He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  Spector flew back to L.A. with plans to cut the song as part of an album of similar lachrymose love songs. Needing an arranger, Sill matched him with Hank Levine, an independent Hollywood producer and orchestrator. But neither Levine nor the musicians Phil booked—including Earl Palmer, Ray Pohlman, and Howard Roberts—for May and early June sessions envisioned what an ordeal recording the Paris Sisters’ drippy ballads would be.

  Roberts, the old jazzman, was still far removed from the ferment of rock and roll, and he had not the slightest notion of what Phil had done or where he had been since “Bumbershoot.” But he had every reason to think that Spector’s lead sheets two years later would be something more intricate than the three-chord cycles of 1959. He was wrong. “He’d walk in and it would say ‘C-F-G’ and that was it,” Roberts recalled. “And the next tune would say ‘C-F-G’ and the next after that was ‘C-F-G.’ ” Given this, Roberts could not understand why Phil pushed him and Pohlman on the same stuff again and again, with little or no variation. “With other producers, there would be some little fine adjustments here and there, and you’d do four sides in three hours and leave. With Nelson Riddle, it sounds great. But with Spector, we’d sit there for hours on end on one tune, strumming these three chords.”

  “He always seemed to have an idea of what he was after,” Pohlman said, “but I don’t know if he could always express it. He would let it happen with the band and let it evolve.”

  To the musicians, Spector’s recording process seemed chaotic and unplanned, something on the order of knitting an afghan in the dark. And yet, as difficult as it was for them to comprehend, Phil—three years more skilled in the “broad mono” with which he and Marshall Lieb made aural images dance across the music image of a song—was working on a higher plane: it wasn’t melody but the blend and the balance of that image that consumed him. Thus, even though the rhythm section would be barely discernible in “I Love How You Love Me,” buried by eight violins and the sugar-plum voices of the Paris Sisters, it would be that way precisely because drum, bass, and guitar merged into a “feel” rather than separating into select instrumental noises. The balance of a Spector song was diaphanously sensitive; it could happen at any moment, like a sudden hiccup. Accordingly, Phil no longer cut strings along with the rhythm track. Hank Levine’s violinists had to overdub the same way Sammy Nelson had tried to keep the drum beat on “To Know Him Is to Love Him”: listening to a disembodied track. It was a hellacious task for Levine, and Stan Ross had to mix and match sound levels to make the finished product sound natural. And because Phil thought that the acoustics at Gold Star would stunt a major string arrangement, he cut the violins at another studio. Ross was amazed at how well Phil and Hank Levine did under these trying circumstances. “It was a perfect meeting ground of strings against rhythm,” Ross said of the song. “The string overlays were done in good taste, very subtle, crisp and sharp but not distracting.”

  However, before Phil would put the song in the can, he took the raw tapes back to Lester’s house, where he was camping during sessions, and listened to them in a monklike trance. “He spent hours with that song,” Sill recalled. “We came home at 3 A.M. and he must’ve played that thing fifty times that night, in our little den. There’s a certain point where the strings come in and out. He wanted to make sure that the level of the strings was just right. He turned the sound way down, because he wanted to make sure the strings cut through, that they wouldn’t fade out, even for a split second. Even after he thought it was right, he would listen and listen and listen.”

  As the Paris Sisters’ sessions ran on, Lester became rooted in the studio. Although he had drifted away from the studio over the years, he now was by Phil’s side during the interminable hours at Gold Star. “I saw what he was doing, the sounds he was getting. Like the way he muted the strings as he blended them. Seeing what Phil was doing, it just made me want to get back in there,” Sill said. It would get to be a problem, because Lee Hazelwood thought Lester was putting in more time with Phil than was necessary—an opinion no doubt reinforced by Hazelwood’s festering dislike of Spector. Two years before, the acrimony between the two had become so intense that when Stan Ross heard that Phil was sent to New York, he swore it had to be because Sill wanted to keep the peace with Hazelwood. Now, with Phil’s star screaming skyward, Hazelwood was forced to take a backseat to the kid he abhorred. It ate him like battery acid. In the studio to offer Sill his help during the early sessions, Hazelwood cringed and his pride burned when Phil, wallowing unabashedly in his new power, showed him little respect. “Phil was running around crazy and giving people a hard time, and he was picking fights with Lee,” Stan Ross said. “Phil wasn’t really being disrespectful—he was being Phil Spector, not the easiest guy for anybody to love. Lee said, ‘I’m not gonna go in the same room with that little fart.’ ”

  Still seeking an act he could get behind now that Duane Eddy was gone, Hazelwood would want to meet with Sill, only to be told constantly that Lester was at Gold Star with Spector. Finally, the irritable producer snapped. In a huff, he went to Gold Star and, in an ugly scene, confronted Sill.

