He's a Rebel (9 page)

She recalled, “His comment, which broke my heart, was: Too bad she didn't die.' I was devastated by that.”
*

In the fall, Imperial released the two last Teddy Bears singles—“If Only You Knew (the Love I Have for You)”/“You Said Goodbye” and “Don't Go Away”/“Seven Lonely Days”—and Dore put out “Wonderful Lovable You.” They all failed. The nation's romance with the Teddy Bears had turned out to be the staggering twenty-three-week run of “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” nothing more.

Crippled months before by internal strife, the Teddy Bears finally dissolved.

Though Phil could not have mustered the grit to fire Shirley, he
now became aware of how deep the problem with her was. After the Teddy Bears signed on with Imperial, Era had disbursed a large sum in writing royalties to Phil, which he had allowed to be assigned to Shirley. When the group broke up, little of that money was left.

“It was $200,000,” Lieb remembered. “Phillip told me he gave it to Shirley, and it didn't reach him. I think he told her, like you would trust a relative to put your money away for you: ‘Here, put it in the bank for me.' When you're seventeen, eighteen years old, you don't know what to do with it. And if she pays some bills with it, or buys a new car, with the expectation of paying it back, you just accept it.”

When Marshall and Annette wanted to close the book on the Teddy Bears by settling up on money matters, they were told that any money Shirley owed them had been used to pay expenses. They did not dispute that, nor did they choose to have the books audited. To them, the breakup was more tragic than infuriating. Exhausted and battered, the three ex-Teddy Bears moved on, scarred by the price of stardom.

*
Lieb and Kleinbard, whose recollections of most matters concerning the Teddy Bears were vivid, recalled Goldstein's departure only in vague terms. Lieb said: “I think Harvey and Phillip had some kind of falling out . . . something along the lines of . . . I don't know,” while Kleinbard (who later changed her professional name to Carol Connors) said: “Harvey was in for about four seconds. It just didn't work, he just wasn't a part of it.”

*
Phil Specter has denied ever making this statement.

The Teddy Bears are a good example of how today's teenagers have a chance to become famous in the record field. In no other field of creative or industrial endeavor can the youngster express himself for so many and reap the lucrative rewards
.

—Liner notes,
The Teddy Bears Sing!

When “To Know Him Is to Love Him” hit Los Angeles, Phil Spector became the center of gravity in a West Hollywood rock-and-roll scene that was bustling because of his example. Comforted by this, Phil stuck close to his home turf, aligning himself with the local talent. One of these was Steve Douglas, whose early band Shirley Spector once managed. Douglas had since gone on to play saxophone with Kip Tyler and the Flips. Backing them on a Johnny Otis show at El Monte Legion Stadium, Steve had caught the attention of a black vocal group called the Sharps, who did the screaming background vocals on Duane Eddy's twangy guitar records. Eddy was going on tour and needed a backup band. Douglas, recommended
by the Sharps, joined the group and also recorded with Eddy in the studio. As he lived in the area and knew Shirley, Steve had once let Phil sit in with his early band. Now Steve wanted very much to sit in with Phil.

“He was the local star on the scene,” Douglas remembered.

With the chance to jam with the hotshot, Douglas began to bring other members of the Duane Eddy touring band to Michael Spencer's house, and it became the word-of-mouth place to be. On Friday nights, jam sessions there blew sky-high, with a combination Teddy Bears/Duane Eddy's Rebel Rousers: Spector and Lieb, Douglas and guitarist Mike Bermani, buttressed by drummer Johnny Clau-der, another neighborhood guy, who played in jazz pianist Don Ran-di's band. Large numbers of kids from the area considered themselves lucky just to catch the music from the street outside the house.

