Tearing Down the Wall of Sound

by Mick Brown

  Spector’s time at Liberty would produce only three singles—for Troy Shondell, Obrey Wilson, and an RB singer from Los Angeles named Bobby Sheen, who had sung with a revamped version of the Robins and been sent to Spector by Lester Sill. Sheen was tall and handsome with a smooth tenor voice that reminded Spector of one of his favorite singers, Clyde McPhatter. In the early part of 1962, Spector recorded him with a song called “How Many Days.” The record was not a success, but within a few months Bobby Sheen would come to play a more significant role in Spector’s plans.

  “There’s No Other (Like My Baby)” by the Crystals was finally released in October 1961, with the catalog number Philles 100. It took the record more than a month to enter the Billboard charts, where it finally peaked at number 20.

  Even before its release, and while notionally committed to Liberty business, Spector had been in search of a follow-up, turning once again to “the Good Housekeeping seal,” as Don Kirshner called himself. Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s “Uptown” was an urban parable about race and class in New York, but which spoke to the frustrations of every young person struggling to be somebody in the stultifying anonymity of city life.

  In his magisterial history of the Brill Building era, Always Magic in the Air, the writer Ken Emerson recounts that Weil had been inspired to write the song after seeing a young African-American pushing a cartload of clothes through New York’s Garment District. Pondering on the scene, she was struck by the idea of a young man who is a nobody in his working life, but who regains his dignity and identity each night when he returns to his home uptown. Weil wrote a lyric from the viewpoint of a girl whose boyfriend may be “a little man” by day, “lost in an angry land,” but who is reborn each night in the glow of her love and admiration. Weil would rightly describe it as “one of the first sociological songs.”

  Don Kirshner was no sociologist—his own taste was for more simple love songs; but he could recognize in “Uptown” “the struggle of the Jews and the blacks, and all the ethnic quality people. I knew it would be a hit.” In keeping with the cinematic quality of Weil’s lyrics, Barry Mann wrote a melody that he characterized as “very much like West Side Story or ‘Soliloquy’ [from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel].”

  While the inspiration for Weil’s song had been a young Afro-American, Spector’s production seemed to recast the protagonist as Puerto Rican, employing a Spanish guitar and flourishes of castanets that gave the song a Latin flavor distinctly reminiscent of Leiber and Stoller’s productions with the Drifters. Emerson recounts that Spector also altered a few notes because the Crystals singer Barbara Alston was unable to reach them. When Mann and Weil heard the finished article they were unhappy with Alston’s vocal, and prevailed on Spector to rerecord it with another singer, Little Eva Boyd, who subsidized her singing aspirations by working as Carole King’s babysitter. But the sessions were a disaster. “He would make her do it over and over again,” Weil recalled. “She was totally pissed off, and she would sit there at the mike, cursing, ‘He’s a bad man. This guy’s a motherfucker. I hate him.’” Eventually Spector abandoned the sessions altogether, and in March released the version he had already recorded with Alston. It would eventually rise to number 13 in the charts.

  Spector then tried his hand with another Mann and Weil song that played on the theme of urban dreams and tribulation. Weil had originally conceived “On Broadway” as a story about a small-town girl dreaming of fame and success among the glittering lights of the Great White Way. Spector recorded the song with the Crystals, but was unhappy with the results and decided not to release it as a single. (It would subsequently appear on their first album.) Mann and Weil then took the song to Leiber and Stoller, who immediately recognized its potential for the Drifters, changing the gender of the song’s protagonist, from a small-town girl to a musician, down on his luck but determined to make it—“’Cause I can play this here guitar / And I won’t quit till I’m a star on Broadway.”

  On the way to the session, Leiber and Stoller ran into Spector on the street and invited him to join them, and it is Spector’s piercing guitar solo that brings the song to its climax, convincing you that for the young player stardom is indeed just a beat away.

  It was only some months later that Leiber and Stoller began to hear how Spector had apparently not only played on the record, but had actually produced it. Recalling the incident some forty-five years later, Leiber would still struggle to keep a tone of neutrality in his voice. “It just confirmed the feeling we’d had all along that Phil was a little…grandiose.”

