by Mick Brown
In college, Ertegun studied philosophy, economics and literature, but his heart was in music. In 1947, he became partners with a blues enthusiast named Herb Abramson and his wife Miriam, and with funding from an acquaintance of Ertegun’s father, a Turkish dentist named Dr. Vahdi Sabit, founded Atlantic Records. For $95 a month they rented a room in a run-down hotel, the Jefferson, with enough space for their desks and for Ahmet to sleep. When they wanted to record, they would push the furniture back against the wall.
The first Atlantic releases were an eclectic grab bag of jazz, blues and gospel recordings. But within a couple of years the label had become synonymous with the raucous, good-time party music epitomized in the recordings of such artists as Ruth Brown and Joe Turner. Within the music industry—if not to its black audience—this music was known as “race music,” until a reporter at Billboard magazine, Jerry Wexler, devised the more palatable, and evocative, term “rhythm and blues.” In 1953, when Herb Abramson departed for the armed forces in Europe, Wexler himself joined Atlantic as a partner. Through the ’50s the red and black Atlantic label, stamped with the legend “Leads the Field in Rhythm and Blues,” dominated the RB charts with recordings by such artists as the Clovers, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, LaVern Baker and Ray Charles. Wexler and Ertegun were an intriguing partnership. Wexler was rabbinical, erudite, knowledgeable in art and literature—probably the only record producer within a ten-mile radius of the Brill Building who could quote Hegel and the philosopher William James. He was also dogmatic, cantankerous and commercially hard-nosed. It was Wexler who took care of business, arriving early each day to chase orders, hassle contracts with pressing plants and distributors and schmooze disc jockeys, usually only turning his attention to producing at night.
But it was Ertegun who set the tone for the operation, a singular concoction of the hip and the urbane, dapper in horn-rimmed spectacles, expensively tailored suits and a trim goatee beard, equally at home in Southern juke joints or sophisticated Upper East Side restaurants, charming all and sundry with what Wexler would describe as his “semi-cosmopolite European stutter.”
Spector had found a new role model. He was mesmerized by Ahmet’s cool vernacular, his sharp dress, his effortless air of hip knowingness and inscrutability. He loved to listen to Ahmet’s stories about venturing into the boondocks of Louisiana in search of the great primitive piano genius Professor Longhair (“and when we got there he’d already signed to Mercury!”), recording with Ray Charles and hanging out with the aristocrats of jazz and blues—the Dukes, the Earls and the Counts. Ertegun’s savoir faire, his cultured enthusiasm and his encyclopedic knowledge of music set him apart from the run-of-the-mill sharks and hustlers, “the short-armed fatties,” as Spector would call them, who populated the music business, and whom he was quickly coming to loathe. The Atlantic label, shaped and informed by good taste and a commitment to musical excellence, was exactly the kind of operation Spector dreamed of one day running himself.
Ertegun, for his part, was a collector and curator of interesting characters, and Spector was a study. He made Ertegun laugh with his practical jokes and corny one-liners, and his uncanny impersonations of other people in the business, including Ertegun himself. “He could do my voice very well,” Ertegun remembered.
“I’d never seen anybody like Phil before, and I’m sure I’ll never see anybody like him again. You know—you smile and you connect with somebody, and Phil and I connected. He was very funny; a great sense of humor. Very intelligent, and also very hip about the music. He wasn’t much into jazz, but he knew everything about RB and he certainly knew everything about rock and roll.”
Like Ertegun, Spector was a student of the Mezz Mezzrow school of hipster slang, and the pair delighted in out-jiving each other. “We developed our own hip way of speaking, our own interpretation of black slang. We’d say ‘yayss,’ rather than yes. We had our own little things. There was a certain kind of food that we both liked very much—Philadelphia food. Scrapple—kind of leftover bits of meat and grease that you fry; like a fried pâté. Or a Philly cheesesteak sandwich—meat cut paper-thin, which has been broiled, served on something resembling French bread with a gooey cheese melt.”
