He's a Rebel Read online

  Shirley expected cash. Her response, according to Bedell, was a flood of blue language in between which she said she couldn’t cash the check because it was too late in the day. “And Danny Gould, he’s lookin’ at me. He says, ‘Lew, I didn’t know you did that sort of thing.’ I said, ‘I don’t, I don’t . . .’ So, anyway, I told her, ‘Listen, the United California Bank is open till six o’clock on Fridays,’ and she goes out in a huff and that’s the last I saw of the meshugenah.”

  Bedell had a bigger problem with Phil, about what would be the follow-up to “To Know Him.” Spector had come in with a song called “Oh Why,” a bluesy piece replete with minor chords similar to the kind he used for the bridge in “To Know Him.”

  “I don’t wanna do it, Phil,” Bedell told him. “I don’t like minor songs, very few of ’em make it.”

  Spector would not budge. “Then I’m leaving. I’m gonna go somewhere else,” he said.

  It was no idle threat either. Spector had by this time gotten feelers from Lou Chudd, the head of Imperial Records, one of the biggest of the L.A. independent labels. Chudd was dangling a real contract, at twice the royalty rate, before Phil’s eyes. Bedell knew he was boxed in, that Spector had him at his mercey because Bedell hadn’t torn up the original lease of master for four songs with a real, binding contract delineating responsibilities. In effect, Spector was working on speculation and Bedell had no control over the material. But Bedell held his ground as well.

  “Hey, I wanted to keep ’em, but I wanted to pick the material, because I’d been pickin’ the material,” he said. “But I made a mistake. I should’ve given ’em a contract where I had complete control. So we had an altercation about this song and I said to my cousin Herb, ‘You wanna handle this kid? I don’t want to. I don’t need this aggravation.’ And Herb didn’t want anything to do with Spector. He was a meshugenah too. And when you got five things in the Top 20, like we had, you don’t need this tsouris. If I could’ve taken the aggravation, I’d still be with him today.”

  Late in 1958—with “To Know Him Is to Love Him” hanging strong at No. 3 in Billboard—the Teddy Bears had signed on with Imperial, the prestigious label of Fats Domino and Ricky Nelson. With royalties hiked to three cents per copy sold, Marshall thought it was time to ask Phil about possibly sharing a few writing credits with him. Lieb didn’t fool himself; he knew he wasn’t close to Phil as a composer, but he felt his lyrical contributions were helpful. “When Phil came up with ‘To Know Him,’ I liked it, but I told him, ‘We need to do some things with it,’ ” Lieb said. “The background part that goes ‘And I do and I’ . . . that was mine.

  “To us, when we started singing, it was always the both of us. We were open and flowing with each other, and all things could happen. And at that time, there was no money in it, and Phil allowed my ideas to be dumped in his lap. Phillip wrote most of the stuff, and I did the backgrounds, because I was the background freak.

  “We talked about me getting some credits a couple of times, and he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m gonna give you half my royalties anyway.’

  “Phillip was more familiar with the business, and he was slowly—or quickly—becoming what he later became, in terms of deceiving people. My whole thing then was, we’d grown up together, we were close friends, and it was gonna be okay. While I called him on it, we’d fight, and I didn’t want to fight with him so I just said, ‘Phillip, if you make a promise then you better keep it.’ And, of course, he didn’t. He never paid me any royalty.”

  Donnie Kartoon didn’t get anything either, on his promise from Phil. He never tried to collect on it. He knew better.

  On January 3, 1959, the Teddy Bears went on national television, flying to New York again to appear on NBC’s “Kraft Music Hall with Perry Como.” The show was a tribute to composer Harold Arlen, who was a guest, along with actor Louis Jourdan, singer Peggy King, and vaudevillian Eddie Foy, Jr.

  For Annette in particular, the trip was a nightmare. Shirley came with the group this time, and she was to room with Annette at the Plaza Hotel. By the time the Teddy Bears arrived, Annette remembered that “I was so frightened of Shirley that I ran into Phil and Marshall’s room and sat there all night crying. They took care of me. . . . Shirley was, in my mind, evil.”

