by Mick Brown
It was Jack Nitzsche who suggested that he should audition a group of local session singers called the Blossoms, who were led by a twenty-three-year-old singer named Darlene Wright. The daughter of a Pentecostal minister, Wright had grown up in Texas and Los Angeles, singing in church choirs before joining with four friends—Gloria Jones, Fanita Barrett and sisters Annette and Nanette Williams—to make the Blossoms. The group made a series of singles for local labels, but they became better known as backing singers. Before the Blossoms, much of the session work in L.A. was covered by the Johnny Mann Singers, five white men and three white women, who could sight-read music and be relied upon to provide performances of a saccharine banality. The Blossoms’ flawless harmonies, which could pass as either black or white, allowed them to work across a bewildering variety of styles, singing behind artists as diverse as Sam Cooke, Doris Day, Ray Charles, Jan and Dean, and Bobby Darin. They would provide the “sha-dums” on Shelley Fabares’s innocuous piece of candy floss “Johnny Angel,” and the “shoop shoops” on Betty Everett’s “Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss).” Nitzsche had often worked with the group, and his wife Gracia sometimes sang with them.
When Wright first met Phil Spector, she would later recount in her autobiography, she took note of his “pasty, Lord Fauntleroy face and waiflike frame,” and his overpowering aftershave, which “smelled like musk. As dark as it was inside Gold Star, he wore his sunglasses. And when he stood up, in four-inch heels, I was still taller than he was.” Spector, she thought, looked like “a little kid in a sandbox.”
Seated at a piano, Spector led her through “He’s a Rebel.” The moment he heard her voice he was sold. But Wright was less convinced. In her autobiography she would recall that compared to the material she’d been recording with Ray Charles and Bobby Darin, “He’s a Rebel” sounded “like a trifle—just another tribute to a teen dream, this one from the wrong side of the tracks, or the police blotter.” Wright might have been only twenty-three herself, but she had a husband, a child and a mortgage to pay—the transition between her teens and adulthood had “lasted about five minutes.” But she could do swooning teenager, if that’s what Spector wanted. It wasn’t. What he wanted, he told her, was the “low, growling side” of her voice, “the righteous indignation and in-your-face testimony that I usually saved for church.”
Spector offered Wright a flat fee of $3,000 to sing lead on the song. Fanita Barrett and Gloria Jones were also booked on the session, for a standard session rate. They were joined by Bobby Sheen, the singer whom Spector had recorded for Liberty the year before.
But there was another problem. Booking Gold Star, Spector had naturally assumed that his old friend Stan Ross would be available to engineer the sessions. But Ross had decided to take a vacation in Hawaii. Ross proposed his cousin, Larry Levine, as a replacement. Spector was furious—he was about to cut the record of a lifetime, and the man he trusted most at the boards had decided to absent himself—but he had no intention of waiting for Ross to return.
At thirty-three, Levine was ten years older than Spector. Tall and quietly spoken, with an easygoing, unflappable manner, he had served in the U.S. Army in Korea as a radio operator and later worked in the aviation industry. When Ross and Dave Gold opened Gold Star in 1950, Levine had taken to dropping by the studio in the evenings, “basically because the people in the music business were more entertaining than the run of the mill,” and ended up working there, initially assisting Ross and then engineering sessions on his own, including Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues.”
Levine had seen Spector around the studio working on the Paris Sisters’ sessions, and he was no more enthralled about the prospect of working with Spector than Spector was about working with him. “I thought he was a brat, spoiled or whatever,” Levine remembers. “There was something abrasive there. It wasn’t anything he said; it was just an aura that he carried with him, and nothing that he can do anything about. But I think that happened with a lot of people with Phil.”