  “I’ll never forget it,” Sill said. “I was there with Phil cutting the Paris Sisters and Lee walked in all pissed. He said, ‘Look, I can’t handle it. I’m doin’ work, too, but you’re spending all your time with Phil.’ He said, ‘Look, you keep Phil, I’m gonna go back with Duane.’ Lee and I hadn’t been getting along, and I said, ‘Fine,’ and that was it. It was the end of our relationship, though we kept the publishing company for years.

  “Lee thought I was neglecting our thing, which wasn’t true. It was really that Lee saw Phil as a threat, creatively. That’s how much Phil had grown.”

  Witnessing the disintegration of Sill/Hazelwood productions before his eyes, Spector was not too preoccupied to sense how it could affect his life. The cadaver of Hazelwood’s abandoned partnership was still not cold, but Phil pounced. Only days after the blowup, he approached Lester with a proposition.

  “Now that Lee’s gone,” Phil told him, “I’m ready to step in.”

  For Lester, it was a logical proposition. He had little to lose by bumping Phil up to a co-ownership and co-publishing position; Spector’s contract with Sill/Hazelwood was about to run out, and a writer/producer future, at any cost, would not have made Phil want to get on an airplane and keep coming to L.A. Sill was in crisis losing a partner on the order of Lee Hazelwood, and Phil Spector was the hottest item in rock. Where the New York heavies were unable to reel him in, Sill could now have him in perpetuity in shared royalties by granting Phil his overriding wish. Right there, with not a beat of delay, he told Phil, “Let’s get it going.”

  The deal necessitated a new label and publishing company. In keeping with the Gregmark acronym custom, the label was christened as an amalgam of Phil and Les—Philles Records.

  The publishing company was named Mother Bertha Inc. “Mother Bertha was a double-edged thing, a big joke.”

  The immediate problem for Philles Records was money. Sill had dealt small, and Phil Spector meant big—Sill could only imagine the production costs on records Phil would make for his own label—and even hit records could not guarantee profits for a small, independent label. Distributors routinely took advantage of such companies, holding back on disbursing funds to see if the labels would fold before they could collect; often the windfall of a hit record outran a label’s ability to collect all the cash it was owed. It was much too risky for Sill to go neck deep into Philles with his own money. Instead, he called in another chit, turning to a convenient if not beloved ally. Sill had sagely refused to go toe-to-toe with Harold Lipsius and Harry Finfer over the Duane Eddy master tapes. Now, with the line between them still open, Sill opted for the clout of Universal Distributing.

  Universal had recently suffered a setback itself. Harry Finfer, who was its general manager and promotion head of Jamie Records, had been implicated in the rock-and-roll payola scandals that bloodied rock’s nose. Test
ifying before a congressional committee in 1960, Finfer admitted that he had slipped under-the-table cash and favors to deejays. Finfer, like Dick Clark, came away relatively unscathed—technically, it was ruled, no laws were broken by payola—but Jamie Records eventually divested of its management interest in Duane Eddy, who went to record for RCA Victor, again produced by Lee Hazelwood. Knowing well about Phil Spector’s fire storm in New York, Harold Lipsius readily agreed to finance, press, and distribute Philles Records in exchange for a one-third financial stake in the profits; in turn, Sill and Lipsius gave Finfer an override on all Philles releases, and because the Philles stock would be owned by Jamie Records, both Lipsius and Finfer were instant shareholders.

