He's a Rebel (17 page)

Still ensconced on E. 82nd St., Terry Phillips watched ambivalently as Phil played his shell games. To be sure, there was some poetic justice in Phil's duplicity, given that the
Blue Hawaii
fiasco had hardened Terry's overview of the recording business. “Big Top was a bunch of fucking whores,” Phillips said. “Freddie Bienstock and Jean and Julian Aberbach had millions of dollars, they were people who looked at writers as scum. Phil saw that. Phil saw everything, man. He knew they were trying to take advantage of him. But they didn't, because he was too smart. Phil took advantage of them and they didn't even know it.”

Phillips, however, had no stomach for finagling or wanderlust, yet the current of intrigue and deception at E. 82nd St. had only gotten hotter since
Blue Hawaii
. “These people were so different than me. I thought it was all greed and stupidity. Everybody was fuckin' everybody, and that was bullshit to me. It started to get awfully complicated and I said, man, I don't wanna deal with this. Because it wasn't interesting to me, being around it wasn't fun anymore.
But I understood Phil s problem. Phil was a young man who had matured enough to be concerned with his future career. I was a young man who was only interested in the next beautiful blonde I could have.”

Terry knew it was over when he suspected that Phil, out of sheer self-interest, was holding him back. “Phil knew more about the business but I also felt he was concerned about my personality—that while he really cared about me, he kept me two steps behind him because I was an open guy and people liked me. Phil knew I was talented, if he had a meeting with Aaron Schroeder or Art Talmadge [the head of Gene Pitney's Musicor label], I wasn't allowed there.” And so in early June, Terry moved out. He began collaborating with a writer named Jerry Vance, whose brother sang in a Brooklyn quintet called Jay and the Americans. Phillips took them to Leiber and S toller, who by now had broken with Atlantic and gone to United Artists, and they produced the group for the label. Every once in a while, Terry would bump into Phil along Broadway, saying little more than hello and good-bye. “My feeling was, if Phil didn't want to call me, I knew I could do things on my own. He was with a whole other crowd, and I didn't want to be perceived as trying to take advantage of what he was achieving. That was important to me because I wasn't gonna suck up to him, because I didn't need to.”

Phillips's place at E. 82nd St. was taken by Michael Spencer, who came to New York to attend the Mannes College of Music. This arrangement pleased Phil: the quiet, taciturn Spencer had none of Phillips's wildman habits, and he had an understanding of music that could keep them busy for days on production ideas. Spencer also was put to work on sessions, as a pianist and leader, a double-scale perk that helped him pay his tuition. Uninterested in the business end, Spencer observed Phil's commandeering of Broadway as a lab experiment in environmental sociology. Michael was incredulous at the change in Phil; the mama's boy of West Hollywood could play the part of the New York honcho in high style. “He was much more flamboyant, his air, his attitude,” Spencer said. “Making it in New York fed his ego and his personality.” Because Phil had missed any period of struggle and adjustment as a young adult, Michael could see that his old friend was a strange hybrid: his insecurities had
never been assuaged, and yet he was caught in an avalanche of success. Concerned that Phil was too shut off from reality for his own good, Michael tried to get Phil's mind off the business. He would drag Phil out of the apartment, out of the Brill Building, even down to the Times Square grind houses. Other times they'd get a car and roam the city, with one clear exception—Phil would not step on his old Bronx turf.

But these were mere interludes, marking time between business paces. Phil was racing recklessly to his requital, and he could not be stalled. At Hill and Range, Phil found, and later cut sessions with, three groups as potential Philles fodder. They were named the Ducanes, the Creations, and the Crystals. The first two sang ethnic white doo-wop, a dying idiom that Phil—who never really got the hang of eastern streetcorner harmony—put on tape only because he liked something in their voices. He soon backed off both groups, though, and he sold to Jamie the Creations masters for a one-shot issue on that label. With the Ducanes he notched a favor with George Goldner, the old tough guy. Goldner was a still-influential figure on Broadway even though huge gambling debts forced him to unload his big fifties' labels, the inverted End and Gone—for which he had produced and then plugged classic R&B hits by the likes of Frankie Lymon, Little Anthony and the Imperials, and the Chantels—to Roulette Records. Goldner was left with silk suits, Havana cigars, and a small label called Goldisc Records, and Goldisc was a logical home for the Ducanes' cover of the old Louis Lymon hit “I'm So Happy (Tra-la-la).”