Ertegun was in the throes of divorcing his first wife, Jan, a Scandinavian who seemed to leave so little impression on him that when he subsequently bumped into her some years later at a party she had to remind Ertegun who she was. He was in search of a playmate, and Spector was happy to play the part. They became inseparable, and when Ertegun offered Spector a job as his personal assistant and staff producer Spector, despite his accumulating number of commitments, quickly accepted. “He was already producing records, and he was in demand,” Ertegun remembered. “I think he only accepted the offer because we were having a good time together.”
Spector shared the news of his new appointment with his old friend Michael Spencer. “He said, ‘I’ve signed one hundred percent exclusive with Hill and Range.’ I said, ‘Congratulations.’ He said, ‘I’m also signed one hundred percent with Leiber and Stoller.’ I said, ‘Double congratulations.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s not it, I just signed one hundred percent exclusive with Ahmet Ertegun. Do you think there’s anything wrong with that?’ I said, ‘It sounds perfectly natural, Phillip. Who am I to say?’ Phil’s view was that they all adored him and so they would somehow all accommodate him and work it out.”
In fact, Spector had grievously overplayed his hand. Contrary to what he had told Terry Phillips, the conflict of interest between Hill and Range and Leiber and Stoller over the offer to write songs for Blue Hawaii had not been “taken care of.” When Leiber and Stoller got wind of the deal they were furious. Elvis Presley was one of their best clients: Leiber and Stoller demanded half of the publishing rights from Hill and Range on any songs written by Spector and Phillips. Hill and Range refused, and no songs by Spector and Phillips were ever submitted to Elvis. As if that weren’t bad enough, Spector was now rubbing salt into the wound by signing on for Atlantic as well. “[Leiber and Stoller] were angry,” Lester Sill recalled, “because they groomed him, helped him, honed his craft. They took Phil in, they took care of him, and they were gonna make deals with him, and the minute he got hot, he walked.”
But there was little Leiber and Stoller could do—particularly when Spector pointed out that the contract he had signed with them was actually null and void because he had been underage when he signed it.
Shortly after the news of Spector’s appointment to Atlantic was published in the trade magazine Billboard, Spector and Ertegun both happened to be in Los Angeles.
“Phil was driving this hot Thunderbird, it was souped-up to make a lot of noise, and he had a record player fitted in the front,” Ertegun remembered. “So these music publishers were talking, ‘Oh my God, Ahmet and Phil Spector are going to be producing a lot of hits; we’ve got to give them songs.’ And most of these were older guys. So Phil said, ‘Listen, we’ll only listen in our car, because we like to hear how it sounds through car speakers. You want to play the demos, come down and we’ll play them in the car.’ So we get this poor old guy who’s come down with a couple of demos, and we put him in the backseat. And Phil takes off, going through the middle of Hollywood at ninety miles per hour, and the guy’s screaming, ‘I don’t care if you never record any of my songs! Lemme out of the car!’ It was just a big hoot and howl.”
On the same trip, Ertegun took Spector to a meeting with Atlantic’s “great white hope” Bobby Darin, at the home in the Hollywood Hills he shared with his starlet wife Sandra Dee. Darin was eager for Ertegun to hear some new songs he’d written. Darin’s musical ideas were often brilliant, but not always. He was also extremely temperamental, and Ertegun had learned to indulge him.
“Good,” said Ertegun after Darin had run through the first song. “Good,” he repeated after the second. “Fine,” he commented after the third. “Interesting,” he remarked after the fourth.
“What?!” Spector broke in. “Are you fuc
kin’ crazy or am I? He can’t record these songs. These songs are pure shit!”
“Who is this guy?” Darin demanded. “Get him the fuck out of here.”
Ertegun’s colleagues at Atlantic apparently thought much the same thing. Jerry Wexler would later come to regard Spector as “a one-off genius” and a close friend, but his first impressions were unfavorable. “Phil had come out of California and he was so brash and full of piss and vinegar with his guitar and his one little hit. You would have a meeting with him and he would just lay it down. He didn’t care who he was talking to or how much experience he was up against, it was ‘Now, this is what I think.’ He had one mantra in the studio; if I made a suggestion or wanted to pursue an avenue he didn’t agree with, his answer would always be ‘Hey, man—I came from California to make hits.’”
