by Mick Brown
With the proceeds from “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” Spector bought his first sports car, a metallic blue Corvette. Late at night, he would drive to Castle’s house in the Valley, tap on her bedroom window and climb in and sit on the end of her bed, playing songs for her on his guitar. “Sweet, sweet songs,” Lynn says. “I was absolutely crazy about him.”
The idyllic mood was somewhat dissipated on the rare occasions when she would visit him at the apartment on Hayworth, to be greeted at the door by Bertha with an arctic glare. Nowadays Bertha was often to be found in Wallich’s Music City, demanding to know exactly how many copies of the Teddy Bears record they had sold. And she continued to exercise an iron grip on her son’s life. “I was definitely not welcome around Bertha,” Lynn says. “The most I can remember is being at the door. I don’t even know if I ever got to go in. I don’t think anyone was good enough for her son. Bertha ran Phil.”
The Teddy Bears’ new home, Imperial, was known primarily as an RB label. Its owner, Lew Chudd, had built Imperial’s fortunes by tapping into the rich vein of talent in New Orleans largely overlooked by other companies. His major discovery was the exuberant Fats Domino—one of Spector’s heroes—who enjoyed a string of hits in what was known as “the race market” until crossing over into the pop charts in 1955 with “Ain’t That a Shame.” Chudd’s next big success came with Ricky Nelson—whom Spector’s mentor Barney Kessel produced for Verve. Nelson enjoyed a huge hit with a cover version of Fats Domino’s “I’m Walkin’.” But by a strange oversight, Verve had neglected to tie Nelson to a contract, and Chudd quickly signed him to Imperial. Chudd was a pushy, abrasive man who employed a novel approach to keeping abreast of teenage trends. “He’d come down to Hollywood High and take the kids to lunch,” Kim Fowley remembers, “have a burger and fries and listen to what they talked about and what they played on the jukebox. He was the old man in the corner; he looked like a guy working in a tailor’s shop. He ran his whole business based around his lunch.”
With the Teddy Bears hit still lingering in the charts, Chudd hurried the group back into the studio to begin work on an album. Lew Bedell had exacted his revenge, using his influence to make Gold Star unavailable. Instead, Spector found himself in unfamiliar surroundings, at Master Sound Studios. For the first time he also had the benefit of experienced session musicians at his disposal, including the bass player Red Callender and the drummer Earl Palmer.
Spector had written a handful of new songs, and in line with the conventional wisdom of the day Chudd decreed that the remainder of the album should be filled out with a grab bag of standards, including a Jerome Kern and George Gershwin song, “Long Ago and Far Away,” and the old chestnut, “Unchained Melody,” chosen to demonstrate the group’s versatility and broad appeal.
But as the sessions wore on Chudd found himself experiencing much the same frustration that Bedell and Newman had felt watching Spector at work at Gold Star. After two weeks of positioning mikes, moving the group and musicians around the studio to capture the right sound and experimenting with echo, he had recorded only six of the required twelve tracks. Beyond impatience, Chudd called in his house arranger and producer Jimmie Haskell and instructed him to complete the album in one day.
“In those days the musicians’ union allowed us to record a maximum of six songs in three hours,” Haskell remembers. “Chudd said, ‘I’ve got the session booked for tomorrow; call the musicians and finish up the other six sides.’” Whatever reservations Spector might have felt about being so brusquely pushed aside, he kept to himself. “Chudd was tough,” Haskell says. “Regardless of how forceful Phil could be as he got older, Chudd would have overwhelmed him. He loved to be talked back to, but nobody had the guts to do it.”
Haskell was given the songs, wrote the arrangements overnight and convened in the studio next day with the group and musicians. The six tracks were dispatched inside the requisite three hours. “But I can tell you this about those sides. They were somewhat on the sterile side. Phil took the time to get a certain sound, and when you do six songs in three hours you get a sterile sound. It can work, and when you have a good vocal on top of it you can have a hit record—but not this time.”
Nor was it altogether Haskell’s fault. Spector’s new songs were largely derivations of a formula established with “To Know Him,” but none achieved anywhere near that song’s heart-stopping effect. Released as a single, “Oh Why”—the song that had already been rejected by Lew Bedell—reached only number 98. And The Teddy Bears Sing would quickly vanish without trace.