The Crystals masters, however, would not leave Phil's hands. From the very beginning, he had the group earmarked for Philles. Five soft-throated black teenage girls from Brooklyn, they came in to Hill and Range with an uptempo song written by a friend named Leroy Bates, “There's No Other (Like My Baby).” As they sang it for him in an audition room, Phil had a different concept. “He was sitting there nibbling on pretzels, little tiny bites like a bunny rabbit, and he just told us to slow it down,” recalled Mary Thomas, one of the Crystals. “Then he turned the lights out in the room and we sat around in the dark, because he thought it would make it sound romantic.” For two weeks, Phil rehearsed the Crystals just that way, in the dark, so much that lead singer Barbara Alston, whose voice had little timber, would leave hoarse.

Spector was not the only one at Hill and Range interested in the Crystals; the group auditioned regularly for two other writer/ producers, Bill Giant and Bernie Baum. But when Hill and Range lagged in signing the Crystals to Big Top, Phil signed them himself and hustled them into the studio. On June 28, graduation day at their high school in Brooklyn, the girls were paged. “We didn't even know we were gonna record,” Mary Thomas said. “All of a sudden we got a message, ‘You gotta come to Manhattan.' We went flyin' there that night.”

Spector, without Jack Nitzsche, who had gone back to L.A., went into Mira Sound with his own arrangement for three songs. Joining Mike Spencer on the date were Gary Chester, guitarists Bob Bushnell and Wallace Richardson, and bassist Richard Ziegler, and when the Crystals did the vocals, Spector came back the next day and conducted a light string arrangement. Yet even with Helen Noga's and Jamie's foot money, Phil did not have the unlimited resources of his Atlantic and Gene Pitney sessions, and “There's No Other,” the A side, was not prime Spector stock; the few instruments splattering against the thick Mira Sound walls sounded small, muddy, and impossible to mix clearly. Still, the languid and sensual beat and the title hook worked well, and recalled the drafty auditorium sound of the Chantels and the Shirelles' cute, imperfect harmonies.

Lester Sill heard the masters and sent word to Jamie to issue “There's No Other (Like My Baby)” and a Spector song called “Oh Yeah Maybe Baby” on the yellow and red label of Philles Records—with Spector listed as a co-writer with Leroy Bates.

Over the summer, while the Hill and Range staff were still unaware of the heist of the Crystals, Spector proceeded to do Big Top's bidding. He produced a Sammy Turner record as a follow-up to Turner's “Lavender Blue,” and another for a singer named Karen Lake. During his hours in the studio, he was difficult, often vexing, and always excessive.

“The thing that used to bug me was that he ran overtime so much,” John Bienstock said. “It was hard to have a budget come in that made sense. But he didn't give a shit. His artistic endeavor was more important to him.” To Bienstock too. Spector was where he wanted him: in the studio for him. And so he was allowed his surfeit.

“I happen to have liked him a lot,” Bienstock insisted. “We used to fight a good deal because we had differences of opinion. But we loved each other. We were real friends.” As a favored son, Phil was thick with the entire Hill and Range clan. When he took a liking to Bienstock's pretty daughter, Jackie, Bienstock did not object to him taking her out one night. Phil went to the Bienstocks' home in Teaneck, New Jersey, well dressed and groomed—“not in his goddamn doo-dads and jeans, but perhaps he did have a cape”—to pick Jackie up. It was the last she wanted to see of him. “She thought he was a kook,” Bienstock said.

Phil's place in the Hill and Range bosom lasted only until summer's end—until they found out through the grapevine about the Crystals and Philles Records.

“We were very angry because we felt they were Big Top artists,” Bienstock said. “He was merely supposed to produce them for us. There was no question about the fact that he was just rehearsing them for Big Top—hell, he rehearsed them for weeks in our offices. And then he just stole them right out of here. That precipitated a breach of contract with us.

