Teddy Bears

Long before Phil Spector was single-handedly constructing his "Wall of Sound" with stacked-up, single-track-mono teen symphonies, he too was a struggling vocalist and musician looking for a break. That break came in 1958 as songwriter, guitarist, and backup singer for the short-lived L.A-based trio, the Teddy Bears, who landed a left-field number one hit with Spector's first recorded composition, the elegiac and sepulchral ballad "To Know Him Is to Love Him," a tribute to his deceased father (who had committed suicide in 1949, during Spector's childhood). As a teenager, Spector was a loner. With little to interest him while taking classes at Fairfax High School, he was drawn to studying music, and soon excelled on the guitar, piano, drums, bass, and French horn. He also began writing and recording original songs in the R&B genre. He may have been only 17 years old, but he was already becoming a magnetic presence on the L.A. music scene and had already attracted his own disciples, including future Warner Bros. Honcho Russ Titelman and future Mother of Invention/Magic Band member Elliot Ingber. Spector soon joined a group of would-be-musicians/producers/baloney throwers hanging around recording studios to learn as much as they could. Like Kim Fowley, Gary Paxton, Herb Alpert, Lou Adler, and others, he learned how to make records by visiting places like Gold Star studios, a recording studio on Vine Street and Santa Monica Blvd., which had opened in 1950. Owners/recording engineers Stan Ross and Dave Gold taught Spector how to record drums, how to arrange, how to mix records -- virtually everything they knew. At one of these studios, he met Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, two songwriters that were already beginning to have much success producing singles for the Robins....