He's a Rebel (6 page)

When it was over, Stan Ross cleaned up the tape, made a master, and cut a lacquer—an acetate, the first copy—for Phil. After leaving Gold Star, Phil and Marshall took the demo into the first record store they saw on Vine Street. “We just made this record,” Phil told the clerk, hoping he might play it. “So what?” the clerk said.

The fact was, as much as they knew about cutting a record,
getting it played was something Phil and Marshall didn't have a clue about. But the acetate they had was a valuable piece of goods, as it might open a few doors. Mulling over his options, Phil thought he might have an in—Donnie Kartoon, one of the people who occasionally sang at gigs with him, lived next door on Alfred Street to the co-owner of Era Records, Lew Bedell. In business less than three years, Era had hit pay dirt with Gogi Grant's massive No. 1 hit in 1956, “The Wayward Wind,” a song written by Bedell's cousin and co-owner, Herb Newman, and the label was looking to make a move into rock and roll. Almost immediately after making his record, Phil asked Donnie if he could get Bedell to hear it. Donnie called him, and Bedell said to bring the record to his office on Vine Street.

“I took Phil down there and, as soon as we got to the reception window he tried to ace me out,” Kartoon remembered with a giggle. “He said, ‘Wait here,' and tried to get into the office by himself, like 1 don't need Kartoon.' He tells the receptionist, ‘Phil Spector's here'—not ‘Don Kartoon is here,' and I'm the guy Lew Bedell knew—and she tells him he can't go in. It was like ‘Who the hell are you? I don't know you.' So I told her who I was and I was there to see Lew, and it was ‘Oh, come right in.' ”

Lew Bedell was a garrulous man who masked a hardheaded business sense with endearing and sometimes annoying bluster. He had been the host of a television show in New York in the early fifties when Newman—working with another cousin, Si Waronker, the head of Liberty Records—had a falling out with Waronker and left Liberty to start Era. Bedell kicked in $7,500, lured Gogi Grant away from RCA Victor, and took her into the studio to record “The Wayward Wind.” Bedell's charm and pushiness had gained Era strong distribution, and he had vital contacts in radio and television. Though not a music man, he could also pick a good record.

After spinning “Don't You Worry” on his office Victrola, Bedell called in Newman. The two men then listened to the acetate over and over—making Spector gnash his teeth as the needle ground into the record, putting crackles and pops into the delicate grooves he'd labored to create. Furthermore, Phil could tell that the Victrola wasn't providing an accurate rendition.

“Your machine is running slow,” he remarked, barely containing himself. “It's not the way we recorded it.”

Bedell and Newman were amused by Spector's cheekiness; when
not discussing his music, he was solicitous and deferential, a good kid. “I liked him,” Bedell said. “I like all Jewish kids.” And, minutely slow or not, both men agreed that the record was worth signing the group to a “lease of master”—a device used to buy a demo in lieu of an actual contract. Era Records gave them an option for four sides, and the four members—Spector, Lieb, Annette Kleinbard, and Harvey Goldstein—of the as-yet unnamed group would divide a 1½-cent royalty for each copy sold, the record industry equivalent of minimum wage. “Actually, they may have wanted to give us
less
,” Marshall Lieb said. “My dad, who was a businessman, thought a lawyer should examine everything. That's when they came up with a penny and a half.”

Bedell and Newman, in fact, had to face more hurdles with this bunch of kids than they may have thought was worth it. Because they all were legally minors, Era had to get a court order approving the signing under California's Jackie Coogan Law, which protected underage performers. “I had all these people in my office before we went to the court, all their parents and everybody,” Bedell recalled. “I said, ‘Look, if I'm gonna have any
tsouris
down there, I don't even wanna do this thing.' And they said, ‘Don't worry.' And we got down there and there was nothing but
tsouris
, everybody talking all at the same time. I said to the judge, ‘Do me a favor. Just ask 'em if they want to sign. If they do, fine. If not . . .' He did and they said, ‘Yes.' And that was it.”

When the papers were signed, Phil didn't forget what Donnie Kartoon had done for him. He told him, “Kartoon, you'll be well taken care of.” Donnie laughed. “I mean, it was such a farfetched thought, that this thing would go anywhere,” said Kartoon. “Lew had said to me, ‘Donnie, why don't you manage them?' But I said no. Phil was into that ‘big-time' thing; it was like a joke to me.”