“We were just incensed because that was a terrific group, and for him to do that shows the type of character he was. We felt he was less than ethical, and, obviously, he was then shown the door.”

Phil did not believe his crime was heinous—to him the Crystals had been fair game. Nevertheless, when told to clear out, he did not feel he had to defend himself, and his reaction was much the same as with the
Blue Hawaii
abortion. He did not flinch.

“He showed no remorse whatsoever,” Bienstock related, “just like the typical piece of shit he was. He was talented, but he was a piece of shit.”

The sacking—along with the failure of his Big Top records—was part of a double-barreled blow for Spector. “Every Breath I Take,” on which Aaron Schroeder had banked so much money and hope, went to No. 42 in mid-September and then died, a killer of a letdown for Spector, Gene Pitney, and Schroeder.

Nervously, Phil turned to sweating out the record he had been waiting to put out all his life.

I felt like I was in the center of the universe when I was with him
.

—
ANNETTE MERAR

“There's No Other (Like My Baby)” was released with the catalogue number Philles 100 in late October. But it wasn't Philles business that occupied Phil when it came out. More important was the staggering blast up the chart of the Paris Sisters' “I Love How You Love Me.” After landing on the
Billboard
chart in early September, the record zoomed into the Top 40 four weeks later, en route to a No. 5 peak and a fifteen-week run—a mandate for Phil to cut a third single with the sisters. In early November, with “I Love How You Love Me” one of the hottest discs in the land, he flew out to Hollywood once again, carrying a song written for the sisters by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “He Knows I Love Him Too Much.”

Phil had won over Goffin and King's allegiance very early in his New York career. While up in Don Kirshner's office just before “Spanish Harlem” was released, Spector sang them the tune to his
own guitar accompaniment. “The way he sang, with his vocal intonations, he sounded like Bob Dylan,” Goffin recalled. Phil, with his tangled mop of thin hair and torn blue jeans, struck Goffin as an
artiste
and a “character,” a wraith of uniqueness that he and his wife had not yet encountered along Broadway. Trying to break out in a Kirshner barn pervaded by the vapid, homogeneous teen pap churned out by the Neil Sedaka-Howard Greenfield team, Goffin and King—both Brooklyn-born, and married in 1958—were not merely beguiled by Spector; Phil's pluck and nerve and his keen musical palate made him seem almost like an oracle to them. “He would play us records that he loved,” Goffin said. “He was very much in tune with what was happening.”

A year later, Goffin-King and Phil Spector had both taken massive strides in carving rock's sixties' identity. Goffin and King were really what was happening in rock prose. They were writing progressively daring, two-minute psychodramas in which the protagonists—based on the couple themselves—were troubled, self-destructive lovers for whom love was a battle zone. Redefining the boundaries of rock realism, they had a massive hit with the Shirelles' “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” in 1961; in 1962, they would provide an anthem for the sadomasochistic minefield of love with the Cookies' “Chains”—a theme very similar to that of “He Knows I Love Him Too Much.” Cooed from Priscilla Paris's quivering lips and moistened by Hank Levine's weeping strings, the pathos was bitingly real.

Happy as he was with the record—which would make it to No. 34 in March—Phil could not be pleased with this trip back to the California sun. Weeks earlier, Lester Sill had found out that an assistant had accidentally discarded the master tapes of the intended Paris Sisters' album. “It was my fault, really,” Sill said. “The guy was cleaning out the dubs and never came to ask me about it. I had them stacked with all the other demos and filed wrong, and he just threw 'em away.” The heart-crushing accident became the focal point of a bitter contention among Phil, the sisters, and Sill. The huge success of “I Love How You Love Me” had led Phil and the sisters to believe that big money was due them. But when they queried Lester about it, he told them that the expenses in making the album had eaten up almost all of the royalties. “There actually was a
debit
, but I gave 'em both some money,” Sill said. “The cost of the album
was horrendous. I showed 'em the figures. It may have been $10,000. That was the way Phil recorded. He was a perfectionist.” With the album now lost, none of that money could ever be recouped.