Of the musicians that Steve Douglas brought into the studio, only the guitarist Howard Roberts and bass player Ray Pohlman had worked with Spector before. Spector had requested a second bass player, Jimmy Bond. The group was filled out with a second guitarist, Tommy Tedesco; a pianist, Al DeLory; the drummer Hal Blaine, a seasoned session musician who had already played on hits by Connie Francis and Elvis Presley; and two sax players—Douglas, and Spector’s old friend Nino Tempo. Used to working with the standard drum/bass/guitar rock and roll combo, Larry Levine was puzzled by the number of musicians trooping into the studio. “I thought, what is this all about?” But whatever reservations he might have had, Levine was diplomatic enough to keep them to himself, patiently following instructions as Spector went through his customarily laborious procedure of organizing mikes and rehearsing the musicians.
Inspired by Spector’s use of strings on “Uptown,” Gene Pitney had written “He’s a Rebel” with the idea that it too should use a string arrangement; but Spector decided to forgo any other adornment, instead cutting it as a tough, swaggering rock and roll song. Al DeLory cast an eye over the musical charts, which Jack Nitzsche had written, and with his right hand began to improvise a naggingly insistent five-note gospel figure that was to become the song’s introduction and central motif. Steve Douglas added a booting sax solo in the middle section. Recording the vocal, Darlene Wright did exactly as Spector had requested, tearing into the song with a gospel fervor. As the song went into the fade, Wright got so carried away testifying—“No, no, no”—that she lost the rhythm and sang off beat. “I’ll sing it again,” she told Spector, but he said that wasn’t necessary. “I like the mistake.” Wright was aghast. What kind of man, she thought, lets mistakes into his records?
It was only when Spector was mastering the recording that he discovered that Snuff Garrett had recorded his own version of “He’s a Rebel” with a virginal young singer named Vikki Carr. It would have been hard to imagine a less appropriate marriage of singer and song. Carr’s release, in the last week of August 1962, was heralded by a full-page ad in Billboard trumpeting “The Original!! The Hit!!” Three weeks later, Spector’s version stood at number 66 on the charts, while Carr’s lodged at number 120.
In the first week of November, “He’s a Rebel” reached number 1, supplanting the novelty hit “Monster Mash” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers (ironically, another song on which the Blossoms sang backing vocals). The first that the Crystals knew of “their” new recording was when they heard “He’s a Rebel” on the radio as they were traveling through Ohio on a tour. It was only by chance that they happened to be sharing a bill with Gene Pitney, who was able to coach them in the song so they could perform it onstage. Cursing Spector silently under their collective breath, the Crystals stepped out each night to bask in the applause for a record they’d had absolutely nothing to do with.
At the end of August 1962, Spector returned to Gold Star. The song that he brought with him was, superficially at least, a bizarre choice. A favorite from his childhood, “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah” was from the 1946 Walt Disney film Song of the South, a slice of happy-go-lucky, not to say mindless, optimism, written by two Tin Pan Alley songwriters, Allie Wrubel and Ray Gilbert.
In search of an even fatter sound, Spector assembled a group consisting of three guitarists (two acoustic, and Billy Strange playing a fuzz-tone electric), three bass players, two sax players, a drummer and a percussionist. Al DeLory was again on piano, but he was now joined by Spector’s old friend Nino Tempo—on the same instrument—DeLory playing the upper register, Tempo the lower. A third pianist, Leon Russell, also played on the song. It was a weekend session, and Stan Ross was again unavailable, so Larry Levine was back at the controls. To perform the song, Spector had once again called on Darlene Wright, Fanita Barrett and Bobby Sheen.
Recording the instrumental track, Spector and Levine, who had no idea of the title of the song, worked for three hours moving the mikes around the studi
o and setting the sound levels. Jack Nitzsche’s arrangement was so clotted that Spector decided there wasn’t even room in the mix for a full drum kit; he instructed Hal Blaine to play only his bass drum. Spector kept asking Levine to turn up the faders on the instruments for more volume. Levine did as he was instructed until the meters on his dials were pinging into the red zone. Realizing that if he tried to record at that level, the sound would distort, Levine turned off the faders and brought the meters back to zero.
“Phil looked at me for a moment like I was crazy, and then he started screaming at me: ‘I just about had it! I had it! You can’t do that!’ I said, ‘I had no choice, I couldn’t record it.’”
