He's a Rebel

by Mark Ribowsky

  With a breathing apparatus attached to Phil Spector’s incredible power source, Tempo could inflate rapidly. And though Phil could be difficult, the relationship was a joyous lark. “He’s got a much better sense of humor than most people think,” Tempo stressed. “Yes, there is another side of him. He can be a very hostile guy. But my memories are of fun and laughs and kicks and screwing around like two crazy young guys.”

  Bono and Tempo could be useful flunkies, but Larry Levine was the only absolute essential. No other engineer was allowed his wide berth; Levine could turn down the sound level of one instrument to compensate for the cranking up of another, he could move microphone placements, he could tell Phil when the distortion was too much. He could even edit tape, something Phil at one time would not have tolerated with his “live” sound. Levine earned the right to do that after accidentally garbling some tape while mixing. When it happened, a self-pitying Spector walked from behind the console board and crawled under a table, drawing his knees up in front of his face. But, luckily, Larry was able to make a copy of a similar passage and splice it in. “It worked perfectly, and from that point on, Phil let me edit tape,” Levine said.

  However, one thing Phil would not let Levine do was record in stereo after Gold Star acquired a three-track recorder in 1963. “I said to him, ‘Why don’t we separate the horns, or the guitars maybe, so we have a little more control?’ He said, ‘Absolutely not. What I hear today is what I wanna hear tomorrow, when I come back to the mix. And you can never bring all those elements back precisely the same in stereo.’ And he was right. Even today, stereo is an approximation of what’s heard in the studio. For Phil, the only sound he wanted was the sound he recorded after three hours getting everything to fit. He cared that much about it.”

  Cut in mono, parts of Spector’s big orchestrations were obscured or lost completely. Phil willingly parted with them. His sound was an overview, a primordial feel of joyful noise, although many technical people in the business could not comprehend it. In New York, removed from Larry Levine and his unspoken command, engineers would jump on Phil about his decibel level and the resulting distortion of sound, to little avail. “He’d say, 1 don’t care if the dials jump off the meters, I want it to sound distorted,’ ” Arnold Goland said, “so what would happen is, on the master the needle would literally jump out of the grooves, that’s how loud it was cut. Sometimes there’d be recalls on his records and he’d have to do them all over again. But he didn’t care. He was going after what he wanted.”

  Tom Dowd, still manning Atlantic’s clear-channeled, eight-track board, heard Spector’s massive hits and shook his head. “Thinking of what the man was doing, it could have been done easier and less expensively,” Dowd said. “Tracks got bounced around so many times they were inarticulate. Phil never measured, was it worth it? If it didn’t sound like he wanted, it’s not ready yet, keep on going, hunt and peck. It’s like shopping for a doctor. It’s a state of confusion.

  “I wish I could’ve made a couple of those records, or had some contribution. There were a lot of brilliant parts in his records that were wiped out. But high fidelity is not what’s sold. Novelty and timeliness is the strength of a record, and he always had that.”

  For the Crystals, the association with Phil was maddeningly contradictory. By the spring of 1963, they had four hits, and while none were actually theirs since “Uptown,” they could go on lucrative tours with no one aware of it. But the strange conflict was personally humiliating. When “He’s a Rebel” broke on the radio, the Crystals were on the road in Ohio. “We were in the car late at night when all of a sudden we hear: ‘Here’s the new Crystals song’—and our mouths fell open,” remembered Mary Thomas. “I mean, goodness gracious, but what could we do? There was nothing we could do.”

  They also now had to perform the song live—luckily, Gene Pitney was a performer at their next show, at the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C., and he taught them the words—and this created an instant problem because Darlene Wright s emphatic voice was so unlike the wan softness of Barbara Alston’s. The only one who could take the lead was Dolores “La La” Brooks, who at age thirteen had been brought into the group after “There’s No Other (Like My Baby),” to replace a pregnant Crystal. Much younger and not part of the original core of schoolmates, Brooks felt the sting of frustration that the girls could not direct at Phil.

