Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (10 page)

5

“A Big Hoot and Howl”

W
ith “Spanish Harlem” under his belt, Spector returned to Los Angeles at the end of 1960 with a distinct spring in his step.

He booked into the Player's Motel, next door to the musicians' union offices on Sunset Boulevard, and a popular stop for visiting actors and musicians. Among the old friends waiting to greet him was Michael Spencer. After graduating from Fairfax, Spencer had gone on to study law at Harvard. But he had dropped out after realizing that his true vocation was music. Spencer had not seen Spector in more than a year, and was struck by the change that his time in New York had wrought in him. Spector, thought Spencer, had grown in stature—quite literally; he now wore lifts in his shoes, adding two inches to his height, and his hair curled toward his collar in a length that seemed, by the standards of the day, ostentatiously bohemian. Spector played his friend a demo pressing of “Spanish Harlem,” enthusing about how he was now accepted and honored among the high rollers of the New York music business. Spencer was struck by how the “unformed entity” that he knew from high school dates and bar mitzvahs was now “calling the shots and feeling his oats.”

Spector's first port of call was his old friend and mentor Lester Sill, who was eager to get Spector to work on a new project. Sill and his partner Lee Hazlewood had hit a rough patch with Duane Eddy, who would shortly abandon them for a new contract with RCA. Casting around for a new act, Sill had picked up the contract of a trio called the Paris Sisters—Albeth, Priscilla, and Sherrell. Managed by their mother, a former opera singer who had modeled the group on the close harmonies of the Andrews Sisters, the girls had been performing in Las Vegas lounges before two of them were even teenagers, disguising their youth with padded bras and lashings of makeup—a subterfuge apparently helped by their father, who worked at the hospital where they were born and was able to alter their birth certificates. Before signing with Sill they had already recorded a couple of singles for Imperial Records, which had gone unnoticed, and earned money singing demos at Gold Star.

The Paris Sisters usually sang in three-part harmony and rarely featured a lead. But meeting the group for the first time, Spector was immediately struck by the similarity between Priscilla's soft, breathy voice and Annette Kleinbard's. The group, he thought, could be his new Teddy Bears. Before long, he and Priscilla were enjoying a brief fling.

“Phillip had such a crush on her,” Michael Spencer remembers. “She was so cute. Flat-chested and so shy. Oh my God! When she sang he was just blown away by her. And their mother, like a fairy tale, taking care of all these sisters. Phillip was just blown away by it all.”

(Stan Ross offers a contrasting view. “They were nice girls, but they all looked like they needed nose jobs. The mother was a pain in the ass. The mother hen. She used to come by with a lot of makeup and a pushed-up bustier, so she wouldn't look so old. I told her, ‘You still look like an agent.'”)

For the group's first single, Spector turned back to the song that he had co-written with his sister Shirley and used as the B-side of Ray Peterson's “Corrina, Corrina,” “Be My Girl”—simply retitling it “Be My Boy.” Seeking some reassuring faces in the studio, Spector invited Russ Titelman, who had sung with the Spector's Three a year before, to play guitar and Michael Spencer to play piano on the sessions. A moody, romantic ballad, “Be My Boy” strongly recalled the Teddy Bears hit—Spencer remembers “the lights were low, the music slow, and Phil mumbling how it was an aural oral job”—but it lacked the earlier hit's heart-stopping poignancy. When the single was released in April it reached only number 56 on the
Billboard
chart.

Michael Spencer threw a party at his parents' house to welcome his friend home. Spector had brought his guitar and began to vamp on some jazz and blues songs, interspersed with wisecracks and comical dialogue. Among the gathering were Russ Titelman, and his girlfriend Annette Merar, whom Spector had employed lip-synching to the Spector's Three record on television. It had never occurred to Annette before to think of Spector in a romantic light. But success seemed to have given him a new sheen of self-assurance, and watching as he sat with his guitar, entertaining the gathering, her feelings suddenly began to change.

“Watching him play, it didn't make my body shiver, it made my soul just fall in love. It wasn't a physical thing at all. I never noticed what Phil looked like or didn't look like. I never look at that. I just look at soul. I feel it. And he just did it for me the way he played that guitar. He had this charisma and charm and humor, and this wonderful smile—some people's eyes just smile, and Phil was like that. And with all of that together I was just floored.”

