Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (13 page)

         

As Spector labored in the studio producing “I Love How You Love Me” and a handful of other songs for an intended album, Sill's partner Lee Hazlewood grew increasingly frustrated at the amount of time, money and attention that Sill was lavishing on his young protégé. It seemed that whenever Hazlewood wanted to talk to Sill he was busy with Spector. Hazlewood had always resented what he regarded as Spector's cockiness and lack of respect, and pumped up with excitement about the Paris Sisters recordings Spector seemed only to goad Hazlewood even more. “Phil was running around like crazy and giving people a hard time and he was picking fights with Lee,” Stan Ross remembered. “Phil wasn't really respectful—he was being Phil Spector, not the easiest guy for anybody to love. Lee said, ‘I'm not gonna go in the same room with that little fart.'”

At length, Hazlewood told Sill he had had enough; he was ending their partnership and going back to work with Duane Eddy. “Lee thought I was neglecting our thing,” Sill later recalled, “which wasn't true. It was really that Lee saw Phil as a threat, creatively. That's how much Phil had grown.”

Sill now put a proposition to Spector. Why didn't they become partners in their own label?

For Spector, the offer was precisely what he had been waiting for. His formative experience with the Teddy Bears, and the fifteen months he had spent working the angles in New York, had provided a salutary lesson in the hierarchy of the music business. Performers—particularly young and gullible ones—came bottom of the pecking order; songwriters, producers and music publishers occupied the next rung; but the real power lay with whoever owned the label and counted the money. Spector had achieved some success as a songwriter and as a staff and freelance producer; but his income was negligible compared to what he could earn if he took complete control of the entire recording process—writing, producing and publishing the songs and releasing them on his own label.

But of even greater importance to Spector was the fact that he would at last have complete freedom to record who he wanted to, how he wanted to and when he wanted to. Spector, it was agreed, would control the artistic direction of the new label from his base in New York, while Sill took care of sales and promotion in Los Angeles. The label would be called Philles—a blending of its partners' names, Phil and Les. At the same time, Spector set up his own publishing company, dedicating its name to the woman he most loved and hated—Mother Bertha Music.

In search of a distributor for the new label, Sill turned to his old partners Harold Lipsius and Harry Finfer at Universal Distributors in Philadelphia, striking a deal to finance, press and distribute Philles records in exchange for a one-third stake in the profits.

Returning to New York, Spector now began to concentrate his attention on scouting for new talent for the label. His short sojourn with Atlantic, and his carousing with Ahmet Ertegun, was anyway coming to an end. Ertegun was about to marry for the second time, this time to Ioana Maria “Mica” Banu, a former Dior model who had once been married to a member of the Romanian aristocracy, and whom Ertegun had courted by hiding a small orchestra in the bathroom at the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal to surprise her with “Puttin' on the Ritz.”

When she and Ertegun married in 1961 the couple bought a house on East Eighty-first for $100,000 which required considerable restoration. Mica undertook the project herself, in the process launching herself into a successful career as an interior designer. Suddenly Ertegun wasn't getting out as much as he used to do. “Phil saw that our every evening was not going to be every evening anymore. And that's when he decided to go on and do something else,” Ertegun remembered.

On the day that Mica and Ertegun married, Spector left Atlantic.

Mica and Spector regarded each other warily. On one occasion Spector was invited to dinner at the Erteguns' new home. A fastidious hostess, Mica had carefully arranged placement cards at the table. While she was entertaining guests in another room, Spector mischievously switched the cards around. Mica's suspicions fell on Spector, and for a while he was barred from the Erteguns' table.

Spector meanwhile turned his attention to finding an act good enough to raise the curtain on his new label. He unearthed three possibilities at Hill and Range. The Ducanes and the Creations were both white male vocal groups, singing in a street-corner doo-wop style that was already going out of fashion. Spector cut records with both but passed them on elsewhere—the Ducanes to his friend George Goldner at Goldisc Records, the Creations to his new partners Lipsius and Finfer to release on their Jamie label. The third group, five teenage girls from Brooklyn known as the Crystals, he decided to keep for himself.