  It was unclear when the first Philles product would come about. Phil would go back to New York, free to sign acts and book sessions. Projecting costs, Phil had no doubt that these sessions would burn more dollars than Lipsius and Finfer could ante. A disposable financial angel was what he needed, and he believed he had one. Months before, Phil had met Helen Noga, the manager of Johnny Mathis, at Hill and Range. Noga was a windy, matronly woman, enormously wealthy and desirous of show-biz power. While still in L.A., he dropped in at her Beverly Hills house and inflated her head with dreams of mutual conquests. When she went to meet with Lester Sill, Lester could see why Phil honed in on her. “She was an obnoxious human being,” he recalled. “She said to me, ‘Lester, when I come to New York, I just reach out and pull the money in.’ ” For a piece of the first Philles record, Noga agreed to kick in on the initial sessions. She assumed there would be bigger and better agreements to be made later.

  During the Paris Sisters’ recordings, Michael Spencer gave a party at his house attended by many of the old gang, including Russ Titelman and Annette Merar, the girl Russ had brought into the Spector’s Three touring group. When Phil dropped by, he was immediately mesmerized by Annette, whose shaggy blond hair and soft green eyes left him short of breath. Trying to keep from toppling off his platform-heeled boots, Phil stood as tall as he could and lied about wanting to use her as a model on an album cover. As an ice-breaker it worked, but it wasn’t until he came down from the Phil trip, played his guitar, and revealed himself as vulnerable that she turned on to him.

  “I knew Phil before that, of course, but it was at that party when I realized I was very attracted to him,” she recalled. “The way he played his guitar and just his persona were extremely interesting to me.”

  When it got late, Phil dropped hints. “I’ve got to go out to the valley, and I don’t want to make that long ride alone,” he said to her.

  Annette, seeing how hard he was trying, laughed and told him, “Okay, I’ll go with you.”

  It was around midnight and Annette, who was in the eleventh grade now, was usually in bed by this time. But she was enthralled by Phil. They drove to Lester’s house and talked until the sun came up. When Phil drove her back to L.A., “We just sat in the car and there was a lot of silence,” she said. “And I remember saying ‘I’ve never felt so comfortable with anybody not saying anything.’ ”

  Phil, who had also been having a fling with Priscilla Paris, began seeing Annette almost daily. Moving from Lester’s to a Hollywood motel, the Plaza Lodge, he brought Annette back to his room one night. A little while later, they were startled when someone started to pound on the door.

  “Open up, Phil!” came a scream from outside. “It’s me, Russ. Open up!”

  Recognizing the voice of an angry Russ Titelman, Phil—who had not bothered to inquire if Annette was still Russ’s girlfriend—whispered, “Be quiet.” The two of them sat silently in the dark until they heard Russ’s footsteps trail away.

  “I don’t know why we did that,” Annette recalled. “Phil and I weren’t doing anything, we must have been watching television. And I was no longer going with Russ at that time. I didn’t cheat on Russ to go with Phil. But for some reason Russ was very . . . maybe he wasn’t over me. Russ must have found out I was with Phil in his room, and he freaked out.”

  Russ, feeling betrayed and sick about Phil romancing Annette, jumped in his car and started driving aimlessly. Finally he rolled to a stop in Lester Sill’s driveway. “The poor kid, he was brokenhearted,” Sill said. “Russ was going with Annette and then he found them there. He had to stay with me for a couple of days before he was ready to go back. He was all shook up.”

  In reality, very little was actually going on between Phil and Annette. “We were not sexually fast or anything,” she said. “Phil was very slow in that area. I thought he was gay at the beginning. I asked him too, and he got real insulted and wouldn’t talk to me for a while. But then we started dating, and he took me to Palm Springs and we’d have dinner, we’d be in the studio and I got to watch his creative efforts from the germ to the fruition. He’d be playing his guitar and he’d come up with a little riff that he liked and he said, ‘I’m gonna do that in the studio,’ and he’d work on it and expand it and make it happen.

  “I was very creative myself, I wrote poetry. I loved what he was doing. And then I remember he took me to lunch one day and he finally kissed me.”

  But by then, his work done with the Paris Sisters, he was ready to go back to New York. They would continue a long-distance love affair—“We had a romance by phone that you would not believe, hours and hours every night, talking about everything from math to sex,” she said—and Annette would send him love poems that would leave him gasping. But in the summer of 1961, other things took priority over romance for Phil Spector. His career, and his whole world, was about to break wide open.