Wexler and Spector collaborated on recordings for Billy Storm and, most disastrously, the Top Notes, working on a song called “Twist and Shout,” which borrowed heavily from the Cuban wedding song “La Bamba,” and which had been brought to Atlantic by its writer Bert Berns. The song had all the makings of a hit, and in the studio, Wexler remembers, he and Spector went at it with “unrestrained ferocity” but succeeded only in “butchering” it, while Berns sat watching in pained silence. Wexler was left to reflect that it would have been better to let Berns produce the song himself, which is exactly what he did the following year with the Isley Brothers, turning it into a major hit.
“Phil and I created negative synergy,” Wexler says. “I liked him, but we could not collaborate. But I don’t think Phil’s a collaborator.”
Nor did Spector’s idiosyncrasies endear him to others on the Atlantic staff. He would infuriate Miriam Abramson, the label’s office manager, by booking rehearsal time, and then turning up late, or not at all. “We’d have artists sitting there in the office, waiting for him. He wouldn’t call, and they’d sit there an hour or two and leave, then come back the next day, and finally he’d show up. He was really very autocratic for somebody who was just starting out. You’d think, who does he think he is. Phil took advantage of people, because to some extent he was lazy. He knew that Ahmet liked him, that Jerry Wexler would support him. He was absolutely always convinced about his own creativity and talents. He never doubted himself, ever.”
The records that Spector produced in the few months he was associated with Atlantic, while all competent productions in the standard RB mold of the day, hardly bore out his conviction in his own genius, nor did they trouble the charts. But Ertegun did not seem overly bothered by that. He just enjoyed having Spector around. “Jerry in particular got frustrated with Phil. He was waiting for him to deliver as a producer, which never really happened at Atlantic. But Phil understood what people loved. He could play it and sing it and do it, boom boom. I knew it was going to come. In the meantime, he and I were going out to clubs and this and that and having a terrific time.”
In March, Michael Spencer left Los Angeles for New York, determined to follow a career in music. In the wake of the debacle over Blue Hawaii, Spector’s friendship with Terry Phillips had cooled, and when he moved out of Spector’s apartment, Spencer moved in. Spector was moving faster than any job description could contain, combining his role at Atlantic with other freelance producing jobs. One of Spencer’s first jobs in New York was contracting the musicians and playing piano on another Spector production—“Pretty Little Angel Eyes,” sung by a discovery of Ray Peterson’s named Curtis Lee. “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” was a mediocre song redeemed only by Spector’s use of a black quartet called the Halos providing an infectious doo-wop backing. Like the majority of his recordings at the time, it was a proficient record but hardly a memorable one, and could have been the work of any one of a dozen producers working around Broadway. But for Spector these records were an important step in learning to “play” the studio like an instrument, experimenting with the placement of microphones and the use of echo, learning how one studio differed from the next, and the importance of establishing relationships with engineers and arrangers he could trust.
Jimmy Reed, a blues singer much admired by Spector and Spencer, now deeply in his cups, was performing at Carnegie Hall, and they made a pilgrimage to see him. But it was a saddening experience. “We came in a few minutes late,” Spencer remembers. “And Jimmy Reed came out and he faced the rear of the stage and he started singing ‘Got me running…’ and someone walked onstage, and as he was singing turned him around to face the audience. At that point Phillip and I left. It was too desperate.”
On another occasion, Spector took Spencer uptown to the Apollo to see Ray Charles. Like Reed, Charles was wrestling with an addiction—in his case, to heroin. “We went backstage, and Ray was walking around with blood dribbling down his arm. And nobody had had the courtesy to clean him up.”
