Tearing Down the Wall of Sound

by Mick Brown

  Some of their best songs were for the Drifters, writing in a style that Pomus called “Jewish Latin.” Between 1959 and 1961 they provided the Drifters with a string of hits that included “This Magic Moment,” “Sweets for My Sweet” and, most memorably, “Save the Last Dance for Me”—a song that Pomus supposedly scribbled on the back of an invitation to his wedding to an actress, Willi Burke. Pomus was a squat, barrel-chested man with twinkling eyes and a goatee beard, who spoke in a scratchy, high-pitched voice that sounded more black than white, punctuating his every utterance with the universal endearment “babe.” “Everybody loved Doc,” says Jerry Wexler. “If the music business ever had a heart it would be Doc Pomus. He was a very lovable guy, a very cool guy. Super cool. He also was a great songwriter.”

  Spector adored him and would spend as much time with him as possible, listening to his stories and relaying them to other friends in a perfect imitation of Pomus’s rasping hipsterese. He would often tease Pomus about his disability, to the embarrassment and mortification of others who were too polite to mention the obvious, but causing Pomus himself to laugh uproariously. Spector seemed to have a particular dispensation to amuse.

  Pomus and his wife had a house on Long Island, but he spent most of his time at the Hotel Forrest, a short walk from the Brill Building, “a dumpy little place” as Ahmet Ertegun remembered it, frequented by a colorful assortment of Broadway show people, quirks and fly-by-nights, and where Pomus would frequently hold court in the hotel’s Spindletop restaurant. Spector liked to tell the story of how one dinner-date with Pomus was enlivened by a contract hit. “[A] guy in a raincoat walks in with a hat and goes up to a guy and boom boom boom, three times in the head, and the guy slumps over dead, just like that.” Pomus couldn’t understand why Spector was reluctant to eat in the restaurant again. “The place is incredible, right, the salads, I mean how about the service in that restaurant? You have to look on the up side.”

  For his first few months in New York, Spector doggedly played the role of apprentice to Leiber and Stoller, trailing them to the studio and playing guitar on their sessions for the Coasters, the Drifters and LaVern Baker. But in October he finally got his chance at production when John Bienstock at Hill and Range asked Leiber and Stoller to produce “Corrina, Corrina,” a new single for Ray Peterson. An erstwhile country singer who had enjoyed a big hit with the “death song” “Tell Laura I Love Her” the year before, Peterson also had an interest in a label called Dunes, which was a subsidiary of Hill and Range. Busy with other projects, Leiber handed the project on to Spector.

  He shared his excitement at the news with Beverly Ross. Together they had been working on a song called “That’s the Kind of Love I Wish I Had.” Spector told Ross that he would get Peterson to record the song as the B-side, to repay her for all the help she’d given him. But according to Ross, when she suggested that she should accompany Spector to the session, he hedged, giving the excuse that nobody except the artist and musicians were allowed.

  “Corrina, Corrina” had been an RB hit for Big Joe Turner, but Spector’s version had none of the bare-fisted rough and tumble of Turner’s; instead, he gave the song a light, lilting quality, sweetening it with a pizzicato string arrangement that might have been borrowed from a Drifters record. Peterson’s hiccoughing falsetto sounded no different from a dozen other “Bobby” records of the time.

  “Corrina, Corrina” charted in November, rising to number 9, and giving Spector his biggest hit since “To Know Him Is to Love Him” two years earlier. Beverly Ross was impressed when she heard the record; less impressed when she turned it over to discover that Spector had dropped the song they had written together, and that he had promised to record as the B-side. In its place was a song called “Be My Girl,” credited to Spector and “Cory Sands”—in fact, a pseudonym for his sister, Shirley. Spector was clearly extending a helping hand to his troubled sister. But Ross was “devastated and heartbroken—speechless practically. I couldn’t believe he’d done that to me.” But what she regarded as a bigger betrayal was to come.

