He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  But these were mere interludes, marking time between business paces. Phil was racing recklessly to his requital, and he could not be stalled. At Hill and Range, Phil found, and later cut sessions with, three groups as potential Philles fodder. They were named the Ducanes, the Creations, and the Crystals. The first two sang ethnic white doo-wop, a dying idiom that Phil—who never really got the hang of eastern streetcorner harmony—put on tape only because he liked something in their voices. He soon backed off both groups, though, and he sold to Jamie the Creations masters for a one-shot issue on that label. With the Ducanes he notched a favor with George Goldner, the old tough guy. Goldner was a still-influential figure on Broadway even though huge gambling debts forced him to unload his big fifties’ labels, the inverted End and Gone—for which he had produced and then plugged classic R&B hits by the likes of Frankie Lymon, Little Anthony and the Imperials, and the Chantels—to Roulette Records. Goldner was left with silk suits, Havana cigars, and a small label called Goldisc Records, and Goldisc was a logical home for the Ducanes’ cover of the old Louis Lymon hit “I’m So Happy (Tra-la-la).”

  The Crystals masters, however, would not leave Phil’s hands. From the very beginning, he had the group earmarked for Philles. Five soft-throated black teenage girls from Brooklyn, they came in to Hill and Range with an uptempo song written by a friend named Leroy Bates, “There’s No Other (Like My Baby).” As they sang it for him in an audition room, Phil had a different concept. “He was sitting there nibbling on pretzels, little tiny bites like a bunny rabbit, and he just told us to slow it down,” recalled Mary Thomas, one of the Crystals. “Then he turned the lights out in the room and we sat around in the dark, because he thought it would make it sound romantic.” For two weeks, Phil rehearsed the Crystals just that way, in the dark, so much that lead singer Barbara Alston, whose voice had little timber, would leave hoarse.

  Spector was not the only one at Hill and Range interested in the Crystals; the group auditioned regularly for two other writer/ producers, Bill Giant and Bernie Baum. But when Hill and Range lagged in signing the Crystals to Big Top, Phil signed them himself and hustled them into the studio. On June 28, graduation day at their high school in Brooklyn, the girls were paged. “We didn’t even know we were gonna record,” Mary Thomas said. “All of a sudden we got a message, ‘You gotta come to Manhattan.’ We went flyin’ there that night.”

  Spector, without Jack Nitzsche, who had gone back to L.A., went into Mira Sound with his own arrangement for three songs. Joining Mike Spencer on the date were Gary Chester, guitarists Bob Bushnell and Wallace Richardson, and bassist Richard Ziegler, and when the Crystals did the vocals, Spector came back the next day and conducted a light string arrangement. Yet even with Helen Noga’s and Jamie’s foot money, Phil did not have the unlimited resources of his Atlantic and Gene Pitney sessions, and “There’s No Other,” the A side, was not prime Spector stock; the few instruments splattering against the thick Mira Sound walls sounded small, muddy, and impossible to mix clearly. Still, the languid and sensual beat and the title hook worked well, and recalled the drafty auditorium sound of the Chantels and the Shirelles’ cute, imperfect harmonies.

  Lester Sill heard the masters and sent word to Jamie to issue “There’s No Other (Like My Baby)” and a Spector song called “Oh Yeah Maybe Baby” on the yellow and red label of Philles Records—with Spector listed as a co-writer with Leroy Bates.

  Over the summer, while the Hill and Range staff were still unaware of the heist of the Crystals, Spector proceeded to do Big Top’s bidding. He produced a Sammy Turner record as a follow-up to Turner’s “Lavender Blue,” and another for a singer named Karen Lake. During his hours in the studio, he was difficult, often vexing, and always excessive.

  “The thing that used to bug me was that he ran overtime so much,” John Bienstock said. “It was hard to have a budget come in that made sense. But he didn’t give a shit. His artistic endeavor was more important to him.” To Bienstock too. Spector was where he wanted him: in the studio for him. And so he was allowed his surfeit.