  Phil returned to New York early in June, and for the Philles sessions he brought with him an arranger named Jack Nitzsche, who was working for Lee Hazelwood in the new office Hazelwood had taken one floor below Lester Sill’s. After arranging several of the songs for the Paris Sister’s album, Nitzsche went to Hazelwood with the New York offer. Hazelwood, who could have been balky out of spite, gave his permission. In New York, Spector kept Philles under his hat, and it was useful that the first Philles sessions would be held under the official banner of Jamie Records. Phil had too many favors to do yet, too much industry goodwill and perks to earn. And building up working capital was still a consideration. For Phil, the Hill and Range connection was vital; not only were acts drawn to the Brill Building like flocks of geese but Paul Case and his minions could judge the marketability of an act and a song like no other industry meter. Besides, Case and the Bienstocks were, as ever, willing to pay him beneficial stipend money to hang around the eleventh floor and feel disposed to produce for Big Top. So many acts streamed through the place that Spector could bird-dog for Philles and do an occasional Big Top turn without changing his step.

  Still ensconced on E. 82nd St., Terry Phillips watched ambivalently as Phil played his shell games. To be sure, there was some poetic justice in Phil’s duplicity, given that the Blue Hawaii fiasco had hardened Terry’s overview of the recording business. “Big Top was a bunch of fucking whores,” Phillips said. “Freddie Bienstock and Jean and Julian Aberbach had millions of dollars, they were people who looked at writers as scum. Phil saw that. Phil saw everything, man. He knew they were trying to take advantage of him. But they didn’t, because he was too smart. Phil took advantage of them and they didn’t even know it.”

  Phillips, however, had no stomach for finagling or wanderlust, yet the current of intrigue and deception at E. 82nd St. had only gotten hotter since Blue Hawaii. “These people were so different than me. I thought it was all greed and stupidity. Everybody was fuckin’ everybody, and that was bullshit to me. It started to get awfully complicated and I said, man, I don’t wanna deal with this. Because it wasn’t interesting to me, being around it wasn’t fun anymore. But I understood Phil s problem. Phil was a young man who had matured enough to be concerned with his future career. I was a young man who was only interested in the next beautiful blonde I could have.”

  Terry knew it was over when he suspected that Phil, out of sheer
self-interest, was holding him back. “Phil knew more about the business but I also felt he was concerned about my personality—that while he really cared about me, he kept me two steps behind him because I was an open guy and people liked me. Phil knew I was talented, if he had a meeting with Aaron Schroeder or Art Talmadge [the head of Gene Pitney’s Musicor label], I wasn’t allowed there.” And so in early June, Terry moved out. He began collaborating with a writer named Jerry Vance, whose brother sang in a Brooklyn quintet called Jay and the Americans. Phillips took them to Leiber and S toller, who by now had broken with Atlantic and gone to United Artists, and they produced the group for the label. Every once in a while, Terry would bump into Phil along Broadway, saying little more than hello and good-bye. “My feeling was, if Phil didn’t want to call me, I knew I could do things on my own. He was with a whole other crowd, and I didn’t want to be perceived as trying to take advantage of what he was achieving. That was important to me because I wasn’t gonna suck up to him, because I didn’t need to.”

  Phillips’s place at E. 82nd St. was taken by Michael Spencer, who came to New York to attend the Mannes College of Music. This arrangement pleased Phil: the quiet, taciturn Spencer had none of Phillips’s wildman habits, and he had an understanding of music that could keep them busy for days on production ideas. Spencer also was put to work on sessions, as a pianist and leader, a double-scale perk that helped him pay his tuition. Uninterested in the business end, Spencer observed Phil’s commandeering of Broadway as a lab experiment in environmental sociology. Michael was incredulous at the change in Phil; the mama’s boy of West Hollywood could play the part of the New York honcho in high style. “He was much more flamboyant, his air, his attitude,” Spencer said. “Making it in New York fed his ego and his personality.” Because Phil had missed any period of struggle and adjustment as a young adult, Michael could see that his old friend was a strange hybrid: his insecurities had never been assuaged, and yet he was caught in an avalanche of success. Concerned that Phil was too shut off from reality for his own good, Michael tried to get Phil’s mind off the business. He would drag Phil out of the apartment, out of the Brill Building, even down to the Times Square grind houses. Other times they’d get a car and roam the city, with one clear exception—Phil would not step on his old Bronx turf.