Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (9 page)

Ross thought Spector was “a great musician” and “a truly brilliant guitar player,” but only a “mediocre” writer. As a team, she believed, they could be greater than the sum of their parts. Together they would sit in Ross's apartment, working on songs, with the television on and the volume turned down. “Phil would sit there with his guitar and these awful commercials would come on, and he would make up these wild riffs, running up and down the scale to match whatever was on the screen; like, for an electronic carving knife he'd hit some dramatic chord, or say it was an ad for a trouser press—he'd do obbligatos on the guitar that were hysterically funny, dramatizing these ridiculous commercials selling products that no one would ever use. He had a great sense of humor, and he liked a very attentive audience.”

But her new friend also discerned a deep vein of insecurity. Spector would talk about the early death of his father—he told her that Ben had died of a heart attack—the unhappiness of his childhood, and his insecurities over his size and appearance. Ross quickly came to the conclusion that beneath the veneer of cockiness and wisecracking humor, Spector was actually “filled with self-loathing.”

He was particularly self-conscious about his hair, which was already beginning to thin and recede. He bought a special electric comb, fitted with a blue light, which was supposed to thicken hair and prevent hair loss, and he would run it through his hair constantly, examining himself in the mirror to see if it was having the desired effect.

“He would comb his hair and be so nervous and worried, and talk about how attractive this friend was and how handsome that one was, and this friend got on the football team when he was in high school, and he was jealous because he didn't get this girl or that girl. And I remember thinking, Well, he is short, he doesn't have big bulging muscles or anything, but he's witty and funny and he has a lot to offer. But I think he had a terrific rage and anger that he didn't look like Tarzan. You just had this feeling that he wanted to get even with everybody for his father dying so young and for him not growing up as every girl's dream.”

Spector, she remembers, would talk for hours, as if to delay for as long as possible the moment when he would have to be alone. “He'd have you there until four in the morning even though you had to get up at eight. It was like a hypnotic spell. I think we had a tremendous chemistry, and one time when I was over at his place he kissed me and we had a powerful boy-girl reaction to each other. I think he was in love with me, and possibly I with him. But I never wanted to get romantically involved. You know when you don't let down your guard because you don't quite trust someone? And I think Phil was bitter about that too.”

         

Ross was not the only connection that Spector was busily cultivating in his first few months in New York. Through Leiber and Stoller he met Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records and Paul Case, the AR manager at Hill and Range. An avuncular man in his mid-forties, Case was a figure of substance in the Brill Building hierarchy, and he quickly took Spector under his wing, introducing him around the wide number of writers and producers on the Hill and Range roster. Foremost among these was Doc Pomus.

Born in Brooklyn in 1935, Pomus—whose real name was Jerome Felder—had been crippled by polio at the age of six and walked on crutches (he would later be confined to a wheelchair). Like Leiber, Stoller and Spector, he was a Jewish boy who had started an early love affair with black music. As a teenager he sang in jazz clubs, affecting the pseudonym Doc Pomus to allay the suspicions of his middle-class parents, and working with a number of legendary musicians, including Milt Jackson and Horace Silver. In the early '50s he began writing songs, achieving his first success with “Boogie Woogie Country Girl,” recorded by Big Joe Turner. He wrote “Lonely Avenue,” an RB hit for Ray Charles in 1956, and collaborated with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller on the Coasters' hit “Young Blood.” But it was not until he teamed up with a younger writer, Mort Shuman, and began pitching songs for the teenage market that Pomus really started to enjoy significant commercial success. Together they wrote across a bewildering variety of styles—rock and roll for Elvis Presley, disposable bubblegum pop for Fabian and Bobby Rydell, “Teenager in Love” for Dion and the Belmonts. In 1959, Pomus and Shuman had ten hits on the
Billboard
charts—only two fewer than Leiber and Stoller.

Some of their best songs were for the Drifters, writing in a style that Pomus called “Jewish Latin.” Between 1959 and 1961 they provided the Drifters with a string of hits that included “This Magic Moment,” “Sweets for My Sweet” and, most memorably, “Save the Last Dance for Me”—a song that Pomus supposedly scribbled on the back of an invitation to his wedding to an actress, Willi Burke. Pomus was a squat, barrel-chested man with twinkling eyes and a goatee beard, who spoke in a scratchy, high-pitched voice that sounded more black than white, punctuating his every utterance with the universal endearment “babe.” “Everybody loved Doc,” says Jerry Wexler. “If the music business ever had a heart it would be Doc Pomus. He was a very lovable guy, a very cool guy. Super cool. He also was a great songwriter.”

