He's a Rebel by Mark Ribowsky

because everywhere he went he had his best friend and a girl that everybody liked. And if he got in trouble with his mouth, which he often did on the road, I’d be there to say to his adversary, with an amp in my hand, ‘This is a very heavy piece of equipment and it could really hurt you if I crushed you with it.’ On his own, I don’t think he looked forward to that kind of thing happening.”
    The ersatz Spector’s Three were Russ, his girlfriend Annette Merar—a very pretty blonde, who was a grade ahead of him at Fairfax High—and another classmate, Warren Entner. Late in 1959, they went on a television show hosted by L.A. deejay Wink Martindale and lip-synched the first Spector’s Three release on Trey Records, “I Really Do.”
    This was a song born in cynicism, and it paid the price. Spector had been beaten in the evolution of the Teddy Bears’ sound by another West Coast coed vocal group, the Fleetwoods, who had a No. 1 hit the previous spring with a trembling song called “Come Softly to Me.” In a roundabout irony, and an open theft in a bid for recognition, the lyric of “I Really Do” played with the same kind of “dum-dum, dooby-doo, dum-dum” riff of the Fleetwoods’ song—which itself was derived from “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” Spector’s rip-off failed, as did two other more original Spector’s Three records.
    Even so, Lester Sill could separate Spector from his chart performance. He gave Phil an arranger’s credit on the label of the Trey records, the way Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller acknowledged their orchestra leaders, though Sill would not go as far as a production credit. Leiber and Stoller had earned the right to that high ground, and eighteen-year-old Phil Spector had no business standing on it. Sill believed in Spector, loved his drive and grasp of recording, tolerated his unorthodox ways. Although Spector continued to consume time and money in the studio, Sill did not get on him about it. “I’m tolerant when it comes to great talent,” said Sill, who did not even pretend that he could keep up with the young man in the studio. “Phil had complete control on his dates. He told us he had something and I said, ‘Let me hear it,’ and that’s when I knew about Spector’s Three.”
    Sill’s house was now Spector’s creative brewery. Lost in his art, shut out from the world, he walked around in a fog of words and music. Once, after a session, he went into the kitchen to make a sandwich and, thinking he was putting the salami back, left his wallet in the refrigerator instead. He looked all over the house before he found it. Sharing a bedroom with ten-year-old Joel, Phil soon had him copying music charts for him. The night still his refuge, Phil confined his work to the late hours. By day he hung around with Sill’s other son, Mark, and his stepson, Chuck Kaye, delighting in a brotherly kind of bonding his own home could not have even lethim imagine. Lester Sill could reasonably think he was playing surrogate father; Phil rarely saw his mother and sister, and Lester could understand why Spector jerked away when his wife, Harriet, would reach out to touch him on the arm or shoulder. “She thought he didn’t know
how
to be close to anybody,” Sill said.
    A year after Donna Kass left his life, Phil’s contact with the opposite sex was minimal, at a wistful distance. Sometimes after late sessions—Spector preferred the late evening hours for his work—he and Russ Titelman would drive for hours around the valley, and inevitably Phil would park in front of a house on Ventura Boulevard where a girl named Lynn Castle lived. Just like in a bad movie, he would wait until the lights went out in the house, then honk the horn for Lynn to come to the window. She would then climb out and get into the car. “We’d just drive around and