He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  On May 26, mere days after he quit Liberty, the Ronettes were with Phil in L.A. and cutting demos at Gold Star, a process that would determine what kind of material he would want to put out when the time came. For now, though, that time was not yet close. To lend credence to the lie about them quitting the business, and pending what he knew would be long months of drilling them to be his big act, he put the Ronettes on the back burner. Knowing he had them under contract was good enough.

  The second factor that hastened his departure from Liberty was the sure-fire song he had been waiting for. Finally, in June, it came—from the recipient of one of his favors: Aaron Schroeder. Schroeder played him a demo Gene Pitney had made of a new song he had written, “He’s a Rebel.” Though Spector did not know it, there was irony in him coming upon the song. “Uptown” had led Pitney to write it. “ ‘Uptown’ was the first song where I ever heard anyone use funky strings like that and especially low strings, violas and cellos down that low,” he said. “I fell in love with it and it hit me. I said, ‘I’m gonna write their next single, another song they could do just like that.”

  An idea came out of a mind reflex, a sudden memory of a tune Pitney had heard years before, “something with the word ‘rebel’ in it. It was goin’ around in my head for some reason and I thought, wow, what a great word, a great color word to use in a song. Twice I tried and twice I trashed it. Then I hit the groove and I knew I had a winner.” Pitney’s demo, with its recycled James Dean movie theme (“He is always good to me / Always treats me tenderly / ’Cause he’s not a rebel, no-no-no / He’s not a rebel no-no-no, to me”), was so catchy that the Crystals’ tie-in was forgotten. “That had kinda faded out of my mind,” Pitney said. “The first time Phil heard it was when he came by looking for material. But Phil did always get the A material. For most A&R guys, or guys like a Stan Shulman, Aaron would pull out the C material, fair stuff you’d say was great, or if a guy didn’t know what he was after he might take. Phil always knew what he wanted. He’d come in and say, ‘Don’t play me the crap.’ He’d listen to maybe eight songs and he’d know right away if something was there.

  “The minute he heard ‘Rebel,’ his eyes lit up. He was still with Liberty and that’s when the fun began. He may have been there on a fishing trip for Liberty, but he knew he was gonna cut it himself. And Aaron used to give people exclusives on songs. He’d say, ‘Exclusive, you got it, I won’t show this to anybody’—but then when the guy was out the door he’d give exclusives to everybody.”

  Knowing Schroeder’s method full well, Spector took no chances. As soon as he got “He’s a Rebel,” he was gone from Liberty and on his way to Gold Star to make the record of his life. “That was so Phil Spector, going through all that to do one session,” Gene Pitney mused. “But he knew what he had in his hand, and I think he would’ve gone through anything to get that onto a disc.”

  “All I knew was that he had to go to Gold Star right away,” Annette Merar remembered. “He didn’t say why, he just knew he had to make that record there.”

  One specific reason for the shift of scenery were the problems Phil had been having with the musicians’ union in New York, the American Federation of Musicians Local 82, concerning his known use of overdubbing; although the technique was becoming commonplace, union leadership was resisting it on grounds that no session should be without a working quorum of musicians, and full acceptance was still years away. Similar resistance existed in L.A., but there monitoring was less likely due to the city’s size. In New York, studios rubbed elbows along Broadway, and the chance that a union snoop could walk in while he was cutting just strings or vocals put Phil under minor but growing duress. “He would have to be surreptitious about it,” recalled Michael Spencer, who was married now and still booking and playing on Phil’s New York sessions. “We would do vocal tracks but wouldn’t use them. He’d come back at 2 A.M. with the girls to put the real vocals on. It was a hassle. He would tell me that the union was driving him out of town.”

  If so, he did not need to be pushed far. Already making demos at Gold Star, Spector was constantly aware that his two biggest hits had been made there, in Studio A, a room he still adored for its acoustics and echo chambers. He never considered moving out of New York—there was no change in the centralization of the music industry, and the sway he had now in the big city was an ongoing high—but “He’s a Rebel” had to be cut in Studio A.