The album’s most enduring legacy is the cover art—an unintended masterpiece of high kitsch, which shows Lieb and Spector, dressed in their sweaters stitched by Bertha, handing stuffed teddy bears to Kleinbard, who affects an expression of theatrical “Who, me?” coyness. According to the album’s liner notes, “Annette, the sixteen-year-old lead voice of the trio is a straight ‘A’ student and had her mind set on psychology as a profession before ‘To Know Him’ hit.” While “Phil’s biggest problem is not to forget the tunes that keep running through his mind. He never steps out of the house without a pencil and notebook. It is not uncommon for him to interrupt a date, dart out of a movie, or wake up in the middle of the night to jot down a new song that pops into his head.
“The Teddy Bears,” the notes went on, “are a good example of how today’s teenagers have a chance to become famous in the record field…In no other field of creative or industrial endeavor can the youngster express himself for so many and reap the lucrative rewards.”
For the members of the group, the words must have seemed bitterly ironic. The contract that the Teddy Bears had originally signed with Era Records entitled the four members of the group to one and a half cents for each record sold. With the sales of “To Know Him Is to Love Him” around 1.4 million, they were theoretically entitled to a grand total of $21,000, split four ways. (Annette Kleinbard remembers her remuneration as “disgusting.”) As the writer of the song, Spector would have been entitled to considerably more. In later years, he would claim that, in all, he was owed some $20,000 on the record but received just $3,000. It was a lesson he would never forget.
By now the group was in a state of terminal decline. Shirley Spector’s behavior was becoming ever more volatile and irrational, what Annette described as her “Jekyll and Hyde” mood swings ever more pronounced, a portent of the mental illness that would soon overwhelm her. When she drew up a contract formalizing her appointment as the group’s manager both Marshall and Annette refused to sign it. Tired of apologizing for Shirley’s behavior, tired of Annette and frustrated over the failure of their recordings, Spector allowed the Teddy Bears to dwindle away. In September 1959, Annette was driving her new MG sports car along a twisting road in the Hollywood Hills when she lost control, plunging into a ravine. She was critically injured, and spent three months in UCLA hospital, undergoing extensive facial surgery. Spector was not among her visitors.
Even as the Teddy Bears were gliding slowly toward extinction, Spector had been casting around for his next move. As part of his Imperial contract, he recorded a guitar instrumental called “Bumbershoot,” and for a brief period led an instrumental group called the Phil Harvey Band, comprised of a loose aggregation of musicians who would gather at Michael Spencer’s home. Spencer’s parents often traveled to Palm Springs at weekends, and his Sunday afternoon gatherings were famous, bringing together musicians, writers, and what passed as bohemia among the Fairfax alumni of West Hollywood, invariably culminating in frantic jam sessions, led by Spencer on the piano. The circle included Steve Douglas, the sax player who had been briefly managed by Shirley Spector; Mike Bermani, who played drums for Duane Eddy; Don Peake, who would go on to play guitar with Ray Charles; another guitarist, Elliot Ingber, who would later play with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention and Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, and the bass player Larry Taylor, later of Canned Heat. The Phil Harvey Band did little else but rehearse, although they did play one
gig at a venue called the Rainbow Roller Rink, appearing on the same bill as Ed “Kookie” Byrnes, who had become a teenage cult hero through his appearance on the hit TV show 77 Sunset Strip. Bruce Johnston was in the audience. “Phil must have had four guitars up there beside himself,” he remembers. “They were tuning their guitars for at least half the set before they played the first song. They played two songs and left the stage.” “Kookie” Byrnes, throwing handfuls of his trademark comb into the audience, got a bigger ovation.
But for Spector the project was a mere dalliance. He had now decided that his future lay not in performing, but in producing. Almost fifty years later, he would cast this decision in characteristically romantic terms. “I wanted to be in the background,” he told me, “but I wanted to be important in the background. I wanted to be the focal point. I knew about Toscanini. I knew that Mozart was more important than his operas. That Beethoven was more important than his music, or whoever was playing it. I knew that the real folk music of America was George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Irving Berlin. Those names were bigger than the music. That’s what I wanted to be.”
