Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (8 page)

But for Spector the project was a mere dalliance. He had now decided that his future lay not in performing, but in producing. Almost fifty years later, he would cast this decision in characteristically romantic terms. “I wanted to be in the background,” he told me, “but I wanted to be important in the background. I wanted to be the focal point. I knew about Toscanini. I knew that Mozart was more important than his operas. That Beethoven was more important than his music, or whoever was playing it. I knew that the real folk music of America was George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Irving Berlin. Those names were bigger than the music. That's what I wanted to be.”

Whether the twenty-year-old Spector was really dreaming of being Beethoven or Toscanini is a moot point. But he realized that if he wanted to progress he needed to cultivate more powerful allies, and it was this that led him to the door of one of the best-connected men in the Los Angeles music business, Lester Sill. Sill was a decorated World War II hero—he had fought at the Battle of the Bulge and the Battle of Sorrento—who after the war moved into the record business, working as the sales manager for Modern Records, the Los Angeles RB label, before setting up as an independent talent scout and publisher. His greatest discovery was the team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, whom Sill found as teenagers, and who would go on to write and produce countless hits for such artists as Elvis Presley, the Coasters and the Drifters.

Sill was a short, dapper man, who always dressed in expensive shirts and beautifully cut sports jackets. He had a reputation as a peerless record salesman; one story tells how he would carry sand around in his pocket, ready to throw on the floor and do a sand-dance when a song demanded it. “Lester was one of the funniest people I've ever met,” Jerry Leiber remembers. “He was just a happy guy. You saw Lester and it was a good day.” “Lester was a gentleman,” concurs Stan Ross. “He always looked you in the eye when he spoke to you. He wasn't one of those guys who's looking around the room for someone else…”

Sill had been around the Master Sound Studios when Spector was working on the Teddy Bears' album and had taken note of his abilities as a producer, and his precocity. “He looked like he was twelve years old,” Sill would recall. In the spring of 1959, with the Teddy Bears' album still warm in the racks, Spector found his way to Sill's office on North Argyle Avenue, where Sill contracted him as a producer and writer.

More than just a mentor, Sill was to become almost a father figure to Spector. Relations with Bertha had by now reached breaking point, and when Spector explained the problem to Lester he invited him to move in to the home in Sherman Oaks where Sill lived with his wife Harriet, his sons Greg and Joel, and his stepson Chuck. Bertha bitterly resented what she construed as Sill's interference and would never forgive him. Relieved to be free of her controlling influence, Phil instructed the Sills to say that he was out whenever she telephoned.

Sill was in partnership with another writer and producer, named Lee Hazlewood. Together they ran a production company called Gregmark (named after Lester's son Greg, and Lee's son Mark). Their biggest act was the guitarist Duane Eddy, whom Hazlewood had discovered while working as a disc jockey in Arizona, and encouraged to play in a deep, twangy style, halfway between country and rock. Eddy's first recording, “Movin' N' Groovin',” was a minor hit early in 1958 and in July of that year he enjoyed his first Top 10 record, “Rebel Rouser.” Over the next two years he would go on to rack up a further thirteen Top 40 hits.

Eddy's recordings were released on Jamie Records, the label owned by Universal Distributors in Philadelphia—the same company that had been so instrumental in the success of the Teddy Bears.

Keen for Spector to gain more experience, Sill took him to Phoenix, Arizona, where Hazlewood made all his recordings, in a small, ramshackle studio called Ramco Audio Recorders. Spector sat fascinated, watching as Hazlewood experimented for hours on end with a variety of echoes and tape delay effects to conjure the deep twang that was the trademark of all Eddy's records. But Hazlewood was also highly protective of his techniques and resented Spector's endless questions and remarks. “Lee was a country boy,” remembers Stan Ross, “and you have to understand country boys to get along with them. He was the kind of guy who laughs at his own jokes before you do. Lee thought Phil was crazy. They were like fire and ice.” After only a short while, Hazlewood told Sill he didn't want Spector around anymore.

