He's a Rebel Read online

  In the spring of 1957, Spector could actually swagger up the steps of the Fairfax High auditorium stage and perform on his guitar “Rock Island Line,” the British skiffle tune popularized by Lonnie Donegan, at a talent show. It surprised nobody that Spector won the contest. Not long after, Spector and Lieb went on a late-night television program on KTLA called “Rocket to Stardom.” Sponsored by an Oldsmobile salesman named Bob Yeakel, and broadcast from Yeakel’s showroom, the program was a showcase of young amateur talent in Los Angeles. Spector and Lieb performed “In the Still of the Night” and won the night’s competition. There were many talented people in Spector’s circle now, but he was fulcrum; his moves were the ones all the others were watching.

  “We all were moving, with our own ambitions,” Michael Spencer said. “But it was Phillip who moved fastest.”

  Phil Spector, Marshall Lieb, and their loose conglomeration of soulmates continued gigging after graduation day at Fairfax High in June of 1957, but the world was smaller now, less open to flights of fancy. In the fall, Phil and Marshall enrolled at Los Angeles City College, and Michael Spencer was at UCLA. Marshall chose political science as a major, but Phil was undecided. With Paris-born Bertha as an influence and tutor, he had taken French in high school, and studied it with such a frenzy that he was now fluent in the language—fomenting what Michael Spencer thought was “a tremendous desire to master something, anything, to prove to himself he could do it.” A more functional outlet for that urge in college became court reporting, a natural dalliance for fingers as nimble as his. With his usual abandon, Spector rapidly progressed; practicing at home, he spent every afternoon in front of the television, watching Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” and transcribing the dialogue onto his stenotype machine.

  During the winter months, it grew more evident that the last link in Spector’s music chain had to happen now or be lost forever. Phil Spector knew he’d have to cut a record.

  Everything was organized in a way that on the first run-through we’d do this, on the second we’d do these parts, on the third these parts. All those things we did took on names years later, like stacking and overdubbing. We innovated all that.

  —MARSHALL LIEB

  In the late spring of 1957, kids all over Los Angeles were descending on recording studios in such numbers that this buffalo run had emerged as the hub of the West Coast rock scene. The western record labels were mostly shoestring operations; they signed kid acts by the truckload, on the cheap, hoping for one record that would click. The demos the kids were coming in with were frequently sent out as-is to radio programmers. Major rock-and-roll record sessions were atypical in L.A., and most of the records produced didn’t have the tight, clean sound of the expensive union sessions in New York and Memphis. In the mid-fifties, L.A.-based labels began issuing hits that were the product of a few instruments rattling around in a drafty studio. The echoey, muddy sound, though an accident of deprivation, was effectively a musical duplication of the wide, smoggy expanse of California, and people began imitating and extending it using artificial echoes and tape overdubs—both of which became staples of the newborn “West Coast sound.”

  Phil Spector, as was his habit, was knee-deep in the industry trends and techniques. He had begun to show up at studios around town, introducing himself and saying whatever would enable him to be allowed to watch sessions. A favorite haunt was Gold Star Sound Studios on Vine Street in Hollywood. This was the hot studio in town. The Hi-Los recorded at Gold Star, and the Four Lads, and their lushly echoed harmonies were a primer on the white-and-light sound. Gold Star had not one but two echo chambers, built with great foresight by the studio’s owners, Stan Ross and Dave Gold, in 1950. That, too, was an accident of fate. Renovating an old store into two small studios, Ross and Gold had to conform to the store’s dimensions, including a very low ceiling, fourteen feet—most studios cleared twenty feet—and a good way to keep the music from flattening out was to goose it in a reverberating room. At Gold Star, with its studios a thimble-sized thirty-five by twenty-three feet, the best echoes were heard in the bathroom, which became the primary echo chamber. Furthermore, Stan Ross was an engineer as well, and a graduate of Fairfax High School, and Phil thought he might be generous with time and advice.

  “He was always looking for an open block of time, but while I let him stick around, I wasn’t gonna give him time,” Ross recalled. “That would’ve started a stampede. You would’ve had fifty thousand Phil Spectors coming in.”