  Almost from the moment he arrived in New York, Spector had been badgering Jerry Leiber to write a song with him, telling Ross that if Leiber agreed she would be included too. But Leiber had done his best to put Spector off. “I kept saying it would be very difficult because Mike is my partner and I think that he would feel put out if I wrote a song with somebody else. But Phil kept insisting, ‘Come on…it’s just a song.’ So in the end I said, ‘I tell you what; if it’s agreeable with you, I would like to invite Mike along to write it with the two of us and if that happens then I will be happy to write the song with you.’ He said, ‘Sure.’ I don’t know why I was asking him, because he was supposed to be working for me. I didn’t owe anyone an explanation. But Phil could put you on the spot like that.”

  Stoller agreed to the plan and the three men made an appointment to meet at Leiber’s apartment at nine in the evening. Spector arrived at 7:30.

  “He said, ‘Let’s get to work,’ and I said, ‘No, we’ve got to wait for Mike.’” By 9:30, with no sign of Stoller, Spector’s impatience was growing uncontainable, and Leiber agreed to start sketching out some ideas. At 9:45, Stoller called to say he couldn’t make the meeting after all.

  Over dinner, Leiber had been playing some classical recordings, including Ravel’s Rhapsody Espagnole and Debussy’s Iberia. He suggested to Spector they should perhaps write something with a Spanish feel. While Spector sat at the piano, developing a theme, Leiber turned his thoughts to the lyric. Within a couple of hours they had fashioned the rudiments of a masterpiece, “Spanish Harlem,” Spector’s poignant melody perfectly complementing the lyric’s theme of romantic yearning. Later, Mike Stoller would embellish the tune yet further with a naggingly memorable figure of descending triplets, played on marimba in the final recording.

  “Phil was an accomplished musician, but we weren’t talking about musicianship, we were talking about the music business, which is about the songs,” says Leiber. “So I think that he learned a lot by just writing that song with me. By the choices that I made and what I told him to do, shade this and shade that, make this shorter and make that a shade longer, whatever.”

  On October 20, Spector joined Leiber and Stoller in the studio with Ben E. King, the lead vocalist of the Drifters, who had recently left the group after a dispute with their manager to embark on a solo career. Over the course of three hours, King recorded four new songs: two were collaborations by Spector and Doc Pomus—“First Taste of Love” and “Young Boy Blues.” The third was “Spanish Harlem,” and the fourth a song hastily improvised at the end of the session by Leiber, Stoller and King himself, called “Stand by Me.”

  Unsure of the commercial prospects for “Spanish Harlem,” King’s label Atlantic initially released it as the B-side of “First Taste of Love.” It was not until the record was flipped that it registered on the charts, in January 1961, eventually rising to number 10. Three months later “Stand by Me” would surpass it, reaching number 4.

  When Spector played Beverly Ross an acetate of “Spanish Harlem” in the offices of Hill and Range, she was less than thrilled. Spector had reneged on his promise, she believed, by not including her in the collaboration with Leiber.

  It was the final straw. Spector, Ross was now convinced, was “a user,” who had exploited their friendship and then callously pushed her to one side. “It was almost as though he had it planned out. That he was going to eliminate this person and that person and go on and get all the credit for himself.”

  What Ross perceived as Spector’s betrayal was to leave a lasting mark on her. When her contract ran out with Hill and Range, Mike Stoller offered her a job as a staff writer at Trio. “I thought, This is a dream that every writer has, to work for Leiber and Stoller. And then I thought, It’s going to mean that every day I’m going to have to see Phil Spector coming in and out of the office or getting charts or being in the studio, and the idea of being in close proximity to him wa
s so hateful to me, so I turned it down.”

  Ross dropped out of the business for almost two years. “I became a lemekhal—something that doesn’t move, like an unhatchable egg.”

  She would eventually pick up the threads of her career, enjoying a Top 40 hit with “Remember Then,” a reprise of the doo-wop style by the Earls. “And one day I was walking on the street with a girlfriend and this great big limo with blackened windows starts following me and all of a sudden I hear ‘Bev, Bev!’ And it’s Phil, poking his head out of this big limo. And he said, ‘Hey, I hear you got a big smash out there’—like he was watching what I was getting, how come I was daring to have a hit without him. So I said, ‘Yeah, it’s really doing great.’ And he just kept following us, wanting me and my girlfriend to get in his car, but I was so gun-shy of ever becoming vulnerable to someone who’d betrayed me like that, because Phil practically killed me emotionally. I figured I wasn’t smart enough to handle the part of his personality I didn’t understand. It was like Phil was born without a conscience, and I was his victim. He could be so ruthless. Phil wrote one line in one of the songs we wrote together that kind of tells the story of his life; the song was ‘Don’t Believe Everything You Hear,’ and the line was ‘If you hear him lying just walk away.’ Don’t even turn back. And that really was his whole attitude; if anyone dares to hurt me I’m just going to walk away; I’m not going to look for any explanation, and no matter how much I love them or they love me, I’m just going to walk away. I think he probably had no use for anybody who was good to him; because I think maybe he thought he was shit. Just bad stuff.”