Spector had meanwhile come up with another idea—if not a particularly original one. While the Teddy Bears themselves had been unable to follow their success with “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” their close-harmony sound had been replicated by a group called the Fleet-woods who enjoyed a Top 10 hit with a song called “Come Softly to Me.” Figuring the formula was worth one more go-round, but contractually prohibited from using the Teddy Bears name, Spector went into the studio to record a handful of songs with a makeshift group that he called Spector's Three. He was joined by a session singer named Ricki Page, and Russ Titelman, the younger brother of Marshall Lieb's girlfriend Susan, and one of the group who frequented the jam sessions at Michael Spencer's home. The Spector's Three's first single, “I Really Do”—which bore a strong resemblance to “Come Softly to Me”—was released by Sill and Hazlewood on their own label, Trey, but quickly disappeared.

Titelman was something of a protégé of Spector's. Three years younger, he had been privy to Spector's mercurial rise, watching with fascination when the Teddy Bears sometimes rehearsed in the front room of his family home, and in awe as “To Know Him Is to Love Him” made its inexorable progress up the charts. Titelman's father had died when he was young. “Phil became my role model—him and James Dean.”

Spector encouraged Titelman to take guitar lessons from his old teacher Burdell Mathis, and they would often cruise the streets in Spector's Corvette with the radio turned up loud. “Phil would point out, that's one guy playing that part, another guy this part, see how the vocals come in here. That's pretty much how I learned to listen to records.”

To Titelman, Spector was a “totally commanding” figure. “He was extremely funny, charming and charismatic. But at the same time he was a manipulator of people. Both of those personalities existed at the same time.”

Better than most, Titelman could recognize that Spector's character had been forged in the crucible of a tempestuous and unhappy home life. On one occasion, visiting Spector at the Hayworth apartment, Titelman watched in astonishment as Bertha chased her son around the apartment, brandishing a kitchen knife. “Phil told me to go downstairs and we ran out of the back door and down the steps. He had his Corvette parked in the alley. We get in, and suddenly Bertha is standing there at the end of the alley with a piece of four-by-two, screaming at the top of her lungs at him. Phil starts inching the car toward her—he just kept on going, and she got out of the way. She didn't hit the car. I have no idea what they were fighting about.”

Titelman's girlfriend was a petite and strikingly attractive blonde named Annette Merar. When the Spector's Three were invited to perform on a local TV program,
The Wink Martindale Show,
lip-synching to “I Really Do,” Spector asked Annette to appear in place of Ricki Page (Spector replaced himself with a friend of Titelman's, Warren Entner). Two years younger than Spector, and a student at Fairfax High, Merar was only dimly aware of who Phil Spector was. “It certainly didn't register that he was on the road to success or was a genius or anything like that.” But Spector was immediately taken with Annette, telling her that she was so pretty he wanted her to model for the cover of a forthcoming Spector's Three album. Annette was duly flattered, but the group, such as it was, had run their course. A second single, “Mr. Robin,” was released with no more success than the first, and the album was never made. Annette shrugged and assumed that was the last she would see of Phil Spector.

His relationship with Lynn Castle was also coming to an end. Lynn had left her parental home and moved into a small apartment in the Valley. She had dreams of becoming a songwriter herself and had struck up a friendship with Lester Sill and his partner Lee Hazlewood. Spector seemed to resent her growing independence and particularly her relationship with Hazlewood. Annette had met Lynn on a couple of occasions with Spector, and could see his infatuation with her. “I think she was really the love of his life. Phil likes women who live life to the full, and Lynn fell into that category, and he was very comfortable around her because of that. He just loved her, loved her, loved her.”

But for Lynn, his jealousy and possessiveness were becoming intolerable.

“His behavior got too frigging crazy, too absolutely crazy. Where are you? What are you doing? What are you thinking? Where are you going? Controlling.”

Occasionally, she would be out shopping or in a coffee shop and Spector would suddenly appear from out of the blue. She began to suspect he was following her.

“I couldn't understand that at all; it just made me want to run. And I remember saying to Phil, I can't stand it anymore, because I just felt like I was choking. I mean, who could take anybody
constantly…
”

Finally, she could take no more and stopped seeing him. For Spector, the end of the relationship seemed to encapsulate the growing disenchantment he was feeling with his life in Los Angeles. Since the success of “To Know Him Is to Love Him” in the winter of 1958, he had recorded a succession of singles and an album, all of which had been, in commercial terms at least, conspicuous failures. In his conversations with Lester Sill, he began to express a desire to try his luck in New York. Sympathetic to his feelings, and reasoning that it would be in his interests too for Spector to gain more experience elsewhere, Sill contacted his old protégés Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and asked whether they could make use of an apprentice. In the spring of 1960 Spector boarded the plane for New York, and a new life.

