A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 104: “He’s a Rebel” by “The Crystals”

Episode Date: November 16, 2020

Episode 104 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “He’s a Rebel”, and how a song recorded by the Blossoms was released under the name of the Crystals.  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Sukiyaki” by Kyu Sakamoto. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A History of Rock Music and 500 songs by 100 Hig. Episode 104. He's a Rebel by The Crystals. A brief note. There are some very brief mentions of domestic abuse here. Nothing I think will upset anyone, but you might want to check the transcript if you're at all unsure. Up to this point, whenever we've looked at a girl group, it's been at one that's had, to a greater or lesser extent, some control over their own career. Groups like the Marvelettes, the Chantels and the Bobettes, all wrote their own material, at least at first,

and had distinctive personalities before they ever made a record. But today we're going to look at a group whose identity was so subsumed in that of their producer that the record we're looking at was released under the name of a different group from the one that recorded it. We're going to look at He's a Rebel, which was recorded by the Blossoms,

and released by the crystals. The crystals, from their very beginnings, were intended as a vehicle for the dreams of men, rather than for their own ambitions. Whereas the girl groups we've looked at so far, all formed as groups of friends at school before they moved into professional singing. The crystals were put together by a man named Benny Wells.

Wells had a niece, Barbara Alston, who sang with a couple of her school friends, Mary Thomas and Merner Giraud. Wells put those three together with two other girls, D.D. Kennebrew and Patsy Wright, to form a five-piece vocal group. Wells seems not to have had much concept of what was in the charts at the time. The descriptions of the music he had the girls singing, talk about him wanting them to sound like the modern airs,

the vocal group who sang with Glenn Miller's band in the early 1940s. But the girls went along with Wells, and Wells had good enough ears to recognize a hit when one was brought. to him, and one was brought to him by Patsy Wright's brother-in-law, Leroy Bates. Bates had written a song called There's No Other Like My Baby, and Wells could tell it had potential. Incidentally, some books say that the song was based on a gospel song called There's No Other Like My Jesus, and that claim is repeated on Wikipedia, but I can't find any evidence of a song of that name other than people talking about There's No Other Like My Baby.

There is a gospel song called There's No Other No Other No Other Name. name like Jesus, but that has no obvious resemblance to Bates' song, and so I'm going to assume that the song was totally original. As well as bringing the song, Bates also brought the fledgling group a name. He had a daughter, Crystal Bates, after whom the group named themselves. The newly named crystals took their song to the offices of Hill and Range music, which, as well as being a publishing company, also owned Big Top Records, the label that had put out the original version of Twist and Shout, which had so annoyed Bert Burns. And it was there that they ended up meeting up with Phil Spector.

After leaving his role at Atlantic, Spector had started working as a freelance producer, including working for Big Top. According to Spector, a notorious liar, it's important to remember, he worked during this time on dozens of hits for which he didn't get any credit, just to earn money. But we do know about some of the records he produced during this time.

For example, there was one by a new singer called Gene Pitney. Pitney had been knocking around for years, recording for Decker as part of a duo called Jamie and Jane, and for Blaze Records, as Billy Brian. But he'd recently signed to Musicore, a label owned by Aaron Schroeder, and had recorded a hit under his own name. Pitney had written, I want to love my life away,

and had taken advantage of the new multi-tracking technology to record his vocals six times over, creating a unique sound that took the record into the top 40. But while that had been a hit, his second single for Musicor was a flop, and so for the third single, Musicor decided to pull out the big guns. They ran a session at which basically

the whole of the Brill building turned up. Libra and Stoller were to produce a song they'd written for Pitney, the new hot husband and wife songwriting team of Barryman and Cynthia Weil were there, as was Bert Baccarac, and so were Goffin and King, who wrote the song that Spectre was to produce for Pitney. All of them were in the control booth, and all of them were chipping in ideas.

