He's a Rebel (14 page)

Sill shopped the master to labels around town. Again, there were no bites. “I couldn't sell the record to anybody, couldn't lease it, nothing. Snuff Garrett at Liberty turned me down flat. Capitol hated it.” With no recourse, Sill pressed and released it himself, creating a new label with Hazelwood, Gregmark, a combination of two of their sons' names and which was also the title of their publishing company. That's when Herb Newman at Era Records agreed to distribute the disc, and a promotion man named Clancy Grass was hired to plug it.

Spector didn't hang around for these machinations. Like a wisp of smoke, he left town quickly. There was too much on the burner in New York.

A few days after getting back, Phil had stunning news for Terry Phillips.

“We have a chance to do the songs in the new Elvis picture,
Blue Hawaii
,” he said.

Terry had no idea how this incredible coup had come about, but then Phil had more news: they were also going to write songs for Bobby Darin and Connie Francis—both of whom were managed by Don Kirshner, now a close Spector confidant. Terry had barely digested all of this before he was caught in a tornado of dizzying activity. He moved in with Phil on E. 82nd St., they began working furiously on all three projects, and Phil took him on successive nights to the Copacabana nightclub, first to meet Connie Francis, then Bobby Darin.

“We played Connie a couple of songs,” he remembered. “I'd written the lyrics, totally, to two or three songs, which she heard in her dressing room. And she flipped out over them. We then got with Bobby and played him a couple of songs, and he loved 'em. And then Hal Wallis, who was producing the Presley movie, heard the stuff we did and we got the affirmation that they loved all our songs for the movie.”

Terry was ecstatic about this sudden turn of events in his still-brief career. But even though he had worked himself into exhaustion churning out lyrics, he could not quite understand the business logistics of it. He and Phil were both under contract to Leiber and
Stoller, but they were doing this new work under the auspices of Paul Case at Hill and Range. Often he tried to get an answer to how they could square this conflict of interest.

“It's cool,” Phil would tell him. “It's been worked out.”

Terry accepted it, trusting that Phil knew much more about this sort of accommodation than he did. Furthermore, Spector was in great demand, and in a power structure not unlike the five families of the Cosa Nostra, vicious competition could be mitigated by “gentlemen's agreements” benefiting any number of sides. Spector was constantly on the phone, dealing. “It never stopped ringing,” Phillips said. “Everybody was stroking Phil, because of what they could get out of it. Phil was so many years beyond his age. I mean, I was a college graduate, I could've gone to law school, and Phil Spector absolutely made me feel like I was eleven years old in the business.”

At times, Terry wondered what was being discussed during those phone calls, but Phil wouldn't open up. “He was like Ollie North. It would've been nice to hear the conversations, but if he saw me listening he'd hang up the phone. And if he would tell me things and he thought he was getting too close to something hush-hush, he would close up.

“I would say, ‘Listen, Phil, if you don't tell me, I'm gonna beat your ass in.' He would say, ‘Man, I'm tired of this business shit,' and he'd punch me in the shoulder—he absolutely was the weakest person I ever met in my life, God love him—and that would be his way out of it, like it all was getting to him.”

And all the while they would be working, nonstop, because Paul Case told them there were tight deadlines. Terry would go as long as he could keep his eyes open, then fall out. Phil would never cave in. “He never went to sleep,” Phillips said. “I'd go to sleep and Phil would sit on his bed and listen to the radio until 6 or 7
A.M
. and he'd have his guitar in his hands, playing riffs. He could not go to sleep. He was afraid of the night, afraid to sleep . . . that if he didn't control himself, he might die before he woke up.”

Inside of two weeks, songs for all three projects were done, a phenomenal output that had Terry euphoric. “I'd written the complete lyrics to everything we did, and now the Johnny Nash thing was like a bullshit little thing. This stuff was gonna put me on the map. I told my mother, ‘I'm here only a few months—and I'm writing
for
Elvis!
' ” Phil then went into the studio and cut several songs with Bobby Darin.

At that point, life was good inside the first-floor apartment on E. 82nd St. The two young music men were bonded by cause and a unique personal chemistry, and Terry found that he was now possessive of the funny little man he knew had great depth and hurting inside him. Phil just naturally seemed like the little brother who needed protecting, and while Terry came to know some of the hairier details of Phil's personal heartaches and guilt, the hurt in Phil's eyes when he told of his home life made his pain so palpable that Terry would wince. He didn't need to hear one word to know that Phil Spector was a lost soul.

