Musical genius, vile killer: The story of Phil Spector

Spector was born in 1939 to a middle-class Jewish family in the Bronx, New York. When he was 9 his father committed suicide, and four years later the family moved to Los Angeles where music entered his life. In 1958, after graduating from high school, Spector released his first album with the band he formed with friends from school, Teddy Barz. One of their first songs, To Know Him Is To Love Him (as the name of the inscription on his father’s tombstone), became a big hit and reached number one on the Billboard singles chart. But the band’s other songs were not very successful, and Spector began to move in other directions, which would soon be revealed as his true destiny – writing, composing and producing.

In 1959 the band disbanded and Spector made a living as a guitar player on the recordings, and in his free time he clung to veteran producers and learned the secrets of the profession. In 1960 he participated in the writing of the hit Spanish Harlem performed by the singer Ben E. King, and from there began a long streak of hits in his production for a variety of different artists. By 1961, at the age of 21, he had co-founded a musical label with his partner, Lester Sill music producer – Philles Records, as the names of its founders – and continued to establish his status as a rising force in the American pop world. Not long after they co-founded the label, Spector managed to quarrel with his partner, who left the company in 1963. This problematic personality will intensify to monstrous proportions even before a decade has passed.

In the first half of the 1960s, as he approached his mid-20s, Spector became a superstar in his field. The singles in his production frequently manned the Billboard charts (and made a force outside the United States as well), the bands he promoted and produced (like the Rontes and the Righteous Brothers) soared in popularity and made their friends stars, and Spector himself became the most sought after producer and millionaire. In 1966, he signed with his label the duo Ike and Tina Turner, who were married at the time, and produced for them the single River Deep – Mountain High which became a pop-soul classic. A year earlier, for the Righteous Brothers, Spector had produced Unchained Melody – the duo’s biggest hit and a beloved classic in its own right.

During this time, Spector developed various recording techniques that would later be incorporated into one concept that would accompany him forever: the sound wall. Spector flag in a maximalist approach; The works on which he is signed as a producer are compressed to the brim. He filled his studio with musicians and instruments – wind, strings, percussion – recorded them on a variety of separate channels, then blended it all together using the natural echo of the recording studio. It is often difficult to identify specific instruments within the confusion of spectral sound, but the melodic totality overcomes any resistance.

The rich, condensed and enveloping style has profoundly influenced the pop scene of the 60s, and has inspired even creators like Brian Wilson, the leader of the legendary Beach Boys band. “Before Spector, people recorded all the instruments separately,” Wilson wrote in his autobiography I Am Brian Wilson, “but he thought of the song as one huge instrument.” Wilson meticulously studied Spector’s songs and developed a special obsession with Be My Baby that he wrote and produced for the Rontes, presenting the Sound Wall in all its glory. Copies of the song were buried around Wilson’s home so he could listen to them at any given moment, as David Dalton – a rock journalist, one of the founders of Rolling Stone magazine, recounted. And that inspiration did its thing. Every character on the 1966 Pet Sounds album, Wilson and the Beach Boys’ masterpiece, is steeped in it.

Wilson was not the only fan. Spector’s professional reputation has brought him to the studios of the biggest names in the business. In 1970 he was hired by Alan Klein, the American director of the Beatles, to finish work on Let It Be, the band’s 12th and final album, which was delayed from ending because the Fantastic Four were busy fighting with each other. The album hit stores a month after the Beatles finally disbanded, and Spector’s fingerprints were evident on it – especially in his many additions to the singles Let It Be, Across The Universe and The Long And Winding Road, thin and modest songs wrapped in grandiose layers of sound, which particularly upset Paul McCartney. In 2003, a few months after Spector was arrested on suspicion of murder, McCartney initiated the release of the album Let It Be aked Naked – an edited version of the original album, without the additions of the aggressive producer.

The influence of Spector and his formidable wall of sound permeated years ahead of other great composers, giving power and aggression to Bruce Springsteen’s blue collar rock and painting Amy Winehouse’s retro solo (heavily influenced by the sound of the Rontas) in bright sixties colors. His contribution to the world of popular music is hard to quantify, so elementary it has become. But already in real time, and along with the meteoric success, stories began to emerge about his alarming behavior.