As you might expect with that many cooks, the session did not go smoothly, and to make matters worse, Pitney was suffering from a terrible cold. The session ended up costing $13,000, at a time when an average recording session cost $500. On the song Specter was producing on that session, Goffin and Kings, Every Breath I Take,

Pitney knew that with the cold he would be completely unable to hit the last note in full voice and went into falsetto. Luckily, everyone thought it sounded good, and he could pretend it was deliberate, rather than the result of necessity. The record only went to number 42, but it resuscitated Pitney's singing career, and forged a working relationship between the two men. But soon after that, Spector had flown back to L.A. to work with his old friend, L.S.

Sil. Sil and producer songwriter Lee Hazelwood had been making records with the guitarist Dwayne Eddie, producing a string of hit like Rebel Rouser. But Eddie had recently signed directly to a label, rather than going through Sil and Hazelwood's company as

before, and so Sil and Hazelwood had been looking for new artists, and they'd recently signed a group called the Paris Sisters to their production company. Sil had decided to get Spector in to produce the group, and Spector came up with the production that Sil was sure would be a hit on a song called I Love How You Love Me, written by Barryman with another writer called Jack Keller. Spector was becoming a perfectionist. He insisted on recording

the rhythm track for that record at one studio and the string part at another, and apparently spent 50 hours on the mix. And Sil was spending more and more time in the studio with Spector, fascinated at his attitude to the work he was doing. This led to a breakup between Sil and Hazelwood. Their business business relationship was already strained, but Hazelwood got jealous of all the time that Sil was spending with Spector, and decided to split their partnership and go and produce Dwayne Eddie, without Sil, at Eddie's new label. So Sil was suddenly in the market for a new business partner, and he and Spector decided that they were going to start up their own label, Phil Les, although by this point everyone who had ever worked with Spectre was warning Sil that it was a bad

idea to go into business with him. But Spector and Sill kept their intention secret for a while, and so when Spector met the crystals at Hillen Range's offices, everyone at Hillen Range just assumed that he was still working for them as a freelance producer, and that the crystals were going to be recording for Big Top. Freddy Beanstock of Hillen Range later said, We were very angry, because we felt they were big top artists. He was merely supposed to produce them for us. There was no question about the fact that he was just rehearsing them for Big Top. Hell, he rehearsed them for weeks in our offices, and then he'd just stole them right out of here. That precipitated a breach of contract with us. We were just incensed because that was a terrific

group, and for him to do that shows the type of character he was. We felt he was less than ethical, and obviously he was then shown the door. Beanstock had further words for Spector too, ones I can't repeat here because of content rules about adult language, but they weren't flattering. Spector had been dating Beanstalk's daughter with Beanstalk's approval, but that didn't last once Spector betrayed Beanstalk. But Spector didn't care. He had his own New York girl group, one that could compete with the Bobbettes or the Chantels or the Cherelles,

and he was going to make the crystals as big as any of them, and he wasn't going to cut Big Top in. He slowed down, there's no other like my baby, and it became the first release on Philez Records, with Barbara Alston singing Lee. That record was cut late at night in June 1961. In fact, it was cut on prom night. Three of the girls came straight to the session from their high school prom,

still wearing their prom dresses. Spector wrote the B-side, a song that was originally intended to be the A-side, called, Oh yeah, Maybe Baby, but everyone quickly realized that There's No Water like my baby was the hit, and it made the top 20. While Spector was waiting for the money to come in on the first Phyllis record, he took another job with Liberty Records, working for his friend

Snuff Garrett. He got a $30,000 advance, made a single flop record with them with an unknown singer named Audrey Wilson, and then quit, keeping his $30,000. Once There's No Other made the charts, Spector took the crystals into the studio again, to record a song by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil that he'd got from Aldon Music. Spector was becoming increasingly convinced that he'd made a mistake in partnering with Lester Sill, and he should really have been working with Don Kirchner, and he was in discussions with Kirchner, which came to nothing, about them having some sort of joint project. While those discussions fell through, almost all the songs that Spector would use for the next few years would come from Aldon songwriters, and Uptown was a perfect example

of the new kind of socially relevant pop songwriting that had been pioneered by Goffin and King, but which Man and Wyle were now making their own. Before becoming a professional songwriter, Weil had been part of the Greenwich Village folk scene, and while she wasn't going to write anything as explicitly political as the work of Pete Seeger, she thought that songs should at least try to be about the real world. Uptown was the first example of a theme which would become a major motif for the Crystal's records, a song about a man who has looked down upon by society, but who the singer believes is better than his reputation. Man and Wiles' song combined that potent teen emotion with an inspiration while it had,

