Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (15 page)

Nor would Spector's next recording with the Crystals help matters. Written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, as the title suggests, “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)” was a particularly perverse choice as a follow-up to the Crystals' first two hits.

         

Gerry Goffin would later explain that the song had been inspired by a story told to them by their babysitter, Eva Boyd, after she had turned up for work bearing the scars of a beating by her jealous boyfriend. “But she sort of smiled before she went to her room,” Goffin recalled, “and she said, ‘He really loves me.” But the idea of love as a sadomasochistic battle zone—bathing the bruises in tears of reconciliation and regret—appeared to be a recurring theme in the pair's songs at the time. Spector also recorded their song “Please Hurt Me” (“If you gotta hurt somebody, please hurt me”) for inclusion on the Crystals' album (Eva Boyd would also record the song as Little Eva), and Goffin and King also wrote “Chains” (“my baby's got me locked up in chains…”) for the Cookies.

Don Kirshner had his own reservations about “He Hit Me.” What he loved about Goffin and King's songwriting was that they wrote “real warm, boy-girl things, songs that got under your skin.” “He Hit Me”—a song more likely to make your skin crawl—was, he acknowledged, “different.” But Kirshner was prepared to indulge his young protégés.

“Gerry Goffin was becoming an important writer, and I didn't want to stamp on his creativity. Most of my songs had a feeling of romanticism—boy/girl. This was a little more controversial. But I had to give them freedom of expression. It wasn't as much entertainment as it was philosophizing.”

“‘He Hit Me' was absolutely, positively the one record that none of us liked,” Barbara Alston, the Crystals' lead singer, recalled. “All I really wanted to know was ‘Why?' Why would five young girls sing something extraordinary like ‘He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)'? Yuk, was what I felt.”

But Spector had no such qualms, and attacked the song with a manic relish. With its funereal beat, overheated production and melodramatic string arrangement, “He Hit Me” sounds almost comically kitsch by today's standards, if one didn't suspect that Spector was approaching it in deadly earnest.

Lester Sill was the first person to tell Spector that he hated it. And he wasn't alone. The record created a minor outcry, disc jockeys refused to play it, and in June 1962, Philles was obliged to pull it from the shelves.

Preoccupied with the Crystals, Spector had all but forgotten about his arrangement with Liberty—his sole telephone call to Snuff Garrett in Los Angeles in the early months of 1962 had been to complain that the plants in his office had not been watered. But while he might have produced nothing of note, his stay at the label was to provide him with a major opportunity.

On a shopping expedition at 1650 Broadway, Spector visited Aaron Schroeder, who played him a new song called “He's a Rebel,” written by his protégé Gene Pitney. The song played on a familiar theme that had inspired the film
Rebel Without a Cause
and any number of other pop songs about the misunderstood teenager. By a pleasing coincidence, Pitney had been inspired to write it after hearing the Crystals' “Uptown.” “‘Uptown' was the first song where I ever heard anyone use funky strings like that,” Pitney recalled, “and especially low strings, violas and cellos down that low. I fell in love with it and it hit me. I said, ‘I'm gonna write their next single, another song they could do just like that.'”

Listening to the song in Aaron Schroeder's office, Spector knew that he had found a hit. He also knew he had to move fast. Schroeder told him that another producer had designs on the song—Spector's friend Snuff Garrett. Pausing only to tender his resignation at Liberty, Spector took the first plane out to Los Angeles.

In the space of eighteen months, he had burned a trail through the New York music scene, cementing alliances that would stand him instead for the rest of his career, and destroying others without a moment's thought. He had co-written one rock and roll classic, “Spanish Harlem,” and produced a handful more; risen from being a nobody to one of the hottest record producers in the business. Now Phil Spector was about to embark on the most spectacular phase of his career.

