He's a Rebel (13 page)

When Leiber and Stoller—Shulman's first choice to produce Peterson on Dunes—were booked solid, Spector moved in.

“He'd gotten real friendly with all the guys at Hill and Range,” Beverly Ross said. “Mind you, he had the run of the place because I had brought him in there, and he was really feeling his oats. He was spending a lot of time in Stan Shulman's office with Paul and the other guys, and there'd be a lot of loud talk and laughing all the time. These were very macho guys, and Phil charmed 'em all, and he convinced them to let him produce.”

“He was bitching and bugging us about it,” John Bienstock recalled. “He said we didn't need Mike and Jerry, that he could do it himself. He was a confident little kid.”

Contracted by Shulman to do a session for $150, a royalty cut, and a label production credit, Spector had no idea that he was stepping into a tempest of discord between Peterson and Shulman. The
manager, a constantly sweating, cigar-chomping ex-Marine, could become carried away with his domination of Peterson. “Stan used to do things like knock me down stairs and throw me on my head and beat me up,” Peterson said. “I had braces on my legs and I weighed ninety-eight pounds, and he would insult me, tell me I looked like a queer on stage, the way I held the microphone. Once he put me in the hospital with internal bleeding, but I told people I slipped in the bathroom. Stan was sick, obsessed with the power he had over me—in fact, he told me about the Svengali story. Stan would lock me in my room. I'd have to practice for five, six hours a day in front of a mirror so I'd learn how to walk, so people wouldn't feel sorry for me.”

Peterson became a boffo performer because of it, but his relationship with Shulman was on a slow, curdling boil. Spector did not like Shulman and, as with many music people, had not a whit of respect for his expertise. Recently Shulman had turned down “Hello Mary Lou,” a song written for Peterson by Gene Pitney, a hugely talented writer/singer managed by Aaron Schroeder. Ricky Nelson then took the song to No. 1. “Stan always had two lead ears,” Peterson said.

Still, Spector grabbed the chance to get in the studio with a major artist. He and Peterson decided to cover the old Joe Turner blues song, “Corinna, Corinna”—Phil had been turned on to Turner by Doc Pomus, and Peterson had been doing the song in his act. Phil then went back to Beverly Ross. “He said, ‘Let's write a song for the B side,' ” she recalled. They came up with a tune called “That's the Kind of Love,” but Beverly had a foreboding feeling. “I already smelled that he was being dishonest with me, because he barred me from the session.”

When Spector and Peterson went into Bell Sound, it was with four songs—“That's the Kind of Love” not among them. “I had thousands of songs I could've done,” said Peterson, “but I didn't have to go through thousands with Phil. He was a tremendous judge of music.”

Phil insisted on only one song, and it became the B side of “Corinna, Corinna.” It was “Be My Girl”—thus guaranteeing that Phil and Shirley Spector would enjoy a royalty windfall.

The Spector/Peterson version of “Corinna, Corinna” was considerably softer than the grit of the Joe Turner record. Arranged by
Robert Mersey, who had worked on numerous sessions for Leiber and Stoller, Spector used violins for the first time—and, later, he confided to Beverly Ross that he had been “scared shitless” by the challenge of going from small rhythm sections to a full orchestra—and he sought a sweetness of sound that bordered on icky. “Phil had a new thought for the song,” Peterson recalled. “It had always been done gutteral and funky. I did it as though I was singing to a little girl, not a lover.” Spector and Bell engineer Eddie Smith balanced out and mixed the vocals and the instrumentation so that the background was broad and dreamy, but Peterson's vocal intimately close to the ear. And, amazingly, Spector cut it in record time for him. Vocals sung right over the orchestra, everything was done live, and in just two takes, inside of half an hour.

Not long after, Beverly Ross found out about the omission of “That's the Kind of Love” from the session. “I was heartbroken over it,” she said. “I had a screaming, hysterical fight with him about it. But when you confronted Phil like that, he would just cringe and walk away, before he could feel anything.”

