He's a Rebel (5 page)

Spencer recalled Spector as “very quiet, very sensitive, a little mouselike creature without a lot of confidence—but when Phillip was playing music, he had a tremendous aggression.”

Spencer thought he knew why: “It was perhaps a desire to be independent from his mother. Phil was overly dependent on Bertha when we met, very coddled by her, smothered really. The relationship
they had was extremely intense, because they were both very emotional people, and Phil's aggressive personality burst out of there, as a way of compensating for being dependent so much of the time.”

Spector, Lieb, and Spencer began taking gigs around Los Angeles and ran into bands making the same scene. One was called the Sleepwalkers, a group from Union High School. The rivalry between Fairfax and Union was fierce, and it carried over to the two bands. Spector took to talking himself up, and it was a technique that came easy to him. Without batting an eyelash, Spector told the Sleepwalkers' drummer, Sammy Nelson, that he had produced several hit records that were on the charts. When Nelson told this to his skeptical bandmates, Bruce Johnston and Kim Fowley—the latter the son of actor Douglas Fowley (“Doc” on television's “Wyatt Earp”) and the grandson of composer Rudolf Friml—they went to a record store to check the records, seeing if Spector's name was anywhere on them. It wasn't, but Spector had already thought of that: he knew he'd be safe because producer's credits were never given. Still, the Union High bunch was not fooled.

“I guess they lied a lot over at Fairfax,” Fowley said.

Having sung with a black L.A. vocal group called the Jayhawks, Fowley was not overly impressed with Spector's unnamed band.

“The Sleepwalkers were much more creative than whatever Spector was doing,” he insisted. “Both of us played biker parties, bar mitzvahs at the Brentwood Temple, then we'd run across the street and do the Catholics' lonelyhearts club crap at the CYO. But when those guys played, we'd be out stripping cars in the parking lot and giving beer to kids our age and younger. We got wallflowers to let us use their houses; we'd give 'em money, set 'em up in a hotel with hookers, and we'd have our own house parties. Or sometimes we'd roll queers in Hollywood for beer money.”

Spector's group was arrow-straight, clean-nosed Fairfax boys. In time, it grew to include various configurations built around Phil and Marshall and the doo-wop and Everly Brothers songs the two would choose for their gigs. Spector was always looking for people who could sing with him. He joined a Fairfax High music club called the Barons, and out of its ranks he plucked what became a rotating carousel of strong-throated singers to take on gigs, which usually paid less money than what it cost in gas to get there in Marshall's old Dodge. Among the singing partners were Spector's next-door neighbor,
Steve Gold, as well as kids named Steve Price, Donnie Kartoon, Bart Silverman, and Harvey Goldstein. None but Phil played an instrument well, and Spector would play guitar and sometimes piano if Mike Spencer wasn't around, at which time Marshall would do a turn on guitar. One gig, by far the most profound for these nice Jewish boys, was at El Monte Legion Stadium, where they managed to place themselves in one of the shows hosted there by Johnny Otis himself. This was in the middle of black and Mexican ethnic L.A., a hotbed of purebred R&B, and while they played to a lukewarm response, Phil and Marshall had a giddy exhilaration simply standing on the hallowed ground of Johnny Otis's stage.

In the spring of 1957, Spector could actually swagger up the steps of the Fairfax High auditorium stage and perform on his guitar “Rock Island Line,” the British skiffle tune popularized by Lonnie Donegan, at a talent show. It surprised nobody that Spector won the contest. Not long after, Spector and Lieb went on a late-night television program on KTLA called “Rocket to Stardom.” Sponsored by an Oldsmobile salesman named Bob Yeakel, and broadcast from Yeakel's showroom, the program was a showcase of young amateur talent in Los Angeles. Spector and Lieb performed “In the Still of the Night” and won the night's competition. There were many talented people in Spector's circle now, but he was fulcrum; his moves were the ones all the others were watching.