  Ross grinned at Spector’s big talk and liked the kid, but he had no inkling of what he could do with a record. Studio time, he kept telling Spector, was only $15 an hour, plus $6 per roll of 1/4-inch recording tape. “Okay, I’ll be back with it,” Spector told him, but when he came back it was with empty pockets. But Spector wasn’t idling. He simply wasn’t ready for the studio because he knew he would have to make the product good and he wasn’t confident he had mastered the techniques he wanted to use. Working those techniques on a smaller scale, Spector and Lieb would record their voices on a small tape recorder and sing over it.

  “What we wanted to do was double ourselves—not just by making a track, hearing it played back in the headphones, singing over that, and mixing the tracks. Everybody was doing that,” Lieb explained. “We wanted the sound of the first track played back over the speakers in the studio and to sing to that—everything into the mike at once. That would make the sound bigger, fuller. There was a lot of overdubbing going on, but no one had stacked voices like that. But we knew what we could do. Believe me, we knew what the studio would be capable of.”

  The song Spector decided he wanted to take into the studio was entitled “Don’t You Worry My Little Pet.” It was built around a Chuck Berry-style guitar lick, a “wah-do-wah” background vocal. As with all the songs he sang on gigs, Spector wrote the lyric as strict harmony—no lead vocal. What he really wanted was to get it sung in the studio, so that he could work on overdubbing, bouncing the lead and background parts off each other.

  When Phil went about trying to get the money to pay for a session at Gold Star, he knew an hour wouldn’t do it, that he’d likely need twice that. Bertha, though, couldn’t spare $40. She did promise him $10, and Marshall could get $10. Canvassing his singing friends, only Harvey Goldstein—who had gone on with Phil and Marshall to Los Angeles City College—was moved to contribute to the cause.

  One more candidate came onto the scene as well. It was a shy, cherubic brunette named Annette Kleinbard, who was Donna Kass’s girlfriend. Annette, who was tiny as a buttercup, lived in another school district, on Stearns Avenue south of Pico Boulevard, but she attended Fairfax High School so she could be close to Donna. By association, she came to know Phil, and Phil was more than interested in Annette’s singing voice. This was her release, and, in her soprano voice, she belted out songs at Fairfax High talent shows that belied her small size. Phil had had little use for girl singers—in the rules of rock, girls sang with girls, like the McGuire Sisters or the Chordettes—and Annette was just a kid, like Donna. But Annette was constantly on the periphery of his music; when he’d rehearse songs in Donna’s garage, Annette would be standing right there, learning the song and the harmony parts. Soliciting contributors for his first session, Phil half-idly asked Annette—but didn’t tell her about the session, saying only that it would be a loan.

  Her first reaction was to laugh. “Ten dollars! I don’t have ten cents.” “Well, can you get it?” he persisted. “Why do you want it?” With reluctance, he replied, “We re gonna go in and cut a record.” Assured that she would be included, Annette secured the money from her mother. Spector took the $40 to Gold Star and reserved two hours for the afternoon of May 20.

  Stan Ross engineered the session at which “Don’t You Worry My Little Pet” was cut, and it was not an easy assignment. Phil was like a water bug in the studio, frantically racing from the control booth to the studio and back again. Unmistakably the point man for this group, he sang, he played guitar a
nd piano, and when he ran into the booth to hear the playback, it was he who judged it acceptable or not.

  When Phil wanted to do tricky things with tape—overdubbing a second clangy guitar part and a supplemental background vocal—Ross’s own skills were tested. Much of what Spector wanted to do was unworkable on Gold Star’s equipment or simply impossible, the product of a naive youthful spirit. Still, some of his ideas broke practical ground. Ross had not engineered a session before in which the playback coming out of a speaker was rerecorded live with the overdub. But he knew it could be done, and tried it.

  “We were experimenting, too, in those days,” Ross said. “Every time engineers went into the studio, we were feeling our way, trying to find out what rock and roll was.”

