Tearing Down the Wall of Sound by Mick Brown

one-nighters and sock hops in cities across the eastern seaboard.
    On the flight to New York, Phil kept Annette amused reciting skits from his two favorite comedians, Jonathan Winters and Lenny Bruce, whose first album,
Interviews of Our Times,
had been released a few months earlier. “Phil idolized Lenny and knew every line there was,” Annette remembers. “There were things about Phil that were great. He could be great fun, and he was very bright. I was having to take schoolwork with me, and he would correct me on my English grammar. It was Phil who drummed into me that you always have to put that ‘ly’ on the end of an adjective—so instead of saying ‘appropriate,’ you say ‘appropriately.’ I have Phil to thank for that. He and Marshall were very protective of me because I really was so young. They watched out for me. And I remember that they never, never, never ever made a pass at me.”
    But what should have been a triumph quickly became an ordeal. Familiar with the fights that had always characterized the Spector household, Annette and Marshall Lieb had swallowed hard when Shirley appointed herself as the group’s manager. Now their worst fears were being realized. Shirley and Phil argued constantly, “screaming fights,” Annette says. And Shirley quickly turned her temper on Annette herself.
    â€œShe could be sweet one minute, and then so mean the next. She always had me off balance because I never knew what she was doing or where she was coming from. I think that Shirley wanted to sing, too; in a sense she wanted to be me, and she resented me, even though it was my voice that had started her brother’s career. She made my life pretty terrible, a living hell.”
    Embarrassed by his sister’s behavior, Phil constantly apologized. “I think he was very concerned about her, how irrational she was. But I remember one day saying to myself, ‘This just isn’t worth it. I am going to lose my sanity over this,’ because she was so exhausting as a human being and so neurotic, or that is how I perceived her to be.”
    It was during this tour that an incident supposedly occurred that was to scar Spector for years afterward. One night, after a performance, some young toughs followed him into the men’s room, held him down and urinated on him. In years to come, this story would become a central part of the Spector mythology, to explain his distrust of the world at large, his obsession with personal security and his subsequent use of bodyguards. Curiously, Annette Kleinbard says she has no recollection of the incident. “I don’t remember that and I would have known that.” But it was a story that Spector himself would recount at various times over the years to friends and intimates.
    It is hard to imagine Spector inventing a story that casts him as the butt of such abject humiliation, but his tendency to self-mythologizing was already becoming apparent to those around him. In a hotel in New York, the three Teddy Bears were astonished when Fidel Castro, newly installed as the revolutionary leader of Cuba and on an unofficial visit to the United States, stepped into the elevator behind them, accompanied by a phalanx of bodyguards in combat fatigues. “Phil,” Annette remembers, “was making faces at them behind their backs. He was a real prankster.” In later years, Spector would inflate this fleeting encounter into a personal meeting with Castro, at which the Cuban leader allegedly offered him a job as a translator.
    Back in Los Angeles, apparently keen to exaggerate his growing importance still further, he told Kim Fowley that he had produced the Mystics’ doo-wop hit “Hushabye,” and “Come On, Let’s Go” by Ritchie Valens. When Valens’s song “Donna” was a hit, Spector told Donna Kass that he had written the song for her. What is so mystifying is that Spector could