More fortunate were those who by some twist of fate could step inside Spector's circle. Marshall Lieb's girlfriend, Sue Titelman, had a younger brother, Russell, who was in junior high school when he got to hear the acetate of “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” “We had a Magnavox 78-rpm phonograph,” Titelman recalled, “and Phil would play those demos on it. Sometimes they rehearsed in the living room, and I was completely fascinated, transfixed by the way Phil played guitar. And then when he was cutting the album, he'd bring over the stuff and play it, and say, ‘What do you think of this?' Can you imagine? Here I was, a fifteen-year-old kid exposed to all of this.”

Lieb also was responsible for finding a younger guitar player named Don Peake. Phil, who now owned a truly princely guitar—a sunburst mahogany, hollow-body Gibson L-5 with a double F-hole and mother-of-pearl inlay—was amused by the guitar Peake had: a frayed, green, Japanese-made slab of knotholes. But Peake could play the daylights out of the thing. “Dig this guy,” Phil would say to friends who hadn't heard Peake play, at which point Peake would blow everybody away.

There were others, too, whom Spector touched by proxy, by what “To Know Him Is to Love Him” meant to them as aspiring rockers. Elliott Ingber was one of those thousands of fifties' teenagers with a guitar when his family moved to West Hollywood in the summer of 1958. He decided to go to Fairfax High as the song was burrowing its way into a generation's subconscious. “I put up with Fairfax High very grudgingly,” Ingber said, “because I didn't think
it was hip at all. The main thing was, this guy had a hit record, his name was Phil Spector, and this girl who sang on the record went there.”

Ingber wanted badly to meet Spector, and introduced himself to Annette. “I told her I played guitar, the whole thing. She was the connection between me meeting him. Either that or she warned me
not
to get involved with him.”

Phil allowed Ingber into his scene, after the latter showed he was a comrade in arms, not a leech. “I knew what the blues scene was and so automatically we had a base level of communication, sort of unspoken . . . there weren't many people around then who knew what the fuck that scene was. I mean, I didn't know what Phil's motivation was with ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him,' but I knew he expressed himself with the odd chord change, the basic blues thing.”

When it became all too clear in the spring of 1959 that the Teddy Bears were goners, Phil had taken his frustrations out by playing jazz, doing the “Bumbershoot”/“Willy Boy” session. Now, straining to break out of a mold that had gone stale, he took a live gig as Phil Harvey. To form a band to go out with him, he turned to Elliott Ingber.

“He wanted to go out and do something on his own scene, and he figured I knew some people who could help him,” Ingber said, “and I got a guy, Larry Taylor, a guitar player. At the time, Larry and I were just startin' out—Phil had to bring us up to a level where we could be on the same stage with him. Like, Phil showed me what a ninth chord was. That was a big deal, but it wasn't to Phil, because the guy was a monster on the guitar. He was on top of it. He was fire. He could play ‘Guitar Boogie Shuffle' like the record. I tell you, man, he and Michael Spencer, they'd have sessions over at Spencer's house and they'd be playing things like ‘It's Wonderful,' way up tempo. That takes some real doing for any guitar player to play that shit and bring it out the way Spector could. He wasn't fucking around. He was actually playing
jazz
.”

Spector rehearsed the Phil Harvey band at Ingber's house on Stanley Street, teaching the ringing guitar harmonies of “Bumber-shoot” and other jazz and blues material to Elliott, Larry Taylor, and Larry's brother Mel. The band was filled out with others of Ingber's buddies, a pianist named Howard Hirsch and a drummer, Rod Schaffer.

Elliott had a much younger brother, Ira, who was only nine at the time. But he could still see something disturbing and adrift in Phil Spector. “He was this lost soul. My mother was a real mom to everybody, and I think Phil liked to be around us, as a family feeling. But he was a lost soul; he got pretty out there and unapproachable during that time.”

Esther Ingber thought so too. Though Phil seemed to want to be around her son and her home, she recalled that he was “a very, very cold person . . . one of those people that don't show any affection.”