  The process Spector and Lieb envisioned, however, was tougher than they thought it would be. Wearing big, bulky headphones as they overdubbed, “We couldn’t hear what we were singing live,” Lieb recalled. “It wasn’t being printed on tape and coming back fast enough, because they didn’t have the technology for that then. We had to feel around it until we got it.”

  In spite of the long, painstaking two hours, though, Phil gained energy. “He loved it; he’d never spent that much time in command of something,” Lieb said. “Phil was at the top of his game when he was in the studio.”

  When it was over, Stan Ross cleaned up the tape, made a master, and cut a lacquer—an acetate, the first copy—for Phil. After leaving Gold Star, Phil and Marshall took the demo into the first record store they saw on Vine Street. “We just made this record,” Phil told the clerk, hoping he might play it. “So what?” the clerk said.

  The fact was, as much as they knew about cutting a record, getting it played was something Phil and Marshall didn’t have a clue about. But the acetate they had was a valuable piece of goods, as it might open a few doors. Mulling over his options, Phil thought he might have an in—Donnie Kartoon, one of the people who occasionally sang at gigs with him, lived next door on Alfred Street to the co-owner of Era Records, Lew Bedell. In business less than three years, Era had hit pay dirt with Gogi Grant’s massive No. 1 hit in 1956, “The Wayward Wind,” a song written by Bedell’s cousin and co-owner, Herb Newman, and the label was looking to make a move into rock and roll. Almost immediately after making his record, Phil asked Donnie if he could get Bedell to hear it. Donnie called him, and Bedell said to bring the record to his office on Vine Street.

  “I took Phil down there and, as soon as we got to the reception window he tried to ace me out,” Kartoon remembered with a giggle. “He said, ‘Wait here,’ and tried to get into the office by himself, like 1 don’t need Kartoon.’ He tells the receptionist, ‘Phil Spector’s here’—not ‘Don Kartoon is here,’ and I’m the guy Lew Bedell knew—and she tells him he can’t go in. It was like ‘Who the hell are you? I don’t know you.’ So I told her who I was and I was there to see Lew, and it was ‘Oh, come right in.’ ”

  Lew Bedell was a garrulous man who masked a hardheaded business sense with endearing and sometimes annoying bluster. He had been the host of a television show in New York in the early fifties when Newman—working with another cousin, Si Waronker, the head of Liberty Records—had a falling out with Waronker and left Liberty to start Era. Bedell kicked in $7,500, lured Gogi Grant away from RCA Victor, and took her into the studio to record “The Wayward Wind.” Bedell’s charm and pushiness had gained Era strong distribution, and he had vital contacts in radio and television. Though not a music man, he could also pick a good record.

  After spinning “Don’t You Worry” on his office Victrola, Bedell called in Newman. The two men then listened to the acetate over and over—making Spector gnash his teeth as the needle ground into the record, putting crackles and pops into the delicate grooves he’d labored to create. Furthermore, Phil could tell that the Victrola wasn’t providing an accurate rendition.

  “Your machine is running slow,” he remarked, barely containing himself. “It’s not the way we recorded it.”

  Bedell and Newman were amused by Spector’s cheekiness; when not discussing his music, he was solicitous and deferential, a good kid. “I liked him,” Bedell said. “I like all Jewish kids.” And, minutely slow or not, both men agreed that the record was worth signing the group to a “lease of master”—a device used to buy a demo in lieu of an actual contract. Era Records gave them an option for four sides, and the four members—Spector, Lieb, Annette Kleinbard, and Harvey Goldstein—of the as-yet unnamed group would divide a 1½-cent royalty for each copy sold, the record industry equivalent of minimum wage. “Actually, they may have wanted to give us less,” Marshall Lieb said. “My dad, who was a businessman, thought a lawyer should examine everything. That’s when they came up with a penny and a half.”

  Bedell and Newman, in fact, had to face more hurdles with this bunch of kids than they may have thought was worth it. Because they all were legally minors, Era had to get a court order approving the signing under California’s Jackie Coogan Law, which protected underage performers. “I had all these people in my office before we went to the court, all their parents and everybody,” Bedell recalled. “I said, ‘Look, if I’m gonna have any tsouris down there, I don’t even wanna do this thing.’ And they said, ‘Don’t worry.’ And we got down there and there was nothing but tsouris, everybody talking all at the same time. I said to the judge, ‘Do me a favor. Just ask ’em if they want to sign. If they do, fine. If not . . .’ He did and they said, ‘Yes.’ And that was it.”