Levine started the process all over again, bringing up the microphones one at a time, balancing the sound of each instrument against the other. He had reached the point where all the microphones were turned up except for the lead guitarist’s, Billy Strange, when Spector stopped him again. “That’s it! That’s the sound!” Leaking through the other microphones into the control-room speakers, Strange’s guitar sounded like an angry wasp.
“But I don’t have Billy’s mike on yet,” Levine protested.
“Tape it!” said Spector.
The track was done in one take. At its conclusion, Levine turned to Spector and asked, “What’s the title of this song again?”
“Phil said, ‘ “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah,” ’” Levine remembers. “And I said, ‘Yeah, sure—that’s a big put-on. What’s it really called?’ And he said, ‘No, really, it’s “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah.” ’ And when I realized that’s what I was hearing, I literally fell out of the chair. Because this was just the greatest thing.”
Spector had taken the jaunty refrain and turned it completely on its head. The rhythm section clunked and rolled like a slow train rumbling through a tunnel, carrying a deranged, wailing gospel choir as freight. It was dark, incantatory and disturbingly sexual; Larry Levine says he had never heard a record like it.
“Later on Phil told me that when he took the demo back to New York, he played it for a publisher, and after four bars—that clunk, clunk, clunk that starts the song—the publisher walked over, lifted up the needle and said, ‘I’ll give you ten thousand dollars up front now, without even hearing what the rest of it sounds like.’
“People would come into Gold Star and I’d say, ‘I’m going to play a tape for you, and if you tell me there’s a chance this is not a Top 10 record I’ll eat the tape right in front of you.’ And they’d look at me like I was crazy. But nobody ever suggested I eat the tape. I was playing that record for everybody. When Phil came back to town he said, ‘Jesus, I’ve got to put this record out now; everybody in Hollywood’s heard it.’ But I couldn’t resist it.”
Casting around for a name for his ad-hoc group, Spector settled on a pun on the teenage sartorial craze of the time. Credited to Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah” entered the charts in December 1962. Larry Levine had no need to eat the tape—the song peaked at number 8—and he would work on virtually every Phil Spector session for the next four years.
Even as the Philles label was gathering momentum, Spector’s relations with Lester Sill were going from bad to worse. Spector was still disgruntled at his partner for wasting money on inferior recordings that he regarded as a blemish on the Philles label. And the debacle over the lost Paris Sisters album continued to rankle. Furthermore Spector now began to suspect that Sill was holding out on him on Philles royalties. Sill could hardly fail to be aware that he was being frozen out when Spector stopped returning his phone calls and became unusually elusive.
In late summer of 1962, Spector approached Lipsius and Finfer, offering to buy out their one-third share in Philles. Lipsius agreed, and Finfer—a minority shareholder to Lipsius in the one-third Philles interest—had little choice but to go along with it. Spector now controlled two-thirds of Philles to Sill’s one-third. With Finfer out of the way, Lipsius, who was an attorney, now began to represent Spector, pressuring Sill to sell his share. Visiting Sill one day at his office, Al Hazan found him sitting on the floor, desperately riffling through the papers strewn all around him. “He was saying, ‘Phil’s told me he’s going to ruin me.’ He was more concerned about that than sad that the partnership had broken up. Lester was a very hard-nosed business guy. He wasn’t the type of guy to get sad about things.”
At length, Sill relented, demanding a figure based on a year’s worth of Philles’s recordings royalties. He eventually settled for far less—around $60,000. Sill told friends that he knew the price was a steal, but he was just happy to be free of the heartache.
In September 1962, as “He’s a Rebel” was making its way up the Billboard charts, Spector circulated a letter to his distributors advising them that he had acquired “complete and absolute control of Philles Records, Inc.” More than just his partner, Sill had been Spector’s mentor, the man who had given him back his career when it seemed to be all but over, but Spector showed no hesitation, or sentiment, in cutting him off. “Lester wasn’t cheating on Phil,” Annette Merar says. “Although there might have been a little bit of suspicion on Phil’s part because Lester was a good businessman, too. I just think Phil didn’t need Lester anymore, and his personal value system allowed him to think, I can do this alone, so fuck Lester Sill. That’s what it amounts to. Phil didn’t want to share it anymore, and Lester had outlived his usefulness.”