  Spector’s relationship with Annette Merar had been growing more serious. In June 1961 Annette graduated from Fairfax High, and the following September she enrolled at the University of California in Berkeley, studying sociology, anthropology, and English. Spector would call her every night from New York, regaling her for hours on end with jokes, stories of his achievements and news of how “There’s No Other (Like My Baby)” was rising up the charts. In January 1962, Annette cut short her studies at Berkeley and returned to Los Angeles and enrolled at UCLA in Brentwood. Spector was in town to see Lester Sill, and his relationship with Annette picked up where it had left off a few months earlier. Spector was staying at the Player’s Motel, but he would frequently call on Annette at her parents’ home. “Duke of Earl” by Gene Chandler was riding high in the charts, a song characterized by an irresistible doo-wop chorus—“Duke, duke, duke, Duke of Earl, duke, duke.”

  “Phil would sit there playing this on the piano,” Annette remembers, “mimicking the song, and he would make it so funny. He would just laugh and laugh.”

  Annette’s dreams of continuing with her studies and becoming a writer began to falter in the face of Spector’s ardor, and after a few weeks she made the decision to drop out of college. Spector had been pressing her to come and live with him in New York. “He was there and I was in L.A. and we just wanted to be together.” In April she left home and moved to New York, joining Spector in his tiny apartment—a bedroom, a living room, a small kitchen and a bathroom. While there was no financial need for her to work, she took an office job typing and filing.

  Spector lost no time in introducing her to the social whirl in New York, dining out in expensive restaurants, kibitzing in nightclubs. “I was in the center of the universe,” Annette remembers. “That’s how I felt when I was around Phil.” On a trip to Coney Island with his friend the arranger Arnold Goland, an amused Spector watched Annette lose money in a boardwalk shell game, before cajoling the con artist into giving the money back.

  “People adored Phil,” she remembers. “The Brill Building people, Donny Kirshner, Doc Pomus. He was always surrounded by people. They all thought he was a genius.”

  Throughout the time that they had spent sharing an apartment, Michael Spencer had noticed that Spector would treat the girls he sometimes brought back to the apartment “like trophies.” Despite the way that Spector had treated her, Beverly Ross would continue to see him from time to time. “She was a compassionate girl, and very supportive of Phil,” Spencer remembers. “But he’d dominated her completely. He liked Beverly, but he wasn’t nice to her. There was always that contradiction in Phil.”

  But Spector seemed to be deeply smitten with Annette. While only nineteen, she had a maturity, an intelligence and an independence of mind beyond her years. She knew about music, and Spector valued her opinion—her ears. She would often accompany him to recording sessions, and copy and print his lead sheets. Annette had quickly grown accustomed to the fact that Spector now habitually kept “musicians’ hours”—exacerbated by his difficulty in sleeping—and would seldom go to bed until the early hours of the morning. “I was up at his Liberty office real late one night,” she remembers, “and I went to sleep on the couch. I remember falling asleep watching him screaming his head off at somebody. I thought: why does he always have to scream like that.”

  At home they would talk endlessly about music, or watch TV, a classic movie, perhaps, wh
ere Spector would perform his old trick of turning down the volume and improvising his own commentary, or making jokes about the commercials, keeping Annette in stitches.

  “There was an advertisement for Ivory Soap, and the slogan was ‘99 and 44/100ths pure.’ And Phil would say, ‘Whatever happened to the other 56/100ths?’ He was so smart and original in his thinking, but he wasn’t an intellectual. I respected his creative genius, but I never particularly respected his intellect. He’d skip over things, like he did with the frets when he was playing the guitar. He never heard anything—he never listened.”

  Spector was proud of his Jewish ancestry, and would observe Jewish holidays, but he had no religious belief, and as he grew older he would become an avowed atheist. Annette thought his Judaism was “political. He was very much a Zionist type.” He also showed a deep fascination with Hitler and read Mein Kampf to try to understand the roots of Hitler’s fanaticism. “Phil’s politics were very liberal. But he thought Hitler was an evil genius. I remember, we argued about the difference between a demagogue and a dictator, because he said there’s no difference. And I drew a line. I argued that a dictator has formal power; a demagogue has the following, but not the formal power. This argument went on forever, and we could never agree. And I still think I’m right.”