4

On Broadway

F
lying over the great heartland of America, which had embraced him, and forgotten him, in the space of eighteen short months, Phil Spector would have pondered long and hard at the prospect of now being apprenticed to two men at the very summit of the New York music business hierarchy, and how closely he seemed to be following in their footsteps.

Jerry Leiber had first met Lester Sill in 1950, when Sill was working as the sales manager for Modern Records. Leiber was a student at Fairfax High, who after school worked in Norty's, a local record shop specializing in Jewish music—a white boy who revered black music, selling records by rabbinical cantors. According to Leiber, Sill walked in one day, hawking a new record by the blues singer John Lee Hooker. “I told him, I love the record, but the only thing that sells here is songs for synagogues on high holidays. They will not be buying records by John Lee Hooker.”

When Leiber told Sill that he wrote blues songs himself, Sill asked him to sing one. Impressed by Leiber's impromptu performance, Sill offered to help circulate his songs and told Leiber to provide him with some lead sheets. “I had no idea what he was talking about. He said, ‘Those are the sheets where the notes are written down, and under the notes are the words'…”

Leiber was unable to write music, but shortly afterward he made a serendipitous connection when he was introduced to Mike Stoller, another Jewish boy fatally enamored of black music and already an accomplished jazz pianist. Leiber and Stoller quickly formed a partnership, and with Lester Sill's help began to make the rounds of what Leiber describes as “the cottage industry” of publishers and independent labels in Los Angeles.

They were beating a path that Spector would follow just a few years later, working the “music row” around Sunset and Vine peopled with chancers and flimflam men, raw opportunists and rough diamonds. Typical was the music publisher Harry Goodman, brother of the clarinet player Benny—a man, Leiber remembers, who dressed like a Savile Row dandy, spoke “like a Brooklyn butcher” and held court in an office engulfed in the aroma of marijuana fumes.

“The first time we met him, we went over there and asked, ‘Can we play you some songs, Mr. Goodman?' And he says, ‘What else do you think I'm here for?' So Mike, very tentatively, walks over to the piano and sits down and one, two, three…And Harry says, ‘These are the lyrics here?' And I said, ‘Yes.' And then he says, ‘What's your name?' And I said, ‘Jerry.' And he says, ‘Jerry, I'm going to tell you something. That song you just sang is a piece of shit.' And he's got a wastepaper basket there and he throws the lyrics in the can. ‘Let's go on to the next one.' And he does this five or six times and then finally we get to a song, and he says, ‘This is a
real
pile of shit—but it's the kind of shit that I need.'”

Gradually, Leiber and Stoller began to place their songs with RB artists such as Amos Milburn, Jimmy Witherspoon and Charles Brown. Their first significant hit came with “Hound Dog,” recorded by Big Mama Thornton, which topped the RB charts for seven weeks in 1953. It would also provide the writers with a timely lesson in music business practice. The producer on the session was the local bandleader Johnny Otis. When the record was released, Leiber and Stoller were disconcerted to find that Otis had added his name to the writers' credits, and mortified when the record company, Duke, stopped payment on a royalty check. Bruised by the experience, Leiber and Stoller set up their own publishing company, Quintet Music, and their own record label, Spark, in partnership with Lester Sill. Their first signing was a local RB group named the Robins, for whom Leiber and Stoller wrote a series of songs—“Riot in Cell Block No. 9,” “Framed” and “Smokey Joe's Cafe”—which Leiber and Stoller termed “playlets,” vivid narrative songs, performed in a humorous, knockabout style that would become one of the songwriters' trademarks.

