by Mick Brown
Turning the dial of his radio in his bedroom, the young Phil Spector would have heard all of these and more. But his favorite station was KGFJ, the home of a disc jockey named Hunter Hancock. Hunter was an anomaly, a white disc jockey who had begun playing what were then still known as “race records” in the late ’40s, and who by the early ’50s had been voted the most popular disc jockey among black listeners in Los Angeles. Hancock was to be Spector’s introduction to the big-voiced blues shouters, piano pumpers and guitar tyros, like Amos Milburn, Fats Domino and Lowell Fulson, and also to jazz.
The guitar became Spector’s entrée to the social world of the school yard, and he would entertain friends during school breaks, vamping on hits of the day. Annette Merar, who would later become his first wife, remembers Spector reminiscing about just one such school yard session. “He was trying to learn a Dean Martin song, so he would just think it, bending his fingers around the neck of the guitar, faking it, but with enthusiasm. Everybody else was just singing along, and they never realized he had no idea what he was doing. Phil just thought that was hilarious.”
Spector’s passion for music was shared by another friend, Marshall Lieb, whom he had first met at John Burroughs. The son of a car dealer, Lieb could not have been more different from Spector. He was tall, dark and handsome, socially accomplished, popular with girls. He took Spector under his wing. The constant feuding with his mother and sister had given Spector a hair-trigger temper and a fast mouth, and on more than one occasion Lieb had to step in to prevent his friend being given a beating. “Phil was rather mischievous in high school—with me alongside him,” Lieb would later recall to the writer Rob Finnis. “He’d have a rather big mouth, and he’d get himself in trouble sometimes, and he always knew he could turn to me and I would help him out…and I helped him many times.” Lieb would be playing much the same role a few years later when the pair toured as the Teddy Bears. “[Phil] wouldn’t take any guff, by the same token he wasn’t very strong, he didn’t have that much power to hurt anyone, yet he felt he had to, so as soon as words came into fighting, that’s when I tried to cool it.”
Together, the two boys took guitar lessons with a sometime session guitarist named Burdell Mathis, who had a small studio around the corner from Wallich’s Music City on Sunset Boulevard. For a while, Spector also took lessons from another session guitarist, Howard Roberts. But he was so shy that he refused even to take his guitar out of its case, simply watching as Roberts demonstrated his moves, before rushing home to practice what he had seen.
On Phil’s fifteenth birthday, Bertha and Shirley took him to see Ella Fitzgerald performing a concert in Hollywood. Playing in her backing group was the guitarist Barney Kessel, and Spector watched transfixed as his fingers flew effortlessly over the frets. Born in Oklahoma in 1923, Kessel was a child prodigy who had left home at fourteen to go on the road, playing with big bands, including those of Charlie Barnett and Benny Goodman. He went on to play with Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson, and with the paragons of the West Coast “cool school,” Chet Baker and Art Pepper, as well as recording a number of acclaimed albums under his own name. He was also one of the most respected session guitarists in Los Angeles. It was Kessel who provided the exquisite guitar accompaniment on Julie London’s 1955 hit “Cry Me a River.”
Phil had found a new hero. He collected every Kessel recording he could find, and in an act of homage pinned a photograph of the guitarist on his bedroom wall, alongside the pictures of Albert Einstein and Abraham Lincoln. (When Kessel died in 2004, Spector would describe him to one friend as “the Quintessential. The greatest musician I’ve ever known; the greatest guitarist that ever lived—well ahead of Segovia whom many, wrongfully, think was the greatest.”)
So impassioned was Spector about Kessel’s playing that when the jazz magazine Down Beat ran an interview with Sal Salvador, the guitarist in the Stan Kenton band, in which Salvador singled out his favorite guitarists but omitted to mention Kessel’s name, Spector wrote a letter in defense of his hero, saying he was “a little disappointed that when naming his favorite guitarists Salvador left out the name of Barney Kessel, who in my opinion holds the title of the greatest guitarist…Sure wish you would ease my pain and have a story about Barney in one of your future issues.”