  Helen Noga’s interest in Philles had been short-lived. The seed money she had provided for the first Crystals sessions had been useful, but between Spector and Sill, and Harry Finfer and Harold Lipsius at Universal, there was no room in Philles for another partner. Spector would later maintain that Noga had been paid off, but her daughter Beverly disputes this.

  “Mother laughed about that for years. She used to say, ‘If a check was mailed I wonder who got it?’ She never got paid for leaving the situation. She didn’t ask for it. She didn’t expect it. She and Phil were so close, and the friendship just kept on going. She was a tremendous supporter of his and was always there to give him advice.”

  For Spector the fact that he needed partners at all in what he was quickly coming to think of as his company was beginning to rankle. He had not been fully persuaded by Lester Sill’s excuses about the vanishing royalties from the Paris Sisters recordings. And while Spector had come to regard himself as the artistic force in Philles, in Los Angeles Sill had been supervising his own sessions for the label. Of the first five Philles releases, only “There’s No Other (Like My Baby)” (Philles 100) and “Uptown” (Philles 102) were Spector productions. The remainder had been organized by Sill. Philles 101 was a lightweight pop record, “Here I Stand,” by Joel Scott; Philles 103, a piano instrumental, “Malaguena,” by another of Sill’s protégés, a writer and producer named Al Hazan (who had been the man behind B. Bumble and the Stingers’ “Nut Rocker”), released under the name Ali Hassan; and Philles 104, a novelty song, “Lieutenant Colonel Bogey’s Parade,” by the sax player Steve Douglas. It wasn’t that Spector particularly disliked the records—Douglas in particular was a good friend and would come to play an important role in Spector’s music in the years to come. It was just that they weren’t his. By the early months of 1962, Sill told Mark Ribowsky he could already begin to “smell things falling out a little bit with Phil.”

  Nor would Spector’s next recording with the Crystals help matters. Written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, as the title suggests, “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)” was a particularly perverse choice as a follow-up to the Crystals’ first two hits.

  Gerry Goffin would later explain that the song had been inspired by a story told to them by their babysitter, Eva Boyd, after she had turned up for work bearing the scars of a beating by her jealous boyfriend. “But she sort of smiled before she went to her room,” Goffin recalled, “and she said, ‘He really loves me.” But the idea of love as a sadomasochistic battle zone—bathing the bruises in tears of reconciliation and regret—appeared to be a recurring theme in the pair’s songs at the time. Spector also recorded their song “Please Hurt Me” (“If you gotta hurt somebody, please hurt me”) for inclusion on the Crystals’ album (Eva Boyd would also record the song as Little Eva), and Goffin and King also wrote “Chains” (“my baby’s got me locked up in chains…”) for the Cookies.

  Don Kirshner had his own reservations about “He Hit Me.” What he loved about Goffin and King’s songwriting was that they wrote “real warm, boy-girl things, songs that got under your skin.” “He Hit Me”—a song more likely to make your skin crawl—was, he acknowledged, “different.” But Kirshner was prepared to indulge his young protégés.

  “Gerry Goffin was becoming an important writer, and I didn’t want to stamp on his creativity. Most of my songs had a feeling of romanticism—boy/girl. This was a little more controversial. But I had to give them freedom of expression. It wasn’t as much entertainment as it was philosophizing.”

  “‘He Hit Me’ was absolutely, positively the one record that none of us liked,” Barbara Alston, the Crystals’ lead singer, recalled. “All I really wanted to know was ‘Why?’ Why would five young girls sing something extraordinary like ‘He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)’? Yuk, was what I felt.”

  But Spector had no such qualms, and attacked the song with a manic relish. With its funereal beat, overheated production and melodramatic string arrangement, “He Hit Me” sounds almost comically kitsch by today’s standards, if one didn’t suspect that Spector was approaching it in deadly earnest.