seeing a handsome black man pushing a hand truck in the garment district, and realising that even though he was oppressed by his job and a nobody when he was working downtown, he was still somebody when he was at home. They originally wrote the song for Tony Orlando to sing, but Spector insisted, rightly, that the song worked better with female voices and that the crystals should do it. Spector took Man and Wiles' song and gave it a production that evoked the Latin feel

of Libre and Stoller's records for the Drifters. By the time of this second record, the crystals had already been through one line-up change. As soon as she left school, Mernard Girod got married and she didn't want to perform on stage anymore. She would still sing with the girls in the studio for a little while. She's on every track of the first album,

though she left altogether soon after this recording. but she was a married woman now and didn't want to be in a group. The girls needed a replacement, and they also needed something else, a lead singer. All the girls loved singing, but none of them wanted to be out-in-front singing lead. Luckily, D.D. Kenny Brew's mother was a secretary at the school attended by a 14-year-old gospel singer named Lala Brooks, and she heard Brooks singing and invited her to join the group. Brooks soon became the group's lead vocalist on stage. But in the studio, Spector didn't want to use her as the lead vocalist.

He insisted on Barb for singing the lead on Uptown, but in a sign of things to come, Man and Weil weren't happy with her performance. Spector had to change parts of the melody to accommodate her range. And they begged Spector to re-record the lead vocal with Little Eva singing. However, Eva became irritated with Spector's incessant demands for more takes and his micro-management, cursed him out, and walked out of the studio. The record was released with Barbara's original lead vocal,

and while Man and Wael weren't happy with that, listeners were, as it went to number 13 on the charts. Little Eva later released her own version of the song, on the Dimension Dolls compilation we talked about in the episode on The Locomotion. It was Little Eva who inspired the next Crystal single as well. As we talked about in the episode on her, she inspired a truly tasteless Goffin and King song called he hit me and it felt like a kiss,

which I will not be excerpting, but which was briefly released as the Crystal's third single, before being withdrawn, after people objected to hearing teenage girls sing about how romantic and loving domestic abuse is. There seems to be some suggestion that the record was released partly as a way for Spector to annoy Lester Sill, who by all accounts was furious at the release.

Spector was angry at Sill over the amount of money he'd made from the Paris Sisters recordings and decided that he was being tried, treated unfairly and wanted to force Sill out of their partnership. Certainly the next recording by the Crystals was meant to get rid of some other business associates. Two of Phil Lez's distributors had a contract which said they were entitled to the royalties on two crystal singles. So the second one was a ten-minute song called The Screw, split over two sides of a disc, which sounded like this.

Only a handful of promotional copies of that were ever produced. One went to Lester Sill, who by this point had been born. out of his share of the company for a small fraction of what it was worth. The last single Spector recorded for Phyllis, while Sil was still involved with the label, was another Crystal's record, one that had the involvement of many people Sil had brought into Spector's orbit, and who would continue working with him long after the two men stopped working together. Spector had decided he was going to start recording in California again, and two of Sil's assistants would become regular parts of Spector's new hit-making machine.

The first of these was a composer and arranger called Jack Nitchie, who we'll be seeing a lot more of in this podcast over the next couple of years, in some unexpected places. Nitchie was a young songwriter, whose biggest credit up to this point was a very minor hit for Preston Epps, Bongo, Bongo, Bongo. Nitchie would become Spector's most important collaborator, and his arrangements, as much as Spector's production, are what characterised the wall of sound for which Spector would become famous.

