This incredible war chest socked away, Phil no longer needed Helen Noga. But neither did he need to alienate her. Guaranteeing her a piece of the first three Philles records, he made a cash settlement, buying out her dream before it began.
Next came a change of address, to a bigger apartment, a one-bedroom on W. 58th Street. Liberty was one block away, at 171 W. 57th Street. Phil inspected his office there and decided that he did not want the desk provided to him. “They had a conference table in a big room, and Spec wanted that as his desk,” Snuff Garrett remembered. “So of course I had to get it done for him. Liberty wanted to hang me.” The first few weeks in the new job, Phil sat in his office, dwarfed by the titanic table, and did almost nothing besides play with an air hockey game, either by himself or with a still-paternal Paul Case.
As New Year’s 1962 arrived, Spector had signed one act to Liberty, a black singer named Bobby Sheen, who was sent to him by Lester Sill. Sheen was, like Kell Osborne and Billy Storm, another in the Clyde McPhatter mold. Tall and thin, with a towering, pomade-juiced pompadour on top of his forehead, he was discovered by Johnny Otis, who guided his career before Sill used him in an offshoot edition of the Robins. Sheen had gone to high school in West Hollywood, and he vaguely knew Phil when they were teenagers, recalling him as “kind of doofish.” No longer. Watching Phil at work in New York, Sheen was dazzled by Phil’s darting, swarming energy and command of all before him. “He was push, push, push, let me do it, I can do it,” said Sheen. “He could do anything. He was invincible.”
However, Phil’s work at Liberty was knocking nobody out. Nor did it seem to matter overly to Phil. Apart from two sides he cut with Sheen, and another with a singer named Troy Shondell—none of which dented the chart—Phil stirred mainly for non-Liberty concerns. The chart performance of “There’s No Other (Like My Baby)” had much to do with this. By Christmas it had vaulted to No. 26, with plenty of steam left in it. As if on cue, Phil arose from his big desk in mid-January and journeyed to L.A. to cut Philles material with Jack Nitzsche at Gold Star—the site where he wanted to eventually make all of the Philles records. Before he left, though, he made a mental note about a girl group he had seen perform at a dance club. Called the Ronettes, they were a trio of caramel-skinned black girls from New York—two sisters and their cousin—who were signed with Don Kirshner’s Dimension Records. Rare among the day’s girl groups, the Ronettes advertised themselves with knee-length wigs and skirts slit to the hip as a mascara-caked vision of sexual paradise, and from what Phil heard, he thought they might be able to sing gritty blues, especially in the quivering, heaving voice of their sultry lead singer, Veronica Bennett. Phil promised himself that he would steal them from Dimension, where they were being regurgitated in a rut of larded white pop that misused their talents.
Eighteen-year-old Annette Merar, who had begun her freshman year at Cal State-Berkeley, transferred after one semester to UCLA just as Phil came to town. For two weeks, he took her out and about L.A., his obsession with her unnerving the Merar family. “My mom and dad didn’t like Phil at all, because he would drive everybody crazy when we were dating,” Annette recalled. “He’d scream and yell and bring me home at all hours of the night, call at ridiculous hours.” Such disruptions led Annette to move in with her sister Renee in Hollywood. By then, Phil was ready to return to New York. He did not want to go without her. Believing in her heart that the two of them shared a deep and special love, Annette agreed to go with him. Hurriedly she threw clothes into suitcases and together they caught the flight back. For once, Phil had no trouble flying. “We made out the whole way,” Annette said.
After moving into his apartment, Annette was inseparable from Phil. She went to the studio with him, copied and printed his lead sheets, and continued the idyllic conversations they’d had on the phone. About the only thing she didn’t do was to sleep with him—literally—because even after they made love long into the night, Phil would not be able to sleep. “I’d usually be in bed way before him. He’d go to sleep at about 5 A.M. and get up at 10. I was up at his Liberty office real late one night and I went to sleep on the couch. I remember falling asleep watching him screaming his head off at somebody. I thought: Why does he always have to scream like that?”