  “It was a lot of tension,” she said. “When I started doin’ ‘He’s a Rebel’ on stage, Barbara just said, ‘The hell with it, let her do “Uptown” too, and everything else.’ She didn’t care anymore.”

  The truth was that, even as the Crystals continued to tour as one of the hottest vocal groups in rock, they had been stripped of their identity by their own producer. One hard sign of Phil’s neglect was the dearth of royalties they received. At the very beginning, Lester Sill, acting as a temporary manager and helping book their appearances, had met them on tour in Washington, D.C., to give them a $1,000 check. “I was worried that we didn’t have the proper pay setup,” Sill explained, “and I just wanted to make sure the kids got paid.” Now, with Lester pushed out, all they had gotten from Phil was one check for $5,000, and that came when they marched en masse to his apartment building. “We had such a hard time getting that out of him that we went right to his bank and cashed the check,” La La Brooks said.

  The Crystals faced constant reminders of their identity crisis. Booked on the Murray the K shows in their hometown Brooklyn, they also had a hard time getting the deejay to pay them. Murray the K, who wore fedora hats over a bald head and loud, tablecloth-print sport jackets, was one of the most aggrandized, and disliked, deejays in the business. Mouthy, pushy, and overbearing, he valued acts according to how much they doted on him, and he apparently had it in for the Crystals. “We worked our buns off for Murray the K,” La La said, “but when he had to pay us, he’d say he didn’t have it, he was in debt, or he’d act like he was ill, pretend he was having a heart attack. We’d be standing over him and he was laying on the couch and all his people were saying ‘Oh, he’s sick,’ and he was holding his heart. Meanwhile, he was putting our money in his pocket.”

  On the other hand, when Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans—really no more than a studio concoction—went on tour, Murray treated Darlene Wright, Bobby Sheen, and Fanita James courteously. In fact, the deejay, with whom Phil maintained a patronizing kind of friendship in deference to his impact on airplay, utilized Bob B. Soxx to degrade the Crystals. Inviting Bob B. Soxx, but not the Crystals, to appear on one holiday show, he told his audience that the Crystals did not record “He’s a Rebel,” and Bob B. Soxx were the “real” Crystals. Mary Thomas, who happened to be sitting in the audience at the Brooklyn Fox that night, was mortified. So was La La Brooks, who listened to the show on the radio at home.

  “He was getting back at us because we didn’t take anything from him, we stood up to him and demanded our money, even if we had to sit there all night,” Brooks said. “We weren’t the type of girls that you could sleep with instead of having to pay.”

  The Crystals had made up their minds that such was not the case with Murray the K’s “dancing girls,” Ronnie Bennett, her sister, and their cousin. However, in 1963, for the Crystals and Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans there were other much more ominous signs involving the Ronettes. Rehearsing in Phil’s new office, on the lobby floor of his apartment building, the Crystals were startled one day when the Ronettes came to the door and then strode in and made themselves comfortable.

  “Ronnie was paying a lot of attention to Phil, and he was married to a very nice girl,” La La recalled. “We were really upset because we couldn’t rehearse any more. All of a sudden he wanted to rehearse them.”

  Never having met Ronnie Bennett before, La La sized her up. “She was more advanced than we were. She was a hard rocker, even then, you know what I mean? She had hard language, was a hard person. She had a hard inside.”

  Actually, Ronnie Bennett, Estelle Bennett, and Nedra
Talley seemed more like vipers and harpies than they were. All lived at home, none smoked or drank, and rather than being on the prowl, Ronnie’s mother Beatrice chaperoned them almost wherever they went. All the same, eighteen-year-old Ronnie, a tiny china doll with large eyes, full lips, and a nasty wiggle, had a trashy, kittenish kind of sexuality that could make men’s knees buckle. It was evident now that Phil had a major hunger for her. When Ronnie was with him, he seemed to see only her. In no time, they were neck deep in a secret love affair.

  When La La Brooks left the building the day she met Ronnie, she ran into a dour and depressed Annette Spector on the street walking her dog.

  “She was very, very unhappy,” Brooks said. “She said she couldn’t deal with Phil. She said he was crazy.”