Shirley Spector may have felt the cold breath of her brother's alienation more than most. As the primary cause of the Teddy Bears' demise, Shirley worried endlessly that Phil would cut her out of his music, even his life. Shirley, and Bertha, still made a habit of checking Phil's whereabouts closely, and when Shirley found out how attached he had become to the Ingbers, she imposed herself on the household as well. “It was like Shirley and her mother wouldn't trust Phil,” Esther Ingber said. “They loved him, but you can smother someone with kindness too.”

Esther Ingber barely knew Phil's family, yet she would be the recipient of a hail of phone calls from Shirley in particular, each one more distraught than the last, and they would go on for hours. It was as if Shirley could find no one else to relieve herself of a terrible burden, and Esther would be supportive. “She would say she was proud of her brother and I would tell her she had every right to be. Phil was the closest thing to her, and Shirley was hurt that they weren't close. All she could do was cry about it.”

When Phil saw how torn up Shirley was, his way of reassuring her was not verbally—open expressions of love would have had to be extracted from him, like rotting teeth—but to ask her to write a song with him. Out of the collaboration came a tune called “Be My Girl.”

Phil's idea for the Phil Harvey band was to sell hot jazz to rock audiences with a flourish of hip show-biz kitsch. The gig was at the Rainbow Roller Rink out in the valley, a roller-skating palace that was converted into a concert hall at night. When the band came out on stage the whole bunch was clad like gangsters—wide-lapel, double-breasted suits with ankle-length overcoats and snap-brim hats pulled down over their faces.

Kim Fowley, who with Bruce Johnston had gone on from the Sleepwalkers to Kip Tyler and the Flips, happened to be in the audience that night. He recalled it as a kind of rock-and-roll predestiny, with Spector a visionary far ahead of his time:

“What a brilliant idea. He had the ‘Untouchables' concept. What Brian DePalma did in a movie in 1987, Phil Spector did in 1959. These guys came out and did this amazing . . . it was like Duane Eddy with
Miami Vice
, or
Scarface
. It was brilliant, a little too heavy for the little girls . . . but the visuals, the sound, it was black shit, Duane Eddy shit, all the elements. It's too bad he never took that anyplace.”

“The gig wasn't a howling success,” Elliott Ingber agreed. “It was okay, but Phil couldn't go to point B with it.”

As it was evident to Spector, he ended the Phil Harvey band and flitted on. “He was here and gone,” Ingber said. “I only knew him a month to six weeks: a three-week rehearsal shot in getting a band together, and then two weeks after that. He was spaced out on the Phil trip, and then he was gone.”

Though he would cost Lou Chudd many thousands of dollars with little return, Spector's value was high around the time of the initial Imperial release. Not long after, knowing the Teddy Bears were about to break up, Phil tried to make a deal for himself as a solo act.

He needed to go no further than his first stop—the Hollywood office of Lester Sill.

Perhaps the most ubiquitous and well-connected figure in the West Coast rock scene, Lester Sill had his hands in many pots; beginning in the late forties as a promotion man for L.A.'s Modern Records, he later managed the enormously successful Coasters, he co-owned his own labels, and with Lee Hazelwood he was now managing and producing Duane Eddy. Sill had an eye for talent on both sides of the control booth glass. In the early fifties, he discovered a pair of Fairfax High kids, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and guided them as a writing/producing team. In the late fifties, the duo's profusion of Latin-flavored R&B hits with the Coasters and then the Drifters, and the songs they composed for Elvis Presley movies, had made them an industry sensation and power. They were in New York now, highly sought independent producers whose names appeared on the labels of their records.

Still a publishing partner with Leiber and Stoller, and with immense
goodwill on both coasts, Lester Sill had extraordinary latitude. He and Lee Hazelwood produced Duane Eddy's country-influenced guitar records for Jamie Records in Philadelphia—a label owned by Dick Clark and the top two men at Universal Distributing, Harold Lipsius and Harry Finfer—and they co-ran a small record company called Trey, which although it had no appreciable talent, was being distributed nationally by Atlantic Records, the New York R&B label for which Leiber and Stoller did most of their work.