He's a Rebel (22 page)

“What do you want?” Spector asked him.

“Look, Phil,” Sill said, “I'm not gonna just walk away from this thing, because I started it.”

Impatiently Phil repeated, “What do you want?”

Goaded into exasperation, Lester grunted. “Look, you figure it out,” he said, and told him to base it on a year's royalties. But in the end, he got nothing close to that.

“I sold out for a pittance,” he recalled. “It was shit, ridiculous, around $60,000. I didn't want to but I had to. Let me tell you, I couldn't live with Phillip. I could've been a millionaire with this guy—don't forget, I owned half of Mother Bertha. I owned all those masters, and if I'd held on to them, he would've had to start a new company. But I just wanted the fuck out of there. If I wouldn't have, I would've killed him. It wasn't worth the aggravation. No matter how important it was, it wasn't that important. I didn't even want a lawyer. I said, ‘Send me the check.' ”

Sill's haste proved costly. “I made the mistake of signing the paper before I got my check, because I trusted him.” Months later, still with no check, Sill met with Spector in Phil's apartment. When he walked in, he again had to go up against both Phil and Harold Lipsius. Lipsius, a lawyer, was now advising Phil on legal matters. Phil was prepared for Lester's demand for payment, and his rationale for holding back on it stretched far back in time—to Lester's refusal to cough up royalties on the discarded Paris Sisters' album.
Only now did it become clear how much of a grudge Phil had nursed against Lester.

“Phil wants to see some figures,” Lipsius told Sill, who went over them again and again but could not elicit a promise from Spector to pay up. Reaching an impasse, Sill hired a lawyer and sued Phil Spector.

A short while later, in late January of 1963, Phil went into Mira Sound with the Crystals, Michael Spencer, and two other musicians and cut a song titled “Let's Dance the Screw Part 1 and 2.” The record was not intended for release, and the only person who received a copy was Lester Sill.

“He wanted to get me,” Sill said. “That was him saying ‘Fuck you, buddy.' ”

Incredibly, Chuck Kaye stayed on as Philles promotion man, working out of Lester's new office in a converted bowling alley on Hollywood's El Centro Avenue. “Phil wanted me to continue,” Kaye said. “We'd been pals since we were teenagers and he tried to separate the business end from the fact that he knifed my father in the back. And my dad was great. He thought it was a great opportunity for me. Philles was the hottest label in the country.”

At the El Centro office, there was a strange combination of bad blood and mixed blood. While Sill feuded with Spector, his son and two of his salaried assistants—Steve Douglas and now Jack Nitzsche—went on working Spector's sessions. Nitzsche had a philosopher's name and a Huck Finn face, he wore thick black-framed eyeglasses and his dark hair swooped forward over his eyes like a sheepdog's. Spector asked a lot from his arrangers—his long hours and capricious chart alterations during sessions had driven away a number of past conductors in a jumble of frayed nerves—but Nitzsche had an intuitive sense of where Phil was going, and he had endurance. Like an athlete, Nitzsche would dart from musician to musician, translating Phil's whim to notes on paper. Out of the studio, Phil would awaken him at ungodly hours and call him to ungodly motels because Spector wanted to develop an arrangement.

Nitzsche's sweat and stamina surely was not bought with money—Spector paid him just $50 per chart. For Nitzsche, Spector was an icon, a solitary man making a rock-and-roll testament and changing the industry's rules purely because of his love of music. Nitzsche
was not without self-interest, of course—“The label credits he gave me got me jobs in this business for years,” he said—but Phil Spector was the fountainhead. Spector was there, he was king, he knew the business, but never did he give an inch in creating what he had to.

“In those days, A&R men would hire me for a three-hour session and we had to get it done in that time,” Nitzsche said. “But if Phil needed two sessions to do his rhythm section, that's the way it happened. Maybe other producers liked their records; Phil
loved
his records.

“Phil really was the artist, and it wasn't just out of ego. Phil understood the teenage market, he related to their feelings and impulses. It was like he was a kid himself—he'd call me at 4
A.M
. and want ice cream—and he could commit those impulses artistically like nobody else.”

Seven weeks after its release, “He's a Rebel,” backed with a Spector song called “I Love You Eddie,” sat at No. 3. The next week, in early November, it was No. 1. It would stay there, looking down at every other piece of grooved vinyl in the United States, for three weeks, and it would not fall out of the Top 10 for another three weeks—nor out of the Top 40 until Christmas.