The signing done, the next piece of business was to cut a song to slap on the back side of “Don't You Worry.” Phil talked to Bedell about several of his songs, and Bedell chose one titled “Wonderful Lovable You,” a slow-tempo ballad. The group then took care of more business by taking on an official name. That was Harvey Goldstein's doing. “They'd been searching for a name left and right and couldn't come up with one,” Goldstein said. “Elvis's ‘Teddy Bear' was a big hit at the time, so I casually mentioned at one of our little bull sessions that we ought to name ourselves the Teddy Bears.”

Goldstein, the bass voice of the group, had chosen to do summer Army Reserve duty instead of taking a chance of being drafted, and was slated to begin a two-week boot camp at Ft. Ord before the next session. Just before he left, he learned that Phil was intent on slipping in another song at the next session. “We had a meeting and they presented the new song to me, sang it for me. Since I was leaving, they said they were going to cut it without me.”

When Phil did a quick run-through of the tune on the guitar, Harvey was knocked out. “It was dynamite. I knew as soon as I heard it that it was an instant hit.”

It was the song that Phil Spector had been nurturing, trying to fit into a proper context ever since being jolted out of his sleep by Ben Spector's graven image. With a slight change of tense, the resulting song he had composed was called “To Know Him Is to Love Him.”

On the surface, the only bond that this song had with Phil Spector's father is the tombstone engraving. The immediate influence was really Annette Kleinbard. When the Teddy Bears rehearsed “Wonderful Lovable You,” her part—unlike in the solid four-part vocal harmony of “Don't You Worry My Little Pet”—was separated from the male vocals; the verses they did were repeated by her alone, and her candied soprano also rang out in the background, almost like an instrument. After the session, Phil told her “I love your voice” and that he was going to write a song to showcase it.

“He made it quite plain it wasn't me he loved, because of Donna, but the sound and the innocence of my voice,” she recalled.

When he heard her in the studio, enhanced and layered by his overdubbing, he thought the new song would be the perfect vehicle for Annette to take a lead vocal. The gravestone phrase easily lent itself to a teenage girl's yearning. Phil refined a simple lyrical hook built around the title. The melody, which would revolve around three-beat repetitions on the words “know” and “love,” was abruptly broken midway through by a minor chord—a ninth chord, which was common in jazz but radical for the straightforward arrangements of early rock and roll. This was Phil Spector's knockout punch, delivered in a spirited rush in the middle of the night.

But Phil could not find time to cut “To Know Him Is to Love Him” at the session for “Wonderful Lovable You.” Lew Bedell and Herb Newman came to Gold Star on that Friday morning expecting
to be in and out in an hour. Instead, after two hours, “Wonderful Lovable You” was still unfinished. Though they expected to produce the side themselves, they were virtually elbowed out of the way as Spector and Lieb did their intricate overdubbing. “Phil and I knew more than those guys did,” Lieb said. “Together, Phil and I were overly knowledgeable.”

Not to Bedell. Three decades later he would still refuse to call what Spector did in the studio that morning producing. “He did
not
produce. I was the whole thing. He was sitting out there playing his
fershtunkenah
guitar all day and a few notes on the piano.” Bedell and Newman had little patience with the notion that Spector was working on a “sound.” Exasperated by apparently so little getting done in so long a time, Bedell threw his arms in the air and yelled, “Okay, that's it! We'll come back and finish this thing on Monday.”

On that day, the Teddy Bears returned with a new addition, a drummer—Sammy Nelson, of Union High's Sleepwalkers, which had evolved into a band called Kip Tyler and the Flips, with a contract on Challenge Records. Up until now, Phil and Marshall had kept the backbeat by hitting a telephone book with a drum brush. Now they required a real drummer. Unfortunately, Sammy Nelson was the only one they knew.

