Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (16 page)

         

Even as the Philles label was gathering momentum, Spector's relations with Lester Sill were going from bad to worse. Spector was still disgruntled at his partner for wasting money on inferior recordings that he regarded as a blemish on the Philles label. And the debacle over the lost Paris Sisters album continued to rankle. Furthermore Spector now began to suspect that Sill was holding out on him on Philles royalties. Sill could hardly fail to be aware that he was being frozen out when Spector stopped returning his phone calls and became unusually elusive.

In late summer of 1962, Spector approached Lipsius and Finfer, offering to buy out their one-third share in Philles. Lipsius agreed, and Finfer—a minority shareholder to Lipsius in the one-third Philles interest—had little choice but to go along with it. Spector now controlled two-thirds of Philles to Sill's one-third. With Finfer out of the way, Lipsius, who was an attorney, now began to represent Spector, pressuring Sill to sell his share. Visiting Sill one day at his office, Al Hazan found him sitting on the floor, desperately riffling through the papers strewn all around him. “He was saying, ‘Phil's told me he's going to ruin me.' He was more concerned about that than sad that the partnership had broken up. Lester was a very hard-nosed business guy. He wasn't the type of guy to get sad about things.”

At length, Sill relented, demanding a figure based on a year's worth of Philles's recordings royalties. He eventually settled for far less—around $60,000. Sill told friends that he knew the price was a steal, but he was just happy to be free of the heartache.

In September 1962, as “He's a Rebel” was making its way up the
Billboard
charts, Spector circulated a letter to his distributors advising them that he had acquired “complete and absolute control of Philles Records, Inc.” More than just his partner, Sill had been Spector's mentor, the man who had given him back his career when it seemed to be all but over, but Spector showed no hesitation, or sentiment, in cutting him off. “Lester wasn't cheating on Phil,” Annette Merar says. “Although there might have been a little bit of suspicion on Phil's part because Lester was a good businessman, too. I just think Phil didn't need Lester anymore, and his personal value system allowed him to think, I can do this alone, so fuck Lester Sill. That's what it amounts to. Phil didn't want to share it anymore, and Lester had outlived his usefulness.”

Michael Spencer saw it another way. “Lester was a father figure, and Phil always turned on the father.”

In the autumn of 1962, Phil and Annette moved out of their small apartment and into a penthouse on Sixty-second Street, close to the East River. Downstairs Spector took a suite of offices for Philles. Standing on the huge balcony of the penthouse apartment and looking down over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge to the lights of Queens shimmering on the far side of the river, it seemed to Phil Spector as if he had arrived on top of the world.

But there was to be one final parting shot at his old partner. According to one story, as part of his settlement with Sill and Finfer, Spector was required to give them the royalties from the next Philles single. Begrudging the thought of sharing anything more with his former partners, Spector devised a plan that would fulfill his obligations while costing him next to nothing. At the end of January 1963, he called the Crystals and three musicians—Michael Spencer on piano, bass player Leonard Gaskin and drummer Herbert Lovelle—into Mirar Sound Studios and recorded a mindless five-minute bump-and-grind dance song he had written himself called “(Let's Dance) The Screw.” Spencer remembers the session as being “as boring as beans.” A handful of copies of the record were pressed with the catalogue number Philles 111, and copies sent to both Sill and Finfer. Whether the record was actually made to fulfill contractual obligations is debatable. Under those terms, it would have needed to be properly pressed and distributed—which it wasn't; and the same catalogue number was subsequently used for the next Philles production, “He's Sure the Boy I Love.” But whatever the reasons behind the record, the implied meaning of the title—screw you—was not lost on Lester Sill.

“Lester didn't speak too kindly of Phil after that,” says Russ Titelman. “He felt he'd been betrayed. But then everybody Phil touched felt that in the end.”

