.
—JERRY WEXLER
Phil went home to Los Angeles for Christmas but it was not merely a sentimental journey. Lester Sill had called and asked him to do a job, and Phil owed it to Lester to do whatever he would have wanted. In fact, Phil was not convinced anything would come out of the job—which was to produce a trio of blond teenage sisters who did a McGuire Sisters–style act. Priscilla, Albeth, and Sherrell Paris—the Paris Sisters, professionally and otherwise—had recorded for Imperial briefly, but they were in a three-year drought when Sill bought them from Jesse Rand, who also managed the Lettermen. Sill solicited producers for the group, but he got no takers; by no stretch of the imagination were the McGuire Sisters a sixties boom.
The Paris Sisters were an odd fork in the road for Sill, given that he and Lee Hazelwood were in dire need of a hit act in 1961. Not long before, on a plane ride from Phoenix to L.A., Hazelwood and Duane Eddy had a spat, and Eddy demanded a break with Sill/Hazelwood Productions. Trying to play hardball, the two men insisted that Harold Lipsius and Harry Finfer, the Jamie Records strongmen in Philadelphia, return master tapes of Eddy sessions that Sill and Hazelwood had paid for. But when Lipsius and Finfer refused, Universal’s dominion was such that Sill and Hazelwood were forced to back down.
Now, with the Trey label dying and with no sure-fire talent, Sill was in crisis. Spector made plane reservations.
Longtime Gold Star clients, the Paris Sisters had cut a number of unsuccessful demos, engineered by Stan Ross, and Phil remembered that he’d heard the group in the studio and that—despite the Sisters being a group-harmony act—he thought that Priscilla Paris had a purring voice similar to Annette Kleinbard’s. That made him think he could refashion yet another version of the Teddy Bears. He called Stan Ross to set the date.
“He wanted to make sure I could do the session, but he also was afraid to fly and he had a wonderful concept for getting over it,” Ross recalled. “His theory was that if he spoke to the place he was going to end up—a music place, because that was his destiny—that he would get there okay.”
It still didn’t prevent Phil from squeezing the armrests of his seat every mile of the way, and a knowing Bertha Spector was at
the airport to meet him with sandwiches. Checking into the Players Motel, a picaresquely dingy Hollywood music lodge, Phil went next to see Russ Titelman. He took back his Telecaster Defender guitar but gave Russ a gig as a guitarist at the Paris Sisters session. Having dealt, sometimes uneasily, with prickly New York musicians, Phil wanted a more conducive, familiar air in the studio. Michael Spencer, who had gone from UCLA to Harvard Law School but had dropped out after three months, was back in L.A., and Phil brought him onto the session as well, along with Johnny Clauder, the drummer for Don Randi who had jammed at Michael’s house on those grandiose Friday nights. Moving Priscilla Paris out in front as lead vocalist—a move her two sisters resented—Spector cut two of his songs, the A side a cover of the tune that was currently making big money for him and Shirley as the flip of “Corinna, Corinna,” though with the gender switch it was now called “Be My Boy.”
Sill shopped the master to labels around town. Again, there were no bites. “I couldn’t sell the record to anybody, couldn’t lease it, nothing. Snuff Garrett at Liberty turned me down flat. Capitol hated it.” With no recourse, Sill pressed and released it himself, creating a new label with Hazelwood, Gregmark, a combination of two of their sons’ names and which was also the title of their publishing company. That’s when Herb Newman at Era Records agreed to distribute the disc, and a promotion man named Clancy Grass was hired to plug it.
Spector didn’t hang around for these machinations. Like a wisp of smoke, he left town quickly. There was too much on the burner in New York.
A few days after getting back, Phil had stunning news for Terry Phillips.
“We have a chance to do the songs in the new Elvis picture, Blue Hawaii,” he said.
Terry had no idea how this incredible coup had come about, but then Phil had more news: they were also going to write songs for Bobby Darin and Connie Francis—both of whom were managed by Don Kirshner, now a close Spector confidant. Terry had barely digested all of this before he was caught in a tornado of dizzying activity. He moved in with Phil on E. 82nd St., they began working furiously on all three projects, and Phil took him on successive nights to the Copacabana nightclub, first to meet Connie Francis, then Bobby Darin.
“We played Connie a couple of songs,” he remembered. “I’d written the lyrics, totally, to two or three songs, which she heard in her dressing room. And she flipped out over them. We then got with Bobby and played him a couple of songs, and he loved ’em. And then Hal Wallis, who was producing the Presley movie, heard the stuff we did and we got the affirmation that they loved all our songs for the movie.”
Terry was ecstatic about this sudden turn of events in his still-brief career. But even though he had worked himself into exhaustion churning out lyrics, he could not quite understand the business logistics of it. He and Phil were both under contract to Leiber and Stoller, but they were doing this new work under the auspices of Paul Case at Hill and Range. Often he tried to get an answer to how they could square this conflict of interest.
“It’s cool,” Phil would tell him. “It’s been worked out.”
