He's a Rebel (21 page)

Learning about Garrett's record, Phil issued a terse order to Lester's stepson, Chuck Kaye, who had been recently put to work doing promotion for Philles.

“Bury it,” he told Chuck.

Pitching the Crystals' version of “He's a Rebel”—hardly a difficult chore to begin with given that a Phil Spector record was now like a gold doubloon—Chuck found himself pitted against longtime Liberty promotion man Tommy LiPuma. “Tommy had a gimpy leg,” Kaye recalled, “and we were both outside the building where KFWB was with our records. I got ours played first solely because I could beat him up the stairs.” Chuck was young and green, but he had been taught the tricks of record hustling by the best, his father, one of the first rock-and-roll song-pluggers. Snuff Garrett found out how sly Chuck Kaye was.

“The thing that made me maddest out of the whole thing,” Garrett said, “was not Spec or anybody else but Lester Sill's son out on the road and tellin' everybody that I went in and ‘covered' that song. Because that was a fuckin' lie. I never knew anybody else had the song, but he was out there hawkin' the deejays and sayin' how the big giant Liberty was covering the little bitty Philles.”

With the Crystals' record on the market first, Liberty tried to retrench by taking out huge ads in the trade papers heralding the Vikki Carr record as “The Original! The Hit!” However, when both records were on playlists, Snuff Garrett's plight was pitiable, framed
by the serious mismatch he faced in Spector's finest work to date. “Ours crashed and burned on takeoff,” Garrett remembered mournfully.

Phil could fully anticipate a hit with “Rebel,” and it was released even though “He Hit Me,” out only a couple of weeks, was just beginning to make a move. However, “He Hit Me” quickly became Philles' first misstep. Although it was played freely by stations all over the country at the beginning, some major station chains and national networks—with outlets in most big cities—were getting mail protesting the all-too-stark imagery of male violence against women. Spector and Sill knew this kind of publicity could not help Philles, and with “He Hit Me” just outside the Top 100, they yanked it off the market and recalled thousands of copies from store shelves before a large storm could ferment. Now “He's a Rebel” became doubly important, and because it would no longer have to compete with another Crystals record, Phil and a grateful Lester barely blinked at the loss of “He Hit Me.” “Rebel” would be
big
.

However, just as exciting to Phil as individual records now was that incredible sound he'd unearthed at Gold Star. He returned to Studio A a month later, after picking a song he could get crazy with in that studio, something that could
really
take off with that monster block of alloyed rhythm. Phil by passed all the usual song sources for it—Kirshner, Schroeder, even Mother Bertha. Instead, he went to Walt Disney for “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” from the 1946 Disney movie
Song of the South
. “The memory of that song is so strong to me,” Annette said. “It was at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and I can still see Phil working on it, expanding it. He was fooling around on the guitar and the song popped into his head. He played the riff and said, I'm gonna make this a hit,' and before I knew it, it was a record. He did that all the time, and whenever he did it was like every man's dream come true, to have an idea and then create something with it.”

The session was on August 24, a Saturday, and Stan Ross was again away. Larry Levine was astonished when Spector came in with a cavalry of musicians and began going through his repetitive paces. Phil had two guitarists—Billy Strange on electric and John Anderson on acoustic—and
three
different-sounding basses: Jimmy Bond played a big upright, Wallick Dean a higher-pitched Fender, and Carole
Kaye—the first female musician on a Spector date—a crisp-toned Danelectro. Al DeLory was back on piano, but he shared the bench with another player; DeLory played half of the keyboard, Nino Tempo the other half. Steve Douglas, on tenor sax, was paired with another horn player, Jay Migliori, who played baritone sax. Only Hal Blaine and percussionist Frank Capp played by themselves.

“It was a mob,” Levine recalled, “and Phil started in and he has me raising this up and that up and adding this and that and making it louder—‘Bring up the bass, bring up the guitar.' We're like three hours into the session now and we're still just rehearsing, and all my meters are pinning, they're just stuck over on the end and I know I can't go on with that but I don't know what to do. Phil is Phil, he's gotta do it his way, but I can't record that way because it's too loud and it'll all be distorted. So, finally, I turned everything down, turned all the mikes off.”

The suddenly-mute control booth hit Phil like a slap in the face. “What the hell are you doing!” he screeched at Levine. “I just about had the sound! I just about had it and you ruined it! Three hours and you ruined it!”

Levine, a big but mild-mannered man, tried to explain why he couldn't record. Phil turned away from him and slumped deep in his chair, saying nothing. As Spector pouted, Levine swallowed hard and began bringing in the instruments again, aping Spector's odd routine as best he could. “I started at a level around zero on the meter and I brought each of the parts in, fitting it all together like Phil would.” Just before Levine got to the final element, Billy Strange's electric guitar solo, Phil came to life.

“That's the sound!” he cried. “Let's record!”

“But I don't have Billy's make in yet,” Larry told him.

“Don't turn it on!” Phil said, meaning Strange's microphone. “That's the sound, just like you have it. Let's record!”

Levine wanted to label the tape. He asked Phil what the name of the song was. “He said it's ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah' and I thought he was joking. The whole room is shaking with this
boom
-
boom
-
boom
and he's telling me it's a kid's song. When I realized he was serious, I fell off my chair. So I rolled the tape, saying ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,' take one—and that's all it took, one take.”

When Strange did his solo on the bridge, his amp leaked into all the live microphones and it came out a fuzzy, tinny coil of disembodied noise. “Phil didn't care,” Levine said. “He didn't care what
the break was gonna sound like. We played a full chorus before we got to the break, and you don't sell a song with a solo on a break. Phil heard it, that was enough.” It was also opportune. The guitar solo was so funky that it would be the lure for many who heard the song.