  Lester Sill was the first person to tell Spector that he hated it. And he wasn’t alone. The record created a minor outcry, disc jockeys refused to play it, and in June 1962, Philles was obliged to pull it from the shelves.

  Preoccupied with the Crystals, Spector had all but forgotten about his arrangement with Liberty—his sole telephone call to Snuff Garrett in Los Angeles in the early months of 1962 had been to complain that the plants in his office had not been watered. But while he might have produced nothing of note, his stay at the label was to provide him with a major opportunity.

  On a shopping expedition at 1650 Broadway, Spector visited Aaron Schroeder, who played him a new song called “He’s a Rebel,” written by his protégé Gene Pitney. The song played on a familiar theme that had inspired the film Rebel Without a Cause and any number of other pop songs about the misunderstood teenager. By a pleasing coincidence, Pitney had been inspired to write it after hearing the Crystals’ “Uptown.” “‘Uptown’ was the first song where I ever heard anyone use funky strings like that,” Pitney recalled, “and especially low strings, violas and cellos down that low. I fell in love with it and it hit me. I said, ‘I’m gonna write their next single, another song they could do just like that.’”

  Listening to the song in Aaron Schroeder’s office, Spector knew that he had found a hit. He also knew he had to move fast. Schroeder told him that another producer had designs on the song—Spector’s friend Snuff Garrett. Pausing only to tender his resignation at Liberty, Spector took the first plane out to Los Angeles.

  In the space of eighteen months, he had burned a trail through the New York music scene, cementing alliances that would stand him instead for the rest of his career, and destroying others without a moment’s thought. He had co-written one rock and roll classic, “Spanish Harlem,” and produced a handful more; risen from being a nobody to one of the hottest record producers in the business. Now Phil Spector was about to embark on the most spectacular phase of his career.

  7

  Building the Wall of Sound

  Spector had good reasons for choosing to record “He’s a Rebel” in Los Angeles rather than New York. For one thing, union rates were cheaper on the West Coast, but he was also growing increasingly weary of the stranglehold which the New York union, the American Federation of Musicians Local 82, held on his sessions. Although the technique was becoming commonplace, union rules theoretically forbade overdubbing. The union was also increasingly vigilant in policing a closed shop: on one occasion, when Annette had been recruited to rattle a tambourine during a Crystals session, Spector had
been anonymously reported for using non-union labor. “He would tell me the union was driving him out of town,” Michael Spencer remembers.

  More importantly, Spector preferred the musicians in Los Angeles. The New York session players were hardened professionals, who tended to view him with a mixture of bemusement, grudging respect or barely concealed contempt, who would groan audibly at the amount of time he spent on preparing the studio, and the protracted run-throughs before recording began. The musicians in Los Angeles were cooler, more relaxed and more attuned to Spector’s iconoclastic approach; nobody thought Spector was crazy, or if they did they certainly didn’t say it to his face.

  And then there was Gold Star. Spector had worked at three or four studios in New York, but none had proved as congenial as the place where he had made his first records, and none could match the singular acoustics and atmosphere of Studio A. “To Know Him Is to Love Him” and “I Love How You Love Me”—for very different reasons, the records closest to Spector’s heart and, not coincidentally perhaps, his biggest hits to date—had both been made at Gold Star. He had come to regard Stan Ross, the studio’s co-owner, who had engineered every one of his sessions there, as almost a talismanic presence.

  Touching down in Los Angeles, Spector wasted no time in making preparations to record “He’s a Rebel.” He contacted his old friend, the sax player Steve Douglas, and asked him to contract the best musicians he could find. To arrange the session, Lester Sill suggested Jack Nitzsche, who had once worked for Sill and was now working as an arranger for his former partner Lee Hazlewood.

  All Spector needed now was a group to sing the song.

  Spector, quite naturally, had earmarked “He’s a Rebel” for the Crystals, but the group would never make the session—whether because they refused to fly to Los Angeles or because they were occupied on the road is unclear. Spector didn’t miss a beat. It would be a relatively easy matter to find singers in Los Angeles to replace them, he reasoned. All he really needed from the Crystals was their name, and Philles owned that.