Yet despite whatever bitterness he might have felt, Sill behaved remarkably charitably toward his estranged partner, urging his stepson Chuck Kaye, who had helped him handle affairs in the Los Angeles office, to continue working for Philles. Sill himself continued to work in the music business, first for Screen Gems and then Jobete Music, right up until his death in 1995. As the years passed, he would often talk fondly of Spector to friends and associates. “Lester didn't harbor a grudge against Phil,” remembers one acquaintance of both men. “If anything it was the other way round. I could never figure out why.” Spector, for his part, seemed seldom to miss an opportunity to disparage Sill in public, sometimes joking that his old partner was “the less” in Philles; yet privately he seemed to retain a deep affection for him. The pair would often talk on the phone, gossiping about the music business and hashing over the past. But when I interviewed Spector in December 2002 he was curt about his former partner.

“Lester was like Mr. Nice Guy. He turned out to be a little deceitful, but he was a nice guy who knew everybody in the business. He introduced me to people, gave me references. I would say, ‘Introduce me to this person, get me to that person,' and he did that.”

And that was all he said.

         

Riding on the success of “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah,” Darlene Wright, Fanita Barrett and Bobby Sheen had been touring the eastern states as Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, as part of a package tour with Marvin Gaye, the Orlons and Little Eva. It was a miserable experience. The weather back east was atrocious, and the group was earning only $900 a week between the three of them. Now at the end of 1962, Spector called them back into Gold Star, eager to capitalize on their success both as “The Crystals” and Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans.

But first he had to placate Darlene Wright.

Chafing at the lack of recognition she had received for her performance on “He's a Rebel”—a number 1 record, and no one ever knew her name!—and the fact that she had received only a flat fee—albeit one that was three times the standard union rate—Wright confronted Spector. If he wanted her to record again it would be under her own name, and with a proper contract, or she wouldn't do it at all. Spector assured her he would get the deal done, but it was only when she threatened to quit altogether that he finally got his lawyers to draw up artist contracts for both Wright and Fanita Barrett.

With Wright once again taking the lead, Spector recorded the group singing the thundering rock and roll song “He's Sure the Boy I Love,” written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. But when the song was released, it was once again under the name of the Crystals. The first Wright knew of it was when she heard the song on the radio. Furious, she confronted Spector in the studio, and in the heat of the moment he made a slighting remark about “you people.” Spector had an almost religious devotion to black people, and it was unlikely he meant the remark as a racial slight. But Wright took it that way, and stormed out of the studio.

“It was like Phil was God, and we were all his little angels,” Gloria Jones remembers wryly. “‘You just stand there and sing the song and I'll decide whose it's going to be.' Then we'd hear on the radio, that's Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans or that's the Crystals. We never knew when we were recording whose song it was going to be.”

“The singers were nothing to Phil,” Darlene Wright would note many years later. “He used to say it was all about ‘his music.' So I'd say, ‘If it's all about your music, why aren't you making instrumentals?'”

         

In search of fresh material, Spector meanwhile had turned to another songwriting team, Ellie Greenwich and Tony Powers. Born in Brooklyn in 1940, Greenwich had worked briefly as a high school teacher and failed as a singer before turning to songwriting. A brief collaboration with Doc Pomus led her to Leiber and Stoller's publishing company, Trio Music, where she forged a partnership with Powers. Her first meeting with Spector in the Trio offices in August 1962 was not auspicious. Greenwich was sitting at a piano playing a song called “It Was Me Yesterday” when Spector walked in. “Phil was walking around the room, fixing his clothes, looking in the mirror and adjusting his hair—all the time making noises while I was playing my song,” Greenwich recalled. “Finally I said, ‘Either you want to hear my songs or you don't.' Phil exploded and stormed out of the room, and everyone in the office felt that Spector was gone for good.” A short while later, however, Spector heard a demo of another Greenwich-Powers song called “(Today I Met) The Boy I'm Gonna Marry” and arranged another meeting with the writers at his office on Sixty-second Street. The pair turned up at 2:00 p.m. as arranged. Spector arrived at 6:00.

“When he came I was really mad. ‘Hey, Phil, if you make an appointment and can't keep it, you should let us know. You were very rude!' And I think he just liked the idea that I stood up to him, because we hit it off right away.”

Spector took two Greenwich and Powers songs back to Los Angeles to record (adding a few embellishments, and his name to the writers' credits, in the process). The first was a vamped-up variation on the doo-wop idiom, called “Why Do Lovers Break Each Other's Heart?” which was ascribed to Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, and reached number 38 in the charts in March 1963.