6

“They All Thought He Was a Genius”

P
hil Spector might have become the undisputed emperor of what became known as the girl group sound, but he was not its originator. That distinction belonged to a young singer-songwriter named Richard Barrett. Barrett led a group called the Valentines, which had enjoyed a modest string of successes for a small New York label, Rama, run by an erstwhile dance-hall manager and record producer named George Goldner. Barrett also discovered Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, who, signed to Goldner's label, quickly became one of the most popular acts in rock and roll. But it was his discovery of five black teenage girls, whom he chanced upon singing a cappella backstage at a Lymon concert while waiting to meet their idol, which was to set the girl group ball rolling. The girls were a group of high school classmates from the Bronx who called themselves the Chantels; the song they were singing, a heartfelt harmony called “The Plea,” was written by one of the group, fifteen-year-old Arlene Smith.

George Goldner prevaricated when Barrett first brought him the group, arguing that young girl singers were not saleable in the rhythm and blues market, but eventually agreed to record them for his new label, End. The Chantels' first single, “He's Gone,” backed with “The Plea,” released late in 1957, was a modest hit on the pop and RB charts. But it was the group's second single, “Maybe,” that would establish the earliest template of the girl group sound, pitching Arlene Smith's high, plaintive vocal against a wailing vocal chorus that owed as much to the call-and-response of gospel as it did to pop. “Maybe” reached number 15 on the pop chart, and while the Chantels would never equal its success, their example would prove an inspiration to myriad teenage girls who began forming themselves into groups and practicing harmony singing. Foremost among them were the Shirelles, a quartet from Passaic, New Jersey, who in 1960 rose to the top of the American charts with King and Goffin's “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” which remained in the American Top 40 for almost four months. More significantly, it was the first ever record by a black female group to reach number 1.

Like virtually every other girl group in New York, the five members of the Crystals—Dee Dee Kenniebrew, Mary Thomas, Barbara Alston, Patsy Wright and Merna Girard (who would soon be replaced by Dolores “LaLa” Brooks)—had been inspired by the example of the Chantels, and it was the success of the Chantels and the Shirelles that was no doubt uppermost in Spector's mind when he first encountered the gaggle of shy and ungainly teenagers in the offices of Hill and Range in March 1961. But that was not the only reason he found the Crystals such an attractive proposition. More than most people, Spector understood that the history of American music was largely the story of white imitating or stealing from black. Jazz and rhythm and blues were his own favorite music forms, and in his year in New York Spector had worked with enough black performers to convince him that the emotional rawness and honesty of black voices was his favorite instrument. Black singers, he would later explain, have a way of expressing themselves “because of true suffering, natural suffering. Musically there are a lot of incredible white singers, too. It's just that my soul probably lies somewhere in suffering, and I identify with people who suffer.”

Not only did Spector fall in love with the Crystals' warm and soulful harmonies—he also recognized that in all their raw and untutored innocence, the group offered a tabula rasa on which he could stamp his own identity as a producer. They even brought with them a tailor-made song, “There's No Other (Like My Baby),” which had been written by a cousin of one of the group, Leroy Bates. Spector thought he could do something with it. Bates had written the song in a rocking tempo, but Michael Spencer came upon Spector in the Hill and Range offices, working with the group, slowing down the tempo to transform the song into a moody ballad, bringing it a completely different feel, and heightening its resemblance to the Chantels' “Maybe” (Spector added his name to the writer credits in the process).

But the Crystals were under contract to Hill and Range and about to sign to the publishing company's own record label, Big Top. Spector needed to move quickly to make them his first signing to Philles. Waiting for Sill to finalize the arrangements with Universal, Spector turned to another source to fund the Crystals sessions—a music business manager named Helen Noga, whom he had met through Paul Case, his mentor at Hill and Range. In later years, Spector would describe Noga as “the toughest woman I ever met in my life. The toughest
person
I ever met in my life. 'Bout four foot nine, four hundred pounds—huge woman, small, with a mouth like a truck driver. She took a liking to me. All these people loved me; they saw money in me.”