Spector adored him and would spend as much time with him as possible, listening to his stories and relaying them to other friends in a perfect imitation of Pomus's rasping hipsterese. He would often tease Pomus about his disability, to the embarrassment and mortification of others who were too polite to mention the obvious, but causing Pomus himself to laugh uproariously. Spector seemed to have a particular dispensation to amuse.

Pomus and his wife had a house on Long Island, but he spent most of his time at the Hotel Forrest, a short walk from the Brill Building, “a dumpy little place” as Ahmet Ertegun remembered it, frequented by a colorful assortment of Broadway show people, quirks and fly-by-nights, and where Pomus would frequently hold court in the hotel's Spindletop restaurant. Spector liked to tell the story of how one dinner-date with Pomus was enlivened by a contract hit. “[A] guy in a raincoat walks in with a hat and goes up to a guy and boom boom boom, three times in the head, and the guy slumps over dead, just like that.” Pomus couldn't understand why Spector was reluctant to eat in the restaurant again. “The place is incredible, right, the salads, I mean how about the service in that restaurant? You have to look on the up side.”

For his first few months in New York, Spector doggedly played the role of apprentice to Leiber and Stoller, trailing them to the studio and playing guitar on their sessions for the Coasters, the Drifters and LaVern Baker. But in October he finally got his chance at production when John Bienstock at Hill and Range asked Leiber and Stoller to produce “Corrina, Corrina,” a new single for Ray Peterson. An erstwhile country singer who had enjoyed a big hit with the “death song” “Tell Laura I Love Her” the year before, Peterson also had an interest in a label called Dunes, which was a subsidiary of Hill and Range. Busy with other projects, Leiber handed the project on to Spector.

He shared his excitement at the news with Beverly Ross. Together they had been working on a song called “That's the Kind of Love I Wish I Had.” Spector told Ross that he would get Peterson to record the song as the B-side, to repay her for all the help she'd given him. But according to Ross, when she suggested that she should accompany Spector to the session, he hedged, giving the excuse that nobody except the artist and musicians were allowed.

“Corrina, Corrina” had been an RB hit for Big Joe Turner, but Spector's version had none of the bare-fisted rough and tumble of Turner's; instead, he gave the song a light, lilting quality, sweetening it with a pizzicato string arrangement that might have been borrowed from a Drifters record. Peterson's hiccoughing falsetto sounded no different from a dozen other “Bobby” records of the time.

“Corrina, Corrina” charted in November, rising to number 9, and giving Spector his biggest hit since “To Know Him Is to Love Him” two years earlier. Beverly Ross was impressed when she heard the record; less impressed when she turned it over to discover that Spector had dropped the song they had written together, and that he had promised to record as the B-side. In its place was a song called “Be My Girl,” credited to Spector and “Cory Sands”—in fact, a pseudonym for his sister, Shirley. Spector was clearly extending a helping hand to his troubled sister. But Ross was “devastated and heartbroken—speechless practically. I couldn't believe he'd done that to me.” But what she regarded as a bigger betrayal was to come.

Almost from the moment he arrived in New York, Spector had been badgering Jerry Leiber to write a song with him, telling Ross that if Leiber agreed she would be included too. But Leiber had done his best to put Spector off. “I kept saying it would be very difficult because Mike is my partner and I think that he would feel put out if I wrote a song with somebody else. But Phil kept insisting, ‘Come on…it's just a song.' So in the end I said, ‘I tell you what; if it's agreeable with you, I would like to invite Mike along to write it with the two of us and if that happens then I will be happy to write the song with you.' He said, ‘Sure.' I don't know why I was asking him, because he was supposed to be working for me. I didn't owe anyone an explanation. But Phil could put you on the spot like that.”

Stoller agreed to the plan and the three men made an appointment to meet at Leiber's apartment at nine in the evening. Spector arrived at 7:30.

