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were a complete and total jerk for wanting to do it.”
    Spector and Milstein became friends. “Kids who couldn’t compete academically would hang out in horticulture, or auto shop, and Phil befriended some of those people. I think he felt compassionate; he felt for those people who were down-and-out or not popular. And there were people who felt for Phil. He was a sensitive person, but he was mixed up. He could be very witty and sharp; he used humor to get through things. It’s a good ploy. But I don’t think he felt very comfortable in himself.”
    Milstein believes that Spector also felt “somewhat embarrassed” by his Jewishness, in a time when anti-Semitic feeling often coursed just below the surface of daily life. “We got an invitation to a party out in Burbank, that we knew was going to be predominantly Gentile. Phil decided that because our names were so obviously Jewish we would go under assumed names. He said, ‘I’ll be Phil Harvey,’ and I was going to be Ron Mills. So we get there and we’re meeting people and all of a sudden I hear Phil’s voice: ‘Hey, Milstein, get over here!’ He basically blew our cover and we had to talk our way out of the whole thing.”
    While Spector might have failed to make his mark in any other subject on the Fairfax curriculum, in one, at least, he was outstanding. Growing up in a household where the radio was on constantly, he had developed an early love for dance music, show tunes and the popular hits of the day. He learned to play the accordion and would occasionally perform at weddings and bar mitzvahs for pocket money. Fairfax had a strong reputation for music—alumni would include the songwriter Jerry Leiber, the producer and trumpeter Herb Alpert and, some years later, the singer Natalie Cole. Spector played French horn in the school orchestra, but he could find his way around almost any instrument and had a natural gift for sight-reading and improvisation. In later years, his music teacher, Dr. Homer Hummel, would tell his pupils that he had learned more from Spector in music classes than Spector had learned from him. Phil adored Dr. Hummel, and when he retired some years later, made a point of turning up at his farewell party, to tell his old mentor how important his teachings on harmony had been in crafting the Teddy Bears records.
    Bertha encouraged her son’s passion, buying him a guitar as a bar mitzvah present on his thirteenth birthday.
    The record producer and scene maker Kim Fowley once described pop as “music for lonely people, made by other lonely people.” And for Spector, his small bedroom on Spaulding Avenue became his sanctuary. Returning home from school, he would go straight to his room, shut the door behind him, pick up his guitar and turn on the radio.
    The music that by the mid-’50s had come to be known as rock and roll had been woven from myriad different strands, but its essence was the appropriation of black musical styles by white performers, and the adopting of what was held to be a black sensibility—visceral, uninhibited, hedonistic—by a teenage audience. Bill Haley’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” which in 1954 became the first rock and roll record to make the Top 10, had earlier been recorded by the rhythm and blues singer Big Joe Turner. Haley’s version diluted the lascivious suggestiveness of the original sufficiently to be played widely on the radio, but to its teenage audience its meaning was clear—shake, rattle and roll was sex. In the same year, at the Sun Studios in Memphis, Elvis Presley recorded his first single, “That’s Alright, Mama”—a blues song originally recorded by Arthur Crudup, infusing it with a country inflection to create a hybrid that came to be known as rockabilly.
    This music came in a variety of regional guises. There was the rolling, piano-driven style of New Orleans, embodied in the