But before long, he was back. “He still wanted to be my friend. He said, ‘I could never match you, Bev. I've looked for people like you all over this business and I could never match you.' He didn't want to burn down any bridges, but I later felt this was the beginning of his terrible two-facedness. I was just too naive and trusting, and I believed him.”

On October 27, just weeks after the Peterson session, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller went into Atlantic's new studio on Sixtieth Street, built by Tom Dowd, to record songs with Ben E. King, who had quit as the Drifters' lead singer for a solo career. King recorded four Drifterish tunes, his own “Stand by Me,” the Spector/Pomus “Young Boy Blues” and “First Taste of Love,” and the Spector/Leiber “Spanish Harlem.” Originally intended as a B side, “Spanish Harlem”—an extraordinary piece of beauty that used the Latin
baion
beat of “Save the Last Dance for Me” and the piercing, frontal strings that created crossover soul on “There Goes My Baby”—was the first side to be released from the session.

Before Christmas and his twentieth birthday, Spector took to the studio twice more. Leiber and Stoller turned over to him Houston-born reggae singer Johnny Nash, who recorded on the ABC-
Paramount label. At Bell Sound, and again with Robert Mersey as arranger, Spector cut two string-laden Drifters-style songs he'd written with Terry Phillips, “Some of Your Loving” and “A World of Tears,” and a cover of “A Thousand Miles Away.”

The second job was for Stan Shulman and Dunes, to record Curtis Lee, a vegetable picker Ray Peterson had discovered singing in a Yuma, Arizona, nightclub. Lee came to New York with four middling songs he had written with L.A. songwriter Tommy Boyce. Spector's ears heard them as white doo-wop, but not with Lee's squeaky voice as the focal point. Instead he brought in a black quartet, the Halos, who recorded for Seven Arts Records and worked background sessions all over town. For $250 per Halo, Stan Shulman received four strong sides; the best was “Pretty Little Angel Eyes,” which bridged the tail end of doo-wop and the new era of dance records.

Spector wanted to use a different studio for the session. He had come upon Mira Sound Studios, which sat in the rear of a forlorn building on W. 47th St. called the Hotel American. Pimps ran in and out of the building and rats had to be rousted from the studio, but the walls were thicker there, and the fat echoes seemed to squish off the plaster like ripe tomatoes. Phil hadn't had as thick a live echo—or “blur,” as he called it—since Gold Star, and the engineer at Mira Sound, Bill MacMeekin, was a visionary in his own right; among other measures, he was the first engineer to put a separate microphone on a bass drum rather than over the entire drum kit, isolating a pounding backbeat not heard before on vinyl. Hunting for a chamber he could send the music through, Spector put a microphone on an outside stairwell. Pleased with the result, he vacated Bell.

Spector, arranging himself and again cutting in haste, recognized that Lee could not carry a tune and turned loose the Halos to pump life into “Angel Eyes.” “We came in and he gave us lyric sheets and told us to do what we felt,” recalled Arthur Cryer, the Halos' bass man and leader. The Halos' churning and shifting riffs—“We stole all those bomps and ha-ha-has from the Spaniels and Cleftones,” Cryer said—made the song infectious.

Early in 1961, Phil Spector had no less than four works on the charts: “Corinna, Corinna,” which was about to peak at No. 9 in
Billboard
and No. 7 in
Cash Box
, “Some of Your Loving,” “Pretty
Little Angel Eyes,” and “Spanish Harlem.” The last, backed with another Spector-Pomus song, “First Taste of Love,” had been released on the last day of 1960 and was now scrambling up the ladder.

Beverly Ross had heard “Spanish Harlem” back in November when Phil played an acetate of the song in Freddie Bienstock's office. She heard the familiar riff that she had worked on with Phil the night he ran out, and her heart sank. She knew she'd been had. Now the grapevine was abuzz with talk about Spector's hard upward thrust and she knew that he was not concerned about taking her on his ride.

“He'd done that song and then he suddenly was writing with some guy named Terry Phillips, and I didn't know from where this Terry Phillips sprang,” she said. “It wasn't like Phil said anything about breaking off, he just started avoiding me. He started gaining power—and he wanted people to be influenced by
him
.” And yet, against all hope, she didn't want to believe Phil would never write with her again.

