He's a Rebel (19 page)

In early February of 1962, as “There's No Other” peaked at a very edifying No. 20, nearing the end of an eleven-week spurt, all of Phil's dreams circled around Philles Records. Seeking an edge on his competition, he conferred with Don Kirshner about a pooling of efforts between Philles and Aldon. There was much about Kirshner that Spector liked. In fact, they were intrinsically alike. Bearlike but with the plump cheeks of an infant, Kirshner was pathologically ambitious; a failure as a songwriter in the fifties, he drew vicarious satisfaction from owning outright the best young writers in pop music in the sixties. More than anyone else Kirshner had made rock and roll a profession rather than just a vehicle of rebellion, and his power was sultanlike: he could deign which labels and producers should have his catalogue—his writers' copyrighted material—and exact a price in return. His label, Dimension, allowed his writers—primarily Goffin and King—to produce some of their own songs. Like Spector, Kirshner could act like an overage child, and his pouting temper tantrums were notorious. But where Spector believed his own puerile side was a subterfuge, a hiding place for manipulation, he thought Kirshner to be somewhat naïve and malleable, and the idea of swaying and controlling Kirshner, with all his power, was arousing. And so Spector and Kirshner waltzed with each other, and in mutual recognition of their corpulent egos they half-facetiously called each other “The Kingpin.” In late January Spector took one of Aldon's best new songs—Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil's “Uptown”—for his second Crystals record, but only after he agreed to put a lesser Aldon work, the Larry Kolber–Jack Keller “What a Nice Way to Turn Seventeen” on the flip side. Through Kirshner's largesse, Spector got to redeem at least part of the deal that Leiber and Stoller squashed a year before. He co-wrote (with free-lance writer Hank Hunter) and produced a Connie Francis record for MGM, “Second Hand Love,” which went Top 10 in June.

Annette was privy to the Spector-Kirshner shadow dance and never thought the two would give enough to work in tandem. “Phil was gonna have an empire with Donnie Kirshner, but he was also very competitive with Donnie—Phil is competitive with everybody,” she said. “His thing was, who's going to have the biggest empire, him or Donnie. That's how he talked—and, you know, if Phil weren't so talented he would sound like he was totally full of shit. But it was really true, he could think that way.”

“Kirshner never spoke his true feelings about whether he liked or disliked Phil,” Gerry Goffin said, “but he had a lot of respect for Phil because he liked his records and he was a great vehicle for us. And Phil knew Kirshner could motivate Carole and me and Barry and Cynthia to write. Kirshner would call and say, ‘Phil needs a song' and we'd be hot to do it. So those two really got a lot out of each other.”

Kirshner confided much about his dealings with Spector to Lester Sill. “Donnie never trusted him,” according to Sill.

It was a feeling that Lester himself would come to know during the early months of 1962. “I began to smell things falling out a little bit with Phil,” he said.

This happened once it was clear that “There's No Other” was a hit and Phil followed it up with a personal
tour de force
—his production of “Uptown.” The record that he took out of Mira Sound was like an oil painting of Spanish Harlem, now hued in frustration and not just the innocent charm of the Jerry Leiber-Spector work. Phil's tableau of brooding violins, cellos, mandolins, and castanets was an echo of the Leiber-Stoller black/Latin Drifters idiom. But it was much more urgent and restless, and it gave an aching anxiety to a lyric that Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil intended to be high-mindedly liberal but unwittingly branded
barrio
men as docile and addicted to servility—the protagonist dutifully shuffled downtown each morning to be a little man in a world “where everyone's his boss.” Spector saved it with the intense, sensual beauty of every note.

Watching the session from inside the booth, Gerry Goffin was knocked out by the song. He asked Phil who wrote it, and Phil said, “I did.” Not until later did Goffin learn otherwise. “The weird thing was, it was the kind of lie Phil knew he'd be caught on,” Goffin said. “I never understood why he told lies like that. Maybe he thought he could
make
it his if he said it was.” Released in March, “Uptown” would rise as high as No. 13 in
Billboard
, No. 10 in
Cash Box
, by early June.

As it climbed, Phil produced only one record for Liberty, with a singer named Obrey Wilson. As Al Bennett feared, his commitment to the label was only transitory. Snuff Garrett, in fact, heard from Spector just once after the new year—when Phil complained that the plants in his office weren't being watered by the Liberty
staff. He did try to cut a Liberty record with the Ducanes, but with ill results. “Liberty tried to tie Phil's hands, they didn't give him the creative freedom he needed,” said Eddie Brian, one of the Ducanes. “Phil couldn't stand Liberty. They wanted us to do a country-western song called Tennessee.' You don't give a song like that to New Jersey teenagers who sing doo-wop. A Liberty executive came in during a rehearsal as we were making fun of it with cow and pig noises. After that, we were out on our asses. They gave the song to Jan and Dean, and they had to flop with it.”

As Annette read Phil, however, his discontent had more to do with personal than creative freedom.

“Phil just didn't like working for anybody but himself,” she said.

Again working in his own interest, Phil cut a third Crystals record in May. As with “Uptown,” Don Kirshner held the option on both sides. The A side was a Goffin-King work with the lurid and provocative title of “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss),” and it was the most literally bruising love/pain theme of all by the tortured couple. Goffin explained that the song grew from a sob story they heard from their live-in babysitter, Eva Boyd—the teenage girl who, as Little Eva, sang the Goffin-King “The Loco-Motion,” a No. 1 hit that Goffin produced for Dimension in mid-1962. “She had this boyfriend and she was off for the weekend and when she came home she was all black and blue. She said, ‘He hit me and that must mean he really loves me.' ” The Goffin-King lyric echoed that sentiment. Years later, Goffin would allow that the tune was “a litde radical for those times.”

