Phil Spector, famous music producer and killer, dies at 81

Phil Spector, the eccentric and revolutionary music producer who transformed rock music with his “Wall of Sound” method and was later convicted of murder, has died. He was 81 years old.

Officials at the California state prison said he died Saturday (US time) of natural causes at a hospital.

Spector was convicted of murdering actress Lana Clarkson in 2003 at her castle-shaped mansion outside Los Angeles. After a trial in 2009, he was sentenced to 19 years to life in prison.

Clarkson, the star of Barbarian Queen and other B movies, was found shot to death in the foyer of Spector’s mansion in the hills overlooking the Alhambra, a modest suburban city outside Los Angeles.

Until the actress’s death, which Spector claimed was an “accidental suicide,” few residents knew that the mansion belonged to the lone producer, who spent his remaining years in a prison hospital east of Stockton.

Decades earlier, Spector had been hailed as a visionary for channeling Wagnerian ambition into the three-minute song, creating the Wall of Sound that fused energetic vocal harmonies with lavish orchestral arrangements to produce pop monuments like Da Doo Ron Ron, Be My Baby, and He is a rebel.

He was the rare self-conscious artist in the early rock years and cultivated an image of mystery and power with his dark shadows and impassive expression.

Tom Wolfe declared him the “first teenage mogul.” Bruce Springsteen and Brian Wilson openly replicated his great recording techniques and great romance, and John Lennon called him “the greatest record producer of all time.”

The secret of their sound: an overdubbed avalanche of instruments, voices and sound effects that changed the way pop records were recorded. He called the result “little symphonies for children.”

– AP