“We all were moving, with our own ambitions,” Michael Spencer said. “But it was Phillip who moved fastest.”

Phil Spector, Marshall Lieb, and their loose conglomeration of soulmates continued gigging after graduation day at Fairfax High in June of 1957, but the world was smaller now, less open to flights of fancy. In the fall, Phil and Marshall enrolled at Los Angeles City College, and Michael Spencer was at UCLA. Marshall chose political science as a major, but Phil was undecided. With Paris-born Bertha as an influence and tutor, he had taken French in high school, and studied it with such a frenzy that he was now fluent in the language—fomenting what Michael Spencer thought was “a tremendous desire to master something, anything, to prove to himself he could do it.” A more functional outlet for that urge in college became court reporting, a natural dalliance for fingers as nimble as his. With his usual abandon, Spector rapidly progressed; practicing at home, he spent every afternoon in front of the television, watching
Dick Clark's “American Bandstand” and transcribing the dialogue onto his stenotype machine.

During the winter months, it grew more evident that the last link in Spector's music chain had to happen now or be lost forever. Phil Spector knew he'd have to cut a record.

Everything was organized in a way that on the first run-through we'd do this, on the second we'd do these parts, on the third these parts. All those things we did took on names years later, like stacking and overdubbing. We innovated all that
.

—
MARSHALL LIEB

In the late spring of 1957, kids all over Los Angeles were descending on recording studios in such numbers that this buffalo run had emerged as the hub of the West Coast rock scene. The western record labels were mostly shoestring operations; they signed kid acts by the truckload, on the cheap, hoping for one record that would click. The demos the kids were coming in with were frequently sent out as-is to radio programmers. Major rock-and-roll record sessions were atypical in L.A., and most of the records produced didn't have the tight, clean sound of the expensive union sessions in New York and Memphis. In the mid-fifties, L.A.-based labels began issuing hits that were the product of a few instruments rattling around in a
drafty studio. The echoey, muddy sound, though an accident of deprivation, was effectively a musical duplication of the wide, smoggy expanse of California, and people began imitating and extending it using artificial echoes and tape overdubs—both of which became staples of the newborn “West Coast sound.”

Phil Spector, as was his habit, was knee-deep in the industry trends and techniques. He had begun to show up at studios around town, introducing himself and saying whatever would enable him to be allowed to watch sessions. A favorite haunt was Gold Star Sound Studios on Vine Street in Hollywood. This was the hot studio in town. The Hi-Los recorded at Gold Star, and the Four Lads, and their lushly echoed harmonies were a primer on the white-and-light sound. Gold Star had not one but
two
echo chambers, built with great foresight by the studio's owners, Stan Ross and Dave Gold, in 1950. That, too, was an accident of fate. Renovating an old store into two small studios, Ross and Gold had to conform to the store's dimensions, including a very low ceiling, fourteen feet—most studios cleared twenty feet—and a good way to keep the music from flattening out was to goose it in a reverberating room. At Gold Star, with its studios a thimble-sized thirty-five by twenty-three feet, the best echoes were heard in the bathroom, which became the primary echo chamber. Furthermore, Stan Ross was an engineer as well, and a graduate of Fairfax High School, and Phil thought he might be generous with time and advice.

“He was always looking for an open block of time, but while I let him stick around, I wasn't gonna give him time,” Ross recalled. “That would've started a stampede. You would've had fifty thousand Phil Spectors coming in.”

Ross grinned at Spector's big talk and liked the kid, but he had no inkling of what he could do with a record. Studio time, he kept telling Spector, was only $15 an hour, plus $6 per roll of 1/4-inch recording tape. “Okay, I'll be back with it,” Spector told him, but when he came back it was with empty pockets. But Spector wasn't idling. He simply wasn't ready for the studio because he knew he would have to make the product good and he wasn't confident he had mastered the techniques he wanted to use. Working those techniques on a smaller scale, Spector and Lieb would record their voices on a small tape recorder and sing over it.