Spector regaled Spencer with stories of his accomplishments, and his new network of friends and allies, treating him to his note-perfect impersonations of Ertegun and Doc Pomus. Spencer noticed how he seemed to be making their mannerisms his own, “as if he was reassembling himself by borrowing this and that. Phil was always looking for the father figure, and Doc played that role to an extent.” Spector joked to Spencer how he would tell everybody that he met that he was a genius, “and they all agree with me.” Spencer fancied that he could see his friend’s burgeoning success “feeding into his ego, and all the forces that were inside of him could manifest because now he had power.” But he could also discern more unsettling currents below the cocksure, braggadocio veneer.
Spector had begun to see a Park Avenue psychoanalyst, Dr. Harold Kaplan, on a regular basis. In later years, he would explain that this was a ruse to “avoid the [military] draft.” He had a deep anxiety about being drafted, even though he had reached draft-eligible age at a time when the United States was not at war. He told Spencer (who had received his Selective Service card) that he had learned of a scam whereby you could buy your way out for $3,000, although it seemed he never took that option. But while avoiding the draft was a happy consequence of the visits to Dr. Kaplan, it was not the only reason. Spector was plagued by unspecified anxieties and inexplicable feelings of unease. He fretted about his appearance, the impression he made on others and what they might really think of him.
Spencer sensed that he was “emotionally disturbed. Not mentally. Mentally is the processing of data, the processing of factual stuff—reality. It wasn’t that. Phil didn’t have cognitive problems; he was shrewd and sharp. He could think through things; he was very observant, very astute. It was more the emotional area. There were contradictions. It was as if Phil was wired differently, and not all the circuits came into play in the early stages, but as his environment changed these wirings manifested.”
Living at close quarters with Spector, Spencer began to notice the personal idiosyncrasies that had not been apparent when they were together in Los Angeles. Sometimes Spector would return from a nearby grocery store and pull out cans of tuna or beans which he had hidden in his pockets, “things he could easily afford to pay for. I don’t know why.” If Spector was going on a date he would ask Spencer to buy his contraceptives because he was too shy to buy them himself. The smallest thing could rattle him. Spencer had the knack of shaving in a matter of seconds, a few quick strokes with the razor and a rinse. Spector would watch aghast, “terrified” that Spencer would slash his own throat. Spector would spend an age in front of the mirror, carefully scratching away his stubble, endlessly experimenting with new creams and unctions to find the perfect preparation, before finally dousing himself in copious quantities of cologne.
Spector, his friend noticed, was constantly “buggy,” constantly on edge. He was uncomfortable in unfamiliar situations, as if he felt physically threatened. Yet at the same time he would provoke confrontations, as if to confirm that his fears were justified, snapping at strangers who stared a moment too long at his hair or his clothes. “There was a chip on his shoulder. It was the chip that would appear somet
imes when we played those frat parties. It wouldn’t take much to throw Phil over the top.”
On one occasion Spencer took Spector on a nocturnal ramble around Forty-second Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, at that time a notoriously seedy area lined with peep shows, third-run cinemas and twenty-four-hour automats, frequented by hustlers, junkies and prostitutes. Spencer liked to catch a movie and then sit in Hector’s Cafeteria watching the carnival of humanity parade by. But Spector, he says, was “terrified. Phil came from a conservative background and I would say he was basically conservative.”
In the apartment they shared Spencer noticed that Spector would stare out of the window or sometimes vanish onto the fire escape. “I never paid it much mind. Then one night I said, ‘What’s out there?’ And he was looking in the window of an adjacent apartment and there were two lesbians in there. And he was just fascinated to watch them. After that, in the park, if he saw two lesbians walking together, or perhaps holding hands, he would just stand and stare. Phillip could get obsessed with things. It was part of his personality.”
For a while, his obsession was learning French. “I think Dr. Kaplan told Phil that if he could master something it would help him get a handle on himself,” Spencer says. A French tutor would visit the apartment several times a week, and Spector started to use the word “bourgeois” at any and every opportunity. But he quickly tired of the new enthusiasm, and the lessons soon stopped.