What You're Missing is the Beat
[David] Susskind invited Phil Spector to the Open End television program one evening to ‘talk about the record business.’ Suddenly Susskind and ‘William B.’ [Williams], station WNEW's old-nostalgia disc jockey, were condemning Spector as some kind of sharpie poisoning American culture.... Susskind and Williams kept throwing Spector's songs at him.... And Susskind sits there on the show reading one of Spector's songs out loud, no music, just reading the words, from the Top Sixty or whatever it is, ‘Fine Fine Boy,’ to show how banal rock'n roll is. The song just keeps repeating ‘He's a fine fine boy.’ So Spector starts drumming on the big coffee table there with the flat of his hands in time to Susskind's voice and says, ‘What you're missing is the beat.’
From the Book The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, “The First Tycoon of Teen”, 1965, ISBN 0553380583
Copyright © 1965 by Tom Wolfe
No. 235