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music. Calling Kessel, she arranged to meet him at a coffee shop called Dupars on Vine Street in Hollywood. There, all three Spectors squeezed into a booth with Kessel. Phil was awestruck meeting his idol—“He was very, very soft-spoken,” as Kessel remembered—and Bertha did most of the talking. She asked Kessel about the hard realities for a boy like Phil in jazz.
    â€œI remember telling her that if he did have talent, I thought it was a wise move to direct it more into the pop field,” Kessel said. “Because there were so many great jazz artists who were not making a living in jazz. Jazz had fallen very far from grace, and guys were not able to sustain themselves. You couldn’t go out and play jazz on the road anymore; it was all rock and roll. I said that he should get into the pop field and write songs and get involved in publishing and maybe work as an apprentice in a record company; to find out how to mix sessions and get involved in the multidimensionality of the whole thing, but from that standpoint.”
    The kid took the the advice to heart, as did his sister. Shirley had finished high school in L.A., at Fairfax, and there she had met a classmate named Steve Douglas, who played the saxophone. Douglas now had a fledgling band. Shirley talked him into letting her manage the group for him.
    After several years in Hollywood, making little headway in show business, Shirley Spector’s adolescent beauty had taken on an embalmed veneer; she had a hard, brassy kind of look, her hair teased and sprayed into cotton candy and her fingertips sporting long, long fingernails. A cigarette was perpetually stuck on her bottom lip, Bogart-style. Shirley was Hollywood all the way, but with a New Yorkcrustiness, convinced she knew all the answers. Her voice was piercing as a blaring siren and she was pushy in a bulldozing way. She obviously felt well suited to the show biz world, but now her outlook was as a hype maker, and she threw herself into booking Steve Douglas’s band into gigs at frat house dances and in bowling alley lounges.
    His own musical ambition having grown by giant steps by 1957, Phil Spector came to believe that he should be on the same kid rock circuit with bands of his own. He was now spending long hours in Marshall Lieb’s living room at 404 Gardner Street, sitting at Belle Lieb’s Hobart piano trying to hash out original songs, his horizon expanding as he was drawn to other capable young musicians. Spector walked into the music room at Fairfax High with his guitar one day and heard a kid named Michael Spencer playing jazzy licks on a piano. Spector joined in on guitar, and the two became fast friends, marveling at each other’s grasp of music. Spencer, whose father was a well-to-do accountant, lived in a large house at 201 S. Highland Avenue, between Third Street and Beverly Boulevard—in the kind of high-tone neighborhood Phil was rarely invited to enter—and it became his Taj Mahal. The two boys jammed around Michael’s piano. Phil was intrigued by Spencer’s classical music background—he told Michael his prime musical influence was Richard Wagner—and how it could be made to fit into mainstream pop. The Spencers had rows of jazz, classical, show, and R&B albums, and the most monstrous hi-fi system in West Hollywood: huge, six-foot-high Patrician Electro-Voice speakers stood like grain silos in the corners of the living room, and the amplifier had a time-lag feature that could reverberate any kind of music to make it sound as if it were being played live in a concert hall. Spector tried it with everything from Sibelius to Gershwin to Larry Williams, playing along on guitar. Beginning with disjointed little riffs, maybe two-note fragments, song ideas would become concepts. Spector was aglow with enthusiasm, his drive furious.
    Spencer recalled Spector as “very quiet, very sensitive, a little mouselike creature without a lot of