7

Building the Wall of Sound

S
pector had good reasons for choosing to record “He's a Rebel” in Los Angeles rather than New York. For one thing, union rates were cheaper on the West Coast, but he was also growing increasingly weary of the stranglehold which the New York union, the American Federation of Musicians Local 82, held on his sessions. Although the technique was becoming commonplace, union rules theoretically forbade overdubbing. The union was also increasingly vigilant in policing a closed shop: on one occasion, when Annette had been recruited to rattle a tambourine during a Crystals session, Spector had been anonymously reported for using non-union labor. “He would tell me the union was driving him out of town,” Michael Spencer remembers.

More importantly, Spector preferred the musicians in Los Angeles. The New York session players were hardened professionals, who tended to view him with a mixture of bemusement, grudging respect or barely concealed contempt, who would groan audibly at the amount of time he spent on preparing the studio, and the protracted run-throughs before recording began. The musicians in Los Angeles were cooler, more relaxed and more attuned to Spector's iconoclastic approach; nobody thought Spector was crazy, or if they did they certainly didn't say it to his face.

And then there was Gold Star. Spector had worked at three or four studios in New York, but none had proved as congenial as the place where he had made his first records, and none could match the singular acoustics and atmosphere of Studio A. “To Know Him Is to Love Him” and “I Love How You Love Me”—for very different reasons, the records closest to Spector's heart and, not coincidentally perhaps, his biggest hits to date—had both been made at Gold Star. He had come to regard Stan Ross, the studio's co-owner, who had engineered every one of his sessions there, as almost a talismanic presence.

Touching down in Los Angeles, Spector wasted no time in making preparations to record “He's a Rebel.” He contacted his old friend, the sax player Steve Douglas, and asked him to contract the best musicians he could find. To arrange the session, Lester Sill suggested Jack Nitzsche, who had once worked for Sill and was now working as an arranger for his former partner Lee Hazlewood.

All Spector needed now was a group to sing the song.

Spector, quite naturally, had earmarked “He's a Rebel” for the Crystals, but the group would never make the session—whether because they refused to fly to Los Angeles or because they were occupied on the road is unclear. Spector didn't miss a beat. It would be a relatively easy matter to find singers in Los Angeles to replace them, he reasoned. All he really needed from the Crystals was their name, and Philles owned that.

It was Jack Nitzsche who suggested that he should audition a group of local session singers called the Blossoms, who were led by a twenty-three-year-old singer named Darlene Wright. The daughter of a Pentecostal minister, Wright had grown up in Texas and Los Angeles, singing in church choirs before joining with four friends—Gloria Jones, Fanita Barrett and sisters Annette and Nanette Williams—to make the Blossoms. The group made a series of singles for local labels, but they became better known as backing singers. Before the Blossoms, much of the session work in L.A. was covered by the Johnny Mann Singers, five white men and three white women, who could sight-read music and be relied upon to provide performances of a saccharine banality. The Blossoms' flawless harmonies, which could pass as either black or white, allowed them to work across a bewildering variety of styles, singing behind artists as diverse as Sam Cooke, Doris Day, Ray Charles, Jan and Dean, and Bobby Darin. They would provide the “sha-dums” on Shelley Fabares's innocuous piece of candy floss “Johnny Angel,” and the “shoop shoops” on Betty Everett's “Shoop Shoop Song (It's in His Kiss).” Nitzsche had often worked with the group, and his wife Gracia sometimes sang with them.

When Wright first met Phil Spector, she would later recount in her autobiography, she took note of his “pasty, Lord Fauntleroy face and waiflike frame,” and his overpowering aftershave, which “smelled like musk. As dark as it was inside Gold Star, he wore his sunglasses. And when he stood up, in four-inch heels, I was still taller than he was.” Spector, she thought, looked like “a little kid in a sandbox.”

Seated at a piano, Spector led her through “He's a Rebel.” The moment he heard her voice he was sold. But Wright was less convinced. In her autobiography she would recall that compared to the material she'd been recording with Ray Charles and Bobby Darin, “He's a Rebel” sounded “like a trifle—just another tribute to a teen dream, this one from the wrong side of the tracks, or the police blotter.” Wright might have been only twenty-three herself, but she had a husband, a child and a mortgage to pay—the transition between her teens and adulthood had “lasted about five minutes.” But she could do swooning teenager, if that's what Spector wanted. It wasn't. What he wanted, he told her, was the “low, growling side” of her voice, “the righteous indignation and in-your-face testimony that I usually saved for church.”