  The next afternoon, at rehearsal, Shirley strutted around the stage of Broadway’s Ziegfeld Theater—from where the show would be broadcast live—puffing clouds of cigarette smoke and trying to co-opt the director. “She would argue that the lighting wasn’t right or that we weren’t standing in the right position,” Lieb said. “She made a real spectacle of herself.”

  When the Teddy Bears did a run-through of “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” accompanied by the Ray Charles Orchestra, a weary Annette couldn’t hit the song’s high note. Phil told her sternly, “Annette, if you don’t hit that note, I’m never going to talk to you again!”

  Annette was numb with fear as showtime approached. “I was so frightened that I wasn’t going to hit that note on the show. Phil had driven me crazy. He said, ‘You can’t do this. You must get the note right. You can’t embarrass me.’ ”

  Further auguring disaster, as the jittery threesome waited to go on that night, Phil accidentally stepped on Peggy King’s gown, ripping it slightly. The singer turned around and glared at him, and Phil wanted to crawl away. But on stage, everything went well. Phil and Marshall wore sharp-creased black tuxedos, their hair sheared into crew cuts. Annette, wearing a pink dress, managed to hit the high note of “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” and they then did a pleasant rendition of Harold Arlen’s “It’s Only a Paper Moon.”

  Fresh off that coup, the Teddy Bears began cutting their first album. Lou Chudd gave Spector a lofty budget to work with, and in March—with “To Know Him” only now having fallen off the chart—the group went into the studio, though it was not Gold Star but Master Sound Recorders, an old, hovellike studio on Fairfax Avenue a block away from Fairfax High School, which was used by a number of Imperial artists. Gold Star was out now, unofficially off limits because it had a close working arrangement with Lew Bedell and Herb Newman, and the fallout from the Teddy Bears’ defection would have made a session with Phil sticky for Stan Ross. But Imperial had a tremendous lure. “It was Fats’s label,” Lieb said. “God, do you know how exciting that was for us?”

  The studio at Master Sound was an even smaller room than Gold Star’s and had less equipment. Spector and Lieb were hard-pressed to duplicate the tonal ambience they had carved with Gold Star’s walls and low ceiling, although for the first time they got to work with union musicians: two of Lou Chudd’s top session men, bassist George “Red” Callander and drummer Earl Palmer, who worked all of Fats Domino’s sessions in New Orleans and many L.A. rock dates. Callander and Palmer were used to breezing through sessions in which they would rip out four songs in two hours. Now, even with simple arrangements, they sat for long periods, as the two teenagers fiddled with echoes and fooled with knobs on the control room board.

  Lieb remembered it as much more: “We were working on the transparency of music; that was the Teddy Bears sound: you had a lot of air moving around, notes being played in the air but not directly into the mikes. Then, when we sent it all into the chamber, this air effect is what was heard—all the notes jumbled and fuzzy. This is what we recorded—not the notes. The chamber.”

  Phil and Marshall believed they had reached the point where “we could get a kind of pseudostereo,” Lieb put it. “We could channel the high end on one side, lower end on the other. We’d be situated between the two speakers and have this big monaural ball in front of us, yet it was from two sides; if you took one of the sides out, the ball would move. We could actually get a guitar to shoot off one of the speakers, by mixing and using equalizers. What we were doing was splitting sound—before stereo.”

  Lou Chudd and Bunny Robyne, the owner of Master Sound and its studio engineer, considered it mostly wasted time. Trying to move things along, Chudd would say, “Why don�
��t you try it this way, Phil?”

  Spector would tell him, “I don’t want to try it that way.”

  “We had ideas and we had rehearsed those ideas, and we were gonna do them our way,” Lieb said. “When we came in to do it, if it wasn’t working, Phil and I would reorganize it. We would experiment with the mixing board beyond the engineer’s capabilities. We didn’t need anybody to help us—we didn’t want anybody to help us.”

  However, after two weeks of sessions—most albums of the day were done inside of a week—a mere six songs were in the can. Spector refused to believe that Lou Chudd expected him to cheapen anything on the album—in the normal manner of album-making, two or three good songs were showcased, buttressed by filler—and he would hunker down between speakers playing back tracks endlessly at screechingly loud decibel levels. Other times he would shut off the lights, just like the atmosphere of his bedroom on those nights of revelation, so that he could concentrate on the sound and nothing else.