This was no longer the Phil Spector of the capes, chukka boots, galoshes, and tousled, tangled hair. He was a figure of New York power now. As much as it pained him that his hair was receding rapidly, he now wore it neat and short, arranged by high-priced coiffeurs. On his bony body and in his closets at home, he boasted Italian seersucker suits, silk ties, and shiny leather boots. Once, with nothing to shield him from the New York cold, Phil had asked to borrow an overcoat from Beverly Ross, and wore it even though the buttons on the left marked it as women’s wear. Now his own overcoats were made of fine cashmere. “I never saw him dress weird,” Annette said. “He was dapper. I liked that, that cut-velvet vest and the silk socks. He was always very elegant.”
The spoils of his success, however, were irrelevant to Annette. “I didn’t go with Phil for his money. The part of him I loved most was his genius, seeing an idea develop and come to fruition. Phil Spector was the rock-and-roll Mozart, and he shared his plans and his dreams with me. Oh, yes, late at night he talked a lot about his dreams.”
In early February of 1962, as “There’s No Other” peaked at a very edifying No. 20, nearing the end of an eleven-week spurt, all of Phil’s dreams circled around Philles Records. Seeking an edge on his competition, he conferred with Don Kirshner about a pooling of efforts between Philles and Aldon. There was much about Kirshner that Spector liked. In fact, they were intrinsically alike. Bearlike but with the plump cheeks of an infant, Kirshner was pathologically ambitious; a failure as a songwriter in the fifties, he drew vicarious satisfaction from owning outright the best young writers in pop music in the sixties. More than anyone else Kirshner had made rock and roll a profession rather than just a vehicle of rebellion, and his power was sultanlike: he could deign which labels and producers should have his catalogue—his writers’ copyrighted material—and exact a price in return. His label, Dimension, allowed his writers—primarily Goffin and King—to produce some of their own songs. Like Spector, Kirshner could act like an overage child, and his pouting temper tantrums were notorious. But where Spector believed his own puerile side was a subterfuge, a hiding place for manipulation, he thought Kirshner to be somewhat naïve and malleable, and the idea of swaying and controlling Kirshner, with all his power, was arousing. And so Spector and Kirshner waltzed with each other, and in mutual recognition of their corpulent egos they half-facetiously called each other “The Kingpin.” In late January Spector took one of Aldon’s best new songs—Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s “Uptown”—for his second Crystals record, but only after he agreed to put a lesser Aldon work, the Larry Kolber–Jack Keller “What a Nice Way to Turn Seventeen” on the flip side. Through Kirshner’s largesse, Spector got to redeem at least part of the deal that Leiber and Stoller squashed a year before. He co-wrote (with free-lance writer Hank Hunter) and produced a Connie Francis record for MGM, “Second Hand Love,” which went Top 10 in June.
Annette was privy to the Spector-Kirshner shadow dance and never thought the two would give enough to work in tandem. “Phil was gonna have an empire with Donnie Kirshner, but he was also very competitive with Donnie—Phil is competitive with everybody,” she said. “His thing was, who’s going to have the biggest empire, him or Donnie. That’s how he talked—and, you know, if Phil weren’t so talented he would sound like he was totally full of shit. But it was really true, he could think that way.”
“Kirshner never spoke his true feelings about whether he liked or disliked Phil,” Gerry Goffin said, “but he had a lot of respect for Phil because he liked his records and he was a great vehicle for us. And Phil knew Kirshner could motivate Carole and me and Barry and Cynthia to write. Kirshner would call and say, ‘Phil needs a song’ and we’d be hot to do it. So those two really got a lot out of
each other.”
Kirshner confided much about his dealings with Spector to Lester Sill. “Donnie never trusted him,” according to Sill.
It was a feeling that Lester himself would come to know during the early months of 1962. “I began to smell things falling out a little bit with Phil,” he said.