Terry accepted it, trusting that Phil knew much more about this sort of accommodation than he did. Furthermore, Spector was in great demand, and in a power structure not unlike the five families of the Cosa Nostra, vicious competition could be mitigated by “gentlemen’s agreements” benefiting any number of sides. Spector was constantly on the phone, dealing. “It never stopped ringing,” Phillips said. “Everybody was stroking Phil, because of what they could get out of it. Phil was so many years beyond his age. I mean, I was a college graduate, I could’ve gone to law school, and Phil Spector absolutely made me feel like I was eleven years old in the business.”
At times, Terry wondered what was being discussed during those phone calls, but Phil wouldn’t open up. “He was like Ollie North. It would’ve been nice to hear the conversations, but if he saw me listening he’d hang up the phone. And if he would tell me things and he thought he was getting too close to something hush-hush, he would close up.
“I would say, ‘Listen, Phil, if you don’t tell me, I’m gonna beat your ass in.’ He would say, ‘Man, I’m tired of this business shit,’ and he’d punch me in the shoulder—he absolutely was the weakest person I ever met in my life, God love him—and that would be his way out of it, like it all was getting to him.”
And all the while they would be working, nonstop, because Paul Case told them there were tight deadlines. Terry would go as long as he could keep his eyes open, then fall out. Phil would never cave in. “He never went to sleep,” Phillips said. “I’d go to sleep and Phil would sit on his bed and listen to the radio until 6 or 7 A.M. and he’d have his guitar in his hands, playing riffs. He could not go to sleep. He was afraid of the night, afraid to sleep . . . that if he didn’t control himself, he might die before he woke up.”
Inside of two weeks, songs for all three projects were done, a phenomenal output that had Terry euphoric. “I’d written the complete lyrics to everything we did, and now the Johnny Nash thing was like a bullshit little thing. This stuff was gonna put me on the map. I told my mother, ‘I’m here only a few months—and I’m writing for Elvis!’ ” Phil then went into the studio and cut several songs with Bobby Darin.
At that point, life was good inside the first-floor apartment on E. 82nd St. The two young music men were bonded by cause and a unique personal chemistry, and Terry found that he was now possessive of the funny little man he knew had great depth and hurting inside him. Phil just naturally seemed like the little brother who needed protecting, and while Terry came to know some of the hairier details of Phil’s personal heartaches and guilt, the hurt in Phil’s eyes when he told of his home life made his pain so palpable that Terry would wince. He didn’t need to hear one word to know that Phil Spector was a lost soul.
That also seemed to be Phil’s attitude about women. He had a terrible time trying to find a love interest in New York. Terry, on the other hand, while not savvy like Spector in the business sense, left him in the dust during carousing hours. Running in a pack of happy wanderers that included songwriters Burt Bacharach, Bert Berns, and Bobby Scott, Phillips frequented downtown clubs like the Harwin. He and the others would attract a horde of women. Spector would sit alone on his bar stool, sipping 7-UP all night. “It was ridiculous,” Phillips said. “He was the king and I was the serf, but I always wound up with the best-looking chicks in New York, I mean women ten years older than us. They’d spend time talking to him but then they’d go to bed with me. I’d get home the next day and Phil would be so pissed at me.
“It hurt him because he always wanted to be sexually attractive based on the fact that he was a human being. It was not that Phil was weird; he wasn’t. Phil was a sweetheart. He was sensitive and hurt and brilliant and charming. He couldn’t connect with women because he wanted one lady who was pretty and sexual and bright enough to be his lady. Someone who was classy and kind and honest.
“Phil wanted a love, he wanted to love and be loved. But every woman he ever met used him. The women he was screwing were doing it because of what he might do for them. And he was very well aware that these women would hurt and use him.”
Eager to prove that he too could be a rogue, Phil came home one night with a very overweight female songwriter—and woke up Terry to invite him to join in as he and the woman undressed.
Casting a tired eye at them, and especially at the woman, Terry said he’d rather not. But Phil was insistent. “You gotta do it, Terry. You gotta do it for me,” he pleaded.
Relenting, Terry crawled into Phil’s bed to join them. But as hands were reaching and bodies touching, Terry began to quake with laughter. “It was just so funny, because this woman was so fat. I couldn’t believe I was doing what I was doing,” he recalled.
Phil was furious. “Terry, fucking Terry!” he kept snorting. They tried to begin over, but this time it was Phil who couldn’t keep from breaking up.
“Then I went crazy again. And in the mi
ddle of this torrent of laughter, the lady got up, put on her clothes, and left, and Phil and I were still lying there in bed, laughing our asses off.”
The elation at Eighty-second Street was shattered when Phil picked up the phone one night in February. Terry assumed it was just another routinely hushed call, until Phil began hollering angrily into the mouthpiece.
“There’s a problem,” Phil said, his face flushed, when he hung up. “Jerry and Mike have gotten wind of the whole thing and called up Freddie Bienstock.”
All three deals, he said, were dead.
“Mike and Jerry found out and they put their foot down,” Phillips explained. “They wanted half the publishing on the songs we wrote and Hill and Range said no.”
Mad enough to kill, Terry glared at Phil. “You know something? You’re all full of shit,” Terry told him. “I love you as a person, man, but why didn’t you tell me we didn’t have the right to do it?”
Phil answered meekly, but unconvincingly, “I thought I understood that we could do it.”
He's a Rebel Page 10