The other assistant of Sills who became important to Spector's future was a saxophone player named Steve Douglas. We've seen Douglas before briefly in the episode on LSD 25. He played in the original line-up of Kip and the Flips, one of the groups we talked about in that episode. He'd left Kip and the Flips to join Dwayne Eddy's band, and it was through Eddie that he had started working with Sil when he played on many of Eddie's hit,

most famously Peter Gunn. Douglas was the union contractor for the session and for most of the rest of Spector's 60s sessions. This is something we've not talked about previously, but when we look at records produced in LA for the next few years, in particular, it's something that will come up a lot. When a producer wanted to make records at the time, he, for they were all men, would not contact all the musicians himself. Instead, he'd get in touch with a trusted musician and say,

I have a session at 3 o'clock. I need two guitars, bass, drums, a clarinet and a cello, or whatever combination of instruments. And sometimes might say, if you can get this particular player, that would be good. The musician would then find out which other musicians were available, get them into the studio and file the forms which made sure they got paid according to union rules.

The contractor, not the producer, decided who was going to play on the session. In the case of this Crystal session, Spector already had a couple of musicians in mind. A bass player named Ray Pullman and his old guitar teacher, Howard Roberts, a jazz guitarist who had played on to know him as to love him, and I love how you love me for Spector already. But Spector wanted a big sound. He wanted the rhythm instruments doubled,

so there was a second bass player, Jimmy Bond, and a second guitarist Tommy Tedesco. Along with them and the music. Douglas were piano player Al DeLoree and drummer Hal Blaine. This was the first session on which Spector used any of these musicians, and with the exception of Roberts, who hated working on Spector's sessions and soon stopped, this group put together by Douglas would become the core of what became known as the Wrecking crew, a loose group of musicians who would play on a large number of the hit records that would come out of LA in the 60s. Spector also had a guaranteed hit song, one by

Gene Pitney. While Pitney wrote few of his own records, he'd established himself a parallel career as a writer for other people. He'd written today's teardrops, the B-side of Roy Orbison's hit, Blue Angel, and had followed that up with a couple of the biggest hits of the early 60s. Bobby V's Rubber Ball I'm like a rubber ball, baby, that's all that I am to you. Just a rubber ball because you think you can be true to two. bouncy bouncy, bouncy, bouncy, you bounce my heart. And Ricky Nelson's Hello Mary Lou.

Pitney had written a song, He's a Rebel, that was very strongly inspired by Uptown, and Aaron Schroeder, Pitney's publisher, had given the song to Spector. but Spector knew Schroeder and knew that when he gave you a song he was going to give it to every other producer who came knocking as well he's a rebel was definitely going to be a massive hit for someone and he wanted it to be for the crystals he phoned them up and told them to come out to L.A. to record the song and they said no the crystals had become sick of Spector

he'd made them record songs like he hit me and it felt like a kiss he'd refused to let their lead singer sing a lead and they'd not see any money from their two big hits. They weren't going to fly from New York to L.A. just because he said so. Spector needed a new group in L.A. that he could record doing the song before someone else did it. He could use the Crystal's name. Philas had the right to put out records by whoever they liked and call it the crystals. He just needed a group. He'd found one in The Blossoms, a group who had connections to many of the people Spector was working with. Jack Nitch's wife sometimes sang with them on sessions, and they'd also sung on a Dwayne Eddy record that Lester still had worked on,

dance with the guitar man, where they'd been credited as the Rebelettes. The Blossoms had actually been making records in L.A. for nearly eight years at this point. They'd started out as the Dreamers, one of the many groups had been discovered by Johnny Otis back in the early 50s, and had also been part of the scene around the Penguins, one of whom went to school with some of the girls. They started out as a six-piece, but slimmed down to a quartet after their first record on which they were the backing group for Richard Berry. The first stable line-up of The Dreamers consisted of Phenita James, Gloria Jones, not the one who would later record Tainted Love, and the twin sisters Annette and Nanette Williams.

They worked primarily with Barry, backing him on five singles in the mid-50s, and also recording songs he wrote for them under their own name, like Do Not Forget, which actually featured another singer, Janelle Hawkins, on lead. They also sang backing vocals on plenty of other R&B records from people in the LAR&B scene. For example, it's them singing backing vocals with Jesse Belvin on Etta James' Good Rocking Daddy. The group signed to Capitol Records in 1957, but not under the name The Dreamers. An executive there said that they all had different skin tones and it made them look like flowers. so they became The Blossoms.