  “He called me and said to get a band together in a matter of days,” recalled Steve Douglas, who had booked several Spector dates in L.A. Douglas, the saxophone player Phil had once begged to jam with in West Hollywood, was more and more becoming a product of Spector’s domain. After Douglas booked some Paris Sisters sessions, Lester Sill signed him to a production deal. Cutting his own records on the Philles label in early 1962, Sill produced two instrumentals under the name of Steve Douglas and His Merry Men, the A side a version of the Bridge on the River Kwai movie theme song.

  Phil went out on such short notice that he not only didn’t wait for Stan Ross to return from a Hawaiian vacation, he didn’t wait for the Crystals, whose record this was to be. At first, when the Crystals refused to make the trip because they didn’t want to fly, Phil looked frantically to alternatives. “I’m comin’ out there and those son of a bitches won’t come out. I gotta get some girls,” he told Lester over the phone. Sill was nonplussed. There was a wealth of black soul singers around L.A. One group, a trio called the Blossoms, were very hot background singers; they were the chorale on Ed Townsend’s “For Your Love” and Sam Cooke’s “Everybody Likes to Cha-Cha-Cha,” and Sill had used them as the “Rebelettes” on Duane Eddy’s “Dance with the Guitar Man.” They weren’t teenagers but they were versatile enough to pass.

  “Phil, I’m tellin’ you,” Lester assured him, “with the song that we got, these girls are better than the Crystals. They’re adults; you can bend them and do what you want with ’em.”

  Legally, Spector and Sill could use proxies, since Philles owned the Crystals name. If a moral issue was involved, Spector in particular was undisturbed. “Phil thought of everybody he worked with as his puppet,” Annette believed. “He was immoral or amoral about things like that. He did connect with me on a human level, but except for me he didn’t like people at all. He treated people like shit.”

  Phil also had to be reassured about a new engineer. When he booked the studio time, Stan Ross said he might not be in town then. Agitated, Phil asked him, “Who’s been working for you?”

  “I got Larry,” Stan said.

  “Who the hell is Larry?” Phil raged.

  “You know Larry. Larry Levine. He’s my cousin. He works here.”

  A year older than Ross, Larry Levine had worked at Gold Star since the mid-fifties, and he engineered Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” and Toni Fischer’s “The Big Hurt.” On the latter, Levine—by accident, as was generally the case with engineering trickery—helped establish a milestone in overdubbing; layering a copy of the tape over the original at a slightly different speed, it caused an in-and-out “phasing” effect that Levine wanted to redo but later came to characterize the record. Levine had also done vocal overdubbing similar to Spector’s, with the Pied Pipers. Yet as much as Spector was at Gold Star, he and Levine had not met, and for Levine that was intentional. “From what I saw of Phil, I didn’t like him,” he said. “He just seemed like a spoiled brat, and this was when he was coming in with the Teddy Bears. His personality was so grating. It’s apropos, ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him,’ because without knowing him, there’s no way to love him. As a mild acquaintance, he’s totally abrasive.”

  To calm Phil, Stan lied that he’d see if he could get back for the date, but at the July 13 session for “He’s a Rebel,” the engineer was Larry Levine.

  Except for Howard Roberts and Ray Pohlman, most of the musicians that Steve Douglas came in with on short notice that day had not worked a Spector session before. Phil, more and more stuck on the concept of bigness as hi
s rock-and-roll mother lode, wanted to double up on the basic rhythm, thus Roberts was paired with guitarist Tommy Tedesco, Pohlman with bassist Jimmy Bond—and the request for a second bass bewildered Douglas. “Two bass players was ridiculous,” he thought. “Nobody used two bass players.” Two other new pieces were pianist Al DeLory and drummer Hal Blaine, and Blaine had to rush in off a road tour he had been on with singer Peggy Lee. Phil did not want to be caught that cold with the vocalists; in addition to Blossoms Darlene Wright, Fanita James, and Gloria Jones, he had brought with him a girlish-sounding voice that he knew: Bobby Sheen.

  The arrangement that Phil dictated to Jack Nitzsche was, as ever, threadbare, and Larry Levine, like others before him, had to get used to Spector’s grueling balancing and feeling-out procedure—which, with more instruments, was even more tedious and brutal for the guitar players. “You just didn’t know what was gonna happen until he had his guitars playing,” Levine said. “They’d play the first four bars over and over and he’d have ’em play fifth notes and then change it to sixteenths. He’d start the guitars, add instruments, then take ’em away and start the guitars all over again. Everyone else was waiting for his turn, but the guitars never got a break. Howard Roberts played for hours on end that day, and I remember him saying that his wrist was killing him.”

