He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  It was now possible to put the pieces together. Leiber and Stoller apparently had never been in on the dealing, and they had every justification to step in with an axe to protect their interests. Whether it was Phil, Paul Case, or Don Kirshner, in any combination, or whoever else had tried to pull this end run, it failed. “They gambled and lost,” Phillips said. “You’re talking about a man named Phil Spector. They wanted him and were willing to bend a few rules to get him.” Hill and Range may have attempted, or planned all along, to settle with Leiber and Stoller after the fact; but Trio had a powerful attorney, Lee Eastman, and when he threatened to sue over the matter, Hill and Range junked everything. And yet, even though Phil was bitter about the crumbled house of cards, he seemed not to be genuinely shocked.

  “I think my reaction was much more emotional and angry than his,” Phillips remembered. “I think he knew all the time what was going on. Maybe he misunderstood, but even if Phil knew, even if he overstepped a bound, the point was, everybody was going to make a lot of money, goddamn it. It seemed to us that the thing to do was for people not to be hard-assed and say, okay, 50 percent of a lot of money was better than 100 percent of nothing. That’s why we were both pissed at everybody. I know Phil was very pissed off at Mike and Jerry.”

  Phillips, fearing Leiber and Stoller suspected him of treason, told Jerry Leiber: “Listen, I knew nothing about this. I was told it was okay.” Spector, however, did not care about covering his backside. He had an attorney inform Trio Music that he construed his contract null and void, on grounds that he had signed it as a minor without court approval, unlike his previous contracts with Doré, Imperial, and Sill/Hazelwood. As with most Spector moves, this was not done rashly. His association with Leiber and Stoller had tremendous leverage; however, in positioning himself for independent power, exclusivity was something he no longer wanted. Leiber and Stoller were also ambivalent about the rupture. To Lester Sill, they decried Spector’s ingratitude. “They were angry,” Sill recalled, “because they groomed him, helped him, honed his craft. They took Phil in, they took care of him, and they were gonna make deals with him and the minute he got hot, he walked.”

  But, clearly, there was nothing they could do, and when Phil asked for a release from Trio Music, they let him out. Yet Spector never really left. Mindful not only of their feelings but of the political danger of crossing Leiber and Stoller, Phil—who could play this game well—continued meeting with them as if nothing had ever come between them. What’s more, he could do this because Leiber and Stoller wanted his modern brand of brilliance around them and their stable and were willing to eat their grudge against him. “More than anyone else, Mike and Jerry understand Phil Spector,” Terry Phillips said. “Psychologically, they knew exactly where Phil was coming from, because they’d been there first. All three were such brilliant creatives, they were of the same mind. Mike and Jerry absolutely loved Phil. They did not want to lose him.”

  Spector thus proceeded with the uncertified imprimatur of Leiber and Stoller, and when he made his next move, finally acceding to the endless solicitations of Ahmet Ertegun to come to Atlantic Records as an A&R (artists and repertoire) man, as a kind of security pillow he went to work on his first day accompanied by the two men he had just jilted.

  Spector went to Atlantic * with a wreath of chart hits: “Spanish Harlem” would top out at No. 10 in mid-March, and its flip side, the Spector-Pomus “First Taste of Love,” broke out for a run to No. 53. Curtis Lee’s “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” hit the chart running in early February, at about the time that “Some of Your Loving” made a one-week appearance at the bottom tip of the chart. Spector’s attitude upon entering Atlantic’s ranks was that he would revitalize the company. The proud and preening Atlantic of the fifties was wobbling now, stunned by the double-barreled defection in 1959 of both Ray Charles and Bobby Darin, and was struggling to isolate a new font of mainstream R&B besides the Drifters and Coasters. Phil often sat in Jerry Wexler’s office, guitar in his hands, as he, Wexler, and Leiber and Stoller sifted through material. If Wexler ventured a criticism or even a suggestion, Phil verbally strafed him. “He came in as an instant sore winner,” Wexler remembered. “To him, he was on equal ground, a peer. He’d say to me, ‘Hey, baby, what the fuck are you talkin’ about?’ Whatever it was, I might’ve said ‘Change the bridge,’ or ‘Get a new line here.’ He said, ‘No way! This is the way it goes down!’

  “That quality was a great thing about him. I respected it. ’Cause he knew what he had and he didn’t need to defer to anybody. Right or wrong, he pursued his own way, and it turned out to be right in the long run, didn’t it?”

