Episode 104: “He’s a Rebel” by “The Crystals”

A history of folk music and 500 songs.

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 had, to a greater or lesser extent, some control over their own career.

Groups like the Marvelettes, the Chantelles, and the Babettes 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 Esa Rebel, which was recorded by the Blossoms and released by the Crystals.

He's a rebel, cause he never ever does what he should do.

Just because he doesn't do what everybody else does,

there's no reason why I can't give him all my love.

He is always good to me, always treats me tenderly.

Cause he's my rebel, long enough, he's my rebel close enough to be

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 Myrna Girode.

Wells put those three together with two other girls, D.

D.

Kennybrew 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 nineteen forties.

But the girls went along with Wells, and Wells had good enough ears to recognise 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 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 Burt 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 Decca as part of a duo called Jamie and Jane.

The waves were softly breaking

as you held me in your arms.

We both knew that it wouldn't last as we looked out o'er the sea.

I felt a tear roll down my cheek at the thought of your leaving me

and for Blaze Records as Billy Bryan.

I

am

so sad and lonely.

I cry myself to sleep

every

night.

I kneel

But he'd recently signed to Musicor, a label owned by Aaron Schroeder, and had recorded a hit under his own name.

Pitney had written, I Wanna 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 forty.

I wanna love my life away.

I wanna love, love, love,

love my life away with you.

In the morning, my pop,

all your kids in the late at night.

I want

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.

Lieber and Stoller were to produce a song they'd written for Pitney.

The new, hot, husband-and-wife songwriting team of Barryman and Cynthia Weill were there, as was Burt Bacharach, 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 five hundred dollars.

On the song Spectre was producing on that session, Goffin and King's 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.

Oh, I'll tell you little remotely

every little step on me.

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, Spectre had flown back to LA to work with his old friend Lester Sill.

Sill and producer-songwriter Lee Hazelwood had been making records with the guitarist Dwayne Eddy, producing a string of hits like Rebel Rouser.

But Eddie had recently signed directly to a label, rather than going through Sill and Hazelwood's company as before.

And so Sill and Hazelwood had been looking for new artists, and they'd recently signed a group called The Paris Sisters to their production company.

Sill had decided to get Spectre in to produce the group, and Spectre came up with a production that Syl was sure would be a hit, on a song called I Love How You Love Me, written by Barry Mann with another writer called Jack Keller.

And when I'm away from you,

I love how you miss

me.

I love the way you always

treat me tenderly.

But, darling, most of all,

I love how you love me.

Spectre 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 Syl was spending more and more time in the studio with Spectre, fascinated at his attitude to the work he was doing.

This led to a breakup between Syl and Hazelwood.

Their business relationship was already strained, but Hazelwood got jealous of all the time that Syl was spending with Spectre, and decided to split their partnership and go and produce Dwayne Eddie, without Syl, at Eddie's new label.

So Sill was suddenly in the market for a new business partner, and he and Spectre 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 Sill that it was a bad idea to go into business with him.

But Spectre and Sill kept their intentions secret for a while, and so when Spectre met the Crystals at Hill and Range's offices, everyone at Hill and 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 Hill and 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 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, ethical, and obviously he was then shown the door.

Beanstock had further words for Spectre too, ones I can't repeat here because of content rules about adult language, but they weren't flattering.

Spectre had been dating Beanstock's daughter with Beanstock's approval, but that didn't last once Spectre betrayed Beanstock.

But Spectre didn't care.

He had his own New York girl group, one that could compete with the Bobbettes or the Chantelles or the Shirelles, 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 Philaz Records, with Barbara Alston singing lead.

Looking at my baby,

feeling so proud

That record was cut late at night in June 1961.

In fact, it was cut on from night.

Three of the girls came straight to the session from their high school prom, still wearing their prom dresses.

Spectre wrote the B-side, a song that was originally intended to be the A-side, called Oh Yeah, Maybe Maybe Baby, but everyone quickly realised that There's No Other Like My Baby was the hit, and it made the top twenty.

While Spectre was waiting for the money to come in on the first Philes 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 Obery Wilson, and then quit, keeping his $30,000.