While only local hits, their work with the Robins brought them to the attention of Atlantic Records in New York. Founded in 1948 by two Turkish-born brothers, Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, Atlantic had established itself as one of the most successful independent RB labels in America. In 1955 Nesuhi Ertegun approached Leiber and Stoller with a proposition: Atlantic should buy out Spark, and Leiber and Stoller move to New York and make records for Atlantic as independent writer-producers—an unheard-of arrangement in the record business at that time. Under the deal, Atlantic would pay for all the sessions and give the pair a 2 percent royalty on sales. Crucially, Leiber and Stoller also insisted that they should receive a label credit as producers on all their work—another unprecedented move. Atlantic quibbled over the use of the word “producers.” “They wanted to call us directors,” Leiber remembers. “They said they were the producers because they put up the money.” But Leiber and Stoller prevailed.

Their first Atlantic recordings were with established Atlantic artists such as Joe Turner, LaVern Baker and Ruth Brown. For the Coasters—a revamped version of the Robins—the pair crafted a further series of comic “mini operettas,” such as “Yakety Yak,” “Charlie Brown,” “Along Came Jones” and “Little Egypt,” honking vaudevillian RB songs with lyrics that aligned the group firmly on the side of their teenage audience by mocking and ridiculing the adult world, and which Leiber described as “a white kid's take on a black kid's take on white society.”

At the same time, the pair landed an unexpected windfall when, in 1956, Elvis Presley recorded their earlier hit “Hound Dog.” Presley's version went on to sell 7 million copies, remaining at number 1 on the pop charts for an incredible eleven weeks—still a record for the longest time any record has held the number 1 spot. In addition to their Atlantic work, Leiber and Stoller suddenly found themselves being called upon to provide more songs for Presley as well.

But perhaps their greatest artistic triumph would come with the Drifters, for whom they crafted a glorious succession of hit singles that would take pop music to new heights of sophistication and polish. Their first hit for the group, “There Goes My Baby,” which reached number 2 in the charts in 1959, is widely credited as being the first RB record to employ strings. It was also the first pop record to employ the subtle Latin American rhythm known as the
baion,
which put the emphasis on the first, third and fourth beats of the bar (
one
[two]
three-four, one
[two]
three-four
). Not only did the
baion
become the basis of a succession of Drifters records, from “Save the Last Dance for Me” to “Under the Boardwalk,” but Leiber and Stoller's combination of subtle rhythms and arrangements, the “cushion” of sound they constructed in their recordings by using two or three guitarists and three or four percussionists, would serve as one of the most important precursors for what Spector later achieved with his Wall of Sound.

Jerry Leiber was less than enthralled when Lester Sill called him from California to ask whether the pair could find a use for “this talented kid” named Phil Spector who wanted to learn the business. “I said, ‘That's an invitation to poach our ideas,'” Leiber remembers. “And Lester said, ‘So what?'”

Sill talked up his young protégé, reminding Leiber about Spector's early success with the Teddy Bears. “I told him that we didn't go for that white-bread trash. We wrote for black people—we were race-record makers. But Lester said, ‘Hey, come on. He's very talented and he would be so grateful'—which is actually not something that you would ever associate with Phil.”

Nor was Leiber any more impressed when Spector walked through the door of his office at 40 West Fifty-seventh Street.

To Leiber, Spector cut an odd-looking figure, small and scrawny, with a “furtive” manner, and a disconcerting tic of widening his eyes and then blinking, “as if he was looking not at you, but through you.” Spector gave off what Leiber calls “conflicting signals” one minute quiet and self-effacing—“he'd had a big, big hit, and that gives people a sense of accomplishment and security, but Phil acted like it had never happened”—the next, pushy, with an eye for the main chance and a self-belief beyond his twenty years. Leiber thought Spector was “a very strange dog.”

What did impress him, however, was Spector's talent. Whatever Leiber might have thought of “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” it was obvious that Spector was a promising producer, and—of more immediate use to the producers—a gifted guitarist. “He'd studied with Barney Kessel and he carried that strong jazz-guitar discipline. He was very good.”

Leiber and Stoller signed him to their company Trio Music on a two-year contract. Lacking funds, for the first few weeks Spector slept on the sofa in their office, his bag and guitar stashed away in the corner, until finding a small apartment of his own.

Spector had now arrived at the epicenter of the American music business and, while sitting in on sessions with Leiber and Stoller, lost no time in exploring the opportunities to hand.

