He's a Rebel by Mark Ribowsky Page A

they’d be kissing. Sometimes they’d drop me off and Phil would pick me up later,” Titelman recalled of the routine, which never seemed to get any more serious.
    Spector had other, more meaningful obsessions in his life. Semiemployed as a court reporter, he was called to do stenotype when depositions were taken and legal papers filed in the Los Angeles courthouse during the interminable appeals case of Caryl Chessman, the convicted murderer who was sentenced in 1949 to die in the gas chamber. As Chessman’s decade-long Death Row bid to stay alive became more heated, and a public
cause célèbre
, the compulsive Spector, devouring reams of details about the case, took to defending Chessman fanatically. In Sill’s office, he’d try to talk everybody over to his side. “He was very liberal, which was unusual for a teenager in those days,” Sill said. “A lot of the kids around the place thought he was communist.”
    Most pressing, however, was for Phil to park himself in the studio. Early in 1960, Sill signed a black singer, Kell Osborne, who sang in the high-pitched, sorrowful style of ex-Drifter Clyde McPhatter, whose voice Sill loved. Shunted to Phil to produce, Spector and Sill rehearsed Osborne for two months, then flew him to Phoenix to record him at Ramco. But when Osborne got off the plane, he was so nervous about making a record that he lost his voice. For five maddening days, Spector tried to coax him to sing. Finally two sides were cut, a remake of “The Bells of St. Mary’s” and a Spector tune, “That’s Alright Baby.” Back in L.A., Phil overdubbed with regular Sill sidemen, saxophonist Plas Johnson and bassist Ray Pohlman.The songs, released on Trey, were starkly, bizarrely opposite: the A side was mawkish, the other tough-teen rattling, on which Osborne sounded more like Eddie Cochran than McPhatter, fitted with booming drums and gnawing guitars.
    The songs’ lack of airplay irritated Spector and prompted him to shift his sights. He was tired of the limited scope of the L.A. rock scene, which was still lowercase compared with New York and Memphis; where music gushed from a thousand geysers in those places, it seeped here. Indeed, Spector’s own group had been L.A.’s most viable product, and now
that
was gone. There was no shape or form to the local scene, no reliability to its structure, no broad power.
    Lester Sill was Phil’s link to the bustle and glamour of the real power. Sill had taken him to New York a few times when he went there on business. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller would call Sill from their studio, and then meet with him when he got to New York. Then Sill would go over to Don Kirshner’s office at Aldon Music, the biggest publisher of rock-and-roll music, to find songs for his acts. Along for the ride, Spector
felt
like an industry scion.
    â€œHe saw all the activity going on,” Sill said, “because at the time the rock-and-roll business was really New York . . . the Brill Building, 1650 Broadway, Leiber and Stoller. Phil knew it, he saw it. He was so bright about how the business worked. And Spector by then had a certain amount of notoriety.”
    Eager to use that as a lever, Spector bugged Sill all the time to find something for him to do back east. “He wanted to go to New York. He knew of my relationship with Mike and Jerry and he asked if something could be arranged with them.”
    Knowing Phil was unhappy on the L.A. treadmill, Sill phoned Mike Stoller in the spring and obtained a position for Phil on the Leiber and Stoller payroll—Spector’s contract with Sill/Hazelwood would still apply to his work in L.A.—as a songwriter and as an apprentice producer. As Sill explained it to Mike Stoller, Spector would not be one to blend into the wallpaper.
    â€œHe’s strange, this kid,” Sill warned. “But you won’t believe how talented he