He's a Rebel (18 page)

Trying to live with this terribly cruel turn of events, Phil cursed an unkind fate. But he also wondered if Lester was being completely honest or fair with him. Biting his lip hard, he refrained from arguing about it, and he soon split for New York, still simmering.

The Paris Sisters were more demonstrative. They were so angry they staged a series of nasty scenes in the office, demanding their money. If they were frantic, they had reason. When Phil left, his haste had made it clear that he was through with them for good. “Phil is like that,” Sill said. “When it doesn't happen the way he wants, he doesn't give a shit what it does to other people involved. He will destroy those people—although in this case, the Paris Sisters destroyed themselves, because they got very salty with me and forced me to drop 'em. Besides, when Phil went back to New York, no one else wanted to record 'em. I loved the Paris Sisters but I don't think anyone could've made hits with 'em but Phil.” Sill did release two more Paris Sisters' records that he had in the can, but he in effect “washed my hands of them” the day Spector walked out on them. They signed with MGM in 1963, but never relived the heady days Spector had given them.

Still unsure about the future of the Crystals' “There's No Other,” Phil sought to close some wounds with Hill and Range. Operating on the periphery of the eleventh floor, he did two more sessions for Stan Shulman and Dunes, one with Ray Peterson, one with Curtis Lee. Each would yield a minor hit: Lee's “Under the Moon of Love” and Peterson's “I Could Have Loved You So Well.” And when the Bienstocks and Paul Case got into a sticky political fray with George Goldner, Spector agreed to be the peacemaker. The problem came about when Big Top signed Arlene Smith, the strong-lunged former Chantels lead singer, as a solo act. Goldner was irate about Smith leaving Roulette Records, and he and the Roulette people began making intimidating noises about it to Hill and Range.

“They thought of me as ‘George's artist,' and they were giving Big Top a hard time,” Smith recalled. “I was caught in the middle of it.”

Burt Bacharach was slated to produce Smith at Big Top, but
when Goldner put the heat on, Big Top shuddered. Rumors about Goldner and the mob were a longtime undercurrent on Broadway, and no one wanted to find out whether there was any truth behind them. “Big Top was afraid of George and Roulette,” Smith thought. And so Bacharach was taken off the gig, to be replaced by the kid who had done Goldner right with the Ducanes, as part of an arrangement leading to Smith eventually being sold back to Roulette.

Phil was thrilled to get Smith's powerful voice in the studio, and he took the extraordinary step of having her do a cover of “He Knows I Love Him Too Much.” Released at about the same time as the Paris Sisters' record, Big Top didn't push it hard, and it was heard almost nowhere. Nor was Smith happy with the product, though she liked working with Phil and later wrote a song with him called “Pretty Face.” Smith would fondly recall his energy and his bizarre wardrobe—he wore pointy-toed desert boots and a little cap, reminding her of Robin Hood—but the song struck her as “a stock arrangement, and the attention wasn't focused on me. I was lost at the bottom of a big orchestra mix, and it didn't work. If I'd been out front, it might've been very special.”

Phil figured in the second stage of the Smith exit plan as well, which was to reunite her with her old Chan tels producer and Goldner protégé, Richard Barrett. When Barrett cut his record, it was released not on Big Top but on a one-shot label sticker under the name “Spectorius.” That was George Goldner's payback to Spector for his generosity with the Ducanes.

Helen Noga, acting on Phil's hints of a shared march to glory, greeted the release of “There's No Other” with a decided effort to wiggle further into the Philles picture. On October 17, after consulting with Phil, she had her lawyers draw up a contract of terms and conditions financing more sessions by the Creations, Ducanes, and Crystals, in exchange for a 50 percent cut of the profits. How Phil hoped to reconcile this with Harold Lipsius and Harry Finfer only he knew, and it was possible he had no intention of ever going that far with Noga. But, pending the showing of “There's No Other,” he signed the contract—including a make-good gesture to the Bienstocks: a clause stating “Paul Case of Hill and Range Songs Inc. is to be given first consideration for material to be recorded.”