The second was “(Today I Met) The Boy I'm Gonna Marry”—a delightfully melodic celebration of what was held—in the early '60s, at least—to be every young girl's dream. Once again, Darlene Wright took the lead, cushioned in an appropriately opulent and romantic arrangement with a celestial choir and percussion that pealed like church bells. This time, Spector promised her, the record would be released under her name—or at least a name that he had decided to give her. Darlene Wright, he had decided, did not have the necessary sass and distinction. Instead, Spector decreed, she would be named Darlene Love, after one of his favorite gospel singers, Dorothy Love Coates. Wright simply shrugged and took the change in her stride. “I figured Phil would just decide to call me something else again two or three records down the road.” But it was Darlene Love she would remain for the rest of her career.

         

By the end of 1962, Phil Spector had begun to gather around him a team of some twenty-five musicians who would form the bedrock of what would come to be known as the Wall of Sound. Not all would play on every Spector record, but the majority would play on most of them. They included the guitarists Billy Strange, Glen Campbell, Irv Rubin, Bill Pitman, Dennis Budimir, Al Casey, Tommy Tedesco and Spector's idol and mentor, Barney Kessel. On drums were Earl Palmer, Richie Frost and the legendary Hal Blaine, who would go on to become probably the most celebrated rock drummer in history, playing on more than 120 Top 10 hits between 1961 and 1971 alone. On keyboards were Don Randi, Leon Russell, Larry Knechtel, Mike Rubini and Al DeLory. Steve Douglas, Jay Migliori, Ollie Mitchell, Dave Wells, Lou Blackburn, Nino Tempo and Roy Caton played horns. On bass were Jimmy Bond, Ray Pohlman, Carol Kaye and Wallick Dean. Anyone and everyone played percussion, including Frank Kapp, Julius Wechter, Gene Estes, Victor Feldman and Sonny Bono.

These musicians, who became the core group for countless Los Angeles sessions throughout the '60s, would later become famous as “The Wrecking Crew,” a name given to them by Hal Blaine, although they more usually referred to themselves as “the clique.” They were far from being rock and roll punks. Most were older than Spector; seasoned professionals who'd cut their teeth on the road with jazz combos, or working sessions with MOR singers at Capitol and Columbia. They wore sports jackets and ties, kept up their mortgage repayments, had drinks cabinets at home and relaxed by going bowling. Along with Jack Nitzsche, several of them played on a bowling team called Spins and Needles—a play on a song that Nitzsche and Sonny Bono had written for Jackie DeShannon, “Needles and Pins.”

Gold Star was far from being the most sophisticated studio in Los Angeles—most regarded it as a dump. But for Spector it provided an environment where he was totally at ease, totally in command. He became the studio's most ubiquitous client and would wrangle with Stan Ross to have it available whenever he required.

“I remember Phil doing an interview one time, where he paraphrased the great Swedish film director Bergman,” Larry Levine says. “Bergman had been asked why he wouldn't direct movies in America, where the facilities were so much better. And he said, well, he knew there were great facilities and great technicians, but there's a time, maybe two or three minutes during filming where you can be totally creative, and he needed to totally trust the people he was working with so he could be free to create within that period. And Phil said that was the way he felt about me and the people he worked with at Gold Star. He could be creative because he trusted us.”

In his earlier recording sessions in New York and Los Angeles, Spector had usually worked with the standard-size group—bass, drums, piano, a couple of guitarists, sometimes three. He had begun to use strings. But the sound he achieved was never quite as big as the sound he was hearing in his imagination. Listening to a symphony orchestra play “The Ride of the Valkyries” or the
1812 Overture
it was as if you could hear great armies on the march. Why couldn't a rock and roll record sound as big, as powerful, as thrilling as that?

In 1962 this would have been a wildly fanciful ambition. Most people—even most people who made it—regarded pop music as instantly disposable ephemera. Records were shaped and made in the heat of the moment, a flash of sheet lightning, forged from passion, excitement or rank opportunism, which might or might not illuminate the charts, and would be forgotten as quickly as they were conceived. Nobody considered pop music an art form. But Spector approached each record as if he were creating a masterpiece, lavishing an unprecedented amount of time, care and attention on the song, the preparation and the recording.