  The Crystals’ “He’s Sure the Boy I Love” went to No. 11 in late February of 1963. Neither “Why Do Lovers Break Each Others’ Hearts?” nor “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Gonna Marry” did more than nudge the Top 40, but Phil was cutting a lava flow of vinyl. He released only about a quarter of what he recorded, at the rate of one a month, and all were quality records. He paid no attention to how a previous record was doing in deciding to put out another one. A one-man label, he did not have the luxury to release a slew of scat-ter-shot records and hope one would hit. As Phil Spector, he had to come through without pause.

  In March Phil went into Gold Star to cut a song that had grown from a piano riff Arnold Goland had improvised one night in his living room. Presenting it to Ellie Greenwich and, now, Jeff Barry—Beverly Ross’s onetime writing partner had married Greenwich in late 1962 and begun to write with her—Phil told them to do something with it. What they worked out was a seriously silly song with a title the writers originally inserted as a gibberish filler phrase until they found a workable line. Finding nothing that worked, Greenwich and Barry concluded that their gibberish line worked on its own as rock-and-roll patois. It also became the title of the song: “Da Doo Ron Ron.” Phil took the tune and touched off a sweaty fervor around it that made it sound like it was recorded in a bar. The rhythm, three guitars, three horns, and now three pianos grinded in a reverberation that created its own echoes and undulated in a great fused mass of reeds, tinkling keys, and hand claps.

  Though Darlene Wright—so cemented in her Darlene Love persona that she had now adopted the name as her own—did a lead vocal on “Da Doo Ron Ron,” Phil turned away from her loud, studied impeccability. He had heard La La Brooks sing in New York, and thought he was blessed. Still only fifteen, Brooks spoke in a whisper, like a breathy sparrow, but when she sang she could knock down a building. She had a Brooklyn accent and a slight vibrato that rippled like a sneering lip through a song. Phil flew her to Gold Star, tried her on “Da Doo Ron Ron,” and axed Darlene’s lead. La La made the simple love cupidity of the song a visceral thump of a young girl’s heart. Darlene had no idea the lead wasn’t hers until the record came out, and Fanita James, recalling Darlene’s studio take, which she thought was brilliant, assumed two decades later that it was Darlene on the record.

  Stepping on the faltering tail of “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Gonna Marry,” “Da Doo Ron Ron,” released as the sixth Crystals record—Arnold Goland went uncredited but was listed as nominal writer of the bunco B side—ran all the way to No. 3 in June. It was still on the chart in mid-July, when the next Philles single, “Not Too Young to Get Married,” by Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, was here and gone after peaking at No. 63, and Darlene Love’s “Wait ‘til My Bobby Gets Home” reached the chart on its way to No. 26 in early September.

  La La Brooks, whose prickly, little boyish voice sharpened Phil’s music scalpel, claimed her second lead on the follow-up to “Da Doo Ron Ron.” This was a similar Greenwich-Barry wall-banger, “Then He Kissed Me,” and the song gave Phil the chance to get back to strings. Mixed with savage-sounding horns and overheated castanets, it was “Uptown” stirred into a frenzy and ablaze with spirit. With “Then He Kissed Me,” Spector’s musical vernacular at last was truly symphonic, the tight, slightly distanced nature of the wad of rhythm forming a suggestion of awesome power while still preserving the intimacy of the vocal through a radio speaker, and remaining recognizable as rock and roll.

  An integral part of the mix was a billowing echo, one that dwarfed any other so far on a Spector record. As it happened, it was an accident, though one forced by Phil’s endless demands for greater and greater exhilarating voltage. “Phil needed volume in the control room on the playback,” Larry Levine said. “No matter how much level we had he wanted more. So I doubled the track, put it on the left and right channels, knowing I would erase one channel because Phil cut in mono. But when I erased one, I was still getting echo from both left and right on the one channel. The echo crossed, it didn’t stay on its own channel. I was left with a double echo with half the musical presence. But it worked fine, Phil liked it, and from then on I knew how to get as much echo as Phil wanted, although I don’t think we ever used more echo than on that record.”