The letter appeared as the lead on the magazine’s letters page in the issue dated November 14, 1956, and its publication not only thrilled Spector, but also inspired his sister Shirley to act on his behalf. Tracking down Barney Kessel at the Contemporary recording studios in Hollywood, she explained that it was her younger brother who had written the letter to Down Beat, that he worshiped the guitarist and dreamed of following in his footsteps; would Kessel meet him to pass on some advice? Astonished to learn that the correspondent who had championed him so eloquently in Down Beat was just fifteen years old, Kessel readily agreed.
A few days later Phil, Bertha and Shirley presented themselves at Du-par’s, a coffee shop on Vine Street, close by the Capitol Records building and much favored by musicians on a break from recording sessions, where Kessel was waiting. Spector spent most of the meeting dumbstruck in the presence of his idol, while his mother and sister belabored Kessel with questions about their son’s career prospects in the music industry.
Kessel offered some surprising advice. It was one thing to love jazz and to play it, he told them, but he would not recommend a career as a jazz musician. Phillip should look at the big picture. Fashions in music were cyclical, and jazz was on the downswing; it was rock and roll that people wanted to listen to now. If Phillip wanted to make a career in music he should be thinking of becoming a songwriter or a record producer. (Kessel was true to his own advice; as well as working as a guitarist and bandleader, at the time of meeting Spector he was also working as a vice president for Verve Records, where he produced recordings by Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. Shortly after meeting Spector, Kessel would take Ricky Nelson, the sixteen-year-old star of the television program The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and produce his first record, a cover version of Fats Domino’s “I’m Walkin’,” which went on to sell more than one million copies. Kessel would go on to perform on countless pop sessions for artists including Elvis Presley and the Beach Boys, as well as working with Spector himself.)
Kessel was obviously impressed by Spector’s determination and ability. As further encouragement, he offered to give his young admirer some guitar lessons and advice on writing songs. According to his son David, Kessel even joined Spector recording a couple of songs at Wallich’s Music City, which provided booths where aspirant musicians could record and cut acetates. “My dad was doing all these heavy jazz sessions, winning Playboy and Down Beat jazz polls, and he takes time out to make a rock and roll record for free for some kid because he believes in him. Barney could see early on that Phil had something special about him.”
In the music room at Fairfax, Spector made another friendship, with a classically trained pianist named Michael Spencer, who played piano for the school choir. Spencer was a year older, and his first impression of Spector was of a “birdy guy—a little twerp,” who under normal circumstances he would never have paid much attention to. But when he heard Spector play guitar he quickly revised his opinion. “Phillip was very quiet, very sensitive, a little mouse-like creature without a lot of confidence—but when he was playing music, he had a tremendous aggression.” Spencer, whose father was an accountant, lived in a large house on Highland Avenue, in a particularly affluent area of West Hollywood. Spector became a regular visitor to the home, and the two boys would sit for hours, improvising together on jazz and pop standards and poring over the family’s large collection of albums of jazz, classical music and show tunes. Spector was particularly impressed by his friend’s knowledge of classical music and would listen enthralled as Spencer expounded on the symphonies of Wagner and Sibelius.
While Spector never talked about his own home life, Spencer sensed that these sessions were a welcome escape from the stifling att
entions of his mother and sister. Bertha would invariably drive him on his visits to Spencer’s home. “Then either she would call to say she was coming to collect him, or she’d just show up, because Harvey was quote ‘sick with asthma,’” Spencer remembers. “She was hypochondriacal about Harvey and his asthma. But I never saw him have an asthma attack.”
On one occasion, Bertha arrived with Shirley, and Spencer invited them inside. It was the first time he had seen the three members of the family together. “And it was like birds in a cage. Shirley, highly strung with this high-pitched voice, squeaking away at Harvey; and Harvey squeaking away at her, both of them walking this way and that. It was so intense. It was fascinating to watch this family unit.”