That also seemed to be Phil's attitude about women. He had a terrible time trying to find a love interest in New York. Terry, on the other hand, while not savvy like Spector in the business sense, left him in the dust during carousing hours. Running in a pack of happy wanderers that included songwriters Burt Bacharach, Bert Berns, and Bobby Scott, Phillips frequented downtown clubs like the Harwin. He and the others would attract a horde of women. Spector would sit alone on his bar stool, sipping 7-UP all night. “It was ridiculous,” Phillips said. “He was the king and I was the serf, but I always wound up with the best-looking chicks in New York, I mean women ten years older than us. They'd spend time talking to him but then they'd go to bed with me. I'd get home the next day and Phil would be so pissed at me.

“It hurt him because he always wanted to be sexually attractive based on the fact that he was a human being. It was not that Phil was weird; he wasn't. Phil was a sweetheart. He was sensitive and hurt and brilliant and charming. He couldn't connect with women because he wanted one lady who was pretty and sexual and bright enough to be his lady. Someone who was classy and kind and honest.

“Phil wanted a love, he wanted to love and be loved. But every woman he ever met used him. The women he was screwing were doing it because of what he might do for them. And he was very well aware that these women would hurt and use him.”

Eager to prove that he too could be a rogue, Phil came home one night with a very overweight female songwriter—and woke up Terry to invite him to join in as he and the woman undressed.

Casting a tired eye at them, and especially at the woman, Terry said he'd rather not. But Phil was insistent. “You gotta do it, Terry. You gotta do it for me,” he pleaded.

Relenting, Terry crawled into Phil's bed to join them. But as hands were reaching and bodies touching, Terry began to quake with laughter. “It was just so funny, because this woman was so fat. I couldn't believe I was doing what I was doing,” he recalled.

Phil was furious. “Terry, fucking Terry!” he kept snorting. They tried to begin over, but this time it was Phil who couldn't keep from breaking up.

“Then I went crazy again. And in the middle of this torrent of laughter, the lady got up, put on her clothes, and left, and Phil and I were still lying there in bed, laughing our asses off.”

The elation at Eighty-second Street was shattered when Phil picked up the phone one night in February. Terry assumed it was just another routinely hushed call, until Phil began hollering angrily into the mouthpiece.

“There's a problem,” Phil said, his face flushed, when he hung up. “Jerry and Mike have gotten wind of the whole thing and called up Freddie Bienstock.”

All three deals, he said, were dead.

“Mike and Jerry found out and they put their foot down,” Phillips explained. “They wanted half the publishing on the songs we wrote and Hill and Range said no.”

Mad enough to kill, Terry glared at Phil. “You know something? You're all full of shit,” Terry told him. “I love you as a person, man, but why didn't you tell me we didn't have the right to do it?”

Phil answered meekly, but unconvincingly, “I thought I understood that we could do it.”

It was now possible to put the pieces together. Leiber and Stoller apparently had never been in on the dealing, and they had every justification to step in with an axe to protect their interests. Whether it was Phil, Paul Case, or Don Kirshner, in any combination, or whoever else had tried to pull this end run, it failed. “They gambled and lost,” Phillips said. “You're talking about a man named Phil Spector. They wanted him and were willing to bend a few rules to get him.” Hill and Range may have attempted, or planned all along, to settle with Leiber and Stoller after the fact; but Trio had a powerful attorney, Lee Eastman, and when he threatened to sue over the matter, Hill and Range junked everything. And yet, even though
Phil was bitter about the crumbled house of cards, he seemed not to be genuinely shocked.

“I think my reaction was much more emotional and angry than his,” Phillips remembered. “I think he knew all the time what was going on. Maybe he misunderstood, but even if Phil knew, even if he overstepped a bound, the point was, everybody was going to make a lot of money, goddamn it. It seemed to us that the thing to do was for people not to be hard-assed and say, okay, 50 percent of a lot of money was better than 100 percent of nothing. That's why we were both pissed at everybody. I know Phil was very pissed off at Mike and Jerry.”