Born in 1913, Noga was an extraordinary woman, a pioneer. In the 1940s, with her husband John Noga she founded the San Francisco jazz clubs the Black Hawk and the Downbeat, that routinely hosted performers such as Sarah Vaughan, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and others. In the 1950s she discovered a young Johnny Mathis singing in a college band and became his manager. She signed him to Columbia Records and groomed him as a smooth crooner in the Frank Sinatra mold, quickly turning Mathis into an international star.

Noga rejoiced in her tough reputation. “I'm an Armenian from Fresno,” she would joke. “And it takes three Jews to take one Armenian in any business deal.”

Perhaps her greatest accomplishment was to break the color bar imposed on black entertainers in Las Vegas. In 1960 she refused to sign a contract for Mathis to perform at the Sands hotel-casino unless he could enter through the front door, gamble in the casino and eat in the restaurant—rights that had been denied to other black entertainers. Nat “King” Cole and Louis Armstrong were among the performers who called Noga, begging her not to make trouble, and warning her that she was putting her own life in danger. “She made a lot of people very angry doing that,” her daughter Beverly remembers, “but even the people she made angry or won her point over—like her or not—still had to respect her.”

She and Spector hit it off immediately. “Mother recognized that he was a talented young guy, but the talent came second in her mind, strangely enough,” says Beverly Noga. “The main reason she adored Phillip was that he made her laugh a lot.”

Noga had a home in Beverly Hills, and whenever Spector went out to the West Coast he would make a point of visiting her, often arriving straight from the airport, carrying the suitcase that served as his portable office. “Mother used to say, ‘Phillip, if the light's on, you can ring the doorbell.' And he eventually didn't care if the light was on or not. He and my mother would sit there and just laugh and talk about everything—music, people, the industry. It was an insane relationship.”

Lester Sill was less enamored of Noga; he thought her “obnoxious” but money was money. In June 1961, with the first funding from Noga in place, Spector called the Crystals into Mira Sound Studios. It was the night of the girls' prom, and Barbara, Mary and Merna showed up at the studio still in their prom dresses. Spector had assembled just a small ensemble—drums, bass, two guitars and a small string section, led by Michael Spencer on piano.

Leroy Bates had originally modeled “There's No Other (Like My Baby)” on a traditional gospel song, “There's No Other Like My Jesus,” and from the opening bars of its spoken introduction, Spector honored the song's antecedents; Spencer's storefront church piano chords, and the chiming truck-stop guitar riffs combined beautifully with a soaring string arrangement to give the song an almost sanctified feel. Watching him work in the dimmed light of the studio, coaching the Crystals in their gospel harmonies, then listening back over and over again to the playback, Spencer reflected that however buggy Phil Spector might have been in the outside world, here he was totally in command, and at peace with himself.

“I would say ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him,' ‘I Love How You Love Me' and ‘There's No Other' were Phillip's three milestone records. They all had the same mood, every song—that yearning feeling.

“I can see his face listening back to ‘There's No Other' he would be repeating the sounds, mouthing the words and listening…you could see the emotion running through him. There was that total immersion in the sound, emotionally processing it, and then, when he came out of it, that intuitive feeling of whether he'd got it or not. And he had got it.”

         

Confident that he had got the right song for his first Philles release, but awaiting the pieces of the label to fall into place, Spector continued to work as a freelance producer. For Hill and Range he produced two singles by Arlene Smith, the lead singer of the Chantels—one released on Big Top, the second on a ready-made label called Spectorius (which never produced another record)—both notable mainly for the amount of time and money that Spector lavished on the sessions. “In person Phil could be quiet and agreeable, but when it came to the studio he was very brash,” remembers Freddie Bienstock of Hill and Range. “But he was a terrific record producer. He was a perfectionist. He would do so many takes until he thought it was right. And then he would listen and listen. He would take so long, which was very annoying to me because it all cost money, until he finally was satisfied and he considered it to be perfect. Others, including Ahmet and Jerry Wexler, were never such perfectionists.”