Michael Spencer saw it another way. “Lester was a father figure, and Phil always turned on the father.”
In the autumn of 1962, Phil and Annette moved out of their small apartment and into a penthouse on Sixty-second Street, close to the East River. Downstairs Spector took a suite of offices for Philles. Standing on the huge balcony of the penthouse apartment and looking down over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge to the lights of Queens shimmering on the far side of the river, it seemed to Phil Spector as if he had arrived on top of the world.
But there was to be one final parting shot at his old partner. According to one story, as part of his settlement with Sill and Finfer, Spector was required to give them the royalties from the next Philles single. Begrudging the thought of sharing anything more with his former partners, Spector devised a plan that would fulfill his obligations while costing him next to nothing. At the end of January 1963, he called the Crystals and three musicians—Michael Spencer on piano, bass player Leonard Gaskin and drummer Herbert Lovelle—into Mirar Sound Studios and recorded a mindless five-minute bump-and-grind dance song he had written himself called “(Let’s Dance) The Screw.” Spencer remembers the session as being “as boring as beans.” A handful of copies of the record were pressed with the catalogue number Philles 111, and copies sent to both Sill and Finfer. Whether the record was actually made to fulfill contractual obligations is debatable. Under those terms, it would have needed to be properly pressed and distributed—which it wasn’t; and the same catalogue number was subsequently used for the next Philles production, “He’s Sure the Boy I Love.” But whatever the reasons behind the record, the implied meaning of the title—screw you—was not lost on Lester Sill.
“Lester didn’t speak too kindly of Phil after that,” says Russ Titelman. “He felt he’d been betrayed. But then everybody Phil touched felt that in the end.”
Yet despite whatever bitterness he might have felt, Sill behaved remarkably charitably toward his estranged partner, urging his stepson Chuck Kaye, who had helped him handle affairs in the Los Angeles office, to continue working for Philles. Sill himself continued to work in the music business, first for Screen Gems and then Jobete Music, right up until his death in 1995. As the years passed, he would often talk fondly of Spector to friends and associates. “Lester didn’t harbor a grudge against Phil,” remembers one acquaintance of both men. “If anything it was the other way round. I could never figure out why.” Spector, for his part, seemed seldom to miss an opportunity to disparage Sill in public, sometimes joking that his old partner was “the less” in Philles; yet privately he
seemed to retain a deep affection for him. The pair would often talk on the phone, gossiping about the music business and hashing over the past. But when I interviewed Spector in December 2002 he was curt about his former partner.
“Lester was like Mr. Nice Guy. He turned out to be a little deceitful, but he was a nice guy who knew everybody in the business. He introduced me to people, gave me references. I would say, ‘Introduce me to this person, get me to that person,’ and he did that.”
And that was all he said.
Riding on the success of “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah,” Darlene Wright, Fanita Barrett and Bobby Sheen had been touring the eastern states as Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, as part of a package tour with Marvin Gaye, the Orlons and Little Eva. It was a miserable experience. The weather back east was atrocious, and the group was earning only $900 a week between the three of them. Now at the end of 1962, Spector called them back into Gold Star, eager to capitalize on their success both as “The Crystals” and Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans.
But first he had to placate Darlene Wright.
Chafing at the lack of recognition she had received for her performance on “He’s a Rebel”—a number 1 record, and no one ever knew her name!—and the fact that she had received only a flat fee—albeit one that was three times the standard union rate—Wright confronted Spector. If he wanted her to record again it would be under her own name, and with a proper contract, or she wouldn’t do it at all. Spector assured her he would get the deal done, but it was only when she threatened to quit altogether that he finally got his lawyers to draw up artist contracts for both Wright and Fanita Barrett.