Spector has always been known as a demanding presence in the studio; His recordings were conducted as dictatorships. But with the early 1970s, he picked up gear when it came to the degree of control he claimed for himself. Not long after working with him on the recording of his 1977 album, Death Of a Ladies’ Man, Leonard Cohen was interviewed by the New York Times and shared his traumatic impression of working with Spector. “I heard he was a genius who knew how to make albums, but I had no idea about the difficult experience of working with him,” Cohen said, “I never thought I would give up so much control. But it’s very hard to fight him. He just disappeared. He had recordings, “His bodyguard took them back to his house every night. I knew he was crazy, but I thought his madness would be sweeter.”

During those recordings, and from what had already become a habit for him, Spector used to walk around with a gun, which he once aimed in Cohen’s direction. During the recordings on John Lennon’s album “Rock’n’Roll” (1975), Spector fired a bullet at the studio ceiling in a rage that Lennon was having fun with the musicians instead of playing. Later, Lennon revealed that Spector smuggled the master tapes out of the studio after each session, and for many months refused to return them. During most of the ’80s, and although he opened the decade with the production of End Of The Century, the album of the pioneering punk band The Ramones (accompanied by a variety of stories about his abuse of band members, including the traditional gun pull), Spector simply barricaded himself in his home, fired his weapon and drank . The 90s also looked like this for him – hidden within its walls, moving away from the world of music and losing touch with reality.

Over the years, more and more stories have been revealed about Spector’s unstable, abusive and destructive personality. Ronny Bennett, the leader of the Rontes band that married Spector in 1968, described her life with him as a “period of imprisonment.” Spector, she said, used to imprison her and their three adopted sons, instilling in the house an atmosphere of paranoia, anxiety and violence. Their first son, Donta, was adopted by Spector and Bennett together, but twins Lewis and Gary were adopted by Spector without Bennett’s knowledge. At Christmas 1972, Bennett came home and found a pair of five-year-old blonde children running around the house. “Merry Christmas!” There was Spector’s reaction, as Bennett said in an interview with People magazine. Later that year, Bennett fled her husband’s estate, barefoot, leaving the children behind. She told Vanity Fair magazine that Spector threatened with a gun and told her that if she ran away with the boys, he would send a hired killer after her. In 1974 they divorced, and Spector received custody of the children. They, from the little they told the media over the years, suffered badly after she left, including cases of sexual abuse.

On February 3, 2003, Spector’s private driver called police. When officers arrived at his “Pyrenees Palace” estate in the Alhambra, Los Angeles, they found Spector standing next to the body of Lana Clarkson – a former actress and host at a club in Los Angeles, where Spector met her. The two spent the night together, which in the end, the prosecution claimed in a trial that began in 2007, Spector shot in the mouth. Spector, who came to court wearing deranged wigs, claimed that Clarkson committed suicide and hired in his defense a battery of senior lawyers, including Robert Shapiro, who represented O.J. Simpson. In September 2007, after the jury failed to reach an agreement, the trial was overturned and another trial was announced.

The new trial opened in 2008, with the prosecution attempting to put pressure on Spector’s driver, who testified that he heard disturbing things from his boss before police arrived. In April 2009, Spector was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 19 years in prison. Eight months before his 70th birthday, he began serving his sentence. In 2014 he was reported to have lost his voice due to a rare disease in his throat. Earlier this month he was hospitalized in the jail hospital, according to reports, following corona disease. Last Saturday, when he was 81, three years before he could have been released on parole, he passed away.

In recent years, while the debate over separating man from his work has heated up and brought with it a re-examination of the legitimacy of artists such as Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, Spector’s character seems to be a touchstone, largely due to the unknown chasm between what he has artistically achieved and his sad and ugly way of life. them. Does his daunting personality and shocking crime tarnish his glorious legacy, as a musician who has expanded the boundaries of the medium’s creativity and consciousness? Is it necessary to re-examine the super-temporary songs he produced – and the masterpieces he designed for John Lennon, George Harrison, Leonard Cohen and many more? Do they suffer from this lesion, from the very knowledge of the monster that was?

Well, it seems to depend on the listener, because at the end of the day, Spector’s body of work will forever involve the work of all the artists with whom he crossed paths. Spector melted his style and taste with the talent they brought to the table; Often, he just forced it on them. But these works still belong to their writers and performers, even if the attire was worn by Spector embroidery. His messy deeds and miserable ending will never be able to change that.