  At the time, though, Wexler was not as philosophical or charitable about Spector’s impudence. A ruddy-faced onetime newspaperman with a flashing temper—in the studio when “There Goes My Baby” was recorded, Wexler thought the song sounded so bad that he hurled a sandwich against the wall—he complained loudly about Spector to Ertegun. “Jerry wanted to fire Phil the first day,” Ertegun said.

  The Turkish-born Ertegun, by contrast, was an industry diplomat whose urbane slickness Spector idolized. More than any other industry prototype, Phil was turned on by Ertegun’s savvy and integrity in standing hard by soul music as a writer, producer, and executive. Spector may have played fast and loose trying to land Blue Hawaii, but Terry Phillips never believed that Phil wanted to be an industry nutcracker; the music was his motive in everything. “That hard-ass shit . . . you’re talking about the George Goldners, the Freddie Bienstocks, guys that dealt a whole different kind of ball game, man,” Phillips said. “You know what Phil Spector identified with in the business? He was totally influenced by Ahmet. Ahmet started a jazz and R&B field when there was no such thing. Phil was a great jazz lover, and Ahmet made an industry out of it. That was so great to him.” People around town for months had noticed that Phil’s hipster mannerisms and jargon were really Ertegun’s. “The prefabricated stutter that Phil did, that’s an Ahmet lick,” Wexler said. “It’s part satire, part emulation, and then it gets ingrained.”

  Erratic as Spector was, Ertegun wanted him to have at the depleted Atlantic roster. Gone now were Joe Turner and Clyde McPhatter; and Ivory Joe Hunter, Ruth Brown, and LaVern Baker were in decline. Besides the Drifters, the Coasters, and Solomon Burke’s pulpit-style blues, numerous acts were in need of a shakeout. Spector went in with brash confidence, but he was wary of life as a staff producer bouncing from act to act and making art by the time clock. He came aboard as a loose kind of employee, without a signed contract and with latitude on the outside. His salary was small—“a pittance,” as Wexler recalled—but what he wanted, and got, was carte blanche in the studio.

  The problem was, high as a balloon on the “Phil trip,” Spector used his time capriciously; if he didn’t feel right on any given day, he’d forget about coming in. “Apparently, he was given authority to start auditioning people,” said Tom Dowd, who as chief Atlantic engineer ran the studio. “I guess they’d given him some leads on people he should listen to. Either they had good songs or a good singer or a good harmony or something, and they wanted to see if Phil could marry off with any of these people. He’d tell them to meet him in the studio. And I used to . . . I was in the middle of trying to get the product out, and somebody would put their nose in the door and say, ‘I’m here for Phil Spector.’ And I’d say, ‘Wait in the studio for him.’ At the end of the day I might have twenty or thirty groups sitting there sending out for sandwiches still waiting for Phil Spector.

  “This went on for a couple of days, and I finally said, ‘Wait a minute, this is getting impossible.’ I had more people there that I didn’t know who they are or what they’re doing. I was hiring musicians and I couldn’t tell whether a guy in the studio was on my payroll or not. Everybody was in everybody else’s way.”

  Spector did cut sides on a good number of people, including Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker, and Billy Storm, the last a find of Lester Sill’s who had previously recorded for Col
umbia Records. But many of these were in collaboration with other producers, some with Ertegun and Wexler, and Phil felt stifled. He was suffering more for his art now, punishing himself and all those around him to effect his concept of rock, and the self-induced pressure made Tom Dowd wonder if Spector was coming unwrapped.

  “A musician might play or somebody might sing at the wrong time or pitch, and it would just unnerve him. And then he would break off all communication and input from anyone else,” Dowd related. “You could see him get tense, and then all of a sudden he’d be out the door into the studio and screaming at somebody. He’d wrest the guitar out of a guy’s hands and say, ‘This is what I told you to play!’ and it didn’t matter who the guitar player was.”

  At those tortured moments, Dowd said, “I could get in about two or three sentences and then he’d be in another space. The more you fed into him, the farther away he got, the more intent he was on getting his one little microcosm going, until he got it right. If you rushed him, or tried to placate him, it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good, and the frustration would make you feel like it was you he was against; but it wasn’t, because he’d be sitting there carrying on a conversation, and then if something went by wrong, he was like three worlds away.

