Tearing Down the Wall of Sound

by Mick Brown

  4

  On Broadway

  Flying over the great heartland of America, which had embraced him, and forgotten him, in the space of eighteen short months, Phil Spector would have pondered long and hard at the prospect of now being apprenticed to two men at the very summit of the New York music business hierarchy, and how closely he seemed to be following in their footsteps.

  Jerry Leiber had first met Lester Sill in 1950, when Sill was working as the sales manager for Modern Records. Leiber was a student at Fairfax High, who after school worked in Norty’s, a local record shop specializing in Jewish music—a white boy who revered black music, selling records by rabbinical cantors. According to Leiber, Sill walked in one day, hawking a new record by the blues singer John Lee Hooker. “I told him, I love the record, but the only thing that sells here is songs for synagogues on high holidays. They will not be buying records by John Lee Hooker.”

  When Leiber told Sill that he wrote blues songs himself, Sill asked him to sing one. Impressed by Leiber’s impromptu performance, Sill offered to help circulate his songs and told Leiber to provide him with some lead sheets. “I had no idea what he was talking about. He said, ‘Those are the sheets where the notes are written down, and under the notes are the words’…”

  Leiber was unable to write music, but shortly afterward he made a serendipitous connection when he was introduced to Mike Stoller, another Jewish boy fatally enamored of black music and already an accomplished jazz pianist. Leiber and Stoller quickly formed a partnership, and with Lester Sill’s help began to make the rounds of what Leiber describes as “the cottage industry” of publishers and independent labels in Los Angeles.

  They were beating a path that Spector would follow just a few years later, working the “music row” around Sunset and Vine peopled with chancers and flimflam men, raw opportunists and rough diamonds. Typical was the music publisher Harry Goodman, brother of the clarinet player Benny—a man, Leiber remembers, who dressed like a Savile Row dandy, spoke “like a Brooklyn butcher” and held court in an office engulfed in the aroma of marijuana fumes.

  “The first time we met him, we went over there and asked, ‘Can we play you some songs, Mr. Goodman?’ And he says, ‘What else do you think I’m here for?’ So Mike, very tentatively, walks over to the piano and sits down and one, two, three…And Harry says, ‘These are the lyrics here?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And then he says, ‘What’s your name?’ And I said, ‘Jerry.’ And he says, ‘Jerry, I’m going to tell you something. That song you just sang is a piece of shit.’ And he’s got a wastepaper basket there and he throws the lyrics in the can. ‘Let’s go on to the next one.’ And he does this five or six times and then finally we get to a song, and he says, ‘This is a real pile of shit—but it’s the kind of shit that I need.’”

  Gradually, Leiber and Stoller began to place their songs with RB artists such as Amos Milburn, Jimmy Witherspoon and Charles Brown. Their first significant hit came with “Hound Dog,” recorded by Big Mama Thornton, which topped the RB charts for seven weeks in 1953. It would also provide the writers with a timely lesson in music business practice. The producer on the session was the local bandleader Johnny Otis. When the record was released, Leiber and Stoller were disconcerted to find that Otis had added his name to the writers’ credits, and mortified when the record company, Duke, stopped payment on a royalty check. Bruised by the experience, Leiber and Stoller set up their own publishing company, Quintet Music, and their own record label, Spark, in partnership with Lester Sill. Their first signing was a local RB group named the Robins, for whom Leiber and Stoller wrote a series of songs—“Riot in Cell Block No. 9,” “Framed” and “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”—which Leiber and Stoller termed “playlets,” vivid narrative songs, performed in a humorous, knockabout style that would become one of the songwriters’ trademarks.

  While only local hits, their work with the Robins brought them to the attention of Atlantic Records in New York. Founded in 1948 by two Turkish-born brothers, Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, Atlantic had established itself as one of the most successful independent RB labels in America. In 1955 Nesuhi Ertegun approached Leiber and Stoller with a proposition: Atlantic should buy out Spark, and Leiber and Stoller move to New York and make records for Atlantic as independent writer-producers—an unheard-of arrangement in the record business at that time. Under the deal, Atlantic would pay for all the sessions and give the pair a 2 percent royalty on sales. Crucially, Leiber and Stoller also insisted that they should receive a label credit as producers on all their work—another unprecedented move. Atlantic quibbled over the use of the word “producers.” “They wanted to call us directors,” Leiber remembers. “They said they were the producers because they put up the money.” But Leiber and Stoller prevailed.