  “Howard’s fingers were bleeding,” Hal Blaine recalled. “He said, 1 can’t take it anymore.’ ”

  While Gene Pitney intended “He’s a Rebel” to include strings, his stringless demo was so good as it was that Spector cut the song as pure, jazzy-licked blues-rock. The orchestration shook Studio A. Turned loose to improvise much of their parts after hours of antsy waiting around, Al DeLory played an itchy be-bop piano figure from end to end, Hal Blaine played a cascade of stylish drum fills and Douglas a blazing sax solo when the recorder was finally turned on for the actual take. In the booth, Phil listened to the playback at his usual ear-numbing levels—“We just looked at each other, like, how can he hear anything?” said Douglas. “It just sounded like a roar”—knowing he not only had made a great record, he found something indefinable in the synergy of a big band, Gold Star’s acoustics and his own perfectionism: a large sound that hung together in one piece, with no drops or drifts or wasted echoes. A sound that would pour out of a transistor radio like cake batter.

  “We all knew we were listening to something different,” Douglas said. “I remember how excited Phil was, he was glowing. We all were, but Phil was so happy with the band, and especially with Hal Blaine. He just fell in love with Hal.”

  A dissenter in the midst of the love-fest was Howard Roberts. He had decided that he’d had enough of Phil Spector.

  “You have to understand that the guitars were primitive and rough to play then,” Roberts said. “A twelve-string guitar had a huge neck and you had five hundred pounds of pressure on the strings. And the kind of thing Phil was into was to let all the chords ring as long as possible. You’d never take your hand off the fingerboard, just keep it down under maximum pressure. When we’d play a thing through, my hand would be about to fall off.”

  As bad as the physical pain, Roberts still found little challenge for a top jazzman in Spector’s method. Unable to peer into Phil’s mind of musical subtlety, and as much as Phil believed jazz players would give simple white chords a jazz varnish, it was still just rock and roll to Roberts. “If there is ever a decline in Western civilization, that period of music will be high on the list of causes. After coming out of a period of Jerome Kern and like that, it was like being thrown back to the dark ages to play stuff I played when I was eight years old.

  “I would come to a Phil Spector date after having been at Twentieth Century-Fox with Alfred Newman or Hugo Friedhofer, playing with some of the world’s great orchestras. There, you’d walk in and see music that was virtually impossible to play at first glance—and you played it perfectly the first time. Those people knew not to overwork the orchestra, because stress produces mistakes. Once you’ve mastered something, the worst thing is repetition. But Phil was using repetition, it seemed to me, to get his piece figured out.”

  Then there was Spector himself. The polite fifteen-year-old who sat in Roberts’s living room was now “aloof, very distant, there was no more closeness. Phil slipped into that Never-Never Land of Hollywood success and really strange weirdness, and I never saw him again after that. Even when I was seeing him, I couldn’t see him.”

  When Phil first heard Darlene Wright sing, he forgot about Barbara Alston and the real Crystals. Toothsome and with hair dyed bright orange, Wright at twenty-four years of age sang the “Rebel” lead as a convincing teenager, smug and sarcastic, but her gospel-oriented vivacity humanized and broadened the pubescent aspect of the lyric. Wright’s was a loud, powerful voice, and if she lacked heartfelt romantic emotion and wasn’t suited to love ballads, she could do anything else. The daughter of a Pentecostal minister, she was singing in a church wedding when Fanita James heard her and began using her as the lead singer of the Blossoms, who had been found and originally managed by Johnny Otis. The group recorded for Capitol from 1958 to 1961, then on Challenge and Okeh before making their mark as a background unit. Given $3,000 to do the “Rebel” lead that she thought of as nothing more than bubble-gum music, Darlene split the money with Fanita, continuing a practice she had started with the Blossoms. Fanita, with Gloria Jones and Bobby Sheen, had received a standard session fee. The session done, Wright doubted if she would ever see the little sprite producer again.

  Only weeks later, she and Sheen signed personal services contracts with Philles Records.

