He's a Rebel by Mark Ribowsky Page B

is.”
    Mike Stoller sent airfare for Phil Spector.
    Kim Fowley hadn’t heard much about Spector since he saw the Phil Harvey band perform at the Rainbow Roller Rink. Fowley had now secured a job at Arwin Records, a small label owned by actress DorisDay and her husband Marty Melcher, which had just had its first hit, Jan and Arnie’s “Jennie Lee.” Fowley—“I was an office boy, quasi-publishing assistant, and song-plugger”—was looking to sign acts, having brought to Arwin Bruce Johnston and other remnants of the old Sleepwalkers—minus Sammy Nelson, now known as Sandy, who had notched a hit of his own in 1959 with a drum instrumental called “Teen Beat” and was signed to Imperial—and Johnston had begun recording with Doris Day’s son, Terry Melcher, as Bruce and Terry. Pondering people who could make Arwin big time, Fowley called soul singer Johnny “Guitar” Watson and then Phil Spector.
    â€œHey, man, I’m at Arwin now,” he told Spector. “If you want some studio time, we’ll back you. Or you can just come hang out here.”
    With typical overstatement, Spector said, “No . . . I just did a deal with Leiber and Stoller. I’m going to New York any minute now to deal with ’em.”
    In mid-May, just before he left, Phil dropped by Russ Titel-man’s place to say good-bye. He gave Russ a guitar, a snazzy Defender Telecaster model, in apparent gratitude.
    â€œHold this for me,” he said to Russ, as if giving himself a reason to return.
    Eight hours later, Phil Spector was on Broadway.

Mike and Jerry had no idea that he was going to be such a manipulator
.
    â€” BEVERLY ROSS
    When he landed in New York, Phil had no plan or itinerary beyond getting to 40 W. 57th Street. This was the location of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s office, and for Phil, having made no arrangement for lodging, it was the width and breadth of his world. After arriving at the narrow office building between Fifth and Sixth avenues, he ascended to the penthouse suite and appeared before his two new mentors—who, to his dismay, did not remember him from the sojourns he had made with Lester Sill. Indeed, Spector’s edgy, inscrutable manner made Leiber and Stoller uneasy.
    Mike Stoller said years later: “He seemed very bright, a very sharp young man, witty and sarcastic. I sensed a rather angry young man. He dressed like a businessman, he wore a suit and tie, and he looked like a man on the make.”
    Implying that he couldn’t afford to go elsewhere, Phil was allowed to crash that night on the couch at the rear of the office, and he would do the same in following days. The truth was, Spector had money in his pocket, but part of his New York music assimilation was to assume the guise of bohemian deprivation.
    â€œHe didn’t
want
a place to live,” Lester Sill explained. “He was happy where he was. I imagine he thought he was in Paris.”
    â€œPhil wasn’t broke when he went to New York,” Marshall Lieb agreed. “Phil was good at camping out, he did that a lot. He did that because he truly liked that bag-lady lifestyle. That to him was how good music was made. He didn’t want to be too set, too comfortable. He wanted to be where if a song came to him at three in the morning, he could get up when everyone else was wasted and get started with it. And where better to do that than in the atmosphere of Leiber and Stoller’s office?”
    And yet Leiber and S toller were too busy to think about figuring him out, or even to notice him much. Left to fend for himself, Spector looked around at a rock-and-roll bureaucracy he had studied from afar, and he was avid to dip his feet into the pond. Hanging around at the restaurants and other haunts where the music crowd congregated, he ran into many of the working and aspiring songwriters who covered the canyons of Broadway like locusts;