  In August of 1963, Phil finally released his first Ronettes record. Over a year since taking them on, he found the right song for them, the Barry-Greenwich-Spector “Be My Baby.” He cut it, a month before, with an obsessive furor incredible even for him. Four hours into the session, Larry Levine’s recorder was still not turned on. The musicians, their sweat-drenched shirts sticking to their bodies, believed that they could get their parts down no better, only to see Phil tear up the lead sheet and start again. Michael Spencer, back home in L.A. for the summer and invited to play on the date, sat on his piano stool almost comatose. “It took forty-two run-throughs to get it the way he wanted it,” Spencer remembered. “I know that because I destroyed the forty-first. On the break, there’s a pause where the drum goes bom, bom-bom. I played right through that, that’s how punchy I was.”

  “The things Phil was doing were crazy and exhausting, but that’s not the sign of a nut, that’s genius,” Levine said. “I mean, if something was remotely possible, he was gonna do it, and we just went ahead without a second thought. There were no rock-and-roll rules for Phil, because he was making them up as he went along.”

  Softly couched by acoustic guitars chewing an unbroken line of repetitive notes, the steady three-beat drum accent and a dramatic entry of horns, Ronnie Bennett’s gushy, seductive voice, with a vibrato that fluttered like bird wings, burst onto the rock-and-roll landscape. The Ronettes were not polished singers—“They sang flat,” Bobby Sheen noted—and Estelle Bennett and Nedra Talley’s backing vocal tracks had to be overdubbed several times and buffered with other voices. But Ronnie sang the way she looked—it was possible to fall in love with just her voice, and the ‘whoa, ho-ho-ho-ho” riff she sang was a come-on that needed no words.

  Phil was to become fixated with her, more so than with the group as a whole. Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry were charged with writing a whole series of plaintive, first-person love declarations that Phil would regard as the longings of his own heart.

  “Be My Baby” was on the chart by the end of summer. By then Phil knew he had Ronnie Bennett right where he wanted her.

  The records are built like a Wagnerian opera. They start simply and they end with dynamic force, meaning and purpose. . . . It’s in the mind. I dreamed it up. It’s like art movies. I aimed to get the record industry forward a little bit, make a sound that was universal.

  —PHIL SPECTOR, London Evening Standard, January 24, 1964

  Phil began work on one other project during that fateful summer of 1963. It was an album of traditional Christmas music done in the untraditional idiom of rock and roll. Spector and Jack Nitzsche laid out arrangements for twelve carols and one original song—a teary, bittersweet Greenwich-Barry-Spector ballad, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”—in the same manner as rock songs, with hip R&B styling, copious strings, and a big band kick to the age-old hooks of pieces like “Frosty the Snowman,” “Sleigh Ride,” and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”

  “H
e thought it was good music, he respected it,” Annette said of Phil’s motivation. “It was like ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.’ God knows why these things came into his head, but if a song was good, Phil had creative input with it.”

  “He probably saw the novelty and absurdity of the idea,” Larry Levine said, “but I don’t think there’s any way for anyone to know where he got it any more than any other idea. I can’t overstate that Phil was just different. When I was with Phil, things happened to me that wouldn’t happen to me with anybody else. Phil was a magnet for unexplained behavior, his kinetic energy was so . . . I mean, people would get into arguments, fights, and not necessarily with him. When you’re part of Phil’s entourage, strange things happen because his mind doesn’t work the way other people’s minds do. You don’t know why they happen, but you know they will.”

  And once Phil began on this anomaly, his commitment grew to a level bordering on insane. Day after day for six weeks, sessions ran almost without seams. The artists—Darlene Love, La La Brooks, the Ronettes, and a shoal of background singers—and the musicians did not know what day it was, whether it was light or dark outside, and cots were set up in the studio.

  If the album had been done without genuine care and sincerity, there would have been no audience for it. Instead, when it was finally completed, it was a feast of cool and mawkish, a hipster’s way of appreciating the seasonal standards that had become stale and depressing for a burgeoning generation of young adults.