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recordings of Fats Domino and Little Richard (respectively, relaxed and frenetic—and both of whose songs were traduced in anodyne cover versions by the white ballad singer Pat Boone). There was the Chicago rhythm and blues of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley; the Memphis rockabilly of Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins; and the doo-wop and vocal group sound that flourished primarily in the urban centers of Los Angeles and New York through such groups as the Crows, the Chords, the Platters, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers.
    But as much as rock and roll, in all its variants, galvanized the teenage audience, its impact on the charts was slow to be felt. The best-selling artists on the
Billboard
charts in 1955 were not Fats Domino and Elvis Presley but crooners, balladeers and close-harmony groups—Frank Sinatra, the Fontane Sisters, Mitch Miller—who already seemed to belong to a passing era.
    Turning the dial of his radio in his bedroom, the young Phil Spector would have heard all of these and more. But his favorite station was KGFJ, the home of a disc jockey named Hunter Hancock. Hunter was an anomaly, a white disc jockey who had begun playing what were then still known as “race records” in the late ’40s, and who by the early ’50s had been voted the most popular disc jockey among black listeners in Los Angeles. Hancock was to be Spector’s introduction to the big-voiced blues shouters, piano pumpers and guitar tyros, like Amos Milburn, Fats Domino and Lowell Fulson, and also to jazz.
    The guitar became Spector’s entrée to the social world of the school yard, and he would entertain friends during school breaks, vamping on hits of the day. Annette Merar, who would later become his first wife, remembers Spector reminiscing about just one such school yard session. “He was trying to learn a Dean Martin song, so he would just
think
it, bending his fingers around the neck of the guitar, faking it, but with enthusiasm. Everybody else was just singing along, and they never realized he had no idea what he was doing. Phil just thought that was hilarious.”
    Spector’s passion for music was shared by another friend, Marshall Lieb, whom he had first met at John Burroughs. The son of a car dealer, Lieb could not have been more different from Spector. He was tall, dark and handsome, socially accomplished, popular with girls. He took Spector under his wing. The constant feuding with his mother and sister had given Spector a hair-trigger temper and a fast mouth, and on more than one occasion Lieb had to step in to prevent his friend being given a beating. “Phil was rather mischievous in high school—with me alongside him,” Lieb would later recall to the writer Rob Finnis. “He’d have a rather big mouth, and he’d get himself in trouble sometimes, and he always knew he could turn to me and I would help him out…and I helped him many times.” Lieb would be playing much the same role a few years later when the pair toured as the Teddy Bears. “[Phil] wouldn’t take any guff, by the same token he wasn’t very strong, he didn’t have that much power to hurt anyone, yet he felt he had to, so as soon as words came into fighting, that’s when I tried to cool it.”
    Together, the two boys took guitar lessons with a sometime session guitarist named Burdell Mathis, who had a small studio around the corner from Wallich’s Music City on Sunset Boulevard. For a while, Spector also took lessons from another session guitarist, Howard Roberts. But he was so shy that he refused even to take his guitar out of its case, simply watching as Roberts demonstrated his moves, before rushing home to practice what he had seen.
    On Phil’s fifteenth birthday, Bertha and Shirley took him to see Ella Fitzgerald performing a concert in Hollywood. Playing in her backing group was the guitarist Barney Kessel, and Spector watched transfixed as his