Tearing Down the Wall of Sound by Mick Brown Page B

mocking and ridiculing the adult world, and which Leiber described as “a white kid’s take on a black kid’s take on white society.”
    At the same time, the pair landed an unexpected windfall when, in 1956, Elvis Presley recorded their earlier hit “Hound Dog.” Presley’s version went on to sell 7 million copies, remaining at number 1 on the pop charts for an incredible eleven weeks—still a record for the longest time any record has held the number 1 spot. In addition to their Atlantic work, Leiber and Stoller suddenly found themselves being called upon to provide more songs for Presley as well.
    But perhaps their greatest artistic triumph would come with the Drifters, for whom they crafted a glorious succession of hit singles that would take pop music to new heights of sophistication and polish. Their first hit for the group, “There Goes My Baby,” which reached number 2 in the charts in 1959, is widely credited as being the first RB record to employ strings. It was also the first pop record to employ the subtle Latin American rhythm known as the
baion,
which put the emphasis on the first, third and fourth beats of the bar (
one
[two]
three-four, one
[two]
three-four
). Not only did the
baion
become the basis of a succession of Drifters records, from “Save the Last Dance for Me” to “Under the Boardwalk,” but Leiber and Stoller’s combination of subtle rhythms and arrangements, the “cushion” of sound they constructed in their recordings by using two or three guitarists and three or four percussionists, would serve as one of the most important precursors for what Spector later achieved with his Wall of Sound.
    Jerry Leiber was less than enthralled when Lester Sill called him from California to ask whether the pair could find a use for “this talented kid” named Phil Spector who wanted to learn the business. “I said, ‘That’s an invitation to poach our ideas,’” Leiber remembers. “And Lester said, ‘So what?’”
    Sill talked up his young protégé, reminding Leiber about Spector’s early success with the Teddy Bears. “I told him that we didn’t go for that white-bread trash. We wrote for black people—we were race-record makers. But Lester said, ‘Hey, come on. He’s very talented and he would be so grateful’—which is actually not something that you would ever associate with Phil.”
    Nor was Leiber any more impressed when Spector walked through the door of his office at 40 West Fifty-seventh Street.
    To Leiber, Spector cut an odd-looking figure, small and scrawny, with a “furtive” manner, and a disconcerting tic of widening his eyes and then blinking, “as if he was looking not at you, but through you.” Spector gave off what Leiber calls “conflicting signals” one minute quiet and self-effacing—“he’d had a big, big hit, and that gives people a sense of accomplishment and security, but Phil acted like it had never happened”—the next, pushy, with an eye for the main chance and a self-belief beyond his twenty years. Leiber thought Spector was “a very strange dog.”
    What did impress him, however, was Spector’s talent. Whatever Leiber might have thought of “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” it was obvious that Spector was a promising producer, and—of more immediate use to the producers—a gifted guitarist. “He’d studied with Barney Kessel and he carried that strong jazz-guitar discipline. He was very good.”
    Leiber and Stoller signed him to their company Trio Music on a two-year contract. Lacking funds, for the first few weeks Spector slept on the sofa in their office, his bag and guitar stashed away in the corner, until finding a small apartment of his own.
    Spector had now arrived at the epicenter of the American music business and, while sitting in on sessions with