Just before “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah”—under the name of Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans—was released in early November, Ray Peterson split with Stan Shulman. Dunes Records had done $11 million in business in 1961, thanks in large part to Spector, but Peterson was paid very little of it. “That was my record company, I was vice president,” he said. “It was supposed to be 50–50, but Stan became extremely greedy. He was cheatin' me. I found out that he was keepin' two sets of books. I told him, ‘You pushed me around but you're never gonna do it again!' I was so angry I threw him against the wall, this marine.

“I told Phil about it. We sat in my car for three hours and I said, ‘Phil, I'm leavin' Stan and I don't want to see the same thing happen to you. Stay away from him.' ”

Phil was so angry that he told Shulman he was going to sell him the “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” master. Shulman ran around the Brill Building boasting that he had a smash Dunes record. Only days later Shulman heard it on the radio, soon to be a smash Philles record.

One facet of the record would become a Spector trademark for two years, and it was indelibly Spector-like: the B side, “Flip and Nitty,” was not a real song but rather a few impromptu licks played by the band at the very end of a session. By attaching these shams, Phil knew he would not run the risk of a deejay flipping over a record and would instead focus all attention on his uncompromised work. Not incidentally, Phil could also collect up to a quadruple royalty by taking a writer's credit on the bogus side and publishing it through Mother Bertha. Or he could use the trick to reward a favored musician by listing him as writer. Several times Phil would list Shirley as writer—helping to pay the bills for her periodic stays in the psychiatric ward of a Palo Alto hospital, which he considered his responsibility—or Annette.

“Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” got as high as No. 8, in early January. By then Spector and his “little bitty label” were so hot that, from September of 1962 to November of 1963, not one month passed without a Philles record on the charts.

The first record after “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” was a true Spector anomaly—the result of a rare deal he made with another producer. This was Lou Adler, a fifties' protégé of Lester Sill's. Teamed with writer-producer Herb Alpert while working for Sill, the two men wrote and produced Jan and Dean for several years. Now both men were making entrepreneurial moves on the West Coast. While Alpert began an independent label called A&M Records, and cutting his own mariachi-flavored trumpet instrumentals under the name of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Adler handled Don Kirshner's West Coast office and then became an A&R man with Columbia Pictures-Screen Gems. As Phil was looking to record a male group, Adler rushed in to link Screen Gems with the name of Phil Spector. Adler had Billy Storm—whom Spector had cut on Atlantic and who now was Bobby Sheen's brother-in-law—under contract with a five-man L.A. soul group, the Alley Cats, and their records did well on the West Coast. Sheen touted Spector on the Alley Cats, and Phil agreed to a one-shot record to benefit him and Adler. A 50–50 deal from top to bottom, Adler would produce the B side.

Phil's side was called “Puddin' 'n' Tain (Ask Me Again and I'll Tell You the Same),” an old nursery rhyme expanded into an uptempo bubble-gum teen love song by Alley Cat Gary Pipkin. It became
a Top 40 hit in late February of 1963 and was Phil s most convincing doo-wop record, ladled with the big band bite. However, in making the record he clashed with Adler. Ambitious and chummy in an unctuous, talent-agent way, Adler seemed to fancy himself as a West Coast Phil Spector. “He was kinda out there too,” said Bobby Sheen, who sang backup on the session. “They all wanted to be different then.” Making his presence felt, poking into Spector's studio time, he seemed to be trying to compete with Spector on his own turf. Phil had known Adler for years, and through him he met and became friendly with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, who revered Phil and whose creative outflow Phil liked to be around. But now Adler made his skin crawl, and by the end of the session Phil had turned Gold Star into a battlefront.

“Phil could never accept anybody being on a level with him,” Larry Levine said. “I could feel the animosity between them, and I found that Phil's dislike for Adler spilled over to me years later when I worked with Lou too. I didn't like him, just because of Phil. At first Lou would come in when Phil was doing things and they'd be acting friendly. Then Phil was funny. He'd turn up the speakers as soon as Lou came into the control room. That was like stepping into a scalding shower.

“Phil would love to blast the sound because it was a great feeling of all this coming at you, but he'd start off at a moderately low level and grow used to it. But when a visitor would walk in, he'd crank it up, like, hey, let's impress him. And they wouldn't make head or tail of it.”