The truth was, Spector had come upon a better means of life
support for Philles. For months he had been quietly dealing with Liberty Records, the L.A. label founded by Lew Bedell and Herb Newman's cousin Si Waronker in 1955 and which had consolidated the range of West and Northwest rock—it was Liberty that distributed the Fleetwoods' “Come Softly To Me” and the hugely influential guitar-rock records of the Ventures, each recorded on a small label in Seattle. The Spector-Liberty romance began with overtures by Tommy “Snuff” Garrett, a skinny producer who was also Liberty's head A&R man on the West Coast. Garrett was, in Phil's mind, the only L.A. producer who really mattered in sixties rock. An ex-deejay from Texas and a close friend of Buddy Holly's, Garrett came to L.A. in 1959 and produced gigantic hits for Liberty with Bobby Vee, a Holly soundalike from Minnesota, and Johnny Burnette by adding opulent string arrangements to rockabilly.

Garrett was Spector's idea of Dixie hip. He wore cowboy boots, spun homilies about horses and pigs, and was fond of saying—and proving—that he could not produce a flop record. Only three years older than Phil, Garrett's long, gravelly face was excavated by the force of a thousand Texas saloons, and if Spector tried to faze Snuff with the Phil trip, he got nowhere. In New York once to bird-dog songs for Liberty, Garrett invited Spector up to his hotel room for breakfast. Phil asked if anyone else was there, and Snuff told him he was with a certain female writer. Phil, who knew the woman, said, “I don't like her.” Snuff told him, “Well, then don't look at her.” Moments later, Spector came to the door—with his eyes jammed shut. “He had a plastic bag and in it was a half-eaten dinner roll, a razor, and a broken comb,” Garrett recalled, “and all the while we talked he sat lookin' at me. He would not look at or talk to the lady.” Garrett never blinked. After breakfast, Phil “closed his eyes again and I helped him to the door and he left.”

When Phil buried himself in the postproduction of “I Love How You Love Me,” he took the record to Garrett for an opinion, knowing he'd get a square count. “He came runnin' over and, God, we went over and over that record,” Garrett said. Months later, Liberty producer Clyde Otis—head of East Coast A&R—quit the label, leaving unfinished records he had been working on. Garrett offered the A&R job to Spector, and the two of them kept increasing salary figures until, almost in jest, Phil said he'd accept $25,000. “It was ridiculous, unheard of for then, but I gave it to him because I believed
Spec to be a great fuckin' talent,” Garrett said. “I thought the two of us would really put Liberty on the map.” Garrett had to talk Liberty president Al Bennett into approving—“Al bitched and moaned. I was enough of a problem to handle. They didn't want two children in A&R.”

But Garrett talked well. Not only did Al Bennett okay the contract, he also capitulated to a clause drawn up by Spector and Sill that gave Phil the leeway to go on producing his three personally owned acts—the Crystals, Creations, and Ducanes—on his own time, as well as liberal travel privileges. For Bennett, this was a very risky clause; at worst, Phil might hoard the best songs he could find for his own label, and at best his attention and purpose might be divided. As Bennett needed signs that Spector would perform well for Liberty, Garrett assigned Phil the unfinished mix of a song Clyde Otis had cut with Timi Yuro, “What's the Matter Baby.” “He went into Mira Sound and redubbed it down,” Garrett said, “and he did a helluva job on it.” Outwardly, at least, Spector seemed gung ho about the job, and this convinced Bennett as to his ability and intentions. And so Bennett gave in to one more of Phil's requests, for a cash advance on expenses. Sitting in his office a continent away, on top of a roster of rockabilly acts, Bennett had ecstatic visions of beating the New York labels on the important new rock acts. Spector was clued in, he was hot, he was good. Suddenly, placating him didn't seem such a gamble. Bennett drew out an entire year's salary, up front, for Spector, with another $5,000 thrown in.

This incredible war chest socked away, Phil no longer needed Helen Noga. But neither did he need to alienate her. Guaranteeing her a piece of the first three Philles records, he made a cash settlement, buying out her dream before it began.

Next came a change of address, to a bigger apartment, a one-bedroom on W. 58th Street. Liberty was one block away, at 171 W. 57th Street. Phil inspected his office there and decided that he did not want the desk provided to him. “They had a conference table in a big room, and Spec wanted that as his desk,” Snuff Garrett remembered. “So of course I had to get it done for him. Liberty wanted to hang me.” The first few weeks in the new job, Phil sat in his office, dwarfed by the titanic table, and did almost nothing besides play with an air hockey game, either by himself or with a still-paternal Paul Case.