  Their first Atlantic recordings were with established Atlantic artists such as Joe Turner, LaVern Baker and Ruth Brown. For the Coasters—a revamped version of the Robins—the pair crafted a further series of comic “mini operettas,” such as “Yakety Yak,” “Charlie Brown,” “Along Came Jones” and “Little Egypt,” honking vaudevillian RB songs with lyrics that aligned the group firmly on the side of their teenage audience by mocking and ridiculing the adult world, and which Leiber described as “a white kid’s take on a black kid’s take on white society.”

  At the same time, the pair landed an unexpected windfall when, in 1956, Elvis Presley recorded their earlier hit “Hound Dog.” Presley’s version went on to sell 7 million copies, remaining at number 1 on the pop charts for an incredible eleven weeks—still a record for the longest time any record has held the number 1 spot. In addition to their Atlantic work, Leiber and Stoller suddenly found themselves being called upon to provide more songs for Presley as well.

  But perhaps their greatest artistic triumph would come with the Drifters, for whom they crafted a glorious succession of hit singles that would take pop music to new heights of sophistication and polish. Their first hit for the group, “There Goes My Baby,” which reached number 2 in the charts in 1959, is widely credited as being the first RB record to employ strings. It was also the first pop record to employ the subtle Latin American rhythm known as the baion, which put the emphasis on the first, third and fourth beats of the bar (one [two] three-four, one [two] three-four). Not only did the baion become the basis of a succession of Drifters records, from “Save the Last Dance for Me” to “Under the Boardwalk,” but Leiber and Stoller’s combination of subtle rhythms and arrangements, the “cushion” of sound they constructed in their recordings by using two or three guitarists and three or four percussionists, would serve as one of the most important precursors for what Spector later achieved with his Wall of Sound.

  Jerry Leiber was less than enthralled when Lester Sill called him from California to ask whether the pair could find a use for “this talented kid” named Phil Spector who wanted to learn the business. “I said, ‘That’s an invitation to poach our ideas,’” Leiber remembers. “And Lester said, ‘So what?’”

  Sill talked up his young protégé, reminding Leiber about Spector’s early success with the Teddy Bears. “I told him that we didn’t go for that white-bread trash. We wrote for black people—we were race-record makers. But Lester said, ‘Hey, come on. He’s very talented and he would be so grateful’—which is actually not something that you would ever associate with Phil.”

  Nor was Leiber any more impressed when Spector walked through the door of his office at 40 West Fifty-seventh Street.

  To Leiber, Spector cut an odd-looking figure, small and scrawny, with a “furtive” manner, and a disconcerting tic of widening his eyes and then blinking, “as if he was looking not at you, but through you.” Spector gave off what Leiber calls “conflicting signals” one minute quiet and self-effacing—“he’d had a big, big hit, and that gives people a sense of accomplishment and security, but Phil acted like it had never happened”—the next, pushy, with an eye for the main chance and a self-belief beyond his twenty years. Leiber thought Spector
was “a very strange dog.”

  What did impress him, however, was Spector’s talent. Whatever Leiber might have thought of “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” it was obvious that Spector was a promising producer, and—of more immediate use to the producers—a gifted guitarist. “He’d studied with Barney Kessel and he carried that strong jazz-guitar discipline. He was very good.”

  Leiber and Stoller signed him to their company Trio Music on a two-year contract. Lacking funds, for the first few weeks Spector slept on the sofa in their office, his bag and guitar stashed away in the corner, until finding a small apartment of his own.

  Spector had now arrived at the epicenter of the American music business and, while sitting in on sessions with Leiber and Stoller, lost no time in exploring the opportunities to hand.