  “I happen to have liked him a lot,” Bienstock insisted. “We used to fight a good deal because we had differences of opinion. But we loved each other. We were real friends.” As a favored son, Phil was thick with the entire Hill and Range clan. When he took a liking to Bienstock’s pretty daughter, Jackie, Bienstock did not object to him taking her out one night. Phil went to the Bienstocks’ home in Teaneck, New Jersey, well dressed and groomed—“not in his goddamn doo-dads and jeans, but perhaps he did have a cape”—to pick Jackie up. It was the last she wanted to see of him. “She thought he was a kook,” Bienstock said.

  Phil’s place in the Hill and Range bosom lasted only until summer’s end—until they found out through the grapevine about the Crystals and Philles Records.

  “We were very angry because we felt they were Big Top artists,” Bienstock said. “He was merely supposed to produce them for us. There was no question about the fact that he was just rehearsing them for Big Top—hell, he rehearsed them for weeks in our offices. And then he just stole them right out of here. That precipitated a breach of contract with us.

  “We were just incensed because that was a terrific group, and for him to do that shows the type of character he was. We felt he was less than ethical, and, obviously, he was then shown the door.”

  Phil did not believe his crime was heinous—to him the Crystals had been fair game. Nevertheless, when told to clear out, he did not feel he had to defend himself, and his reaction was much the same as with the Blue Hawaii abortion. He did not flinch.

  “He showed no remorse whatsoever,” Bienstock related, “just like the typical piece of shit he was. He was talented, but he was a piece of shit.”

  The sacking—along with the failure of his Big Top records—was part of a double-barreled blow for Spector. “Every Breath I Take,” on which Aaron Schroeder had banked so much money and hope, went to No. 42 in mid-September and then died, a killer of a letdown for Spector, Gene Pitney, and Schroeder.

  Nervously, Phil turned to sweating out the record he had been waiting to put out all his life.

  I felt like I was in the center of the universe when I was with him.

  —ANNETTE MERAR

  “There’s No Other (Like My Baby)” was released with the catalogue number Philles 100 in late October. But it wasn’t Philles business that occupied Phil when it came out. More important was the staggering blast up the chart of the Paris Sisters’ “I Love How You Love Me.” After landing on the Billboard chart in early September, the record zoomed into the Top 40 four weeks later, en route to a No. 5 peak and a fifteen-week run—a mandate for Phil to cut a third single with the sisters. In early November, with “I Love How You Love Me” one of the hottest discs in the land, he flew out to Hollywood once again, carrying a song written for the sisters by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “He Knows I Love Him Too Much.”

  Phil had won over Goffin and King’s allegiance very early in his New York career. While up in Don Kirshner’s office just before “Spanish Harlem” was released, Spector sang them the tune to his own guitar accompaniment. “The way he sang, with his vocal intonations, he sounded like Bob Dylan,” Goffin recalled. Phil, with his tangled mop of thin hair and torn blue jeans, struck Goffin as an artiste and a “character,” a wraith of uniqueness that he and his wife had not yet encountered along Broadway. Trying to break out in a Kirshner barn pervaded by the vapid, homogeneous teen pap churned out by the Neil Sedaka-Howard Greenfield team, Goffin and King—both Brooklyn-born, and married in 1958—were not merely beguiled by Spector; Phil’s pluck and nerve and his keen musical palate made him seem almost like an oracle to them. “He would play us records that he loved,” Goffin said. “He was very much in tune with what was happening.”

  A year later, Goffin-King and Phil Spector had both taken massive strides in carving rock’s sixties’ identity. Goffin and King were really what was happening in rock prose. They were writing progressi
vely daring, two-minute psychodramas in which the protagonists—based on the couple themselves—were troubled, self-destructive lovers for whom love was a battle zone. Redefining the boundaries of rock realism, they had a massive hit with the Shirelles’ “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” in 1961; in 1962, they would provide an anthem for the sadomasochistic minefield of love with the Cookies’ “Chains”—a theme very similar to that of “He Knows I Love Him Too Much.” Cooed from Priscilla Paris’s quivering lips and moistened by Hank Levine’s weeping strings, the pathos was bitingly real.