Once There's No Other made the charts, Spectre took the crystals into the studio again to record a song by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill that he'd got from Aldon Music.

Spectre was becoming increasingly convinced that he'd made a mistake in partnering with Lester Sill, and he should really have been working with Don Kirshner, and he was in discussions with Kirschner, which came to nothing, about them having some sort of joint project.

While those discussions fell through, almost all the songs that Spectre 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 Mann and Weill were now making their own.

Before becoming a professional songwriter, Weill 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 is looked down upon by society, but who the singer believes is better than his reputation.

Mann and Wilde's song combined that potent teen emotion with an inspiration Wilde had had, seeing a handsome black man pushing a hand truck in the garment district, and realizing 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 Spectre insisted, rightly, that the song worked better with female voices, and that the crystals should do it.

Spector took Man and Wilde's song and gave it a production that evoked the Latin feel of Lieber and Stoller's records for the Drifters.

he comes uptown each evening into my tenement.

Uptown where folks don't have to play much rent.

And when he's there with me, he can see that he's everything.

By the time of this second record, the Crystals had already been through one line-up change.

As soon as she left school, Myrna Giraud 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, Spectre didn't want to use her as the lead vocalist.

He insisted on Barbara singing the lead on Uptown, but in a sign of things to come, Mann and Weill weren't happy with her performance.

Spectre had to change parts of the melody to accommodate her range, and they begged Spectre to re-record the lead vocal with Little Eva singing.

However, Eva became irritated with Spectre's incessant demands for more takes and his micromanagement, micromanagement, cursed him out, and walked out of the studio.

The record was released with Barbara's original lead vocal, and while Madame Will weren't happy with that, listeners were, as it went to number thirteen on the charts.

call this up town where he can hold his head up high.

Uptown, he knows that I'll be the standing guy.

And when I take his hand, there's a man who could put him down.

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 Spectre to annoy Lester Sill, who by all accounts was furious at the release.

Spectre was angry at Sill over the amount of money money he'd made from the Paris Sisters recordings, and decided that he was being treated unfairly and wanted to force Syl out of their partnership.

Certainly, the next recording by the Crystals was meant to get rid of some other business associates.

Two of Phil Lezz'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.

The Screw, part one.

new hill,

come on and do it

to the right,

to the left,

now front,

now back,

come on and do.

Only a handful of promotional copies of that were ever produced.

One went to Lester Sill, who by this point had been bought out of his share of the company for a small fraction of what it was worth.

The last single Spectre recorded for Phyllis, while Sill was still involved with the label, was another Crystal's record, one that had the involvement of many people Sill had brought into Spectre's orbit, and who would continue working with him long after the two men stopped working together.

Spectre had decided he was going to start recording in California again, and two of Sill's assistants would become regular parts of Spectre's new hitch-making machine.

The first of these was a composer and arranger called Jack Nitchy, who we'll be seeing a lot more of in this podcast over the next couple of years, in some unexpected places.

Nitchy 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 Spectre's most important collaborator, and his arrangements, as much as Spectre's production, are what characterised the wall of sound for which Spectre would become famous.

The other assistant of Sill's who became important to Spectre'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 Eddie's band, and it was through Eddie that he had started working with Syl, when he played on many of Eddie's hits, most famously Peter Gunn.

Douglas was the union contractor for the session, and for most of the rest of Spectre'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 three 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, Spectre 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 is To Love Him and I Love How You Love Me for Spector already.

But Spectre 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 Douglas were piano player Al DeLauri and drummer Hal Blaine.

This was the first session on which Spectre used any of these musicians, and with the exception of Roberts, who hated working on Spectre'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.

Spectre 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.

Rainbows, we will share me and you.

So dry your eyes, little girl.

Dry your eyes, and we're gonna see if the sky's a blue.

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, cause you think you can be true to two.

You bounce my heart around.

You don't even put her down.

to you.

Rubber ball, I'm bouncing.

And Vicki Nelson's Hello, Mary Lou.

Hello, Mary Lou,

goodbye, heart, sweet Mary Lou.

I'm so in love with you.

Goodbye, Doo, Mary Lou.

We never part.

So hello, Mary Lou.

Goodbye, heart.

