He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  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.

  “What do you want?” Spector asked him.

  “Look, Phil,” Sill said, “I’m not gonna just walk away from this thing, because I started it.”

  Impatiently Phil repeated, “What do you want?”

  Goaded into exasperation, Lester grunted. “Look, you figure it out,” he said, and told him to base it on a year’s royalties. But in the end, he got nothing close to that.

  “I sold out for a pittance,” he recalled. “It was shit, ridiculous, around $60,000. I didn’t want to but I had to. Let me tell you, I couldn’t live with Phillip. I could’ve been a millionaire with this guy—don’t forget, I owned half of Mother Bertha. I owned all those masters, and if I’d held on to them, he would’ve had to start a new company. But I just wanted the fuck out of there. If I wouldn’t have, I would’ve killed him. It wasn’t worth the aggravation. No matter how important it was, it wasn’t that important. I didn’t even want a lawyer. I said, ‘Send me the check.’ ”

  Sill’s haste proved costly. “I made the mistake of signing the paper before I got my check, because I trusted him.” Months later, still with no check, Sill met with Spector in Phil’s apartment. When he walked in, he again had to go up against both Phil and Harold Lipsius. Lipsius, a lawyer, was now advising Phil on legal matters. Phil was prepared for Lester’s demand for payment, and his rationale for holding back on it stretched far back in time—to Lester’s refusal to cough up royalties on the discarded Paris Sisters’ album. Only now did it become clear how much of a grudge Phil had nursed against Lester.

  “Phil wants to see some figures,” Lipsius told Sill, who went over them again and again but could not elicit a promise from Spector to pay up. Reaching an impasse, Sill hired a lawyer and sued Phil Spector.

  A short while later, in late January of 1963, Phil went into Mira Sound with the Crystals, Michael Spencer, and two other musicians and cut a song titled “Let’s Dance the Screw Part 1 and 2.” The record was not intended for release, and the only person who received a copy was Lester Sill.

  “He wanted to get me,” Sill said. “That was him saying ‘Fuck you, buddy.’ ”

  Incredibly, Chuck Kaye stayed on as Philles promotion man, working out of Lester’s new office in a converted bowling alley on Hollywood’s El Centro Avenue. “Phil wanted me to continue,” Kaye said. “We’d been pals since we were teenagers and he tried to separate the business end from the fact that he knifed my father in the back. And my dad was great. He thought it was a great opportunity for me. Philles was the hottest label in the country.”

  At the El Centro office, there was a strange combination of bad blood and mixed blood. While Sill feuded with Spector, his son and two of his salaried assistants—Steve Douglas and now Jack Nitzsche—went on working Spector’s sessions. Nitzsche had a philosopher’s name and a Huck Finn face, he wore thick black-framed eyeglasses and his dark hair swooped forward over his eyes like a sheepdog’s. Spector asked a lot from his arrangers—his long hours and capricious chart alterations during sessions had driven away a number of past conductors in a jumble of frayed nerves—but Nitzsche had an intuitive sense of where Phil was going, and he had endurance. Like an athlete, Nitzsche would dart from musician to musician, translating Phil’s whim to notes on paper. Out of the studio, Phil would awaken him at ungodly hours and call him to ungodly motels because Spector wanted to develop an arrangement.

  Nitzsche’s sweat and stamina surely was not bought with money—Spector paid him just $50 per chart. For Nitzsche, Spector was an icon, a solitary man making a rock-and-roll testament and changing the industry’s rules purely because of his love of music. Nitzsche was not without self-interest, of course—“The label credits he gave me got me jobs in this business for years,” he said—but Phil Spector was the fountainhead. Spector was there, he was king, he knew the business, but never did he give an inch in creating what he had to.

  “In those days, A&R men would hire me for a three-hour session and we had to get it done in that time,” Nitzsche said. “But if Phil needed two sessions to do his rhythm section, that’s the way it happened. Maybe other producers liked their records; Phil loved his records.

  “Phil really was the artist, and it wasn’t just out of ego. Phil understood the teenage market, he related to their feelings and impulses. It was like he was a kid himself—he’d call me at 4 A.M. and want ice cream—and he could commit those impulses artistically like nobody else.”

