KILLER SONGS, BUT A PSYCHO
PHIL SPECTOR LOSES THAT LIVING FEELING
LOS ANGELES: Famed music producer turned killer Phil Spector — who worked with some of the greatest bands of the 1960s but ended up in prison for murder — has died in a California prison.
Spector was pronounced dead on Saturday (US time) after suffering from coronavirus in jail. His official cause of death was due to be released by the medical examiner.
Born Harvey Phillip Spector in the Bronx, New York, on December 26, 1939, he rose to fame as an innovative record producer, musician, and songwriter who developed the “Wall of Sound” — a unique music production formula that elevated pop and rock music to an experiential art form more akin to opera than a commercial product.
Spector quickly became known for his creative control over every phase of the recording process, as well as his increasingly unstable and bizarre behaviour. Having been badly bullied and abused as a boy, he once said he “had devils” inside him.
At the age of 21 he became the youngest ever US label owner, and throughout the 1960s he wrote, co-wrote, and produced records for the Ronettes, the Crystals and Ike and Tina Turner.
He appeared to retire in 1966 only to return to the music industry in 1969, when he went on to produce The Beatles’ 1970 album Let it Be, as well as solo records for both John Lennon and George Harrison.
But not everybody was happy with Spector’s technique. Paul McCartney once sent a memo complaining about the “Wagnerian” Wall of Sound production values.
By the mid-1970s, Spector had produced 18 US Top 10 singles for various artists, including The Righteous Brothers, Leonard Cohen, The Ramones and others — but he appeared to succumb to personal problems and again withdrew from the recording industry.
His song You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling received the most US airplay of any song in the 20th century.
Spector won a Grammy award for Album of the Year as one of the producers of George Harrison’s The Concert for Bangladesh. He was also inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame.
After 30 years in retirement, he was thrust back into the limelight in 2009 when he was convicted for the 2003 murder of American actress Lana Clarkson. Spector, then 67, was accused of killing Clarkson, 40, after she was found shot dead in his Alhambra, California, home.
When he died, Spector was serving a 19-year sentence in Kern County, California, for the second-degree murder.
He had a violent past. His ex-wife Ronnie Spector details years of violence, abuse and death threats in her 1990 autobiography Be My Baby.
Few musicians on social media mourned the passing of Spector. Most preferred instead to remember the artists he helped make famous, or Clarkson, whose life was cut short the night she met Spector while working as a hostess at a Hollywood nightclub.