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 Spectre.

But Spectre 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.

Here'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 LA to record the song, and they said no.

The Crystals had become sick of Spectre.

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 lead, and they'd not seen any money from their two big hits.

They weren't going to fly from New York to LA just because he said so.

Spectre needed a new group in LA that he could record doing the song before someone else did it.

He could use the Crystals' name.

Phyllaz had the right to put out records by whoever they liked and call it the Crystals.

He just needed a group.

He found one in the Blossoms, a group who had connections to many of the people Spectre 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 Rebolettes.

The Blossoms had actually been making records in LA 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 group, but slimmed down to a quartet after their first record, on which they were the backing group for Richard Berry.

My empty life is over,

and life is but a song.

The first stable line-up of the Dreamers consisted of Fanita James, Gloria Jones, not the one who would later record Tainted Love, and the twin sisters Annette and Nanette Williams.

They worked primarily with Berry, backing him on five singles in the mid-fifties, 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.

Do not forget, do not forget,

do not forget,

not forget.

I

stand

darling.

I'm waiting for no one

but you,

no one but you

They also sang backing vocals on plenty of other RB records from people in the LA RB scene.

For example, it's them singing backing vocals with Jesse Belvin on Etta James's Good Rocking Daddy.

Come on now,

up on your feet.

You can't be beat.

You're a good rockin' daddy, good rockin' daddy, good rock and daddy.

Good rock and daddy, good rock and daddy, good rock and 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 Capitol 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 Gee But I'm Lonesome, a song written by Bruce Johnston, who was briefly dating at Annette Williams at the time.

But I'm lonesome,

lonesome because

you don't love me.

Oh,

what to do?

I guess I'll just wait

and see

all you.

By 1961, Annette had left the group, and they were down to a trio of Fanita, 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 Cook to Gene 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 no royalties for singing the lead on a number one record.

My bad, he always the one

From that point on, the Blossoms would sing on almost every Spectre session for the next three years, and Darlene, who he renamed Darlene Love, would become Spectre's go-to lead vocalist for records under her own name, The Blossoms, Bobby's Socks and the Blue Jeans, and The Crystals.

It was lucky for Spectre 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 Evan Schroeder.

As Spectre and Sill 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 Spectre mastered the record, his friend Snuff Garrett was producing Vicky Carr singing, He's a Rebel.

He's a rebel because he never does what he shouldn't have, just because he doesn't do what everybody else Philaz got their version out first, and Carr's record sank without trace, while The Crystals went to number one, keeping the song's writer off the top spot, as Gene Pitney sat at number two with a Bacharak and David song, Only Love Can Break a Heart.

be

Last night I heard you

But darling

remember The Crystals were shocked that Spectre released a Crystals record without any of them on it, but Lala Brooks had a similar enough voice to Darling 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 fifteen, 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 Dadoo Ron Ron.

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 Da Doo Ron Ron and see if you recognise the voice.

filled.

They do run, run, run, then do run, run.

Somebody told me that his name was Bill.

Then do run, run, run, let a run, run.

Yes, my heart stood still.

Yes, his name was Bill.

And when he walked me home, they do run, run, run, let a run, run.

Cher would later move on to bigger things than being a filling crystal.

The do run run became another big hit, making number three in the charts, and the follow-up, Then He Kissed Me, with Lala once again on lead vocals, also made the top ten, but the group were falling apart.

Spectre was playing Lala 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 Ronettes, who we'll be hearing more about in future episodes.

The singles following Then He Kissed Me barely scraped the bottom of the hot one hundred, and the group left Les 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 Spectre, and one by one the group members left, and the group split up by 1966.

Mary, Barbara, and Dee Dee briefly reunited as the Crystals in 1971, and Lala and Dee Dee made an album together in the 80s of remakes of the group's hits, but nothing came of any of these.

Dee Dee continues to tour under the Crystals name in North America, while Lala performs solo in America and under the Crystals name in Europe.

Barbara, the lead singer on the group's first hits, died in 2018.

Darling 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 Spectre the song that became the first Philae's hit, that both Barbara and Lala were fine singers who sang lead on classic hit records, and that Spectre 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.

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