  With the tapes of “He’s a Rebel,” Spector and Sill rushed out of Gold Star to the well-equipped United-Western Sound Studios to make the master of the song. As they worked in United’s Studio A, musicians on a break from a session in Studio B drifted out into the hall. “One by one they came in and heard our record. They said, ‘Hey, man, we were just playing the same goddamn song!’ ” Lester Sill remembered.

  Sill and Spector stiffened in surprise when they heard this. Aaron Schroeder had indeed given a second “exclusive” on “He’s a Rebel”—and it went to none other than Snuff Garrett and Liberty Records. Garrett, in Studio B, was cutting the tune with soft-pop singer Vikki Carr.

  “By the time Snuff finished recording, our master was in the bath and done,” Sill said. “I heard his record and I said to Snuff, ‘You don’t have a chance.’ ”

  Garrett was purple-faced, incensed not at Phil as much as he was at Schroeder. “Aaron screwed us on the song, and I stopped doing business with him for a while after that,” Garrett related. “I wouldn’t have done that to Spec for anything, and I don’t think he would’ve done it to me intentionally. That’s not the way it played between us. I didn’t know he had the song and I don’t think he knew I had it—or else he knew I had it because Schroeder tipped him and he went and cut it. I wouldn’t blame him for runnin’ with it.”

  Learning about Garrett’s record, Phil issued a terse order to Lester’s stepson, Chuck Kaye, who had been recently put to work doing promotion for Philles.

  “Bury it,” he told Chuck.

  Pitching the Crystals’ version of “He’s a Rebel”—hardly a difficult chore to begin with given that a Phil Spector record was now like a gold doubloon—Chuck found himself pitted against longtime Liberty promotion man Tommy LiPuma. “Tommy had a gimpy leg,” Kaye recalled, “and we were both outside the building where KFWB was with our records. I got ours played first solely because I could beat him up the stairs.” Chuck was young and green, but he had been taught the tricks of record hustling by the best, his father, one of the first rock-and-roll song-pluggers. Snuff Garrett found out how sly Chuck Kaye was.

  “The thing that made me maddest out of the whole thing,” Garrett said, “was not Spec or anybody else but Lester Sill’s son out on the road and tellin’ everybody that I went in and ‘covered’ that song. Because that was a fuckin’ lie. I never knew anybody else had the son
g, but he was out there hawkin’ the deejays and sayin’ how the big giant Liberty was covering the little bitty Philles.”

  With the Crystals’ record on the market first, Liberty tried to retrench by taking out huge ads in the trade papers heralding the Vikki Carr record as “The Original! The Hit!” However, when both records were on playlists, Snuff Garrett’s plight was pitiable, framed by the serious mismatch he faced in Spector’s finest work to date. “Ours crashed and burned on takeoff,” Garrett remembered mournfully.

  Phil could fully anticipate a hit with “Rebel,” and it was released even though “He Hit Me,” out only a couple of weeks, was just beginning to make a move. However, “He Hit Me” quickly became Philles’ first misstep. Although it was played freely by stations all over the country at the beginning, some major station chains and national networks—with outlets in most big cities—were getting mail protesting the all-too-stark imagery of male violence against women. Spector and Sill knew this kind of publicity could not help Philles, and with “He Hit Me” just outside the Top 100, they yanked it off the market and recalled thousands of copies from store shelves before a large storm could ferment. Now “He’s a Rebel” became doubly important, and because it would no longer have to compete with another Crystals record, Phil and a grateful Lester barely blinked at the loss of “He Hit Me.” “Rebel” would be big.

  However, just as exciting to Phil as individual records now was that incredible sound he’d unearthed at Gold Star. He returned to Studio A a month later, after picking a song he could get crazy with in that studio, something that could really take off with that monster block of alloyed rhythm. Phil by passed all the usual song sources for it—Kirshner, Schroeder, even Mother Bertha. Instead, he went to Walt Disney for “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” from the 1946 Disney movie Song of the South. “The memory of that song is so strong to me,” Annette said. “It was at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and I can still see Phil working on it, expanding it. He was fooling around on the guitar and the song popped into his head. He played the riff and said, I’m gonna make this a hit,’ and before I knew it, it was a record. He did that all the time, and whenever he did it was like every man’s dream come true, to have an idea and then create something with it.”