So too was Spector's arrangement, which seemed to justify violence against women as a way to true love. The song began with an ominous drum-and-bell thudding that sounded as if it could be a fist hitting bone, then lifted in a crescendo of stringed
schmaltz
as the girl realized how lucky she was to have her brute. The ending was a prayerlike font of soprano voices echoing into silence, the girl's blessing.

Hearing this bizarre vinyl soap opera, Lester Sill was horrified. “I hated that record,” he said. “I got into a big fight with him over it. I thought it was a terrible fucking song.”

Gerry Goffin, immersed in his and his wife's personal obsession with battered and bruised romance—“It was the mood we were in, a phase we were going through,” he said—clearly found Spector to be an indirect inspiration and direct market for the darker themes. “Phil was
sort of a masochist himself,” he said. Asked by Spector to write material for the Crystals after “Uptown,” Goffin and King not only gave him “He Hit Me” but two other harrowing songs: “No One Ever Tells You” and “Please Hurt Me.” Spector took all three, using “No One Ever Tells You” as the flip side of “He Hit Me” and saving “Please Hurt Me” for an upcoming Crystals album.

And yet the caricature of Phil Spector as a physical beast was not one that Annette could recognize. “That was just a good song,” she said. “Phil thought it was a great hook, and he never had any other musical rationale than what was a good song. Yes, Phil is definitely a sadist—but of the mind, not the body. He was a gentle lover, a very fine lover. He was not a ferocious tiger who was some kind of a crazy sadist in the bedroom.”

In June, Phil called Al Bennett and said he was quitting Liberty Records. He told Bennett he was “burned out” and was going on a sabbatical to Spain, to get his head together. Phil, who padded his alibi for weeks by registering for a Spanish study course at Berlitz and ostentatiously leaving the language school's pamphlets all around his office, left Liberty with no apparent inclination to pay back any portion of his $30,000 advance. Like Jerry Wexler, Al Bennett and Snuff Garrett knew they had been had.

For Garrett, it was a kick in the pants. “It was my deal, I brought him in, and I felt bad about it not workin' out,” he said. “That's the only thing in my life that never worked out well. But my reaction was: who cares? That it didn't work out didn't mean anything to me. All I knew was that I knew Spec was a talent and I really liked Spec a lot and we had fun, man.”

Spector and Garrett would never hook up again, but they had a chance reckoning with fate just weeks later.

The group has a winning sound on this new ballad. They handle it with much feeling over a martial-styled big ork background that builds. Watch this one
.

—
Billboard
review of “He's a Rebel”

Phil did not walk out on Liberty until he had two must-do items checked off on his list of priorities. One was the courting of the Ronettes. Phil preferred not to deal with Don Kirshner on this one, and indeed never let on that he was interested in them. Instead, so convinced was he that he and the group were right for each other, he wanted to have no ties and no conditions in connection with their services. When Phil found out that the Ronettes were doing session work as background singers, he passed the word that he wanted them to contact him—but that they should not be told his identity. Although Phil loved these kind of secret games, it is likely that Kirshner would not have objected to letting the Ronettes go, since their records for Dimension under the name of Ronnie and the Relatives
and the Heartbreakers were failures. In fact, Kirshner had asked Gerry Goffin to produce the group. Unimpressed with them, Goffin said no.

“I remember going through rehearsals with them and trying to get them to sing harmonies and they seemed pretty terrible,” Goffin said. “I turned 'em down because I couldn't stand Ronnie's voice.”

Born on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Veronica and Estelle Bennett and their younger cousin, Nedra Talley, began singing as the Darling Sisters, playing local hops in flare dresses and pony tails. The hardening of their image came when they started dancing for pay in New York's Peppermint Lounge during the twist craze. Their name was changed to the Ronettes—a fusing of their first names—as they danced on the holiday rock shows hosted by the influential New York deejay Murray “The K” Kaufman at Brooklyn's Fox and Paramount theaters. Their recording career was less fruitful. Signed to Columbia Records' Colpix label, then to Dimension, they were handled for Kirshner by a capable producer named Stu Phillips, and also appeared in the movie
Rock Around the Clock
. But their records, candy-coated gruel with titles like “I Want a Boy” and “What's So Sweet About Sweet Sixteen,” kept them obscure. Eventually, Phillips quit Dimension after a spat with Kirshner, and the girls had little to do but work outside sessions.

On one such gig, they got a message with a number to call for more work. They called and were put through to Phil. “When he came on, it was not who we expected,” Nedra Talley recalled, “and he told us to meet him at Mira Sound. We went, and not much later we were recording as an act for him.” Their ears ringing by his promises of stardom, recording much better material with a superstar producer, they didn't bother to terminate their Dimension contract. At Spector's behest, they told the Dimension people they were quitting the business—an alibi delivered at about the same time Phil gave a similar story to Al Bennett. “We weren't pulling any hits where we were,” Talley reasoned, “and if you have another situation, you go with what reeks of success.”

On May 26, mere days after he quit Liberty, the Ronettes were with Phil in L.A. and cutting demos at Gold Star, a process that would determine what kind of material he would want to put out when the time came. For now, though, that time was not yet close. To lend credence to the lie about them quitting the business, and
pending what he knew would be long months of drilling them to be his big act, he put the Ronettes on the back burner. Knowing he had them under contract was good enough.

The second factor that hastened his departure from Liberty was the sure-fire song he had been waiting for. Finally, in June, it came—from the recipient of one of his favors: Aaron Schroeder. Schroeder played him a demo Gene Pitney had made of a new song he had written, “He's a Rebel.” Though Spector did not know it, there was irony in him coming upon the song. “Uptown” had led Pitney to write it. “ ‘Uptown' was the first song where I ever heard anyone use funky strings like that and especially low strings, violas and cellos down that low,” he said. “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.”