This happened once it was clear that “There’s No Other” was a hit and Phil followed it up with a personal tour de force—his production of “Uptown.” The record that he took out of Mira Sound was like an oil painting of Spanish Harlem, now hued in frustration and not just the innocent charm of the Jerry Leiber-Spector work. Phil’s tableau of brooding violins, cellos, mandolins, and castanets was an echo of the Leiber-Stoller black/Latin Drifters idiom. But it was much more urgent and restless, and it gave an aching anxiety to a lyric that Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil intended to be high-mindedly liberal but unwittingly branded barrio men as docile and addicted to servility—the protagonist dutifully shuffled downtown each morning to be a little man in a world “where everyone’s his boss.” Spector saved it with the intense, sensual beauty of every note.
Watching the session from inside the booth, Gerry Goffin was knocked out by the song. He asked Phil who wrote it, and Phil said, “I did.” Not until later did Goffin learn otherwise. “The weird thing was, it was the kind of lie Phil knew he’d be caught on,” Goffin said. “I never understood why he told lies like that. Maybe he thought he could make it his if he said it was.” Released in March, “Uptown” would rise as high as No. 13 in Billboard, No. 10 in Cash Box, by early June.
As it climbed, Phil produced only one record for Liberty, with a singer named Obrey Wilson. As Al Bennett feared, his commitment to the label was only transitory. Snuff Garrett, in fact, heard from Spector just once after the new year—when Phil complained that the plants in his office weren’t being watered by the Liberty staff. He did try to cut a Liberty record with the Ducanes, but with ill results. “Liberty tried to tie Phil’s hands, they didn’t give him the creative freedom he needed,” said Eddie Brian, one of the Ducanes. “Phil couldn’t stand Liberty. They wanted us to do a country-western song called Tennessee.’ You don’t give a song like that to New Jersey teenagers who sing doo-wop. A Liberty executive came in during a rehearsal as we were making fun of it with cow and pig noises. After that, we were out on our asses. They gave the song to Jan and Dean, and they had to flop with it.”
As Annette read Phil, however, his discontent had more to do with personal than creative freedom.
“Phil just didn’t like working for anybody but himself,” she said.
Again working in his own interest, Phil cut a third Crystals record in May. As with “Uptown,” Don Kirshner held the option on both sides. The A side was a Goffin-King work with the lurid and provocative title of “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss),” and it was the most literally bruising love/pain theme of all by the tortured couple. Goffin explained that the song grew from a sob story they heard from their live-in babysitter, Eva Boyd—the teenage girl who, as Little Eva, sang the Goffin-King “The Loco-Motion,” a No. 1 hit that Goffin produced for Dimension in mid-1962. “She had this boyfriend and she was off for the weekend and when she came home she was all black and blue. She said, ‘He hit me and that must mean he really loves me.’ ” The Goffin-King lyric echoed that sentiment. Years later, Goffin would allow that the tune was “a litde radical for those times.”
So too was Spector’s arrangement, which seemed to justify violence against women as a way to true love. The song began with an ominous drum-and-bell thudding that sounded as if it could be a fist hitting bone, then lifted in a crescendo of stringed schmaltz as the girl realized how lucky she was to have her brute. The ending was a prayerlike font of soprano voices echoing into silence, the girl’s blessing.
Hearing this bizarre vinyl soap opera, Lester Sill was horrified. “I hated that record,” he said. “I got into a big fight with him over it. I thought it was a terrible fucking song.”
Gerry Goffin, immersed in his and his wife’s personal obsession with battered and bruised romance—“It was the mood we were in, a phase we were going through,” he said—clearly found Spector to be an indirect inspiration and direct market for the darker themes. “Phil was sort of a masochist himself,” he said. Asked by Spector to write material for the Crystals after “Uptown,” Goffin and King not only gave him “He Hit Me” but two other harrowing songs: “No One Ever Tells You” and “Please Hurt Me.” Spector took all three, using “No One Ever Tells You” as the flip side of “He Hit Me” and saving “Please Hurt Me” for an upcoming Crystals album.