  Happy as he was with the record—which would make it to No. 34 in March—Phil could not be pleased with this trip back to the California sun. Weeks earlier, Lester Sill had found out that an assistant had accidentally discarded the master tapes of the intended Paris Sisters’ album. “It was my fault, really,” Sill said. “The guy was cleaning out the dubs and never came to ask me about it. I had them stacked with all the other demos and filed wrong, and he just threw ’em away.” The heart-crushing accident became the focal point of a bitter contention among Phil, the sisters, and Sill. The huge success of “I Love How You Love Me” had led Phil and the sisters to believe that big money was due them. But when they queried Lester about it, he told them that the expenses in making the album had eaten up almost all of the royalties. “There actually was a debit, but I gave ’em both some money,” Sill said. “The cost of the album was horrendous. I showed ’em the figures. It may have been $10,000. That was the way Phil recorded. He was a perfectionist.” With the album now lost, none of that money could ever be recouped.

  Trying to live with this terribly cruel turn of events, Phil cursed an unkind fate. But he also wondered if Lester was being completely honest or fair with him. Biting his lip hard, he refrained from arguing about it, and he soon split for New York, still simmering.

  The Paris Sisters were more demonstrative. They were so angry they staged a series of nasty scenes in the office, demanding their money. If they were frantic, they had reason. When Phil left, his haste had made it clear that he was through with them for good. “Phil is like that,” Sill said. “When it doesn’t happen the way he wants, he doesn’t give a shit what it does to other people involved. He will destroy those people—although in this case, the Paris Sisters destroyed themselves, because they got very salty with me and forced me to drop ’em. Besides, when Phil went back to New York, no one else wanted to record ’em. I loved the Paris Sisters but I don’t think anyone could’ve made hits with ’em but Phil.” Sill did release two more Paris Sisters’ records that he had in the can, but he in effect “washed my hands of them” the day Spector walked out on them. They signed with MGM in 1963, but never relived the heady days Spector had given them.

  Still unsure about the future of the Crystals’ “There’s No Other,” Phil sought to close some wounds with Hill and Range. Operating on the periphery of the eleventh floor, he did two more sessions for Stan Shulman and Dunes, one with Ray Peterson, one with Curtis Lee. Each would yield a minor hit: Lee’s “Under the Moon of Love” and Peterson’s “I Could Have Loved You So Well.” And when the Bienstocks and Paul Case got into a sticky political fray with George Goldner, Spector agreed to be the peacemaker. The problem came about when Big Top signed Arlene Smith, the strong-lunged former Chantels lead singer, as a solo act. Goldner was irate about Smith leaving Roulette Records, and he and the Roulette people began making intimidating noises about it to Hill and Range.

  “They thought of me as ‘George’s artist,’ and they were giving Big Top a hard time,” Smith recalled. “I was caught in the middle of it.”

  Burt Bacharach was slated to produce Smith at Big Top, but when Goldner put the heat on, Big Top shuddered. Rumors about Goldner and the mob were a longtime undercurrent on Broadway, and no one wanted to find out whether there was any truth behind them. “Big Top was afraid of George and Roulette,” Smith thought. And so Bacharach was taken off the gig, to be replaced by the kid who had done Goldner right with the Ducanes, as part of an arrangement leading to Smith eventually being sold back to Roulette.

  Phil was thrilled to get Smith’s powerful voice in the studio, and he took the extraordinary step of having her do a cover of “He Knows I Love Him Too Much.” Released at about the same time as the Paris Sisters’ record, Big Top didn’t push it hard, and it was heard almost nowhere. Nor was Smith happy with the product, though she liked working with Phil and later wrote a song with him called “Pretty Face.” Smith would fondly recall his energy and his bizarre wardrobe—he wore pointy-toed desert boots and a little cap, reminding her of Robin Hood—but the song struck her as “a stock arrangement, and the attention wasn’t focused on me. I was lost at the bottom of a big orchestra mix, and it didn’t work. If I’d been out front, it might’ve been very special.”

  Phil figured in the second stage of the Smith exit plan as well, which was to reunite her with her old Chan tels producer and Goldner protégé, Richard Barrett. When Barrett cut his record, it was released not on Big Top but on a one-shot label sticker under the name “Spectorius.” That was George Goldner’s payback to Spector for his generosity with the Ducanes.