  At the age of twenty, Spector had landed, in musical terms at least, at the very heart of the world. The great tornado of rock and roll that swept through America in the mid-1950s had blown up largely from the South. The Sun Records studio in Memphis had been the cradle for Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash—the rough-hewn country and rockabilly roots of rock. Little Richard and Ray Charles were from Georgia; Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly from Texas; Fats Domino from New Orleans. There were thriving music scenes in Chicago, Detroit and, of course, Los Angeles, serviced by small, independent labels. But New York remained the heart of the music industry. Most of the Big Six labels had their headquarters here, as did most of the major music publishers, and the two principal performing rights organizations, ASCAP and BMI.

  New York’s burgeoning pop music industry was centered around two neighboring office buildings that housed the music publishers and writers who were the engine of the industry. The Brill Building, located at 1619 Broadway, was a ten-storey art deco block, built in 1931, and named after its first owners the Brill brothers, whose clothing store initially occupied the ground floor. In the 1930s, in the face of deepening economic recession, the Brills started renting out space to music publishers, who found the location convenient for the theaters, nightclubs and vaudeville halls that lined the “Great White Way.” In the 1940s, the Brill Building was celebrated by The New Yorker humorist A. J. Liebling as “The Jollity Building,” where sundry Broadway agents, publishers, songwriters and bandleaders camped out in a rabbit warren of cubicle-sized offices, hustling and scuffling for a break. By 1960 the building housed some ninety music publishers, offering what has been held up as the perfect model of “vertical integration”—a writer could sit in one cubicle, penning a song, sell it to a publisher in the next, hastily record a demo in one of the number of small studios scattered through the building, and then make a deal with a producer hanging around in the lobby. The most prestigious company of all was Hill and Range, owned by two brothers, Jean and Julian Aberbach, which among other things managed the publishing catalogue for Elvis Presley, and occupied a location befitting its station at the top of the music publishing tree in the building’s penthouse suite.

  If the Brill Building was the spiritual heart of Tin Pan Alley, 1650 Broadway, located just a couple of blocks north, was its upstart younger brother, a scruffier block with none of the Brill’s art deco grandeur or raffish show business history. A hive of small publishers, independent record labels and songwriters, its most illustrious occupant was Aldon Music, run by Al Nevins and Don Kirshner, where a formidable team of young writers worked day and night in a series of rabbit warren cubicles, fashioning hits for the pop market.

  Within days of arriving in New York, Spector had set about forging new alliances. At Leiber and Stoller’s office, he met another young aspirant musician and songwriter from Los Angeles named Nino Tempo. A swaggering young Italian-American with Marlon Brando looks, Tempo (born Antonio Lo Tempi) had worked as a child actor and recorded an album of instrumentals (a multi-instrumentalist, his main instrument was the sax), Nino Tempo’s Rock and Roll Beach Party. He and Spector connected immediately, and the friendship was cemented when Jerry Leiber went off on a summer vacation, and invited Spector and Tempo to housesit his midtown brownstone. Over the next couple of months, until Tempo returned to Los Angeles, he and Spector were inseparable.

  “We were as flat broke as you can imagine,” Tempo remembers. “We’d sit there in a diner with two bucks between us, saying, ‘Well, we can afford one coffee and two donuts, or two coffees and one donut.’ Phil was likeable, funny, crazy, wacky, all those things. But you could also tell he was going places. He knew he was good, and it was just a matter of time before everybody else realized it too.”

  Tempo would come to play a significant role in Spector’s career, but Spector forged a more immediately productive friendship over a cup of coffee in a Howard Johnson’s diner on Broadway, when he was introduced to a young songwriter named Beverly Ross. Ross was just seventeen when she wrote “Lollipop” for the Chordettes, which reached number 2 in 1958, and she had recently signed to Hill and Range as a staff writer. “Phil’s eyes lit up when I told him that,” she remembers. “He was very impressed. And I was impressed that he’d written ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him.’ The two of us were kind of looking at each other thinking, Geez, you’re so young and you’ve had a big hit. We hit it off straightaway.”