Phil, meanwhile, was informing people that he had produced “Spanish Harlem,” which in its glory and power dwarfed the songs he had produced. He took no official credit, he implied, out of deference to Leiber and Stoller's preeminence. Hearing this kind of scuttlebutt, Tom Dowd would bellow, “Horsefeathers!” since, in fact, while Phil had attended the session at which it was cut, he had neither played on it nor had any real input.

“I seem to recall him leaning against a wall or something,” Ben E. King said.

Doc Pomus heard the poop too and would chuckle about it. “Phil always told a lot of stories, but here's the reality: what actually happened, what Phil wished could have happened, and what he
says
happened.”

As the calendar ran out on 1961, to Phil Spector, spread all over the canyons of New York music but in his mind owned by nobody, only one reality mattered: he was omnipotent.

He had to find himself but I'll tell you one thing. He was complete when he walked in. He was like Minerva coming out of Jupiter's head. He had it all in him. I don't think he had to learn too much. All he had to do was implement
.

—
JERRY WEXLER

Phil went home to Los Angeles for Christmas but it was not merely a sentimental journey. Lester Sill had called and asked him to do a job, and Phil owed it to Lester to do whatever he would have wanted. In fact, Phil was not convinced anything would come out of the job—which was to produce a trio of blond teenage sisters who did a McGuire Sisters–style act. Priscilla, Albeth, and Sherrell Paris—the Paris Sisters, professionally and otherwise—had recorded for Imperial briefly, but they were in a three-year drought when Sill bought them from Jesse Rand, who also managed the Lettermen. Sill solicited producers for the group, but he got no takers; by no stretch of the imagination were the McGuire Sisters a sixties boom.

The Paris Sisters were an odd fork in the road for Sill, given that he and Lee Hazelwood were in dire need of a hit act in 1961. Not long before, on a plane ride from Phoenix to L.A., Hazelwood and Duane Eddy had a spat, and Eddy demanded a break with Sill/Hazelwood Productions. Trying to play hardball, the two men insisted that Harold Lipsius and Harry Finfer, the Jamie Records strongmen in Philadelphia, return master tapes of Eddy sessions that Sill and Hazelwood had paid for. But when Lipsius and Finfer refused, Universal's dominion was such that Sill and Hazelwood were forced to back down.

Now, with the Trey label dying and with no sure-fire talent, Sill was in crisis. Spector made plane reservations.

Longtime Gold Star clients, the Paris Sisters had cut a number of unsuccessful demos, engineered by Stan Ross, and Phil remembered that he'd heard the group in the studio and that—despite the Sisters being a group-harmony act—he thought that Priscilla Paris had a purring voice similar to Annette Kleinbard's. That made him think he could refashion yet another version of the Teddy Bears. He called Stan Ross to set the date.

“He wanted to make sure I could do the session, but he also was afraid to fly and he had a wonderful concept for getting over it,” Ross recalled. “His theory was that if he spoke to the place he was going to end up—a music place, because that was his destiny—that he would get there okay.”

It still didn't prevent Phil from squeezing the armrests of his seat every mile of the way, and a knowing Bertha Spector was at the airport to meet him with sandwiches. Checking into the Players Motel, a picaresquely dingy Hollywood music lodge, Phil went next to see Russ Titelman. He took back his Telecaster Defender guitar but gave Russ a gig as a guitarist at the Paris Sisters session. Having dealt, sometimes uneasily, with prickly New York musicians, Phil wanted a more conducive, familiar air in the studio. Michael Spencer, who had gone from UCLA to Harvard Law School but had dropped out after three months, was back in L.A., and Phil brought him onto the session as well, along with Johnny Clauder, the drummer for Don Randi who had jammed at Michael's house on those grandiose Friday nights. Moving Priscilla Paris out in front as lead vocalist—a move her two sisters resented—Spector cut two of his songs, the A side a cover of the tune that was currently making big
money for him and Shirley as the flip of “Corinna, Corinna,” though with the gender switch it was now called “Be My Boy.”