  “Jerry Leiber was a lot like that, but he had Mike Stoller as a buffer against taking it out on somebody. Mike was always very solid, very steady, always positive. Jerry was positive until the first little obstacle and then he’d go off and you’d have to settle him down like a pigeon fluttering. But with Phil, there was no way I knew of how to settle him down. He just wouldn’t recover.”

  Spector’s predicament was time; unlike Leiber and Stoller, he needed too much of it to make the job work at Atlantic. And teaming him with another producer was to nobody’s gain. Co-producing with Wexler a group called the Topnotes, a unit built around soul singer Derek Martin, the two had a blowup over who had final say. The songs suffered for it. “Together, we created negative synergy,” Wexler said. “There was absolutely no consonance in the studio. I liked him, but we could not collaborate. I don’t think Phil’s a collaborator; it’s his way or none.”

  The nadir was their co-production of a Bert Berns song, “Twist and Shout.” Berns hated what they did to it but could only sit in the studio in pained silence. “We stashed him in the mezzanine, with the spectators, and we went out there and proceeded to murder his song,” Wexler said. “There’s a thousand ways to make a bad song and only one way to make it a good one. We never caught the right groove, the right spirit. When Bert went in and cut it himself [with the Isley Brothers in 1962], he did.”

  Atlantic was more than a clash of egos and will. For Spector, it was a clash of geography and technology. Having cut his teeth on the West Coast’s archaic recorders, and continuing on similar equipment in New York, the culture clash of Dowd’s eight-track machine made him swallow harder. “Phil was in his element with a two- or three-track, at most a four,” Dowd said, “where he could allocate one track to all the rhythm, one to the backgrounds, one to the group. And then he’d play checkerboard with the tracks, bouncing one to the other. That was very California. He had better ways available to him, but if it impaired or impeded or made him insecure, technology means nothing. Let him do what he does best and capture the genius of the work. You don’t make a Phil Spector a victim of technology.”

  Ertegun and Wexler never put Spector under the gun. “We didn’t play that ‘get your ass in gear’ thing,” Wexler said. “We knew how difficult it was.” But in the early spring, Phil was writing Atlantic out of his world; abashed by his record of failure at the company, he was no longer mentioning Atlantic in conversation. He was dealing again on the outside, and Atlantic was merely a mental apparition by the time Phil told Ertegun and Wexler that he was walking away from them. But if Spector’s job performance had been mediocre, his timing was perfect. Only days after Phil left, Lester Sill got an agitated call from Jerry Wexler. “That son of a bitch Spector owes me $10,000!” Wexler bellowed. Atlantic had given Spector a number of cash advances, and Wexler believed—accurately—that Phil was not going to return the money. Wexler also believed Spector had ripped off the company for hundreds of dollars in long-distance phone calls after office hours. Working late one night, Wexler discovered a note under a blotter on the front desk. “It was a letter from the switchboard girl to Phil, telling him how to use the phones, which were shut off at night,” Sill said. “Evidently Phil developed a relationship with the girl and was making all these calls. It got me into a very embarrassing situation with the Atlantic people.”

  Wexler, however, did not press the case. He chalked it up to the experience of living with Phil Spector.

  The courting of Spector did not abate during his Atlantic detour, nor did Phil’s desire to get on the good side of as many industry heavies as he could. One of these was Aaron Schroeder, the hard-selling, cunning, and likable song publisher and manager of Gene Pitney. Schroeder tried feverishly to charm Phil into coming onto his staff and finally reeled him in with an offer to produce a record for Pitney—who had recently had a self-produced hit, “(I Wanna) Love My Life Away” on a custom label begun for him by Schroeder and Art Talmadge called Musicor. Pitney was going in to record again and, with typical overkill, Schroeder had already lined up Leiber and Stoller to produce one of their songs at the same session.

  Schroeder, who had written over twenty songs for Elvis Presley, was fanatical about getting his own company’s catalogue material recorded, but he allowed Phil to pick the A side for Pitney. Spector, who wanted to link up with Don Kirshner’s coterie of unorthodox young writers, tabbed Carole King and her husband and writing partner, Gerry Goffin, and they penned a melodramatic song called “Every Breath I Take.” Schroeder also offered Phil another sop: Gene Pitney recorded a demo of a song written by Spector and Terry Phillips, “Dream for Sale,” which would later end up as a cut on one of his albums.