  Chudd, a bottom-line type, lost all patience. This seemingly juvenile exercise in indulgence was costing him a small fortune. In late March, fed up, Chudd took the album out of Phil’s hands and gave the job of finishing it to Jimmie Haskell, Imperial’s top staff writer/producer/arranger. Haskell took three days to record six songs. In the name of haste, he forbade Phil from playing guitar on the sessions, rightly assuming that would make Spector want to alter the arrangements that Haskell wrote. Each song was completed in one or two takes. Relegated to the unaccustomed role of a bit player, Phil petulantly said nothing beyond a few civil words to Haskell—who himself would take few bows for the album.

  “I did the songs that sound like they were hurried,” he acknowledged, unlike the Spector-produced tunes, which Haskell thought were “very well blended. . . . As a general rule then, we did everything live. If we overdubbed, it was with a single voice, not a group the way they did it.” Haskell was fascinated by how Spector and Lieb overdubbed their voices as the playback was piped in live. “They couldn’t hear themselves so they’d wear a headphone on one ear and cup the other ear—which everyone picked up on in the business, and is still being done today.”

  But, rushed through production, the album—The Teddy Bears Sing!—was a limp and soggy effort, a telling argument. No matter how well Phil Spector could tailor the sound of a record, the subliminal angst of “To Know Him Is to Love Him” owed its life to the death of Ben Spector; the genesis of that song was the culmination of dark forces Spector tried to push out of his psyche but which rose up in Freudian vengeance in the dead of night. Now, with no emotional context, the Teddy Bears’ songs, well crafted to be sure, were essentially heartless, derivative pinwheeling of a now-empty teen cliché. This doomed the Teddy Bears as an example of country fair cute instead of white R&B. Three Spector-penned songs were as banal as the filler songs picked by Lou Chudd—including standards like “Long Ago and Far Away,” “Little Things Mean a Lot” and “Tammy,” “True Love,” the country ballad “My Foolish Heart,” and “Unchained Melody,” which had been covered previously by both Fats Domino and Ricky Nelson, per Chudd’s orders. Two of the Spector tunes, “Oh Why”—the work rejected by Lew Bedell—and “I Don’t Need You Any More” were sides A and B of the first Imperial release in the early spring.

  As the Imperial record died, barely scraping the bottom of the charts, the schism between group members caused by Shirley Spector widened into a gulf that could not be bridged.

  “Shirley never had the approval of Annette and me,” Marshall Lieb recalled, “but then she wanted to sign papers with us making it legal, and we wouldn’t do it.”

  “In my mind,” Annette Kleinbard said, “it became a matter of integrity and honor. I said, I’m not selling myself to the devil for anything or anybody.’

  “It was hard for Phil too. He knew there was a problem, but blood is thicker than water. I think sometimes he just said, 1 can’t deal with this. I’m under siege!’ ”

  Spector had for months tried to walk a shaky tightrope between family solidarity and peace within the band. Now it was painfully obvious that there was no solution to the problem.

  The Teddy Bears limped into the spring, fulfilling contract obligations with two more records. And Phil cut a session without the other Teddy Bears, a perk allowed him in his contract. He indulged himself by hiring two guitarists he yearned to be in a studio with. One was Ernie Freeman, who made albums for Imperial. The other was Howard Roberts.

  As thrilled as Spector was to have him, Roberts did not enjoy doing the bland, three-chord movements he and Freeman were required to play. Spector regarded the pair of instrumentals that came out of the session as blues-rock. To Roberts they were pap, not pop—the same as the rest of the rock gigs he was called to. “At that time, everything was produced with the intelligence of a fern,” Roberts said. Titled “Dumbo” and “Willy Boy,” the first song was later changed to “Bum-bershoot” when Imperial released the two sides—under the name Phil Harvey—into a marketplace that ignored them.

  Seeing that the breakup of the Teddy Bears was becoming inevitable, Phil Spector was a restless young man now, again without direction and bitter about his broken dream. While he didn’t sever his friendship with Marshall—“We had too many years behind us,” said Lieb—things were clearly not the same between them.

  For Annette, whom he blamed the most for the rift, he had nothing but loathing.