When Spector was sixteen, Shirley left home and moved into an apartment of her own nearby. Phil and Bertha moved to a smaller apartment, on the first floor of a Spanish-style apartment building at 726 North Hayworth Avenue, two blocks west of Fairfax Avenue. Bertha had given up her job as a seamstress and found work as a bookkeeper. The work was less arduous; the pay, better. But her improving circumstances did nothing to alleviate the strained relations between mother and son, and the pair bickered constantly. Whatever the starting point of the arguments—school grades, money, Phil’s “unsuitable” friends—they would inevitably progress to the family’s festering sore, the death of Ben. “Phil would be berated with that,” one friend remembers. “Bertha would say, ‘Your father killed himself because you were a bad child.’ And then he would say, ‘Daddy killed himself because of you.’ Your mother tells you this, you attack back with that. They would just attack each other all the time. There’s a reason for everything, and with Phil the reason he’s the way he is is all to do with his immediate family.”
Spector was awkward around girls, but by the age of sixteen he had found a steady girlfriend named Donna Kass. His first attempts to woo her had unfortunate results. When Donna wanted to get out of a class, Phil wrote a note, forged the name of a teacher, and handed it in personally. The teacher looked at the note and asked Phil, “Do you know who I am?” It was his name that Phil had forged.
Kass was a year younger than Spector, timorous and shy. He was her first boyfriend, and she seemed to see in him qualities that others had missed. Phil, she told the writer Mark Ribowsky, was “not a handsome guy, not at all. He was very pale and had no chin. Not real masculine.” But behind the unprepossessing appearance and the quirky manner, Kass thought, lay a “great personality” and a “brilliant” mind. “God, he was brilliant,” she told Ribowsky. “He was a great historian—he knew everything about Lincoln…Phil was just so different from anybody else. He was not the run-of-the-mill kid.”
When Donna asked about his father, Phil told her the same thing he told most people—that Ben had died of a heart attack, and when she learned from a friend that Ben had actually killed himself, she warmed to Phil even more, understanding his insecurities.
Establishing a pattern that would characterize his relationships with women for the rest of his life, Spector became intensively possessive of Donna, interrogating her on her movements and sometimes tracking her down on the telephone if she went off with other friends without telling him. Donna thought that Phil’s behavior was a mirror of Bertha’s suffocating possessiveness. Clearly anxious to keep her away from his mother, Phil would seldom invite Donna to his home, and whenever he visited her it would not be long before Bertha would be on the telephone, asking when he was coming home.
To Donna, it was as if Bertha and Shirley saw her as a rival for Phil’s affections who was trying to “steal” him away from them. “I always felt they were in love with him or something. They treated him like he was a god. They protected him, and they wanted to protect him from me.”
Donna was probably unaware of Bertha’s hypochondriacal anxieties over her son’s health, and Phil never mentioned it. But the issue would surface from time to time nonetheless. Donna’s best friend was Annette Kleinbard, who was still a junior high school student at Louis Pasteur School. One night Donna and Spector were on a double date with Annette and her boyfriend, George, and parked up in a quiet spot in the nearby Hollywood Hills, known among the local teenagers as Pussy Hollow.
“Donna and Phil were in the backseat, and I was in the front with George with his arm around me,” Annette remembers. “And all of a sudden I could hear this heavy breathing in the back. Now, I was a virgin, and I assumed that Donna was too. And I was beside myself because the sounds were getting louder and louder and George was trying to get more romantic, and we were both listening to this incredible heavy breathing that was getting more and more passionate. And suddenly I heard Phil’s voice from the back: ‘I’ve got to get out of here, I’m having an asthma attack.’ It wasn’t heavy petting at all. We’d parked up in some weeds.”
Money had always been tight in the Spector household, with little available for luxuries. Ron Milstein’s parents would sometimes give him the money to buy dinner at Norm’s cafeteria on La Cienega. “Phil would come with me with a brown bag and ask the waitress for a glass of water, a toothpick and napkins, all kinds of other things and never buy anything.”
For a while he worked after school as a busboy at Canter’s, and then as a page at the CBS studios where I Love Lucy was filmed, showing the audience to their seats and running errands. (A huge fan of Lucille Ball, in 1966 he wrote the theme song for a television special, Lucy Goes to London, which was performed by the Dave Clark Five.) Bertha added to the money he had saved and bought him a secondhand Chevrolet Impala. The car was Spector’s pride and joy. On Friday nights he would drive to Dolores, the drive-in restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard, where waitresses delivered the food on roller skates, and which was packed with the scene makers from Fairfax. Spector would park on the edges and lounge against his car, hoping to be noticed, never quite part of the crowd.