Spector also produced a second single with Curtis Lee, “Under the Moon of Love,” which strongly recalled the ‘party in a cardboard box' productions of Frank Guida for Gary “U.S.” Bonds. But his most notable recording of this period, and a giant step toward what he would later achieve with the Wall of Sound, was “Every Breath I Take” sung by Gene Pitney, a young singer-songwriter who would come to play a critical part in Spector's career—although not with this record. Pitney was signed with the publisher Aaron Schroeder, who occupied an office at 1650 Broadway. Another aspiring songwriter, Al Kooper, was in Schroeder's office when Pitney walked in to audition “wearing a salt-and-pepper jacket, heavily greased down DA [duck's ass] hairdo, and white bucks. Three dressing schools tied together; very strange. The creature was quickly ushered in, sat down at the piano and proceeded to mesmerize us for two uninterrupted hours with his incredible songs and bizarre voice. He was an original.” Schroeder signed Pitney to a contract, according to Kooper, “so thorough it might've included bathroom privileges,” and set up a new label, Musicor, as a vehicle for his young prodigy. But Pitney's first two singles for the label vanished without trace. Schroeder then walked down the corridor to the reliable mother lode of Don Kirshner, who provided him with a new song by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, “Every Breath I Take,” adding the recommendation that Spector should produce the record.

Pitney would later recall that at their first meeting, at a Chinese restaurant off Broadway, Spector, by way of introduction, informed him that his sister was in a lunatic asylum, “and she's the sane one in the family.” “Phil then had long hair, no loot and little success. He was a kind of an angry young man, undirected but not mixed up…a very small hunched-up man who didn't want to hurt anybody.”

For some reason, everybody of Spector and Pitney's acquaintance—Schroeder, Kirshner, Goffin and King, Leiber and Stoller, and Mann and Weil—decided to turn up for the recording, crowding into the tiny booth at Bell Sound Studios. “It turned out to be the most ridiculous session ever,” Pitney told the writer Alan Betrock. “Although Phil wanted to experiment, he didn't have enough control—not to the extent he had later—and there were too many people at the session, making comments. To add to it all, I had a wicked cold and was croaking—I sang the whole thing in falsetto.” According to Pitney, at that time the average cost of recording one song, carefully calibrated to the sliding scale of union fees, was around $500.

“For the first three hours, the musicians got regular scale, the next thirty minutes they got time and a half, and after three and a half hours they got double scale. Most people would just do three-hour sessions, and if they weren't finished, would start fresh again next day. It was a lot cheaper that way. But not Phil, he kept on and on. In the end there were only two usable takes for fourteen thousand dollars. It was unbelievable.”

But the result was Spector's most startlingly original production to date, a melodramatic concoction that pitched a doo-wop choir, swirling strings and a martial drumbeat behind Pitney's quivering, neurasthenic and adenoidal voice.

According to Pitney, Aaron Schroeder was so impressed that at the end of the session he tried to press a $50 bill into Spector's hand. But Spector, so confident of the record's prospects that he had done the job for nothing, refused. “That was Phil's way of saying ‘You can't buy me.' I did my thing. I did you a favor, but that's it. Aaron wanted to grab Phil, put him under contract, but Phil was too smart for that. You could see what was comin' with him. Phil purely had designs on creating his own little empire.”

         

As summer turned to autumn, Spector's relationship with Hill and Range came to an abrupt end, when the company finally woke up to the fact that he had enticed the Crystals away from them. It was Hill and Range that had discovered the group in the first place; Spector had spent weeks rehearsing the girls in their offices, and was himself under contract to make records for Big Top. Spector had spent eighteen months nurturing his relationship with Hill and Range, but had no hesitation in burning it to the ground in a second when the occasion demanded.

“That was one of the things that I loved about Phil,” Doc Pomus reflected later. “He knew what the game was, and he played it. Every businessman is your best friend until they've sucked you dry of whatever they want. Phil just got to them before they got to him.”