Crowding Lou Adler out of the studio was Spector's way of ignoring a potential rival. “He had no respect for anyone he thought was a threat to him in any way,” Lester Sill believed, and by 1963 that applied to Don Kirshner as well. After recording Mann and Weil's brightly upbeat but again too-fatalistic song, “He's Sure the Boy I Love,” the next Darlene Wright-fronted Crystals hit, Phil did not go to Aldon for two years. “He thought he was making Kirshner too big,” Annette said.

His alternative became a a young woman from Long Island, Ellie Greenwich. Mostly unknown around Broadway, Greenwich had recorded briefly for RCA in the late fifties, taught school for a while, and now was writing under the Leiber and Stoller banner at Trio Music—in another irony of mixed industry blood, it was Terry Phillips
who recommended her for a job while he was dating her best friend. Greenwich was a melody writer of immense ability, and her songs were inventive teen tripe, with beguiling chord changes and cute hooks. Armed with songs, the blond and spunky Greenwich tried to play some for Phil one day in the Brill Building. Spector looked in a mirror, combed his hair, and ignored her. Greenwich scolded him, yelling “Are you going to listen?” and he huffed out, apparently turned off to her. But when Phil heard her demo of a song she'd written with a Trio collaborator named Tony Powers, “(Today I Met) The Boy I'm Gonna Marry,” he thought they could do business and invited them to his apartment. Phil came home very late, and Greenwich accosted him in the lobby, again berating him for being rude. This time Phil smiled at her, as if she had passed a test. He took her and Powers up to the apartment, sat them at a piano, and heard much that he thought he could use.

The first Greenwich-Powers-Spector tune, correctly listed in that order, was “Why Do Lovers Break Each Others' Hearts?”, a chugging, glockenspiel-punctuated piece sung in unison by Bobby Sheen and Darlene Wright and released as a Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans record. The second, “(Today I Met) The Boy I'm Gonna Marry”—credited as Spector-Greenwich-Powers—made Darlene Wright into an unlikely torch singer. Wright sang the ballad the only way she could, as if she were in a pulpit, and it was a loud wail that Phil did not want to use as a Crystals record. When released, it was with the name of a new Philles act: Darlene Love.

Phil was in the studio all the time now, hopping from coast to coast, cutting mostly in L. A. but also doing album fillers with the real Crystals at Mira Sound. He stepped away, briefly, on a February day in 1963. On that day, he married Annette Merar.

As much as she loved Phil, and though things were good between them, Annette was not happy as a live-in love interest for a man almost never at home. She was young, still friendless in New York, and she had seen a darkness in Phil that was disconcerting. As had Donna Kass, Annette felt the hot breath of Phil's jealousy. When Phil was in L.A. cutting “He's a Rebel,” she told him over the phone that she was about to go sunbathing. “He got freaked out and so pissed that I was wearing a two-piece bathing suit that I couldn't sunbathe in it,” she said. “He made me promise not to wear it.” All too often, Annette stood in the firing
line of his temper. “The worst of it was his verbal abuse and arguing. Phil loves to argue, and he would destroy me, and I'm no dummy. But he'd have to win.” Trying to cope with his bottomless pit of insecurities, Phil had begun seeing a Park Avenue psychiatrist named Dr. Harold Kaplan, on Mondays for group therapy plus two or three private sessions during the week.

Annette believed that their love was the only emotional cement of their lives. Phil said as much when he proposed marriage. In January, he gave her a glimmering 2½-carat diamond ring. They also moved to an apartment Annette had secured from a realtor, a magnificent terraced penthouse at Sixty-second Street and York Avenue with a breathtaking view of the East River and neighbors that included Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. They took the apartment completely furnished, the living-room walls painted in shades of olive, expensive French frying pans dangling on hooks in the kitchen. The only new piece was a television sent as a gift from Don Kirshner. On February 18, they were wed in a rabbi's study of a synagogue on Central Park West. The ceremony was attended only by three of Phil's friends: Arnie Goland, an arranger who charted many of Phil's New York sessions, was best man, and the other witnesses were a Liberty Records producer named Ed Silver and Peter Bitlisian, a show-biz photography who sometimes took Phil to Las Vegas to meet celebrities. The reception was held at Helen Noga's sprawling Central Park South apartment.