Free He's a Rebel by Mark Ribowsky Page B

this big monaural ball in front of us, yet it was from two sides; if you took one of the sides out, the ball would move. We could actually get a guitar to shoot off one of the speakers, by mixing and using equalizers. What we were doing was splitting sound—before stereo.”
    Lou Chudd and Bunny Robyne, the owner of Master Sound and its studio engineer, considered it mostly wasted time. Trying to move things along, Chudd would say, “Why don’t you try it this way, Phil?”
    Spector would tell him, “I don’t want to try it that way.”
    â€œWe had ideas and we had rehearsed those ideas, and we weregonna do them our way,” Lieb said. “When we came in to do it, if it wasn’t working, Phil and I would reorganize it. We would experiment with the mixing board beyond the engineer’s capabilities. We didn’t need anybody to help us—we didn’t
want
anybody to help us.”
    However, after two weeks of sessions—most albums of the day were done inside of a week—a mere six songs were in the can. Spector refused to believe that Lou Chudd expected him to cheapen anything on the album—in the normal manner of album-making, two or three good songs were showcased, buttressed by filler—and he would hunker down between speakers playing back tracks endlessly at screechingly loud decibel levels. Other times he would shut off the lights, just like the atmosphere of his bedroom on those nights of revelation, so that he could concentrate on the sound and nothing else.
    Chudd, a bottom-line type, lost all patience. This seemingly juvenile exercise in indulgence was costing him a small fortune. In late March, fed up, Chudd took the album out of Phil’s hands and gave the job of finishing it to Jimmie Haskell, Imperial’s top staff writer/producer/arranger. Haskell took three days to record six songs. In the name of haste, he forbade Phil from playing guitar on the sessions, rightly assuming that would make Spector want to alter the arrangements that Haskell wrote. Each song was completed in one or two takes. Relegated to the unaccustomed role of a bit player, Phil petulantly said nothing beyond a few civil words to Haskell—who himself would take few bows for the album.
    â€œI did the songs that sound like they were hurried,” he acknowledged, unlike the Spector-produced tunes, which Haskell thought were “very well blended. . . . As a general rule then, we did everything live. If we overdubbed, it was with a single voice, not a group the way they did it.” Haskell was fascinated by how Spector and Lieb overdubbed their voices as the playback was piped in live. “They couldn’t hear themselves so they’d wear a headphone on one ear and cup the other ear—which everyone picked up on in the business, and is still being done today.”
    But, rushed through production, the album—
The Teddy Bears Sing!
—was a limp and soggy effort, a telling argument. No matter how well Phil Spector could tailor the sound of a record, the subliminal angst of “To Know Him Is to Love Him” owed its life to thedeath of Ben Spector; the genesis of that song was the culmination of dark forces Spector tried to push out of his psyche but which rose up in Freudian vengeance in the dead of night. Now, with no emotional context, the Teddy Bears’ songs, well crafted to be sure, were essentially heartless, derivative pinwheeling of a now-empty teen cliché. This doomed the Teddy Bears as an example of country fair cute instead of white R&B. Three Spector-penned songs were as banal as the filler songs picked by Lou Chudd—including standards like “Long Ago and Far Away,” “Little Things Mean a Lot” and “Tammy,” “True Love,” the country ballad “My Foolish Heart,” and “Unchained Melody,” which had been covered previously by both Fats Domino and Ricky Nelson, per