He's a Rebel Read Online Free PDF Page B

and I don’t know how I found out, but I think it was a horrible stigma. There wasn’t a whole lot of talk, it was fleeting, but what I remember was that it was with real kindness and real feeling.
    â€œI imagine his father was a very kind, wonderful person. I bet Phil adored him. Phil had to get his brilliance and his sensitivity from somewhere, and it was not from Bertha.”
    The irony is that, even while chafing under Bertha’s wing, Phil was actually very much like her. It is possible that Spector didn’t even realize how much his own possessiveness mirrored hers. “He was very, very jealous,” Kass recalled. “I remember I once went to a friend’s cousin’s house to go swimming and I didn’t tell him, and somehow he tracked me down by calling all of my friends. He found out I was there and he called over and over, had me on the phone for hours, jealous of why I didn’t call and who I was with and so on.
    â€œIt was such a crazy thing. He was doing what his mother did to him. I was like fifteen, sixteen years old. He had no reason to ever bejealous, because everyone who ever came into contact with him, got to know him, adored him. But he didn’t believe it.”
    On Phil’s fifteenth birthday, December 26, 1955, Bertha and Shirley had taken him to see Ella Fitzgerald perform at a nightclub in Hollywood. In the band backing her was an Oklahoma-born jazz guitarist named Barney Kessel, whose work on the instrument riveted Phil. Almost a year later, in October, Phil was reading
Down Beat
, the weekly jazz magazine, when he saw an article about rhythm guitarist Sal Salvador, who played in the Stan Kenton band. In the article, Salvador mentioned some rhythm guitarists he favored, including Howard Roberts but not Barney Kessel, who Phil came to learn had also played in the bands of Oscar Peterson, Charlie Parker, and Bob Crosby. So offended was he by the omission, Phil wrote in protest to the magazine’s Chicago offices. His letter sounded so knowledgeable that
Down Beat
ran it on the Letters page of its November 14, 1956, issue. On a page that regularly carried correspondence from luminaries such as Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie, and Nat King Cole sat the name of fifteen-year-old Phil Spector. The letter read:
    Just finished reading your article entitled “Garrulous Sal” in the Oct. 3 issue and am a little disappointed that when naming his favorite guitarists Salvador left out the name of Barney Kessel, who in my opinion holds the title of the greatest guitarist.
    Salvador mentioned Howard Roberts, a very fine jazz guitarist from the West Coast, and also mentioned the state of California, where Kessel is most well known, yet he failed to say a word about the man whose style of guitar is copied so much but never equaled and is a favorite among jazz fans everywhere.
    This I cannot understand. Maybe you could ask Salvador, who I think is also a fine guitarist, just why Kessel does not rate. Sure wish you would ease my pain and have a story about Barney in one of your future issues.
    After the letter ran, Shirley Spector—who, like her mother, would have run through brick walls to aid Phil in his musical reverie—called Kessel’s record label and found out where he was recording. She went to the studio and told Kessel that her little brother, Phil, was crazy about jazz guitar and loved Kessel’s records, and would he meet Phil. Kessel, who recognized the name Phil Spector from the
Down Beat
letter, was shocked to learn that he was just a kid, and he agreed.
    Bertha took such a meeting very seriously. Phil had said he wanted to become a jazz guitarist, and she was going to have to finance this cockamamy avocation that she knew nothing about. Already she had given him every available dollar she had so he could buy the guitar, music sheets, and books he wanted. But now both she and her son had to know the details and realities of a career in