Spector offered Wright a flat fee of $3,000 to sing lead on the song. Fanita Barrett and Gloria Jones were also booked on the session, for a standard session rate. They were joined by Bobby Sheen, the singer whom Spector had recorded for Liberty the year before.

But there was another problem. Booking Gold Star, Spector had naturally assumed that his old friend Stan Ross would be available to engineer the sessions. But Ross had decided to take a vacation in Hawaii. Ross proposed his cousin, Larry Levine, as a replacement. Spector was furious—he was about to cut the record of a lifetime, and the man he trusted most at the boards had decided to absent himself—but he had no intention of waiting for Ross to return.

At thirty-three, Levine was ten years older than Spector. Tall and quietly spoken, with an easygoing, unflappable manner, he had served in the U.S. Army in Korea as a radio operator and later worked in the aviation industry. When Ross and Dave Gold opened Gold Star in 1950, Levine had taken to dropping by the studio in the evenings, “basically because the people in the music business were more entertaining than the run of the mill,” and ended up working there, initially assisting Ross and then engineering sessions on his own, including Eddie Cochran's “Summertime Blues.”

Levine had seen Spector around the studio working on the Paris Sisters' sessions, and he was no more enthralled about the prospect of working with Spector than Spector was about working with him. “I thought he was a brat, spoiled or whatever,” Levine remembers. “There was something abrasive there. It wasn't anything he said; it was just an aura that he carried with him, and nothing that he can do anything about. But I think that happened with a lot of people with Phil.”

Of the musicians that Steve Douglas brought into the studio, only the guitarist Howard Roberts and bass player Ray Pohlman had worked with Spector before. Spector had requested a second bass player, Jimmy Bond. The group was filled out with a second guitarist, Tommy Tedesco; a pianist, Al DeLory; the drummer Hal Blaine, a seasoned session musician who had already played on hits by Connie Francis and Elvis Presley; and two sax players—Douglas, and Spector's old friend Nino Tempo. Used to working with the standard drum/bass/guitar rock and roll combo, Larry Levine was puzzled by the number of musicians trooping into the studio. “I thought, what is this all about?” But whatever reservations he might have had, Levine was diplomatic enough to keep them to himself, patiently following instructions as Spector went through his customarily laborious procedure of organizing mikes and rehearsing the musicians.

Inspired by Spector's use of strings on “Uptown,” Gene Pitney had written “He's a Rebel” with the idea that it too should use a string arrangement; but Spector decided to forgo any other adornment, instead cutting it as a tough, swaggering rock and roll song. Al DeLory cast an eye over the musical charts, which Jack Nitzsche had written, and with his right hand began to improvise a naggingly insistent five-note gospel figure that was to become the song's introduction and central motif. Steve Douglas added a booting sax solo in the middle section. Recording the vocal, Darlene Wright did exactly as Spector had requested, tearing into the song with a gospel fervor. As the song went into the fade, Wright got so carried away testifying—“No, no, no”—that she lost the rhythm and sang off beat. “I'll sing it again,” she told Spector, but he said that wasn't necessary. “I like the mistake.” Wright was aghast. What kind of man, she thought, lets mistakes into his records?

It was only when Spector was mastering the recording that he discovered that Snuff Garrett had recorded his own version of “He's a Rebel” with a virginal young singer named Vikki Carr. It would have been hard to imagine a less appropriate marriage of singer and song. Carr's release, in the last week of August 1962, was heralded by a full-page ad in
Billboard
trumpeting “The Original!! The Hit!!” Three weeks later, Spector's version stood at number 66 on the charts, while Carr's lodged at number 120.