As New Year's 1962 arrived, Spector had signed one act to Liberty, a black singer named Bobby Sheen, who was sent to him by Lester Sill. Sheen was, like Kell Osborne and Billy Storm, another in the Clyde McPhatter mold. Tall and thin, with a towering, pomade-juiced pompadour on top of his forehead, he was discovered by Johnny Otis, who guided his career before Sill used him in an offshoot edition of the Robins. Sheen had gone to high school in West Hollywood, and he vaguely knew Phil when they were teenagers, recalling him as “kind of doofish.” No longer. Watching Phil at work in New York, Sheen was dazzled by Phil's darting, swarming energy and command of all before him. “He was push, push, push, let me do it, I can do it,” said Sheen. “He could do anything. He was invincible.”

However, Phil's work at Liberty was knocking nobody out. Nor did it seem to matter overly to Phil. Apart from two sides he cut with Sheen, and another with a singer named Troy Shondell—none of which dented the chart—Phil stirred mainly for non-Liberty concerns. The chart performance of “There's No Other (Like My Baby)” had much to do with this. By Christmas it had vaulted to No. 26, with plenty of steam left in it. As if on cue, Phil arose from his big desk in mid-January and journeyed to L.A. to cut Philles material with Jack Nitzsche at Gold Star—the site where he wanted to eventually make all of the Philles records. Before he left, though, he made a mental note about a girl group he had seen perform at a dance club. Called the Ronettes, they were a trio of caramel-skinned black girls from New York—two sisters and their cousin—who were signed with Don Kirshner's Dimension Records. Rare among the day's girl groups, the Ronettes advertised themselves with knee-length wigs and skirts slit to the hip as a mascara-caked vision of sexual paradise, and from what Phil heard, he thought they might be able to sing gritty blues, especially in the quivering, heaving voice of their sultry lead singer, Veronica Bennett. Phil promised himself that he would steal them from Dimension, where they were being regurgitated in a rut of larded white pop that misused their talents.

Eighteen-year-old Annette Merar, who had begun her freshman year at Cal State-Berkeley, transferred after one semester to UCLA just as Phil came to town. For two weeks, he took her out and about L.A., his obsession with her unnerving the Merar family. “My mom
and dad didn't like Phil at all, because he would drive everybody crazy when we were dating,” Annette recalled. “He'd scream and yell and bring me home at all hours of the night, call at ridiculous hours.” Such disruptions led Annette to move in with her sister Renee in Hollywood. By then, Phil was ready to return to New York. He did not want to go without her. Believing in her heart that the two of them shared a deep and special love, Annette agreed to go with him. Hurriedly she threw clothes into suitcases and together they caught the flight back. For once, Phil had no trouble flying. “We made out the whole way,” Annette said.

After moving into his apartment, Annette was inseparable from Phil. She went to the studio with him, copied and printed his lead sheets, and continued the idyllic conversations they'd had on the phone. About the only thing she didn't do was to sleep with him—literally—because even after they made love long into the night, Phil would not be able to sleep. “I'd usually be in bed way before him. He'd go to sleep at about 5
A.M
. and get up at 10. I was up at his Liberty office real late one night 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?”

This was no longer the Phil Spector of the capes, chukka boots, galoshes, and tousled, tangled hair. He was a figure of New York power now. As much as it pained him that his hair was receding rapidly, he now wore it neat and short, arranged by high-priced coiffeurs. On his bony body and in his closets at home, he boasted Italian seersucker suits, silk ties, and shiny leather boots. Once, with nothing to shield him from the New York cold, Phil had asked to borrow an overcoat from Beverly Ross, and wore it even though the buttons on the left marked it as women's wear. Now his own overcoats were made of fine cashmere. “I never saw him dress weird,” Annette said. “He was dapper. I liked that, that cut-velvet vest and the silk socks. He was always very elegant.”

The spoils of his success, however, were irrelevant to Annette. “I didn't go with Phil for his money. The part of him I loved most was his genius, seeing an idea develop and come to fruition. Phil Spector was the rock-and-roll Mozart, and he shared his plans and his dreams with me. Oh, yes, late at night he talked a
lot
about his dreams.”