“What we wanted to do was double ourselves—not just by making
a track, hearing it played back in the headphones, singing over that, and mixing the tracks. Everybody was doing that,” Lieb explained. “We wanted the sound of the first track played back over the speakers in the studio and to sing to that—everything into the mike at once. That would make the sound bigger, fuller. There was a lot of overdubbing going on, but no one had stacked voices like that. But we knew what we could do. Believe me, we knew what the studio would be capable of.”

The song Spector decided he wanted to take into the studio was entitled “Don't You Worry My Little Pet.” It was built around a Chuck Berry-style guitar lick, a “wah-do-wah” background vocal. As with all the songs he sang on gigs, Spector wrote the lyric as strict harmony—no lead vocal. What he really wanted was to get it sung in the studio, so that he could work on overdubbing, bouncing the lead and background parts off each other.

When Phil went about trying to get the money to pay for a session at Gold Star, he knew an hour wouldn't do it, that he'd likely need twice that. Bertha, though, couldn't spare $40. She did promise him $10, and Marshall could get $10. Canvassing his singing friends, only Harvey Goldstein—who had gone on with Phil and Marshall to Los Angeles City College—was moved to contribute to the cause.

One more candidate came onto the scene as well. It was a shy, cherubic brunette named Annette Kleinbard, who was Donna Kass's girlfriend. Annette, who was tiny as a buttercup, lived in another school district, on Stearns Avenue south of Pico Boulevard, but she attended Fairfax High School so she could be close to Donna. By association, she came to know Phil, and Phil was more than interested in Annette's singing voice. This was
her
release, and, in her soprano voice, she belted out songs at Fairfax High talent shows that belied her small size. Phil had had little use for girl singers—in the rules of rock, girls sang with girls, like the McGuire Sisters or the Chordettes—and Annette was just a kid, like Donna. But Annette was constantly on the periphery of his music; when he'd rehearse songs in Donna's garage, Annette would be standing right there, learning the song and the harmony parts. Soliciting contributors for his first session, Phil half-idly asked Annette—but didn't tell her about the session, saying only that it would be a loan.

Her first reaction was to laugh. “Ten dollars! I don't have ten
cents.” “Well, can you get it?” he persisted. “Why do you want it?” With reluctance, he replied, “We re gonna go in and cut a record.” Assured that she would be included, Annette secured the money from her mother. Spector took the $40 to Gold Star and reserved two hours for the afternoon of May 20.

Stan Ross engineered the session at which “Don't You Worry My Little Pet” was cut, and it was not an easy assignment. Phil was like a water bug in the studio, frantically racing from the control booth to the studio and back again. Unmistakably the point man for this group, he sang, he played guitar and piano, and when he ran into the booth to hear the playback, it was he who judged it acceptable or not.

When Phil wanted to do tricky things with tape—overdubbing a second clangy guitar part and a supplemental background vocal—Ross's own skills were tested. Much of what Spector wanted to do was unworkable on Gold Star's equipment or simply impossible, the product of a naive youthful spirit. Still, some of his ideas broke practical ground. Ross had not engineered a session before in which the playback coming out of a speaker was rerecorded live with the overdub. But he knew it could be done, and tried it.

“We were experimenting, too, in those days,” Ross said. “Every time engineers went into the studio, we were feeling our way, trying to find out what rock and roll was.”

The process Spector and Lieb envisioned, however, was tougher than they thought it would be. Wearing big, bulky headphones as they overdubbed, “We couldn't hear what we were singing live,” Lieb recalled. “It wasn't being printed on tape and coming back fast enough, because they didn't have the technology for that then. We had to feel around it until we got it.”

In spite of the long, painstaking two hours, though, Phil gained energy. “He loved it; he'd never spent that much time in command of something,” Lieb said. “Phil was at the top of his game when he was in the studio.”