  Seven weeks after its release, “He’s a Rebel,” backed with a Spector song called “I Love You Eddie,” sat at No. 3. The next week, in early November, it was No. 1. It would stay there, looking down at every other piece of grooved vinyl in the United States, for three weeks, and it would not fall out of the Top 10 for another three weeks—nor out of the Top 40 until Christmas.

  Just before “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah”—under the name of Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans—was released in early November, Ray Peterson split with Stan Shulman. Dunes Records had done $11 million in business in 1961, thanks in large part to Spector, but Peterson was paid very little of it. “That was my record company, I was vice president,” he said. “It was supposed to be 50–50, but Stan became extremely greedy. He was cheatin’ me. I found out that he was keepin’ two sets of books. I told him, ‘You pushed me around but you’re never gonna do it again!’ I was so angry I threw him against the wall, this marine.

  “I told Phil about it. We sat in my car for three hours and I said, ‘Phil, I’m leavin’ Stan and I don’t want to see the same thing happen to you. Stay away from him.’ ”

  Phil was so angry that he told Shulman he was going to sell him the “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” master. Shulman ran around the Brill Building boasting that he had a smash Dunes record. Only days later Shulman heard it on the radio, soon to be a smash Philles record.

  One facet of the record would become a Spector trademark for two years, and it was indelibly Spector-like: the B side, “Flip and Nitty,” was not a real song but rather a few impromptu licks played by the band at the very end of a session. By attaching these shams, Phil knew he would not run the risk of a deejay flipping over a record and would instead focus all attention on his uncompromised work. Not incidentally, Phil could also collect up to a quadruple royalty by taking a writer’s credit on the bogus side and publishing it through Mother Bertha. Or he could use the trick to reward a favored musician by listing him as writer. Several times Phil would list Shirley as writer—helping to pay the bills for her periodic stays in the psychiatric ward of a Palo Alto hospital, which he considered his responsibility—or Annette.

  “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” got as high as No. 8, in early January. By then Spector and his “little bitty label” were so hot that, from September of 1962 to November of 1963, not one month passed
without a Philles record on the charts.

  The first record after “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” was a true Spector anomaly—the result of a rare deal he made with another producer. This was Lou Adler, a fifties’ protégé of Lester Sill’s. Teamed with writer-producer Herb Alpert while working for Sill, the two men wrote and produced Jan and Dean for several years. Now both men were making entrepreneurial moves on the West Coast. While Alpert began an independent label called A&M Records, and cutting his own mariachi-flavored trumpet instrumentals under the name of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Adler handled Don Kirshner’s West Coast office and then became an A&R man with Columbia Pictures-Screen Gems. As Phil was looking to record a male group, Adler rushed in to link Screen Gems with the name of Phil Spector. Adler had Billy Storm—whom Spector had cut on Atlantic and who now was Bobby Sheen’s brother-in-law—under contract with a five-man L.A. soul group, the Alley Cats, and their records did well on the West Coast. Sheen touted Spector on the Alley Cats, and Phil agreed to a one-shot record to benefit him and Adler. A 50–50 deal from top to bottom, Adler would produce the B side.

  Phil’s side was called “Puddin’ ’n’ Tain (Ask Me Again and I’ll Tell You the Same),” an old nursery rhyme expanded into an uptempo bubble-gum teen love song by Alley Cat Gary Pipkin. It became a Top 40 hit in late February of 1963 and was Phil s most convincing doo-wop record, ladled with the big band bite. However, in making the record he clashed with Adler. Ambitious and chummy in an unctuous, talent-agent way, Adler seemed to fancy himself as a West Coast Phil Spector. “He was kinda out there too,” said Bobby Sheen, who sang backup on the session. “They all wanted to be different then.” Making his presence felt, poking into Spector’s studio time, he seemed to be trying to compete with Spector on his own turf. Phil had known Adler for years, and through him he met and became friendly with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, who revered Phil and whose creative outflow Phil liked to be around. But now Adler made his skin crawl, and by the end of the session Phil had turned Gold Star into a battlefront.