They were only at Capital for a year, but during that time an important line-up change happened. Nanette quit the group and was replaced by a singer called Darlene Wright. From that point on, The Blossoms was the main name the group went under, though they also recorded under other names. For example, using the name The Play Girls to record, G, but I'm Lonesome, a song written by Bruce Johnston, who was briefly dating Annette Williams at the time.

By 1961, Annette had left the group, and they were down to a trio of Finita, Gloria and Darlene. Their records, under whatever name, didn't do very well, but they became the first call session singers in LA, working on records by everyone from Sam Cuck to Jean Autry. So it was the Blossoms who were called on in late 1962 to record, He's a Rebel, and it was Darlene Wright who earned her session fee, and no royalties, singing the lead on a number one record. From that point on, the Blossoms would sing on almost every Spector session for the next three years, and Darlene, who he renamed Darlene Love, would become Spector's go-to lead vocalist for records under her own name, The Blossoms,

Bobby Sox and the Blue Jeans, and the Crystals. It was lucky for Spector that he decided to go this route rather than wait for the crystals, not only because it introduced him to the Blossoms, but because he'd been right about Aaron Schroeder. As Spector and Sil sat together in the studio where they were mastering the record, some musicians on a break from the studio next door wandered in, and said, Hey man, we were just playing the same goddamn song! Literally in the next room, as Spector mastered the record,

his friend Snuff Gareth was producing Vicky Carr singing, He's a Rebel. Philez got their version out first, and Carr's record sank without trace, while The Crystals went to number one, keeping the songs writer off the top spot, as Jean Pitney sat at number two with a Bacacac and David's song, Only Love can break a heart. The crystals were shocked that Spector released a crystals record without any of them on it,

but La La Brooks had a similar enough voice to Darlene Loves that they were able to pull the song off live. They had a bit more of a problem with the follow-up, also by the blossoms but released as the crystals. Lala could sing that fine, but she had to work on the spoken part. Darlene was from California, and Lala had a thick Brooklyn accent. She managed it just about. As Lala was doing such a good job of singing Darlene Love's Parts Live, and, more importantly, as she was only 15, and so didn't complain about things like royalties,

the crystals finally did get their way and have Lala start singing the leads on their singles, starting with Do Do Run Run. The problem is, none of the other crystals were on those records. It was Lala singing with the blossoms plus other session singers. Listen out for the low harmony in Do Do Run Ron Ron and see if you recognise the voice. Cher would later move on to bigger things than being a filling crystal. Do Do Run Ron Ron became another big hit, making number three in the charts. And the follow-up, then he kissed me, with La La La once again a little.

on lead vocals also made the top ten, but the group were falling apart. Spector was playing La La La Off against the rest of the group just to cause trouble, and he'd also lost interest in them once he discovered another group, the Ronette, who we'll be hearing more about in future episodes. The singles following Then He Kissed Me barely scraped the bottom of the Hot 100, and the group left Phyllis in 1964. They got a payoff of $5,000, in lieu of all future royalties on any of their recordings. They had no luck having hits without Spector, and one by one the group members left, and the group split up by 1966. Mary, Barbara and Didi briefly reunited as the Crystals in 1971, and Lala and Didi made an album together in the 80s of remakes of the group's hits,

but nothing came of any of these. Didi continues to tour under the Crystal's name in North America, while La Laugh performs solo in America and under the crystals name in Europe. Barbara, the lead singer on the group's first hits, died in 2018. Darlene Love continues to perform, but we'll hear more about her and the blossoms in future episodes, I'm sure. The crystals were treated appallingly by Spectre, and are not often treated much better by the fans, who see them as just interchangeable parts in a machine created by a genius. but it should be remembered that they were the ones who brought Spector the song that became the first Philas hit.

That both Barbara and Lala were fine singers who sang lead on classic hit records, and that Spector taking all the credit for a team effort doesn't mean he deserved it. Both the crystals and the blossoms deserved better than to have their identities erased in return for a flat session fee in order to service the ego of one man. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast. This week's is on Sukki-Arki by Kiyu Sakamoto. Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month.

A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available. Search Andrew Hickey 500 songs on your favourite online bookstore, or visit the links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Ariser. visit 500Songs.com that's 500000 the numbers songs.com to read transcripts and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing,

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