“He was not a great drummer, he couldn't keep time real well,” Lieb said, and adding a drum overdub on the session ate up a huge chunk of time. “We'd made the demo with tempo, our tempo, and it fluctuated. Sammy had to play at that exact tempo, and no one could have done that. So we wound up giving him the beat, pointing at him, like ‘
Now!
' ”

Bedell, who was paying Nelson $15 an hour as an outside musician, was spitting mad. “He stinks, Stan!” he yelled to Ross, who instructed Nelson to use only a brush stick scraped across a snare drum. Still, for over an hour Nelson played alone in the studio, and Bedell and Newman were so frustrated that they left. “They told me, ‘Look, give 'em the two hours, then cut 'em off,' ” Ross related. “They split because they didn't want to be around Phil. They couldn't stand him, they thought he was crazy. But he wasn't. He was ambitious, not crazy.”

With minutes left, Phil asked Stan if he could squeeze in one more song. Now Ross was generous; he let them go for an extra half hour.

In that half hour, Phil Spector produced “To Know Him Is to Love Him.”

With little time to get tricky, Phil was forced to keep things simple. But even after Annette had done her lead and Nelson overdubbed his drum, Phil and Marshall wrang every second they could out of Ross's generosity, adding more background vocals and a guitar and piano track. The record they took from Gold Star was reminiscent of the great L.A. demo hits such as Patience and Prudence's “Tonight You Belong to Me” in 1956 and Tab Hunter's cover of “Young Love” in 1957; even with overdubbing it sounded as if it could have been recorded in a garage between two parked cars. But there was an odd wonder in its grooves. Minus Goldstein's bass part, the feel was less studied and cliche-ish, not so much a West Coast kiddie version of doo-wop as sincere white R&B.

Annette's lead was remarkable, a little girl hurting with real pain. She was the glue of a record on which instruments can barely be heard—though, as Lieb told it, the whole thing was deceptively sparse. “It sounds real simple but it's very complicated. In the real Spector tradition, it was very planned. Even though we had a short time we knew exactly what we wanted to do, the nuances, everything.”

“To Know Him Is to Love Him” was an epiphany of yearning in the placid Eisenhower years. For all its innocence, the song had an undercurrent of sadness and alienation. It swayed back and forth in a hammocklike lull, sounding like a mantra, then given a sudden urgency by a ninth chord that was dark and melancholy in itself. In its inscrutability, the title regained its original implication.

But while Lew Bedell thought it had “a magic sound” when he heard it, and decided to use it as the slow-tempo song on the first Teddy Bears record, he was unsure which side to plug. Although Bedell would later say he put the play on “To Know Him,” Lieb and Annette Kleinbard recalled otherwise. “Herb and Lew didn't love it, they liked it . . . I don't remember them loving it until it became a hit,” she said.

“First of all, to do a ballad at that time was absurd. ‘To Know Him' was the first girl ballad of its time. There was no girl, innocent, white-type voice on songs like that.”

Bedell, at least, thought he might have had a two-sided hit on his hands when the disc—on Era's brand-new rock-and-roll label,
named after Bedell's son—was pressed and released as Doré #503, both tunes copyrighted to Bedell and Newman's publishing company, Warman Music. On August 1, Era sent out a cautious run of five hundred copies through a distributor named George Jay.

And then, for the next month, not a thing happened.

Harvey Goldstein, returning home from boot camp, rehearsed “To Know Him” with the group, but they rarely got to sing it anywhere. In September he and Lieb began their second semester at L.A. City College. Annette and Donna Kass began twelfth grade at Fairfax High School. And Phil Spector, unconvinced of musical stardom, primed his court reporting skills at a business school in Los Angeles. The Teddy Bears did sing their two songs on a local television show hosted by deejay Art Laboe, but there was only sporadic airplay in L.A. B. Mitchell Reid, on KFWB, spun it—but he played “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” not the A side. “We heard that deejays were flipping the record over,” Lieb remembered. “In L.A., we heard the song for a couple of days, then the station dropped it.”

The Teddy Bears were almost an afterthought at thriving Era Records, but the trend to flip over its rock-and-roll entry did not go unnoticed by Lew Bedell. With “Don't You Worry My Little Pet” dead in the water, George Jay put the play on “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” Invariably, the response from distributors was “It sounds too much like a demo.”

Finally, early in September, a deejay in Fargo, North Dakota, Charlie Boone, was the first non-L.A. deejay to break the record, and he put it in regular rotation. Then Bedell got word from his Midwest distributor: Lou Riegert, the program director at Minneapolis station KDWB—a sister station of KFWB—had said he had fallen in love with Annette's voice and put it on the air. The response was fantastic.