At the end of the evening, Spector told her that he had to drive out to the Valley to see Lester Sill. “I'll come with you,” said Annette.

Russ Titelman thought that Annette was “one of the most beautiful girls on the face of the earth.” She was petite, almost elfin in stature, with an aquiline nose, wide green eyes, and a vivacious, palpably sexual intensity about her. She loved literature and poetry, and dreamed of becoming a writer herself. At the time she and Spector started dating, she was just completing her senior year at Fairfax. Over the next few weeks that Spector spent in Los Angeles, the couple saw each other as often as they could, Spector frequently calling at her home. Annette's father was an accountant who was in awe of Spector having achieved so much at such an early age. “‘Isn't he amazing!' That was the theme,” Annette remembers. Her mother was a classically trained pianist. “She wasn't a social person, and nor was Phil. So when he came over to the house my mother would disappear and my father would just smile, and Phil would say, ‘Let's go…' He was definitely the domineering one in the relationship. I was the moth around his flame, and whatever he did was fine. I was so clueless.”

The first Russ Titelman learned of the relationship was when he was driving past the Player's Motel and saw Annette's car in the parking lot. Knocking on the door of Spector's room, he discovered them inside. His relationship with Annette was already on the wane, he says. “But it was the secrecy that hurt. That my idol and my girlfriend should be doing that behind my back.”

         

As his friendship with Beverly Ross cooled, Spector wasted no time in forging a new partnership, with another protégé of Leiber and Stoller named Phil Teitelbaum, who had enjoyed fleeting fame as a singer under the name Terry Phillips but was now signed to Trio Music as a writer. Together they wrote some material for Ruth Brown, who was being produced by Leiber and Stoller, and for Johnny Nash, a Houston-born reggae singer whom Spector himself produced for ABC Records. Shortly after his return from Los Angeles, Spector broke some unbelievable news to Phillips. His schmoozing at Hill and Range had apparently paid dividends, he told Phillips; they had been given the opportunity to write some songs for Elvis Presley's forthcoming movie,
Blue Hawaii.
^*1
Phillips's incredulity at the news—how had a relatively unknown songwriter like Spector managed to land a deal to write for the biggest name in pop music?—was tempered by a more pragmatic consideration. Both he and Spector were under contract to Leiber and Stoller at Trio Music; how could they write for Hill and Range at the same time? But Spector brushed aside his concerns, assuring him that everything had been taken care of. Phillips moved into Spector's apartment on Eighty-second Street and in a whirlwind of activity set to writing new material.

Spector also had another offer on the table. Since his arrival in New York, he had grown increasingly close to Ahmet Ertegun, the owner of Atlantic Records, where Leiber and Stoller so successfully plied their trade. Even among the colorful array of impresarios, mavericks and hustlers who populated the New York record business, Ertegun cut a distinctive and singularly stylish figure. The son of a Turkish diplomat, he had lived in Switzerland, France, and England before his father was appointed Turkish ambassador to the United States in 1934, when Ahmet was eleven. Through his older brother, Nesuhi, Ahmet acquired a passion for jazz, nurtured by the janitor at the Turkish embassy in Washington, a black man named Cleo Payne, who introduced the young Ertegun to the world of beer joints, boxing, soul food and what Ertegun himself described as the “secret language of the black man.” By the age of sixteen, he was absconding from home and traveling to New York to inveigle himself into the joints and jazz clubs of Harlem.

In college, Ertegun studied philosophy, economics and literature, but his heart was in music. In 1947, he became partners with a blues enthusiast named Herb Abramson and his wife Miriam, and with funding from an acquaintance of Ertegun's father, a Turkish dentist named Dr. Vahdi Sabit, founded Atlantic Records. For $95 a month they rented a room in a run-down hotel, the Jefferson, with enough space for their desks and for Ahmet to sleep. When they wanted to record, they would push the furniture back against the wall.

