Tearing Down the Wall of Sound by Mick Brown Page A

easily be found out. On February 3, 1959, Valens died when the small plane carrying him, Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper crashed in Iowa. Watching the news on television, Donna Kass saw Valens’s girlfriend Donna Ludwig, for whom Valens had written the song, weeping, and realized for the first time that Phil had lied to her. But by then, his relationship with Donna was all but over.
    Spector now started dating a girl called Lynn Castle, whom he had met through Marshall Lieb. Lynn was seventeen when she met Spector, and like Donna Kass before her fancied she could see in him qualities that most people missed. Lynn had spent her childhood in a Catholic boarding school, and Spector, she thought, was actually as vulnerable and unworldly as she felt herself to be.
    â€œIt was like you see in a movie, two lost souls. I felt that. Nobody could see what in the world I ever saw in him. He didn’t look like anything that anyone with an eye for glamour would look at. But he was smart, he was sweet and he was funny. I didn’t know about his bleakness and blackness, because I had bleakness and blackness too. But I could see his vulnerability. That’s what I loved about him. Because he was fragile he was able to see my fragility. And he knew that what would make him feel okay would work for me as well. Water seeks its own level, and that’s what happened.”
    With the proceeds from “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” Spector bought his first sports car, a metallic blue Corvette. Late at night, he would drive to Castle’s house in the Valley, tap on her bedroom window and climb in and sit on the end of her bed, playing songs for her on his guitar. “Sweet, sweet songs,” Lynn says. “I was absolutely crazy about him.”
    The idyllic mood was somewhat dissipated on the rare occasions when she would visit him at the apartment on Hayworth, to be greeted at the door by Bertha with an arctic glare. Nowadays Bertha was often to be found in Wallich’s Music City, demanding to know exactly how many copies of the Teddy Bears record they had sold. And she continued to exercise an iron grip on her son’s life. “I was definitely not welcome around Bertha,” Lynn says. “The most I can remember is being at the door. I don’t even know if I ever got to go in. I don’t think anyone was good enough for her son. Bertha ran Phil.”
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    The Teddy Bears’ new home, Imperial, was known primarily as an RB label. Its owner, Lew Chudd, had built Imperial’s fortunes by tapping into the rich vein of talent in New Orleans largely overlooked by other companies. His major discovery was the exuberant Fats Domino—one of Spector’s heroes—who enjoyed a string of hits in what was known as “the race market” until crossing over into the pop charts in 1955 with “Ain’t That a Shame.” Chudd’s next big success came with Ricky Nelson—whom Spector’s mentor Barney Kessel produced for Verve. Nelson enjoyed a huge hit with a cover version of Fats Domino’s “I’m Walkin’.” But by a strange oversight, Verve had neglected to tie Nelson to a contract, and Chudd quickly signed him to Imperial. Chudd was a pushy, abrasive man who employed a novel approach to keeping abreast of teenage trends. “He’d come down to Hollywood High and take the kids to lunch,” Kim Fowley remembers, “have a burger and fries and listen to what they talked about and what they played on the jukebox. He was the old man in the corner; he looked like a guy working in a tailor’s shop. He ran his whole business based around his lunch.”
    With the Teddy Bears hit still lingering in the charts, Chudd hurried the group back into the studio to begin work on an album. Lew Bedell had exacted his revenge, using his influence to make Gold Star unavailable. Instead, Spector found himself in unfamiliar