Whether the twenty-year-old Spector was really dreaming of being Beethoven or Toscanini is a moot point. But he realized that if he wanted to progress he needed to cultivate more powerful allies, and it was this that led him to the door of one of the best-connected men in the Los Angeles music business, Lester Sill. Sill was a decorated World War II hero—he had fought at the Battle of the Bulge and the Battle of Sorrento—who after the war moved into the record business, working as the sales manager for Modern Records, the Los Angeles RB label, before setting up as an independent talent scout and publisher. His greatest discovery was the team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, whom Sill found as teenagers, and who would go on to write and produce countless hits for such artists as Elvis Presley, the Coasters and the Drifters.
Sill was a short, dapper man, who always dressed in expensive shirts and beautifully cut sports jackets. He had a reputation as a peerless record salesman; one story tells how he would carry sand around in his pocket, ready to throw on the floor and do a sand-dance when a song demanded it. “Lester was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met,” Jerry Leiber remembers. “He was just a happy guy. You saw Lester and it was a good day.” “Lester was a gentleman,” concurs Stan Ross. “He always looked you in the eye when he spoke to you. He wasn’t one of those guys who’s looking around the room for someone else…”
Sill had been around the Master Sound Studios when Spector was working on the Teddy Bears’ album and had taken note of his abilities as a producer, and his precocity. “He looked like he was twelve years old,” Sill would recall. In the spring of 1959, with the Teddy Bears’ album still warm in the racks, Spector found his way to Sill’s office on North Argyle Avenue, where Sill contracted him as a producer and writer.
More than just a mentor, Sill was to become almost a father figure to Spector. Relations with Bertha had by now reached breaking point, and when Spector explained the problem to Lester he invited him to move in to the home in Sherman Oaks where Sill lived with his wife Harriet, his sons Greg and Joel, and his stepson Chuck. Bertha bitterly resented what she construed as Sill’s interference and would never forgive him. Relieved to be free of her controlling influence, Phil instructed the Sills to say that he was out whenever she telephoned.
Sill was in partnership with another writer and producer, named Lee Hazlewood. Together they ran a production company called Gregmark (named after Lester’s son Greg, and Lee’s son Mark). Their biggest act was the guitarist Duane Eddy, whom Hazlewood had discovered while working as a disc jockey in Arizona, and encouraged to play in a deep, twangy style, halfway between country and rock. Eddy’s first recording, “Movin’ N’ Groovin’,” was a minor hit early in 1958 and in July of that year he enjoyed his first Top 10 record, “Rebel Rouser.” Over the next two years he would go on to rack up a further thirteen Top 40 hits.
Eddy’s recordings were released on Jamie Records, the label owned by Universal Distributors in Philadelphia—the same company that had been so instrumental in the success of the Teddy Bears.
Keen for Spector to gain more experience, Sill took him to Phoenix, Arizona, where Hazlewood made all his recordings, in a small, ramshackle studio called Ramco Audio Recorders. Spector sat fascinated, watching as Hazlewood experimented for hours on end with a variety of echoes and tape delay effects to conjure the deep twang that was the trademark of all Eddy’s records. But Hazlewood was also highly protective of his techniques and resented Spector’s endless questions and remarks. “Lee was a country boy,” remembers Stan Ross, “and you have to understand country boys to get along with them. He was the kind of guy who laughs at his own jokes before you do. Lee thought Phil was crazy. They were like fire and ice.” After only a short while, Hazlewood told Sill he didn’t want Spector around anymore.
Spector had meanwhile come up with another idea—if not a particularly original one. While the Teddy Bears themselves had been unable to follow their success with “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” their close-harmony sound had been replicated by a group called the Fleet-woods who enjoyed a Top 10 hit with a song called “Come Softly to Me.” Figuring the formula was worth one more go-round, but contractually prohibited from using the Teddy Bears name, Spector went into the studio to record a handful of songs with a makeshift group that he called Spector’s Three. He was joined by a session singer named Ricki Page, and Russ Titelman, the younger brother of Marshall Lieb’s girlfriend Susan, and one of the group who frequented the jam sessions at Michael Spencer’s home. The Spector’s Three’s first single, “I Really Do”—which bore a strong resemblance to “Come Softly to Me”—was released by Sill and Hazlewood on their own label, Trey, but quickly disappeared.