The first Atlantic releases were an eclectic grab bag of jazz, blues and gospel recordings. But within a couple of years the label had become synonymous with the raucous, good-time party music epitomized in the recordings of such artists as Ruth Brown and Joe Turner. Within the music industry—if not to its black audience—this music was known as “race music,” until a reporter at
Billboard
magazine, Jerry Wexler, devised the more palatable, and evocative, term “rhythm and blues.” In 1953, when Herb Abramson departed for the armed forces in Europe, Wexler himself joined Atlantic as a partner. Through the '50s the red and black Atlantic label, stamped with the legend “Leads the Field in Rhythm and Blues,” dominated the RB charts with recordings by such artists as the Clovers, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, LaVern Baker and Ray Charles. Wexler and Ertegun were an intriguing partnership. Wexler was rabbinical, erudite, knowledgeable in art and literature—probably the only record producer within a ten-mile radius of the Brill Building who could quote Hegel and the philosopher William James. He was also dogmatic, cantankerous and commercially hard-nosed. It was Wexler who took care of business, arriving early each day to chase orders, hassle contracts with pressing plants and distributors and schmooze disc jockeys, usually only turning his attention to producing at night.

But it was Ertegun who set the tone for the operation, a singular concoction of the hip and the urbane, dapper in horn-rimmed spectacles, expensively tailored suits and a trim goatee beard, equally at home in Southern juke joints or sophisticated Upper East Side restaurants, charming all and sundry with what Wexler would describe as his “semi-cosmopolite European stutter.”

Spector had found a new role model. He was mesmerized by Ahmet's cool vernacular, his sharp dress, his effortless air of hip knowingness and inscrutability. He loved to listen to Ahmet's stories about venturing into the boondocks of Louisiana in search of the great primitive piano genius Professor Longhair (“and when we got there he'd already signed to Mercury!”), recording with Ray Charles and hanging out with the aristocrats of jazz and blues—the Dukes, the Earls and the Counts. Ertegun's savoir faire, his cultured enthusiasm and his encyclopedic knowledge of music set him apart from the run-of-the-mill sharks and hustlers, “the short-armed fatties,” as Spector would call them, who populated the music business, and whom he was quickly coming to loathe. The Atlantic label, shaped and informed by good taste and a commitment to musical excellence, was exactly the kind of operation Spector dreamed of one day running himself.

Ertegun, for his part, was a collector and curator of interesting characters, and Spector was a study. He made Ertegun laugh with his practical jokes and corny one-liners, and his uncanny impersonations of other people in the business, including Ertegun himself. “He could do my voice very well,” Ertegun remembered.

“I'd never seen anybody like Phil before, and I'm sure I'll never see anybody like him again. You know—you smile and you connect with somebody, and Phil and I connected. He was very funny; a great sense of humor. Very intelligent, and also very hip about the music. He wasn't much into jazz, but he knew everything about RB and he certainly knew everything about rock and roll.”

Like Ertegun, Spector was a student of the Mezz Mezzrow school of hipster slang, and the pair delighted in out-jiving each other. “We developed our own hip way of speaking, our own interpretation of black slang. We'd say ‘yayss,' rather than yes. We had our own little things. There was a certain kind of food that we both liked very much—Philadelphia food. Scrapple—kind of leftover bits of meat and grease that you fry; like a fried pâté. Or a Philly cheesesteak sandwich—meat cut paper-thin, which has been broiled, served on something resembling French bread with a gooey cheese melt.”

Ertegun was in the throes of divorcing his first wife, Jan, a Scandinavian who seemed to leave so little impression on him that when he subsequently bumped into her some years later at a party she had to remind Ertegun who she was. He was in search of a playmate, and Spector was happy to play the part. They became inseparable, and when Ertegun offered Spector a job as his personal assistant and staff producer Spector, despite his accumulating number of commitments, quickly accepted. “He was already producing records, and he was in demand,” Ertegun remembered. “I think he only accepted the offer because we were having a good time together.”

Spector shared the news of his new appointment with his old friend Michael Spencer. “He said, ‘I've signed one hundred percent exclusive with Hill and Range.' I said, ‘Congratulations.' He said, ‘I'm also signed one hundred percent with Leiber and Stoller.' I said, ‘Double congratulations.' He said, ‘Well, that's not it, I just signed one hundred percent exclusive with Ahmet Ertegun. Do you think there's anything wrong with that?' I said, ‘It sounds perfectly natural, Phillip. Who am I to say?' Phil's view was that they all adored him and so they would somehow all accommodate him and work it out.”