  5

  “A Big Hoot and Howl”

  With “Spanish Harlem” under his belt, Spector returned to Los Angeles at the end of 1960 with a distinct spring in his step.

  He booked into the Player’s Motel, next door to the musicians’ union offices on Sunset Boulevard, and a popular stop for visiting actors and musicians. Among the old friends waiting to greet him was Michael Spencer. After graduating from Fairfax, Spencer had gone on to study law at Harvard. But he had dropped out after realizing that his true vocation was music. Spencer had not seen Spector in more than a year, and was struck by the change that his time in New York had wrought in him. Spector, thought Spencer, had grown in stature—quite literally; he now wore lifts in his shoes, adding two inches to his height, and his hair curled toward his collar in a length that seemed, by the standards of the day, ostentatiously bohemian. Spector played his friend a demo pressing of “Spanish Harlem,” enthusing about how he was now accepted and honored among the high rollers of the New York music business. Spencer was struck by how the “unformed entity” that he knew from high school dates and bar mitzvahs was now “calling the shots and feeling his oats.”

  Spector’s first port of call was his old friend and mentor Lester Sill, who was eager to get Spector to work on a new project. Sill and his partner Lee Hazlewood had hit a rough patch with Duane Eddy, who would shortly abandon them for a new contract with RCA. Casting around for a new act, Sill had picked up the contract of a trio called the Paris Sisters—Albeth, Priscilla, and Sherrell. Managed by their mother, a former opera singer who had modeled the group on the close harmonies of the Andrews Sisters, the girls had been performing in Las Vegas lounges before two of them were even teenagers, disguising their youth with padded bras and lashings of makeup—a subterfuge apparently helped by their father, who worked at the hospital where they were born and was able to alter their birth certificates. Before signing with Sill they had already recorded a couple of singles for Imperial Records, which had gone unnoticed, and earned money singing demos at Gold Star.

  The Paris Sisters usually sang in three-part harmony and rarely featured a lead. But meeting the group for the first time, Spector was immediately struck by the similarity between Priscilla’s soft, breathy voice and Annette Kleinbard’s. The group, he thought, could be his new Teddy Bears. Before long, he and Priscilla were enjoying a brief fling.

  “Phillip had such a crush on her,” Michael Spencer remembers. “She was so cute. Flat-chested and so shy. Oh my God! When she sang he was just blown away by her. And their mother, like a fairy tale, taking care of all these sisters. Phillip was just blown away by it all.”

  (Stan Ross offers a contrasting view. “They were nice girls, but they all looked like they needed nose jobs. The mother was a pain in the ass. The mother hen. She used to come by with a lot of makeup and a pushed-up bustier, so she wouldn’t look so old. I told her, ‘You still look like an agent.’”)

  For the group’s first single, Spector turned back to the song that he had co-written with his sister Shirley and used as the B-side of Ray Peterson’s “Corrina, Corrina,” “Be My Girl”—simply retitling it “Be My Boy.” Seeking some reassuring faces in the studio, Spector invited Russ Titelman, who had sung with the Spector’s Three a year before, to play guitar and Michael Spencer to play piano on the sessions. A moody, romantic ballad, “Be My Boy” strongly recalled the Teddy Bears hit—Spencer remembers “the lights were low, the music slow, and Phil mumbling how it was an aural oral job”—but it lacked the earlier hit’s heart-stopping poignancy. When the single was released in April it reached only number 56 on the Billboard chart.