  Spector, Ross recalls, was “very bright, very funny,” but she sensed that for all his braggadocio and self-confidence, he was actually lonely and a little homesick. “There’s a Yiddish expression my mother used to use —schmalzgrub; it’s a little warm place. So I brought him in to my schmalzgrub.”

  Ross thought Spector was “a great musician” and “a truly brilliant guitar player,” but only a “mediocre” writer. As a team, she believed, they could be greater than the sum of their parts. Together they would sit in Ross’s apartment, working on songs, with the television on and the volume turned down. “Phil would sit there with his guitar and these awful commercials would come on, and he would make up these wild riffs, running up and down the scale to match whatever was on the screen; like, for an electronic carving knife he’d hit some dramatic chord, or say it was an ad for a trouser press—he’d do obbligatos on the guitar that were hysterically funny, dramatizing these ridiculous commercials selling products that no one would ever use. He had a great sense of humor, and he liked a very attentive audience.”

  But her new friend also discerned a deep vein of insecurity. Spector would talk about the early death of his father—he told her that Ben had died of a heart attack—the unhappiness of his childhood, and his insecurities over his size and appearance. Ross quickly came to the conclusion that beneath the veneer of cockiness and wisecracking humor, Spector was actually “filled with self-loathing.”

  He was particularly self-conscious about his hair, which was already beginning to thin and recede. He bought a special electric comb, fitted with a blue light, which was supposed to thicken hair and prevent hair loss, and he would run it through his hair constantly, examining himself in the mirror to see if it was having the desired effect.

  “He would comb his hair and be so nervous and worried, and talk about how attractive this friend was and how handsome that one was, and this friend got on the football team when he was in high school, and he was jealous because he didn’t get this girl or that girl. And I remember thinking, Well, he is short, he doesn’t have big bulging muscles or anything, but he’s witty and funny and he has a lot to offer. But I think he had a terrific rage and anger that he didn’t look like Tarzan. You just had this feeling that he wanted to get even with everybody for his father dying so young and for him not growing up as every girl’s dream.”

  Spector, she remembers, would talk for hours, as if to delay for as long as possible the moment when he would have to be alone. “He’d have you there until four in the morning even though you had to get up at eight. It was like a hypnotic spell. I think we had a tremendous chemistry, and one time when I was over at his place he kissed me and we had a powerful boy-girl reaction to each other. I think he was in love with me, and possibly I
with him. But I never wanted to get romantically involved. You know when you don’t let down your guard because you don’t quite trust someone? And I think Phil was bitter about that too.”

  Ross was not the only connection that Spector was busily cultivating in his first few months in New York. Through Leiber and Stoller he met Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records and Paul Case, the AR manager at Hill and Range. An avuncular man in his mid-forties, Case was a figure of substance in the Brill Building hierarchy, and he quickly took Spector under his wing, introducing him around the wide number of writers and producers on the Hill and Range roster. Foremost among these was Doc Pomus.

  Born in Brooklyn in 1935, Pomus—whose real name was Jerome Felder—had been crippled by polio at the age of six and walked on crutches (he would later be confined to a wheelchair). Like Leiber, Stoller and Spector, he was a Jewish boy who had started an early love affair with black music. As a teenager he sang in jazz clubs, affecting the pseudonym Doc Pomus to allay the suspicions of his middle-class parents, and working with a number of legendary musicians, including Milt Jackson and Horace Silver. In the early ’50s he began writing songs, achieving his first success with “Boogie Woogie Country Girl,” recorded by Big Joe Turner. He wrote “Lonely Avenue,” an RB hit for Ray Charles in 1956, and collaborated with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller on the Coasters’ hit “Young Blood.” But it was not until he teamed up with a younger writer, Mort Shuman, and began pitching songs for the teenage market that Pomus really started to enjoy significant commercial success. Together they wrote across a bewildering variety of styles—rock and roll for Elvis Presley, disposable bubblegum pop for Fabian and Bobby Rydell, “Teenager in Love” for Dion and the Belmonts. In 1959, Pomus and Shuman had ten hits on the Billboard charts—only two fewer than Leiber and Stoller.