  Pitney had met Spector once before, during an early visit Phil made to Schroeder’s office at 1650 Broadway. At the time Pitney had done very little in the business, and Spector had yet to get a New York gig. But Phil left a definite imprint when the two young men dined at a Chinese restaurant. “He understood the big picture of the whole thing, and what he wanted to do in the business,” Pitney recalled. “He talked fast, like a machine gun, and he dropped a line on me that floored me. He said, ‘My sister’s in an asylum—and she’s the sane one in my family.’ ”

  Schroeder booked Bell Sound for the session, and the control room quickly was transformed into a zoo. Along with Leiber and Stoller and Spector, it was filled with writers of songs to be cut—Goffin and King, Burt Bacharach, and another married couple under the Kirshner domain, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil—as well as Schroeder, his top hand Wally Gold, and Kirshner. Listening for direction from the booth, Pitney found he had not one producer per song but anywhere up to a dozen. “It was a real problem,” he said. “Because every time somebody would be satisfied with something, somebody else would say, ‘Yeah, it’s all right, but you should’ve done this.’ And I’d have to do it again. There were so many egos in there. Nobody wanted to step on anyone else, but that’s all they did.”

  Scheduled to run from 7 to 10 P.M., the session stretched long into the morning hours, at double-scale overtime for an army of musicians. “Every Breath I Take” was the final song cut, and Pitney, suffering from a head cold and his vocal cords wrung raw, concluded his vocal by jumping into an unexpected falsetto. “Everybody said, ‘Yeah, great idea, Gino.’ What they didn’t know was that was the only way I could get it out.” It cost a startling $13,000—the average date ran around $500—but Spector, Pitney, Schroeder, and Kirshner got a song that they all swore would blister the pop chart. Phil used the Halos once again as a background choir, and a string section rose like great heaving breaths in a wild interplay with Gary Chester’s choppy, booming drums.

  Gerry Goffin recalled Spector on that night as a mercurial blur. “It was really
something to see him work,’ ” Goffin said. “He was all over the studio, telling everybody what to do. He was hardly in the booth. He was always out there on the floor. I remember he was telling Gary Chester what fills he wanted. There was a great drum fill after the instrumental, and Phil practically directed that himself.”

  The result of these meticulous, back-breaking hours was Spector’s boldest and most ambitious work, a spectacle of sound and fury that he had been building toward for over a year. Aaron Schroeder was pleased. After the session he reached into his pocket, pulled out a $50 bill, and tried to stuff it in Phil’s palm. Spector, who received absolutely no compensation for the gig, declined.

  “That was Phil’s way of saying ‘You can’t buy me. I did my thing, I did you a favor, but that’s it,’ ” Gene Pitney believed. “Aaron wanted to grab Phil, put him under contract, but Phil was too smart for that. You could see what was comin’ with him. Phil purely had designs on creating his own little empire.”

  *When he was interviewed for this book, Ahmet Ertegun claimed that he had originally brought Spector to New York, after signing him to Atlantic in Los Angeles as his “assistant.” That version of history was rebuffed by everyone else in a position to know. “That’s total bullshit, and I can’t believe Ahmet said anything like that,” Lester Sill said. “Ahmet met Phil after I sent him back to Leiber and Stoller. Jerry and Mike took him up to Atlantic. Ahmet had nothing to do with Phil coming to New York. He’s full of shit and I’ll tell him that.”

  He would have all kinds of things going on. He was just wheeling and dealing. And he couldn’t believe what he was doing, how easy it was. He would come home and say, “Mike, you won’t believe this one . . .” and go on to describe the deal he cut that day.

  —MICHAEL SPENCER

  To everyone’s surprise, the Paris Sisters’ “Be My Boy” made a respectable display on the chart, reaching No. 56 in late May of 1961. In search of a follow-up record, Lester Sill came to New York to make the rounds on Broadway. At Don Kirshner’s office, Artie Ripp, who was now working at Aldon, sat at a piano and played Sill and Spector a ballad by Barry Mann and Larry Kolber called “I Love How You Love Me.” Ripp could hardly hit the right keys and had a voice like a hinge, but Phil loved it; the long pauses in the lyrics made it compatible with strings, and it intrigued him that the old Teddy Bears sound could be buffed with violins.