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TThree years before his death in 2006, I interviewed Gene Pitney. The conversation inevitably turned to Phil Spector. He had written Spector’s truly groundbreaking record, The Crystals’ 1962 number 1, he’s a rebel, arguably one of the best singles in pop history, a perfect cocktail of soaring melody, echo-soaked production and lush vocals. by Darlene Love. A year before that, he had sung Every Breath I Take, which, with its booming timpani, chorus overload, and dramatic orchestration, was one of the few early Spector productions that hinted at Wall of Wall’s more-is-more approach. Sound. that would make him a legend. And besides, Spector was, as Pitney put it, “kind of a hot news story”: He was awaiting trial for murder.
Like many people who knew Spector, Pitney seemed horrified, but strangely not surprised by this turn of events, as if something like this was going to happen sooner or later: alcohol, drugs, obvious instability, obsession with guns, and weapons. history of violence against women. Spector, he suggested, had been in trouble from the start. “I had dinner with him the first day he arrived in New York and he told me that his sister was in an asylum and that she was the sanest of the family,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘Wow, where did that come from?'”
The truth is that everyone knew what Phil Spector was like long before he killed Lana Clarkson: according to his own account, a childhood marked by the suicide of his father and torn by harassment – by his mother, by his peers from school – had left him “with demons in me.” His ex-wife Ronnie Spector’s 1990 autobiography, Be My Baby, laid bare all the horror of their marriage: the house surrounded by barbed wire and guard dogs; threats to kill her, either himself or by a hit man, the gold-plated, glass-topped coffin he installed in the basement and threatened to display her body after she was killed.
The stories about recording sessions that had gone terribly wrong were also countless: he fired a gun at the roof of A&M Studios in Los Angeles while working with John Lennon in 1973; pointed a loaded gun at Leonard Cohen’s throat (Cohen later compared him to Hitler) and, according to his bassist, Dee Dee, held the Ramones hostage at gunpoint during the making of End of the Century in the 1890s. 1980. As writer Sean O’Hagan once noted, in a sense even the extraordinary music he made between 1962 and 1966 was an “act of revenge in a world that had irreparably wounded him as a child”; each blow was a vindication that he hoped would mitigate his deep-seated feelings of inferiority.
But he’s a rebel, Da Doo Ron Ron and Be My Baby don’t sound like acts of revenge; they sound absolutely joyous, innocent. Understandably, Spector’s tendency to overload himself as a producer draws a lot of attention: the myriad musicians needed to make his singles, the doubling and tripling of instrumentation. But Spector’s excess baggage never hurt his records. They cheerfully advance even the most somber of their ballads: the Ronettes’ extraordinary Is This What I Get for Loving You? and I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine – the latter arguably the artistic pinnacle of the Wall of Sound years – feel remarkably light on your feet. He was somehow able to create singles that were dense in sound, but also had a sense of space. They never sound over the top or claustrophobic, with the possible exception of River Deep, Ike’s Mountain High, and Tina Turner, Spector’s favorite among his works, but a song that could have benefited from a simpler approach.
The American failure of the latter sent Spector plummeting from which he never really recovered. His next high-profile job, on The Beatles’ Let It Be, was a disaster. The source material wasn’t the best – John Lennon memorably called it “the most horrible load of shit badly recorded with a lousy feeling” – but, nonetheless, Spector dipped the good songs in inappropriate orchestral syrup and choral. His production of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass was equally controversial: “Too much echo,” Harrison complained years later, and his son Dhani claimed that “making the album sound clearer was one of my father’s greatest wishes.” but his work on Lennon’s Plastic The Ono Band and Imagine albums were fantastic: severe, minimal, the opposite of what you might expect, with just the fabulously explosive drums on the 1970 single Instant Karma! an echo of his work from the 60s.
The rest of his career produced only scattered moments that suggested his former greatness, most notably the tracks he recorded for Dion’s Born To Be With You in 1975. He ended his recording career being fired by, of all people, the British indie rock band. Starsailor. At the time, it seemed like an ignoble fate for someone who once presided over a succession of age-defining classics, whose work prompted Brian Wilson to create the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, regularly touted as the greatest album of all time, and Whose ’60s Sound you heard echoes everywhere, especially in the roar of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. But it turned out that the worst was yet to come.