Phillips, fearing Leiber and Stoller suspected him of treason, told Jerry Leiber: “Listen, I knew nothing about this. I was told it was okay.” Spector, however, did not care about covering his backside. He had an attorney inform Trio Music that he construed his contract null and void, on grounds that he had signed it as a minor without court approval, unlike his previous contracts with Doré, Imperial, and Sill/Hazelwood. As with most Spector moves, this was not done rashly. His association with Leiber and Stoller had tremendous leverage; however, in positioning himself for independent power, exclusivity was something he no longer wanted. Leiber and Stoller were also ambivalent about the rupture. To Lester Sill, they decried Spector's ingratitude. “They were angry,” Sill recalled, “because they groomed him, helped him, honed his craft. They took Phil in, they took care of him, and they were gonna make deals with him and the minute he got hot, he walked.”

But, clearly, there was nothing they could do, and when Phil asked for a release from Trio Music, they let him out. Yet Spector never really left. Mindful not only of their feelings but of the political danger of crossing Leiber and Stoller, Phil—who could play this game well—continued meeting with them as if nothing had ever come between them. What's more, he could do this because Leiber and Stoller wanted his modern brand of brilliance around them and their stable and were willing to eat their grudge against him. “More than anyone else, Mike and Jerry understand Phil Spector,” Terry Phillips said. “Psychologically, they knew exactly where Phil was coming from, because they'd been there first. All three were such brilliant creatives, they were of the same mind. Mike and Jerry absolutely loved Phil. They did not want to lose him.”

Spector thus proceeded with the uncertified imprimatur of Leiber and Stoller, and when he made his next move, finally acceding to the endless solicitations of Ahmet Ertegun to come to Atlantic Records as an A&R (artists and repertoire) man, as a kind of security pillow he went to work on his first day accompanied by the two men he had just jilted.

Spector went to Atlantic
*
with a wreath of chart hits: “Spanish Harlem” would top out at No. 10 in mid-March, and its flip side, the Spector-Pomus “First Taste of Love,” broke out for a run to No. 53. Curtis Lee's “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” hit the chart running in early February, at about the time that “Some of Your Loving” made a one-week appearance at the bottom tip of the chart. Spector's attitude upon entering Atlantic's ranks was that he would revitalize the company. The proud and preening Atlantic of the fifties was wobbling now, stunned by the double-barreled defection in 1959 of both Ray Charles and Bobby Darin, and was struggling to isolate a new font of mainstream R&B besides the Drifters and Coasters. Phil often sat in Jerry Wexler's office, guitar in his hands, as he, Wexler, and Leiber and Stoller sifted through material. If Wexler ventured a criticism or even a suggestion, Phil verbally strafed him. “He came in as an instant sore winner,” Wexler remembered. “To him, he was on equal ground, a peer. He'd say to me, ‘Hey, baby, what the fuck are you talkin' about?' Whatever it was, I might've said ‘Change the bridge,' or ‘Get a new line here.' He said, ‘No way! This is the way it goes down!'

“That quality was a great thing about him. I respected it. 'Cause he knew what he had and he didn't need to defer to anybody. Right or wrong, he pursued his own way, and it turned out to be right in the long run, didn't it?”

At the time, though, Wexler was not as philosophical or charitable about Spector's impudence. A ruddy-faced onetime newspaperman with a flashing temper—in the studio when “There Goes My Baby” was recorded, Wexler thought the song sounded so bad
that he hurled a sandwich against the wall—he complained loudly about Spector to Ertegun. “Jerry wanted to fire Phil the first day,” Ertegun said.

The Turkish-born Ertegun, by contrast, was an industry diplomat whose urbane slickness Spector idolized. More than any other industry prototype, Phil was turned on by Ertegun's savvy and integrity in standing hard by soul music as a writer, producer, and executive. Spector may have played fast and loose trying to land
Blue Hawaii
, but Terry Phillips never believed that Phil wanted to be an industry nutcracker; the music was his motive in everything. “That hard-ass shit . . . you're talking about the George Goldners, the Freddie Bienstocks, guys that dealt a whole different kind of ball game, man,” Phillips said. “You know what Phil Spector identified with in the business? He was totally influenced by Ahmet. Ahmet started a jazz and R&B field when there was no such thing. Phil was a great jazz lover, and Ahmet made an industry out of it. That was so great to him.” People around town for months had noticed that Phil's hipster mannerisms and jargon were really Ertegun's. “The prefabricated stutter that Phil did, that's an Ahmet lick,” Wexler said. “It's part satire, part emulation, and then it gets ingrained.”