Free He's a Rebel by Mark Ribowsky Page A

time the Teddy Bears arrived, Annette remembered that “I was so frightened of Shirley that I ran into Phil and Marshall’s room and sat there all night crying. They took care of me. . . . Shirley was, in my mind, evil.”
    The next afternoon, at rehearsal, Shirley strutted around the stage of Broadway’s Ziegfeld Theater—from where the show would be broadcast live—puffing clouds of cigarette smoke and trying to co-opt the director. “She would argue that the lighting wasn’t right or that we weren’t standing in the right position,” Lieb said. “She made a real spectacle of herself.”
    When the Teddy Bears did a run-through of “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” accompanied by the Ray Charles Orchestra, a weary Annette couldn’t hit the song’s high note. Phil told her sternly, “Annette, if you don’t hit that note, I’m never going to talk to you again!”
    Annette was numb with fear as showtime approached. “I was so frightened that I wasn’t going to hit that note on the show. Phil had driven me crazy. He said, ‘You can’t do this. You
must
get the note right. You can’t embarrass me.’ ”
    Further auguring disaster, as the jittery threesome waited to go on that night, Phil accidentally stepped on Peggy King’s gown, ripping it slightly. The singer turned around and glared at him, and Phil wanted to crawl away. But on stage, everything went well. Phil and Marshall wore sharp-creased black tuxedos, their hair sheared into crew cuts. Annette, wearing a pink dress, managed to hit the high note of “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” and they then did a pleasant rendition of Harold Arlen’s “It’s Only a Paper Moon.”
    Fresh off that coup, the Teddy Bears began cutting their first album. Lou Chudd gave Spector a lofty budget to work with, and in March—with “To Know Him” only
now
having fallen off the chart—the group went into the studio, though it was not Gold Star but Master Sound Recorders, an old, hovellike studio on Fairfax Avenuea block away from Fairfax High School, which was used by a number of Imperial artists. Gold Star was out now, unofficially off limits because it had a close working arrangement with Lew Bedell and Herb Newman, and the fallout from the Teddy Bears’ defection would have made a session with Phil sticky for Stan Ross. But Imperial had a tremendous lure. “It was
Fats
’s label,” Lieb said. “God, do you know how exciting that was for us?”
    The studio at Master Sound was an even smaller room than Gold Star’s and had less equipment. Spector and Lieb were hard-pressed to duplicate the tonal ambience they had carved with Gold Star’s walls and low ceiling, although for the first time they got to work with union musicians: two of Lou Chudd’s top session men, bassist George “Red” Callander and drummer Earl Palmer, who worked all of Fats Domino’s sessions in New Orleans and many L.A. rock dates. Callander and Palmer were used to breezing through sessions in which they would rip out four songs in two hours. Now, even with simple arrangements, they sat for long periods, as the two teenagers fiddled with echoes and fooled with knobs on the control room board.
    Lieb remembered it as much more: “We were working on the transparency of music; that was the Teddy Bears sound: you had a lot of air moving around, notes being played in the air but not directly into the mikes. Then, when we sent it all into the chamber, this air effect is what was heard—all the notes jumbled and fuzzy. This is what we recorded—not the notes. The chamber.”
    Phil and Marshall believed they had reached the point where “we could get a kind of pseudostereo,” Lieb put it. “We could channel the high end on one side, lower end on the other. We’d be situated between the two speakers and have