And yet the caricature of Phil Spector as a physical beast was not one that Annette could recognize. “That was just a good song,” she said. “Phil thought it was a great hook, and he never had any other musical rationale than what was a good song. Yes, Phil is definitely a sadist—but of the mind, not the body. He was a gentle lover, a very fine lover. He was not a ferocious tiger who was some kind of a crazy sadist in the bedroom.”
In June, Phil called Al Bennett and said he was quitting Liberty Records. He told Bennett he was “burned out” and was going on a sabbatical to Spain, to get his head together. Phil, who padded his alibi for weeks by registering for a Spanish study course at Berlitz and ostentatiously leaving the language school’s pamphlets all around his office, left Liberty with no apparent inclination to pay back any portion of his $30,000 advance. Like Jerry Wexler, Al Bennett and Snuff Garrett knew they had been had.
For Garrett, it was a kick in the pants. “It was my deal, I brought him in, and I felt bad about it not workin’ out,” he said. “That’s the only thing in my life that never worked out well. But my reaction was: who cares? That it didn’t work out didn’t mean anything to me. All I knew was that I knew Spec was a talent and I really liked Spec a lot and we had fun, man.”
Spector and Garrett would never hook up again, but they had a chance reckoning with fate just weeks later.
The group has a winning sound on this new ballad. They handle it with much feeling over a martial-styled big ork background that builds. Watch this one.
—Billboard review of “He’s a Rebel”
Phil did not walk out on Liberty until he had two must-do items checked off on his list of priorities. One was the courting of the Ronettes. Phil preferred not to deal with Don Kirshner on this one, and indeed never let on that he was interested in them. Instead, so convinced was he that he and the group were right for each other, he wanted to have no ties and no conditions in connection with their services. When Phil found out that the Ronettes were doing session work as background singers, he passed the word that he wanted them to contact him—but that they should not be told his identity. Although Phil loved these kind of secret games, it is likely that Kirshner would not have objected to letting the Ronettes go, since their records for Dimension under the name of Ronnie and the Relatives and the Heartbreakers were failures. In fact, Kirshner had asked Gerry Goffin to produce the group. Unimpressed with them, Goffin said no.
“I remember going through rehearsals with them and trying to get them to sing harmonies and they seemed pretty terrible,” Goffin said. “I turned ’em down because I couldn’t stand Ronnie’s voice.”
Born on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Veronica and Estelle Bennett and their younger cousin, Nedra Talley, began singing as the Darling Sisters, playing local hops in flare dresses and pony tails. The hardening of their image came when they started dancing for pay in New York’s Peppermint Lounge during the twist craze. Their name was changed to the Ronettes—a fusing of their first names—as they danced on the holiday rock shows hosted by the influential New York deejay Murray “The K” Kaufman at Brooklyn’s Fox and Paramount theaters. Their recording career was less fruitful. Signed to Columbia Records’ Colpix label, then to Dimension, they were handled for Kirshner by a capable producer named Stu Phillips, and also appeared in the movie Rock Around the Clock. But their records, candy-coated gruel with titles like
“I Want a Boy” and “What’s So Sweet About Sweet Sixteen,” kept them obscure. Eventually, Phillips quit Dimension after a spat with Kirshner, and the girls had little to do but work outside sessions.
On one such gig, they got a message with a number to call for more work. They called and were put through to Phil. “When he came on, it was not who we expected,” Nedra Talley recalled, “and he told us to meet him at Mira Sound. We went, and not much later we were recording as an act for him.” Their ears ringing by his promises of stardom, recording much better material with a superstar producer, they didn’t bother to terminate their Dimension contract. At Spector’s behest, they told the Dimension people they were quitting the business—an alibi delivered at about the same time Phil gave a similar story to Al Bennett. “We weren’t pulling any hits where we were,” Talley reasoned, “and if you have another situation, you go with what reeks of success.”
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