  Early in September, Annette was at the wheel of her white MG convertible, coming around a winding turn high up on Mulholland Drive, when she swerved and lost control. The car spun wildly, went off the road, and tumbled down a mountainside and into a ditch. Annette was pulled from the wreckage. Her face was ravaged, her nose almost completely sheared off. For weeks she lay in a bed at the UCLA Medical Center as doctors reconstructed her features. She required four operations. When she was well enough to receive guests, Phil was not among the bedside visitors. In fact, one of Annette’s friends told her that when Phil had heard of her accident he responded with venom.

  She recalled, “His comment, which broke my heart, was: Too bad she didn’t die.’ I was devastated by that.”*

  In the fall, Imperial released the two last Teddy Bears singles—“If Only You Knew (the Love I Have for You)”/“You Said Goodbye” and “Don’t Go Away”/“Seven Lonely Days”—and Dore put out “Wonderful Lovable You.” They all failed. The nation’s romance with the Teddy Bears had turned out to be the staggering twenty-three-week run of “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” nothing more.

  Crippled months before by internal strife, the Teddy Bears finally dissolved.

  Though Phil could not have mustered the grit to fire Shirley, he now became aware of how deep the problem with her was. After the Teddy Bears signed on with Imperial, Era had disbursed a large sum in writing royalties to Phil, which he had allowed to be assigned to Shirley. When the group broke up, little of that money was left.

  “It was $200,000,” Lieb remembered. “Phillip told me he gave it to Shirley, and it didn’t reach him. I think he told her, like you would trust a relative to put your money away for you: ‘Here, put it in the bank for me.’ When you’re seventeen, eighteen years old, you don’t know what to do with it. And if she pays some bills with it, or buys a new car, with the expectation of paying it back, you just accept it.”

  When Marshall and Annette wanted to close the book on the Teddy Bears by settling up on money matters, they were told that any money Shirley owed them had been used to pay expenses. They did not dispute that, nor did they choose to have the books audited. To them, the breakup was more tragic than infuriating. Exhausted and battered, the three ex-Teddy Bears moved on, scarred by the price of stardom.

  *Lieb and Kleinbard, whose recollections of most matters concerning the Teddy Bears were vivid, recalled Goldstein’s departure only in vague terms. Lieb said: “I think Harvey and Phillip had some kind of falling out . . . something along the lines of . . . I don’t know,” while Kleinbard (who later changed h
er professional name to Carol Connors) said: “Harvey was in for about four seconds. It just didn’t work, he just wasn’t a part of it.”

  *Phil Specter has denied ever making this statement.

  The Teddy Bears are a good example of how today’s teenagers have a chance to become famous in the record field. In no other field of creative or industrial endeavor can the youngster express himself for so many and reap the lucrative rewards.

  —Liner notes, The Teddy Bears Sing!

  When “To Know Him Is to Love Him” hit Los Angeles, Phil Spector became the center of gravity in a West Hollywood rock-and-roll scene that was bustling because of his example. Comforted by this, Phil stuck close to his home turf, aligning himself with the local talent. One of these was Steve Douglas, whose early band Shirley Spector once managed. Douglas had since gone on to play saxophone with Kip Tyler and the Flips. Backing them on a Johnny Otis show at El Monte Legion Stadium, Steve had caught the attention of a black vocal group called the Sharps, who did the screaming background vocals on Duane Eddy’s twangy guitar records. Eddy was going on tour and needed a backup band. Douglas, recommended by the Sharps, joined the group and also recorded with Eddy in the studio. As he lived in the area and knew Shirley, Steve had once let Phil sit in with his early band. Now Steve wanted very much to sit in with Phil.

  “He was the local star on the scene,” Douglas remembered.

  With the chance to jam with the hotshot, Douglas began to bring other members of the Duane Eddy touring band to Michael Spencer’s house, and it became the word-of-mouth place to be. On Friday nights, jam sessions there blew sky-high, with a combination Teddy Bears/Duane Eddy’s Rebel Rousers: Spector and Lieb, Douglas and guitarist Mike Bermani, buttressed by drummer Johnny Clau-der, another neighborhood guy, who played in jazz pianist Don Ran-di’s band. Large numbers of kids from the area considered themselves lucky just to catch the music from the street outside the house.