Titelman was something of a protégé of Spector’s. Three years younger, he had been privy to Spector’s mercurial rise, watching with fascination when the Teddy Bears sometimes rehearsed in the front room of his family home, and in awe as “To Know Him Is to Love Him” made its inexorable progress up the charts. Titelman’s father had died when he was young. “Phil became my role model—him and James Dean.”
Spector encouraged Titelman to take guitar lessons from his old teacher Burdell Mathis, and they would often cruise the streets in Spector’s Corvette with the radio turned up loud. “Phil would point out, that’s one guy playing that part, another guy this part, see how the vocals come in here. That’s pretty much how I learned to listen to records.”
To Titelman, Spector was a “totally commanding” figure. “He was extremely funny, charming and charismatic. But at the same time he was a manipulator of people. Both of those personalities existed at the same time.”
Better than most, Titelman could recognize that Spector’s character had been forged in the crucible of a tempestuous and unhappy home life. On one occasion, visiting Spector at the Hayworth apartment, Titelman watched in astonishment as Bertha chased her son around the apartment, brandishing a kitchen knife. “Phil told me to go downstairs and we ran out of the back door and down the steps. He had his Corvette parked in the alley. We get in, and suddenly Bertha is standing there at the end of the alley with a piece of four-by-two, screaming at the top of her lungs at him. Phil starts inching the car toward her—he just kept on going, and she got out of the way. She didn’t hit the car. I have no idea what they were fighting about.”
Titelman’s girlfriend was a petite and strikingly attractive blonde named Annette Merar. When the Spector’s Three were invited to perform on a local TV program, The Wink Martindale Show, lip-synching to “I Really Do,” Spector asked Annette to appear in place of Ricki Page (Spector replaced himself with a friend of Titelman’s, Warren Entner). Two years younger than Spector, and a student at Fairfax High, Merar was only dimly aware of who Phil Spector was. “It certainly didn’t register that he was on the road to success or was a genius or anything like that.” But Spector was immediately taken with Annette, telling her that s
he was so pretty he wanted her to model for the cover of a forthcoming Spector’s Three album. Annette was duly flattered, but the group, such as it was, had run their course. A second single, “Mr. Robin,” was released with no more success than the first, and the album was never made. Annette shrugged and assumed that was the last she would see of Phil Spector.
His relationship with Lynn Castle was also coming to an end. Lynn had left her parental home and moved into a small apartment in the Valley. She had dreams of becoming a songwriter herself and had struck up a friendship with Lester Sill and his partner Lee Hazlewood. Spector seemed to resent her growing independence and particularly her relationship with Hazlewood. Annette had met Lynn on a couple of occasions with Spector, and could see his infatuation with her. “I think she was really the love of his life. Phil likes women who live life to the full, and Lynn fell into that category, and he was very comfortable around her because of that. He just loved her, loved her, loved her.”
But for Lynn, his jealousy and possessiveness were becoming intolerable.
“His behavior got too frigging crazy, too absolutely crazy. Where are you? What are you doing? What are you thinking? Where are you going? Controlling.”
Occasionally, she would be out shopping or in a coffee shop and Spector would suddenly appear from out of the blue. She began to suspect he was following her.
“I couldn’t understand that at all; it just made me want to run. And I remember saying to Phil, I can’t stand it anymore, because I just felt like I was choking. I mean, who could take anybody constantly…”
Finally, she could take no more and stopped seeing him. For Spector, the end of the relationship seemed to encapsulate the growing disenchantment he was feeling with his life in Los Angeles. Since the success of “To Know Him Is to Love Him” in the winter of 1958, he had recorded a succession of singles and an album, all of which had been, in commercial terms at least, conspicuous failures. In his conversations with Lester Sill, he began to express a desire to try his luck in New York. Sympathetic to his feelings, and reasoning that it would be in his interests too for Spector to gain more experience elsewhere, Sill contacted his old protégés Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and asked whether they could make use of an apprentice. In the spring of 1960 Spector boarded the plane for New York, and a new life.