He's a Rebel (31 page)

I get a little angry when people say it's bad music. This music has a spontaneity that doesn't exist in any other kind of music, and it's what is here now. It's unfair to classify it as rock and roll and condemn it. It has limited chord changes, and people are always saying the words are banal and why doesn't anybody write lyrics like Cole Porter anymore, but we don't have any presidents like Lincoln anymore, either. You know? Actually, it's more like the blues. It's pop blues. I feel it's very American. It's very
today.
It's what people respond to today. It's not just the kids. I hear cab drivers, everybody, listening to it
.

—
PHIL SPECTOR
, from “The First Tycoon of Teen,”
Tom Wolfe,
New York Herald Tribune
, January 3, 1965,
New York
magazine section.

The concept of true “pop blues” was a promise that rock and roll had forsaken in the great rush to move the most vinyl. Phil himself believed he had gone back on his implicit blues genesis; in the seven
years since “To Know Him Is to Love Him” made the
Billboard
R&B chart, he returned there with only one record—“Be My Baby”—and not since “He's a Rebel” had he turned loose the jazzmen in Studio A without care for any formulizing. Spector's vocalists sang blacker than Berry Gordy tolerated from his Motown artists, but in truth neither idiom was R&B in its brokenhearted and wailing sense.

Contemplating pop music after the initial wave of Beatlemania, Phil thought that as marketable as Motown and the Merseybeat were, they were still teenage idioms and that there really was nowhere for rock and roll to go but back to the heart of R&B, because that would close the circle of its evolution. The pity for Phil was that rock had virtually bludgeoned and whitewashed great black soul singers out of the business; in a mid-sixties that was riffling by like pages from a Greek tragedy, Sam Cooke was shot dead, and Ben E. King, the Drifters, and the Coasters had to work in supper clubs.

When Phil found a soul act with which he thought he could right the world, it was ironically a white act, but one that no set of ears would ever hear as anything but black. Indeed, when Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield began vocalizing together, they took their performing name from the reaction of a mostly all-black audience who greeted their music with cries of “righteous”—black slang for that which is truthful and honest. Signed to the small L.A. label Moonglow Records in 1962, the Righteous Brothers were a local word-of-mouth sensation. They had a middling hit, “Little Latin Lupe Lu,” in 1963 and cut songs written by, among others, Sonny Bono and Jack Nitzsche. But their hard gospel blues were their calling card. It kept them on the L.A. club circuit and landed them a regular gig on “Shindig.”

Phil wanted Medley and Hatfield so much that he was willing to deal with Moonglow to lease their services, a sharing of the riches that usually was anathema to him. In early October of 1964, he signed papers with Moonglow's R.J. Van Hoogten that granted him an exclusive four-year license to record and release the Righteous Brothers on the Philles label in the U.S., Britain, and Canada. Van Hoogten, who was eager to make this step into the rock elite, retained the right to sell the records anywhere outside those three countries. Spector's cut of publishing royalties would be divided between Mother Bertha and the publishing company of Moonglow's owner, Ray Maxwell Music. Medley and Hatfield, eager for a national hit, met with
Spector and forwarded their approval in a signed letter on October 1, 1964.

Slim, dark-haired, and narrow-faced, Bill Medley, born in Santa Ana, California, was the Righteous Brothers' soul fulcrum. His voice was a bold and edgy basso that sounded like a Bing Crosby croon powered by a diesel engine. The turnip-nosed and blond Bobby Hatfield, from Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, was Medley's physical and vocal counterpoint, with a honeyed soprano that trilled with heated Jackie Wilson-style shrieks. Together, their tight harmonies soared in every direction, each note wildly exuberant and at times almost angrily emotional.

As such they were tailored to the Mann-Weil meat grinder of passion. They and Phil collaborated in a harvest of love's shameless irrationality called “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'.” The lyric of this song indicted, derided, and then ultimately pleaded for reunion, and it would be Bill Medley, solo and almost
a capella
for a Spector song, who would carry the record into its raging currents by crooning the damning intro of eyes unclosed during kissing and fingertips bereft of tenderness.

Phil took the purgatory nature of the song literally. This record was to be a rebirth; far more so than “Walking in the Rain,” this was a holy conversion of his music. To go with his new act, Gold Star's Studio A was fertilized with the seeds of new life. There were a number of new musicians in the room. Jack Nitzsche, busy elsewhere, was replaced with an arranger named Gene Page. Hal Blaine, who had mildly irritated Phil by refusing to cancel other gigs and stay on hold for him, was out and Earl Palmer back in. And, most significantly for Phil, an invitation was sent out to Barney Kessel, the great jazz guitarist who helped steer Phil to pump the fortunes of rock.

Kessel had never before played on a rock-and-roll session. Like Howard Roberts before him, he knew almost nothing of Spector's career or music, and was just as puzzled about Phil's conceptualizing of a record. But Barney could see that Phil was on to something. “It was all loose and laid back, but all the time he was working on a strategy, like he was going to invade Moscow,” Kessel said. “He had a sketch, and there were very few things happening, but there was a lot of weight on each part. The three pianos were different, one electric, one not, one harpsichord, and they would all play the same
thing and it would all be swimming around like it was all down a well.

“Musically, it was terribly simple, but the way he recorded and miked it, they'd diffuse it so that you couldn't pick any one instrument out. Techniques like distortion and echo were not new, but Phil came along and took these to make sounds that had not been used in the past. I thought it was ingenious.” Spector had Kessel play a high-octave, six-string bass guitar on the bass-heavy “Lovin' Feelin',” in tandem with Carole Kaye's Fender and Ray Pohlman on stand-up. “Really, more than anything else, what he wanted from me was the jazz kind of energy,” Kessel said.

Studio A was like a nuclear generator that night, but Medley and Hatfield, unaccustomed to anything like this grand-scale session, sat through the hours of mounting orchestration bewildered and bored. Waiting to lay down their vocals, they watched Phil ring-lead a circus of flash and noise and could not believe that they were the stars of the record. Larry Levine, who knew from the first guitar chord that something special was happening here, was incredulous that Medley and Hatfield didn't seem to care. “How can you sit there?” he admonished them. “You should be ecstatic about this!” Bill and Bobby remained impassive, but Larry would play the song for record people as soon as they entered the Gold Star doorway. “They'd come back after three hours and want to hear it again,” he said. “All day long people would be comin' over to listen to that thing.”