  When the papers were signed, Phil didn’t forget what Donnie Kartoon had done for him. He told him, “Kartoon, you’ll be well taken care of.” Donnie laughed. “I mean, it was such a farfetched thought, that this thing would go anywhere,” said Kartoon. “Lew had said to me, ‘Donnie, why don’t you manage them?’ But I said no. Phil was into that ‘big-time’ thing; it was like a joke to me.”

  The signing done, the next piece of business was to cut a song to slap on the back side of “Don’t You Worry.” Phil talked to Bedell about several of his songs, and Bedell chose one titled “Wonderful Lovable You,” a slow-tempo ballad. The group then took care of more business by taking on an official name. That was Harvey Goldstein’s doing. “They’d been searching for a name left and right and couldn’t come up with one,” Goldstein said. “Elvis’s ‘Teddy Bear’ was a big hit at the time, so I casually mentioned at one of our little bull sessions that we ought to name ourselves the Teddy Bears.”

  Goldstein, the bass voice of the group, had chosen to do summer Army Reserve duty instead of taking a chance of being drafted, and was slated to begin a two-week boot camp at Ft. Ord before the next session. Just before he left, he learned that Phil was intent on slipping in another song at the next session. “We had a meeting and they presented the new song to me, sang it for me. Since I was leaving, they said they were going to cut it without me.”

  When Phil did a quick run-through of the tune on the guitar, Harvey was knocked out. “It was dynamite. I knew as soon as I heard it that it was an instant hit.”

  It was the song that Phil Spector had been nurturing, trying to fit into a proper context ever since being jolted out of his sleep by Ben Spector’s graven image. With a slight change of tense, the resulting song he had composed was called “To Know Him Is to Love Him.”

  On the surface, the only bond that this song had with Phil Spector’s father is the tombstone engraving. The immediate influence was really Annette Kleinbard. When the Teddy Bears rehearsed “Wonderful Lovable You,” her part—unlike in the solid four-part vocal harmony of “Don’t You Worry My Little Pet”—was separated from the male vocals; the verses they did were repeated by her alone, and her candied soprano also rang out in the background, almost like an instrument. After the session, Phil told her “I love your voice” and that he was going to write a song to showcase it.

  “He made it quite plain it wasn’t me he loved, because of Donna, but the sound and the innocence of my voice,” she recalled.

  When he h
eard her in the studio, enhanced and layered by his overdubbing, he thought the new song would be the perfect vehicle for Annette to take a lead vocal. The gravestone phrase easily lent itself to a teenage girl’s yearning. Phil refined a simple lyrical hook built around the title. The melody, which would revolve around three-beat repetitions on the words “know” and “love,” was abruptly broken midway through by a minor chord—a ninth chord, which was common in jazz but radical for the straightforward arrangements of early rock and roll. This was Phil Spector’s knockout punch, delivered in a spirited rush in the middle of the night.

  But Phil could not find time to cut “To Know Him Is to Love Him” at the session for “Wonderful Lovable You.” Lew Bedell and Herb Newman came to Gold Star on that Friday morning expecting to be in and out in an hour. Instead, after two hours, “Wonderful Lovable You” was still unfinished. Though they expected to produce the side themselves, they were virtually elbowed out of the way as Spector and Lieb did their intricate overdubbing. “Phil and I knew more than those guys did,” Lieb said. “Together, Phil and I were overly knowledgeable.”

  Not to Bedell. Three decades later he would still refuse to call what Spector did in the studio that morning producing. “He did not produce. I was the whole thing. He was sitting out there playing his fershtunkenah guitar all day and a few notes on the piano.” Bedell and Newman had little patience with the notion that Spector was working on a “sound.” Exasperated by apparently so little getting done in so long a time, Bedell threw his arms in the air and yelled, “Okay, that’s it! We’ll come back and finish this thing on Monday.”