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wrote “It’s Too Soon to Know” for the Orioles, which sounded like the undersong of “Maybe” and, perhaps because of its qualms, made for beguiling seduction. And Marion Keisker has gone down in history as Sam Phillips’s “secretary,” although Peter Guralnick makes it plain that she was a Memphis radio personality in her own right, host of WNEC’s daily talk show, Meet Kitty Kelly, for over ten years, as well as its nightly show Treasury Bandstand, which she also wrote, produced, and directed, along with fourteen other programs during her career for that station. Although Ike Turner and Phil Spector were certainly puppeteers in the most misogynist sense, Tina Turner, Ronnie Spector, Lesley Gore, and Dusty Springfield were far from puppets even in the most liberal sense.
    To be sure, male producers held (and still hold) most of the power in the business relationship between singers and record companies. Britney Spears exemplifies this old-school arrangement, with Swede Max Martin either writing or selecting, then producing, her material. But the impact of girl-group music on its audiences relies more on the internal struggle, enacted in the great girl-group performances, between these controlling men and the defiant, powerful, independent-spirited women they fashioned recordings around. In song after song, the best girl-group records engulf and transform the typical meekness of the lyric. Led by voices as strong and supple as any in the history of popular music, waves of emotion spill out of these recordings that the lyrics can only annex. Far from passive and diffident, the result is style as grandiose and visionary as only the romantic yearnings of teenagers can be.
    Producer/songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and writers Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry fell all over themselves with laughter as they overproduced “Leader of the Pack” with revved-up chopper-engine sound effects for the Shangri-Las, but the record turned out to be a key morality play teenagers took seriously as only teenagers could. Good girls wanted bad boys, and the unspoken but clearly articulated motive was sex: bad boys came through in the backseat. If the price to pay for sex in that era was a brutal motorcycle death, so be it. This grandiose idea of sex—so forbidden, so desirable—was worth the terror. How else could Mary Weiss get away with so much lust in the first half of the song?
    In the work of Phil Spector, this tension between the male desire to manipulate women and the coming female declaration of independence reached its apogee. Nowhere else does the battle between a teenage girl’s towering romanticism and the overpowering male ego’s huge Wall of Sound set off hits that make the earth move.
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    Phil Spector is the great wizard, the ironic “man behind the curtain” of girl-group sounds. Arlene Smith of the Chantels, Shirley Owens Alston of the Shirelles, Darlene (Wright) Love (uncredited on many Crystals tracks), and Veronica Spector were each at least as talented as their producers, but Spector upstaged them all. A notorious control freak and industry snake, Spector built his reputation on a distinctive, too-much-is-never-enough sound that he would wind up betting the bank on with Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High” in 1966. (The song’s commercial failure was his Waterloo.) Even his enemies speak with respect of Spector’s talent; he’s the Orson Welles of pop producers, a young titan who comes out of the gate roaring, only to be undone by his flamboyant promise and arrogant business sense. Spector even built his own Xanadu in Bel Air, where he married and then held Ronnie Spector hostage, secluding himself (after “River Deep” flopped) to watch Citizen Kane with his young bride: “Phil actually wanted to be like Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, ” Ronnie remembered in her memoirs,