“He said, ‘Let's get to work,' and I said, ‘No, we've got to wait for Mike.'” By 9:30, with no sign of Stoller, Spector's impatience was growing uncontainable, and Leiber agreed to start sketching out some ideas. At 9:45, Stoller called to say he couldn't make the meeting after all.

Over dinner, Leiber had been playing some classical recordings, including Ravel's
Rhapsody Espagnole
and Debussy's
Iberia.
He suggested to Spector they should perhaps write something with a Spanish feel. While Spector sat at the piano, developing a theme, Leiber turned his thoughts to the lyric. Within a couple of hours they had fashioned the rudiments of a masterpiece, “Spanish Harlem,” Spector's poignant melody perfectly complementing the lyric's theme of romantic yearning. Later, Mike Stoller would embellish the tune yet further with a naggingly memorable figure of descending triplets, played on marimba in the final recording.

“Phil was an accomplished musician, but we weren't talking about musicianship, we were talking about the music business, which is about the songs,” says Leiber. “So I think that he learned a lot by just writing that song with me. By the choices that I made and what I told him to do, shade this and shade that, make this shorter and make that a shade longer, whatever.”

On October 20, Spector joined Leiber and Stoller in the studio with Ben E. King, the lead vocalist of the Drifters, who had recently left the group after a dispute with their manager to embark on a solo career. Over the course of three hours, King recorded four new songs: two were collaborations by Spector and Doc Pomus—“First Taste of Love” and “Young Boy Blues.” The third was “Spanish Harlem,” and the fourth a song hastily improvised at the end of the session by Leiber, Stoller and King himself, called “Stand by Me.”

Unsure of the commercial prospects for “Spanish Harlem,” King's label Atlantic initially released it as the B-side of “First Taste of Love.” It was not until the record was flipped that it registered on the charts, in January 1961, eventually rising to number 10. Three months later “Stand by Me” would surpass it, reaching number 4.

When Spector played Beverly Ross an acetate of “Spanish Harlem” in the offices of Hill and Range, she was less than thrilled. Spector had reneged on his promise, she believed, by not including her in the collaboration with Leiber.

It was the final straw. Spector, Ross was now convinced, was “a user,” who had exploited their friendship and then callously pushed her to one side. “It was almost as though he had it planned out. That he was going to eliminate this person and that person and go on and get all the credit for himself.”

What Ross perceived as Spector's betrayal was to leave a lasting mark on her. When her contract ran out with Hill and Range, Mike Stoller offered her a job as a staff writer at Trio. “I thought, This is a dream that every writer has, to work for Leiber and Stoller. And then I thought, It's going to mean that every day I'm going to have to see Phil Spector coming in and out of the office or getting charts or being in the studio, and the idea of being in close proximity to him was so hateful to me, so I turned it down.”

Ross dropped out of the business for almost two years. “I became a
lemekhal—
something that doesn't move, like an unhatchable egg.”

She would eventually pick up the threads of her career, enjoying a Top 40 hit with “Remember Then,” a reprise of the doo-wop style by the Earls. “And one day I was walking on the street with a girlfriend and this great big limo with blackened windows starts following me and all of a sudden I hear ‘Bev, Bev!' And it's Phil, poking his head out of this big limo. And he said, ‘Hey, I hear you got a big smash out there'—like he was watching what I was getting, how come I was daring to have a hit without him. So I said, ‘Yeah, it's really doing great.' And he just kept following us, wanting me and my girlfriend to get in his car, but I was so gun-shy of ever becoming vulnerable to someone who'd betrayed me like that, because Phil practically killed me emotionally. I figured I wasn't smart enough to handle the part of his personality I didn't understand. It was like Phil was born without a conscience, and I was his victim. He could be so ruthless. Phil wrote one line in one of the songs we wrote together that kind of tells the story of his life; the song was ‘Don't Believe Everything You Hear,' and the line was ‘If you hear him lying just walk away.' Don't even turn back. And that really was his whole attitude; if anyone dares to hurt me I'm just going to walk away; I'm not going to look for any explanation, and no matter how much I love them or they love me, I'm just going to walk away. I think he probably had no use for anybody who was good to him; because I think maybe he thought he was shit. Just bad stuff.”