In the first week of November, “He's a Rebel” reached number 1, supplanting the novelty hit “Monster Mash” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers (ironically, another song on which the Blossoms sang backing vocals). The first that the Crystals knew of “their” new recording was when they heard “He's a Rebel” on the radio as they were traveling through Ohio on a tour. It was only by chance that they happened to be sharing a bill with Gene Pitney, who was able to coach them in the song so they could perform it onstage. Cursing Spector silently under their collective breath, the Crystals stepped out each night to bask in the applause for a record they'd had absolutely nothing to do with.

         

At the end of August 1962, Spector returned to Gold Star. The song that he brought with him was, superficially at least, a bizarre choice. A favorite from his childhood, “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah” was from the 1946 Walt Disney film
Song of the South,
a slice of happy-go-lucky, not to say mindless, optimism, written by two Tin Pan Alley songwriters, Allie Wrubel and Ray Gilbert.

In search of an even fatter sound, Spector assembled a group consisting of three guitarists (two acoustic, and Billy Strange playing a fuzz-tone electric), three bass players, two sax players, a drummer and a percussionist. Al DeLory was again on piano, but he was now joined by Spector's old friend Nino Tempo—on the same instrument—DeLory playing the upper register, Tempo the lower. A third pianist, Leon Russell, also played on the song. It was a weekend session, and Stan Ross was again unavailable, so Larry Levine was back at the controls. To perform the song, Spector had once again called on Darlene Wright, Fanita Barrett and Bobby Sheen.

Recording the instrumental track, Spector and Levine, who had no idea of the title of the song, worked for three hours moving the mikes around the studio and setting the sound levels. Jack Nitzsche's arrangement was so clotted that Spector decided there wasn't even room in the mix for a full drum kit; he instructed Hal Blaine to play only his bass drum. Spector kept asking Levine to turn up the faders on the instruments for more volume. Levine did as he was instructed until the meters on his dials were pinging into the red zone. Realizing that if he tried to record at that level, the sound would distort, Levine turned off the faders and brought the meters back to zero.

“Phil looked at me for a moment like I was crazy, and then he started screaming at me: ‘I just about had it! I had it! You can't do that!' I said, ‘I had no choice, I couldn't record it.'”

Levine started the process all over again, bringing up the microphones one at a time, balancing the sound of each instrument against the other. He had reached the point where all the microphones were turned up except for the lead guitarist's, Billy Strange, when Spector stopped him again. “That's it! That's the sound!” Leaking through the other microphones into the control-room speakers, Strange's guitar sounded like an angry wasp.

“But I don't have Billy's mike on yet,” Levine protested.

“Tape it!” said Spector.

The track was done in one take. At its conclusion, Levine turned to Spector and asked, “What's the title of this song again?”

“Phil said, ‘ “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah,” '” Levine remembers. “And I said, ‘Yeah, sure—that's a big put-on. What's it really called?' And he said, ‘No, really, it's “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah.” ' And when I realized that's what I was hearing, I literally fell out of the chair. Because this was just the greatest thing.”

Spector had taken the jaunty refrain and turned it completely on its head. The rhythm section clunked and rolled like a slow train rumbling through a tunnel, carrying a deranged, wailing gospel choir as freight. It was dark, incantatory and disturbingly sexual; Larry Levine says he had never heard a record like it.

“Later on Phil told me that when he took the demo back to New York, he played it for a publisher, and after four bars—that clunk, clunk, clunk that starts the song—the publisher walked over, lifted up the needle and said, ‘I'll give you ten thousand dollars up front now, without even hearing what the rest of it sounds like.'

“People would come into Gold Star and I'd say, ‘I'm going to play a tape for you, and if you tell me there's a chance this is not a Top 10 record I'll eat the tape right in front of you.' And they'd look at me like I was crazy. But nobody ever suggested I eat the tape. I was playing that record for everybody. When Phil came back to town he said, ‘Jesus, I've got to put this record out now; everybody in Hollywood's heard it.' But I couldn't resist it.”

Casting around for a name for his ad-hoc group, Spector settled on a pun on the teenage sartorial craze of the time. Credited to Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah” entered the charts in December 1962. Larry Levine had no need to eat the tape—the song peaked at number 8—and he would work on virtually every Phil Spector session for the next four years.