‘(Let’s Dance) The Screw’: The deliberately unreleasable song Phil Spector wrote to screw over his former partner
It’s probably something of an understatement to say that producer, songwriter and ‘Wall of Sound’ pioneer Phil Spector had a screw loose. Given his groundbreaking yet experimental production style, there was always a mad streak to Spector in terms of his artistry, but then given his criminal history of battery, abuse and first-degree murder, there’s also a dark side to his madness. With that, there was also a twisted sense of humour bubbling underneath all of the surface-level chaos.
In 1961, at the age of 20, Spector co-founded Philles Records alongside business partner Lester Sill, but Spector’s difficult nature meant that the duo endured a fractious relationship from the outset, and only two years into their partnership, they had an irreparable bust-up that forced Sill to sell his shares of the business. After a lengthy court proceeding, Sill received compensation in the form of a measly $60,000, and Philles Records was handed over to Spector to deal with.
In the aftermath of this split, Spector recruited the most successful act on the label, The Crystals, to record a song with him, which was entitled ‘(Let’s Dance) The Screw’. However, the track wasn’t exactly the most professional-sounding recording, and Spector had never intended to release the track for the general public either, so what exactly was the point of putting it together?
The contents of the song were almost five minutes of off-key harmony vocals that repeat the same lines throughout: “Let’s do it. C’mon and do it. To the right, to the left. Now front, now back. C’mon and do… dance the screw”. The backing track is a simple 12-bar blues riff, and the delivery of the title is Spector himself speaking in a monotone voice that suggests little to no enthusiasm was put into his part. However, not only did they record this song, but they also made a B-side for this non-single. The contents of the B-side? Why, it’s a further six minutes of the same thing. Riveting stuff, you have to say.
The song was so obviously not single material, but that didn’t bother Spector in the slightest. He had no intention of success with this song, and it was only ever recorded as a joke. However, the true nature of the ‘joke’ is one that has been the subject of urban legend, and plenty of conflicting stories have emerged to try and get to the bottom of his reasoning.
Many initially speculated that there was a clause in Sill’s contract that he would still receive royalties from the next song released on Philles Records after his sale of the label, and that ‘(Let’s Dance) The Screw’ was recorded in a rush and made deliberately badly so that it wouldn’t sell any copies and would ‘screw’ Sill out of any payments. However, the song was never officially released as a single, so this couldn’t possibly hold up as the real reason for recording the bizarre song.
The real reason was simply that Spector had a strange sense of humour and made the song out of spite for his former business partner. Only a handful of copies were ever printed, and one of them was mailed to Sill directly after he had announced his departure. Sill bluntly summed up his perception of the song’s true meaning: “He wanted to get me. That was him saying, ‘Fuck you, buddy.’”
It’s a truly petulant way of getting revenge, and considering that only the first part of the song has ever surfaced in the public domain as a bootleg, it was probably never meant to be heard by anyone except its victim, Lester Sill. In all honesty, the song was probably better off buried and left as a curious slice of rock and roll mythology, but at the same time, the backstory is too good for it to have been left in the vaults forever.