At the age of twenty, Spector had landed, in musical terms at least, at the very heart of the world. The great tornado of rock and roll that swept through America in the mid-1950s had blown up largely from the South. The Sun Records studio in Memphis had been the cradle for Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash—the rough-hewn country and rockabilly roots of rock. Little Richard and Ray Charles were from Georgia; Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly from Texas; Fats Domino from New Orleans. There were thriving music scenes in Chicago, Detroit and, of course, Los Angeles, serviced by small, independent labels. But New York remained the heart of the music industry. Most of the Big Six labels had their headquarters here, as did most of the major music publishers, and the two principal performing rights organizations, ASCAP and BMI.

New York's burgeoning pop music industry was centered around two neighboring office buildings that housed the music publishers and writers who were the engine of the industry. The Brill Building, located at 1619 Broadway, was a ten-storey art deco block, built in 1931, and named after its first owners the Brill brothers, whose clothing store initially occupied the ground floor. In the 1930s, in the face of deepening economic recession, the Brills started renting out space to music publishers, who found the location convenient for the theaters, nightclubs and vaudeville halls that lined the “Great White Way.” In the 1940s, the Brill Building was celebrated by
The New Yorker
humorist A. J. Liebling as “The Jollity Building,” where sundry Broadway agents, publishers, songwriters and bandleaders camped out in a rabbit warren of cubicle-sized offices, hustling and scuffling for a break. By 1960 the building housed some ninety music publishers, offering what has been held up as the perfect model of “vertical integration”—a writer could sit in one cubicle, penning a song, sell it to a publisher in the next, hastily record a demo in one of the number of small studios scattered through the building, and then make a deal with a producer hanging around in the lobby. The most prestigious company of all was Hill and Range, owned by two brothers, Jean and Julian Aberbach, which among other things managed the publishing catalogue for Elvis Presley, and occupied a location befitting its station at the top of the music publishing tree in the building's penthouse suite.

If the Brill Building was the spiritual heart of Tin Pan Alley, 1650 Broadway, located just a couple of blocks north, was its upstart younger brother, a scruffier block with none of the Brill's art deco grandeur or raffish show business history. A hive of small publishers, independent record labels and songwriters, its most illustrious occupant was Aldon Music, run by Al Nevins and Don Kirshner, where a formidable team of young writers worked day and night in a series of rabbit warren cubicles, fashioning hits for the pop market.

Within days of arriving in New York, Spector had set about forging new alliances. At Leiber and Stoller's office, he met another young aspirant musician and songwriter from Los Angeles named Nino Tempo. A swaggering young Italian-American with Marlon Brando looks, Tempo (born Antonio Lo Tempi) had worked as a child actor and recorded an album of instrumentals (a multi-instrumentalist, his main instrument was the sax),
Nino Tempo's Rock and Roll Beach Party.
He and Spector connected immediately, and the friendship was cemented when Jerry Leiber went off on a summer vacation, and invited Spector and Tempo to housesit his midtown brownstone. Over the next couple of months, until Tempo returned to Los Angeles, he and Spector were inseparable.

“We were as flat broke as you can imagine,” Tempo remembers. “We'd sit there in a diner with two bucks between us, saying, ‘Well, we can afford one coffee and two donuts, or two coffees and one donut.' Phil was likeable, funny, crazy, wacky, all those things. But you could also tell he was going places. He knew he was good, and it was just a matter of time before everybody else realized it too.”

Tempo would come to play a significant role in Spector's career, but Spector forged a more immediately productive friendship over a cup of coffee in a Howard Johnson's diner on Broadway, when he was introduced to a young songwriter named Beverly Ross. Ross was just seventeen when she wrote “Lollipop” for the Chordettes, which reached number 2 in 1958, and she had recently signed to Hill and Range as a staff writer. “Phil's eyes lit up when I told him that,” she remembers. “He was very impressed. And I was impressed that he'd written ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him.' The two of us were kind of looking at each other thinking, Geez, you're so young and you've had a big hit. We hit it off straightaway.”

Spector, Ross recalls, was “very bright, very funny,” but she sensed that for all his braggadocio and self-confidence, he was actually lonely and a little homesick. “There's a Yiddish expression my mother used to use
—schmalzgrub;
it's a little warm place. So I brought him in to my
schmalzgrub.
”