Among his schoolmates, opinions of Spector differed wildly; those who were unaware of his musical talent, or indifferent to it, dismissed him as “a doofus,” a “nebbish,” a runt. Those who had heard him play tended to hold a very different view. As Spector’s confidence in his abilities grew, so too did his circle of friends and acquaintances. With Marshall Lieb he was admitted into a Fairfax High social club called the Barons, and would often join a group of friends that included Ron Milstein and a boy named Harvey Goldstein in impromptu music sessions, practicing harmonies on the doo-wop and pop songs of the day. Milstein noticed how Spector increasingly took command of these sessions. “Phil was definitely the leader in that respect. He would sing all the different parts, showing us what he wanted us to do.” He had now acquired a hollow-bodied Gibson guitar, similar to the one played by his hero Barney Kessel, and Milstein remembers how he would impress everybody by unleashing a flurry of dazzling guitar licks. “He called it ‘doing a Barney.’” Milstein fancied that Spector “had thoughts of being someone special, but in high school there was no way for that specialness to come out.” For now, he was just a confused mixture of budding brilliance, frustration and anger.
With Lieb and Michael Spencer he would sometimes play at house parties and weddings. Spencer too admired Spector’s growing abilities as a guitarist, but noticed how easily his temper could be triggered: “We’d be playing some party or frat house, and maybe someone was giving him looks, or acting weird, and it would be: ‘What are you looking at?’ He’d want to take on some of these guys, and you’d have to step in to quiet things down. My guess is there was liquor in the formula, because at frat houses there was always a lot of liquor going on, and Phil could never hold his drink. He was not an easy one to take around.” They would often run into another group playing the same circuit, the Sleepwalkers, made up of students from the neighboring University High: the singer Kim Fowley, Dave Shostak, who played sax, Bruce Johnston, who played keyboards, and the drummer Sandy Nelson. Spector would sometimes sit in with the group on guitar.
“We were playing bar mitzvahs at the Brentwood Temple, house parties—the
Jewish kids would have their chaperone dances, and the Catholic kids would have theirs—it was all dogshit,” Kim Fowley remembers. “In between times we’d be stealing golf clubs. We’d chase ambulances and fire engines, and when some rich guy’s house went up in flames we’d go for the golf clubs because we could sell them in the ghetto. Black people wanted to play golf in the ’50s. We’d go down to the black neighborhood, and all the other thieves would be there with the toasters and waffle irons.
“The bass players were always wandering in and out, and the guitar players were always the hardest to get. So Phil Spector would come by and play sometimes. But he was just a guy who knew the songs that everybody else knew. He didn’t make an impression. Give him ten bucks, or don’t give him anything so we can have more.”
Bruce Johnston, who would later go on to join the Beach Boys, has a slightly different recollection: “Phil talked a little funny—like a more masculine Pee-wee Herman. And he’d pull faces, like a little grimace now and then, which was kind of strange. But he was light-years ahead of any other teenage guitar player around. Our whole thing was wishing we sounded like the radio, and Phil’s guitar playing did that, and it certainly didn’t hurt with meeting girls and all that teenage stuff. I remember playing someone’s house in Brentwood and Phil, who definitely didn’t have movie-idol looks, with all the girls sitting by him as he played, because he had that radio sound. I remember that because they weren’t sitting around me.”
Occasionally too Spector would play in a scratch group led by a sax player named Steve Douglas, who had been two years ahead of Phil at Fairfax. Douglas’s group was managed, after a fashion, by Spector’s sister Shirley, who still harbored her own dreams of being a singer, while working full-time as a secretary. Shirley affected a kind of brittle glamour, wearing her peroxide-blond hair in the style of Lana Turner and blowing plumes of cigarette smoke out of the side of her mouth. “She was a real nervous, speedy little chick, who didn’t know how to stop talking,” Douglas remembered. “Phil would always show up late to rehearsal, or not show up at all, but he was a hell of a guitar player.”