The Teddy Bears
In summer 1958, Phillip Harvey Spector
(who had moved from New York to LA a few years earlier) and three
of his Fairfax High School pals - Marshall Leib, Harvey Goldstein
and Annette Kleinbard - managed to raise $40 between them to pay
for a two hour recording session at Gold Star Sound on Santa
Monica and Vine. They succeeded in recording only one song, Don't
Worry My Little Pet.
Returning
shortly afterwards without Goldstein but with drummer Sandy Nelson
in tow, and calling themselves The Teddy Bears, they cut Wonderful
Lovable You. In the last half hour they also quickly recorded
a song Spector had written after the death of his father several
years earlier - To Know Him Is To Love Him.
Phil
Spector pitched the recordings to local independent record company
Dore, run by Lew Bedell, who recognised an effective yet naive
sound in the last song, while being less impressed with the
supposed main songs.
Spector
overdubbed extra vocals onto To Know Him Is To Love
Him to add more body to the track, and - through
Bedell's astuteness - ended up with a worldwide Number One hit
that sold 1.5 million copies in 1958.
The
Teddy Bears - presented as a trio of Spector, Leib and Kleinbard -
enjoyed a brief period in the spotlight, and were rapidly tempted
away to sign a new deal with the bigger Imperial Records, where
they managed only one minor hit, Oh Why (US Number
91 for one week).
Despite
an album and some quick follow-up attempts from both Dore and
Imperial (including an instrumental called Bumbershoot under
the name Phil Harvey), The Teddy Bears had been swiftly consigned
to the back of the toy cupboard, and Phil Spector was left,
perhaps unsurprisingly given the nature of the business, with
substantially less money than he might have expected from a major
worldwide hit. It was a lesson he would heed.
He
tried again the following year to repeat the formula, this time
with a trio called The Spectors Three with two singles on the Trey
label. I Really Do copied The Fleetwoods' Come
Softly To Me hit sound, but without any success, which led to
a re-assessment of Phil's career direction and a return to New
York.
The
rest, as they say, is history . . .
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