  Helen Noga, acting on Phil’s hints of a shared march to glory, greeted the release of “There’s No Other” with a decided effort to wiggle further into the Philles picture. On October 17, after consulting with Phil, she had her lawyers draw up a contract of terms and conditions financing more sessions by the Creations, Ducanes, and Crystals, in exchange for a 50 percent cut of the profits. How Phil hoped to reconcile this with Harold Lipsius and Harry Finfer only he knew, and it was possible he had no intention of ever going that far with Noga. But, pending the showing of “There’s No Other,” he signed the contract—including a make-good gesture to the Bienstocks: a clause stating “Paul Case of Hill and Range Songs Inc. is to be given first consideration for material to be recorded.”

  The truth was, Spector had come upon a better means of life support for Philles. For months he had been quietly dealing with Liberty Records, the L.A. label founded by Lew Bedell and Herb Newman’s cousin Si Waronker in 1955 and which had consolidated the range of West and Northwest rock—it was Liberty that distributed the Fleetwoods’ “Come Softly To Me” and the hugely influential guitar-rock records of the Ventures, each recorded on a small label in Seattle. The Spector-Liberty romance began with overtures by Tommy “Snuff” Garrett, a skinny producer who was also Liberty’s head A&R man on the West Coast. Garrett was, in Phil’s mind, the only L.A. producer who really mattered in sixties rock. An ex-deejay from Texas and a close friend of Buddy Holly’s, Garrett came to L.A. in 1959 and produced gigantic hits for Liberty with Bobby Vee, a Holly soundalike from Minnesota, and Johnny Burnette by adding opulent string arrangements to rockabilly.

  Garrett was Spector’s idea of Dixie hip. He wore cowboy boots, spun homilies about horses and pigs, and was fond of saying—and proving—that he could not produce a flop record. Only three years older than Phil, Garrett’s long, gravelly face was excavated by the force of a thousand Texas saloons, and if Spector tried to faze Snuff with the Phil trip, he got nowhere. In New York once to bird-dog songs for Liberty, Garrett invited Spector up to his hotel room for breakfast. Phil asked if anyone else was there, and Snuff told him he was with a certain female writer. Phil, who knew the woman, said, “I don’t like her.” Snuff told him, “Well, then don’t look at her.” Moments later, Spector came to the door—with his eyes jammed shut. “He had a plastic bag and in it was a half-eaten dinner roll, a razor, and a broken comb,” Garrett recalled, “and all the while we talked he sat lookin’ at me. He would not look at or talk to the lady.” Garrett never blinked. After breakfast, Phil “closed his eyes again and I helped him to the door and he left.”

  When Phil buried himself in the postproduction of “I Love How You Love Me,” he took the record to Garrett for an opinion, knowing he’d get a square count. “He came runnin’ over and, God, we went over and over that record,” Garrett said. Months late
r, Liberty producer Clyde Otis—head of East Coast A&R—quit the label, leaving unfinished records he had been working on. Garrett offered the A&R job to Spector, and the two of them kept increasing salary figures until, almost in jest, Phil said he’d accept $25,000. “It was ridiculous, unheard of for then, but I gave it to him because I believed Spec to be a great fuckin’ talent,” Garrett said. “I thought the two of us would really put Liberty on the map.” Garrett had to talk Liberty president Al Bennett into approving—“Al bitched and moaned. I was enough of a problem to handle. They didn’t want two children in A&R.”

  But Garrett talked well. Not only did Al Bennett okay the contract, he also capitulated to a clause drawn up by Spector and Sill that gave Phil the leeway to go on producing his three personally owned acts—the Crystals, Creations, and Ducanes—on his own time, as well as liberal travel privileges. For Bennett, this was a very risky clause; at worst, Phil might hoard the best songs he could find for his own label, and at best his attention and purpose might be divided. As Bennett needed signs that Spector would perform well for Liberty, Garrett assigned Phil the unfinished mix of a song Clyde Otis had cut with Timi Yuro, “What’s the Matter Baby.” “He went into Mira Sound and redubbed it down,” Garrett said, “and he did a helluva job on it.” Outwardly, at least, Spector seemed gung ho about the job, and this convinced Bennett as to his ability and intentions. And so Bennett gave in to one more of Phil’s requests, for a cash advance on expenses. Sitting in his office a continent away, on top of a roster of rockabilly acts, Bennett had ecstatic visions of beating the New York labels on the important new rock acts. Spector was clued in, he was hot, he was good. Suddenly, placating him didn’t seem such a gamble. Bennett drew out an entire year’s salary, up front, for Spector, with another $5,000 thrown in.