  Michael Spencer threw a party at his parents’ house to welcome his friend home. Spector had brought his guitar and began to vamp on some jazz and blues songs, interspersed with wisecracks and comical dialogue. Among the gathering were Russ Titelman, and his girlfriend Annette Merar, whom Spector had employed lip-synching to the Spector’s Three record on television. It had never occurred to Annette before to think of Spector in a romantic light. But success seemed to have given him a new sheen of self-assurance, and watching as he sat with his guitar, entertaining the gathering, her feelings suddenly began to change.

  “Watching him play, it didn’t make my body shiver, it made my soul just fall in love. It wasn’t a physical thing at all. I never noticed what Phil looked like or didn’t look like. I never look at that. I just look at soul. I feel it. And he just did it for me the way he played that guitar. He had this charisma and charm and humor, and this wonderful smile—some people’s eyes just smile, and Phil was like that. And with all of that together I was just floored.”

  At the end of the evening, Spector told her that he had to drive out to the Valley to see Lester Sill. “I’ll come with you,” said Annette.

  Russ Titelman thought that Annette was “one of the most beautiful girls on the face of the earth.” She was petite, almost elfin in stature, with an aquiline nose, wide green eyes, and a vivacious, palpably sexual intensity about her. She loved literature and poetry, and dreamed of becoming a writer herself. At the time she and Spector started dating, she was just completing her senior year at Fairfax. Over the next few weeks that Spector spent in Los Angeles, the couple saw each other as often as they could, Spector frequently calling at her home. Annette’s father was an accountant who was in awe of Spector having achieved so much at such an early age. “‘Isn’t he amazing!’ That was the theme,” Annette remembers. Her mother was a classically trained pianist. “She wasn’t a social person, and nor was Phil. So when he came over to the house my mother would disappear and my father would just smile, and Phil would say, ‘Let’s go…’ He was definitely the domineering one in the relationship. I was the moth around his flame, and whatever he did was fine. I was so clueless.”

  The first Russ Titelman learned of the relationship was when he was driving past the Player’s Motel and saw Annette’s car in the parking lot. Knocking on the door of Spector’s room, he discovered them inside. His relationship with Annette was already on the wane, he says. “But it was the secrecy that hurt. That my idol and my girlfriend should be doing that behind my back.”

  As his friendship with Beverly Ross cooled, Spector wasted no time in forging a new partnership, with another protégé of Leiber and Stoller named Phil Teitelbaum, who had enjoyed fleeting fame as a singer under the name Terry Phillips b
ut was now signed to Trio Music as a writer. Together they wrote some material for Ruth Brown, who was being produced by Leiber and Stoller, and for Johnny Nash, a Houston-born reggae singer whom Spector himself produced for ABC Records. Shortly after his return from Los Angeles, Spector broke some unbelievable news to Phillips. His schmoozing at Hill and Range had apparently paid dividends, he told Phillips; they had been given the opportunity to write some songs for Elvis Presley’s forthcoming movie, Blue Hawaii.*1 Phillips’s incredulity at the news—how had a relatively unknown songwriter like Spector managed to land a deal to write for the biggest name in pop music?—was tempered by a more pragmatic consideration. Both he and Spector were under contract to Leiber and Stoller at Trio Music; how could they write for Hill and Range at the same time? But Spector brushed aside his concerns, assuring him that everything had been taken care of. Phillips moved into Spector’s apartment on Eighty-second Street and in a whirlwind of activity set to writing new material.

  Spector also had another offer on the table. Since his arrival in New York, he had grown increasingly close to Ahmet Ertegun, the owner of Atlantic Records, where Leiber and Stoller so successfully plied their trade. Even among the colorful array of impresarios, mavericks and hustlers who populated the New York record business, Ertegun cut a distinctive and singularly stylish figure. The son of a Turkish diplomat, he had lived in Switzerland, France, and England before his father was appointed Turkish ambassador to the United States in 1934, when Ahmet was eleven. Through his older brother, Nesuhi, Ahmet acquired a passion for jazz, nurtured by the janitor at the Turkish embassy in Washington, a black man named Cleo Payne, who introduced the young Ertegun to the world of beer joints, boxing, soul food and what Ertegun himself described as the “secret language of the black man.” By the age of sixteen, he was absconding from home and traveling to New York to inveigle himself into the joints and jazz clubs of Harlem.