In actuality, it was only when Bobby Sheen, with Darlene Wright and Fanita James doing the backing, laid in a fabulously emotive lead was the song discernible as the Disney classic. The melody simply offered Phil the chance to erect the most deafening instrumental effect he could, and the clanking
chink-a-chink
beat was more Bo Diddley than Mickey Mouse. As a rock-and-roll form, it was a dip into the still-to-be-tested waters of metal-rock. “That was one record I knew absolutely was a smash,” said Levine, whose baptism by fire earned him a loyalty from Phil that few humans knew. Though Phil never told Larry how much he valued him, the message of “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” was implicit: Larry Levine was now Phil Spector's engineer.

Phil had to know for himself if the record was sellable. He took it back to New York and, saying he wanted to sell the master, played it all around Broadway. To a man, everyone he played it for thought it couldn't miss. After hearing only eight bars, Stan Shulman lifted the needle off the record and offered to buy the master for $10,000. Spector smiled and Shulman thought they had a deal.

“I don't think there was anything vicious about Phil when he led people on like that,” Gene Pitney said, “but Phil was not a straight-ahead type of a guy. That's part of his creative mentality. I can just picture him going in and saying ‘Yeah, man, we'll do it, great,' and the people he said that to didn't forget it like he did.”

“Phil told me, jokingly, that he had to put the record out because everybody, on both coasts, had already heard it,” Levine said. “That's because when he was in New York, I was playing it for everybody who came into Gold Star. It would knock your ass off, the way it sounded. You could hear the total joy of it.”

It was now mid-September. “He's a Rebel”—released with a very crowded label, including the names of Spector, Jack Nitzsche, and Larry Levine—had hit the chart on the dead run, with not a bullet so much as a rocket. “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” was in the wings. Riding an emotional crest, Phil made a critical decision, one that would strain the limits of his impudence.

Lester Sill had to be purged from Philles Records.

Jerry Wexler and Jerry Leiher told me this long before I was aware of it. They said, “He's a snake, he'll stab his own mother in the back to get ahead.”

—
LESTER SILL

By the time “He's a Rebel” came out, Phil's peevish independence had eaten away the partnership with Lester Sill. Lester heard from Phil infrequently and never could reach him on business matters. Phil started to sign papers and make some moves regarding Philles without informing Lester, moves that could reach all the way down to minor changes in distributors. While the Philles office was in L.A., Phil was making it clear that he considered the office to be wherever he happened to be. When Sill could get through, Phil would be tense, curt, and would ring off quickly. If Phil was in L.A., he would call and arrange a meeting, then fail to show. Lester knew what was going down.

“The problem was, when it got to the point where it was a
successful venture, he didn't want anybody around him,” Sill said. “He felt no one else was carrying his weight—creatively, no one carried his weight with Phil.”

Though he said nothing to Lester, in his private moments Phil was foaming about ridding himself of his onetime mentor and godfather figure. If it was Sill's benevolence and stability that began Philles Records, he reasoned, it was his own genius that got it off the ground. Spitting venom in Sill's direction, it was as if he thought he could further convince himself. “It was a vicious thing,” Annette would remember. “He was saying, 1 want Lester out. It's my juices he's riding on. He's a parasite, I want to be on my own,' and all like that. He wanted it all to himself. Phil wants total power, total control. He had no guilt about it. He just put Lester down and that was it.”

When he caught on that Phil felt this way, Lester did not go away meekly. Insulted by Spector's arrogance, he made adversarial gestures of his own. Sill had been cutting his own stuff for Philles, recording unknown singers and instrumentals like Steve Douglas's. Phil hated these records and was offended that they broke the Philles string of Crystals hits. Knowing of Phil's discontent over the records, Lester went on making them. “I knew they were shitty records, and I did it for a reason. I intended it to be a personal affront, only because I couldn't stand his fucking attitude and I wanted to aggravate his ass. I knew it was breaking up. I knew it was over.”

In September 1962, Sill and Harry Finfer were in New York on business when they both got word from Harold Lipsius that Phil was going to force the issue. They were told Phil would call Lester's hotel room and that they both should be there. As Sill and Finfer waited for the call, recriminations flew. “Harry got mad at me because he thought I was in on a plot with Phil and Harold to get rid of him,” Sill recalled. Lester, meanwhile, suspected Lipsius carried a dagger for both of them. “Harold helped Phil get me out. When the call came, it was from Harold, and Phil was with him. Harold was already unhappy with Harry, and this was an excuse for him to get rid of Harry at the same time Phil did me in.”

It certainly abetted Phil's purge that Lipsius and Finfer had fallen out and were connected now only by Philles Records. Recently Finfer had stunned Lipsius by quitting Universal Distributing and selling out of Jamie Records—though his Philles override remained.
Like Helen Noga, Finfer felt aggrandized wearing the Philles wreath; not only did he want to do things with Spector, he now wanted to run his own independent labels as well. He even sent memos to the trade press claiming that he was “running” Philles, which riled Spector, Sill, and Lipsius. But when Lipsius agreed to Phil's buy-out offer, it meant that Finfer was automatically out and left Phil with two-thirds of the stock. An inducement for Lipsius was that Phil retained Universal as national distributor for Philles.

When Lipsius told Sill and Finfer that he was stepping aside and that Sill should work out a buy-out deal with Phil, Lester did not capitulate easily. “Harry had a handshake deal with Lipsius, and Lipsius paid him off, but I wasn't gonna take anything from Phil right then, because to me, no matter what it was it wouldn't have been enough.” Eventually, though, Sill gave in and agreed to talk about a buy-out.