Ruin Of Sound

IN THE booklet for 1991’s Back To Mono,a five-LP collection mapping the history of Phil Spector’s trademark ‘Wall of Sound’ production technique, there were two essays. The first was a reprint of Tom Wolfe’s 1965 profile of Spector, ‘The First Tycoon Of Teen’, the other a contemporary portrait by New York Daily News columnist David Hinckley. The Hinckley sketch now makes for uncomfortable reading. In jocular tones, it paints Spector as a dangerous ‘lock-up-your-daughters’ ladies’ man, before asking us to overlook the “dark corners” of his life and focus on the music: “It’s why we care about him.”

The Wolfe essay is something else entirely. It describes the then 23-year-old millionaire record producer as a “bearded creep” and an entitled asshole living in “a doldrum fury”, forever “tamping his frontal lobes in the gloom”.

Both these narratives have always been in play. There were always those who looked to the “human hit machine” first. But many others were scared of him from the start. Music publisher Don Kirshner, who first met Spector in 1961, told biographer Mick Brown “[I knew here] was a candidate for doing himself or other people harm… someone who’d go down in flames to be known.”

Harvey Philip Spector was born in the Bronx on December 26, 1940. The son of Ben and Bertha, descendants of Russian Jews, Harv was short, pale, and asthmatic. But he had an ear for music, and following his father’s suicide in April 1949, turned that skill into a kind of weapon, by which he would exact revenge on life.

When Bertha moved Harvey and his sister Shirley to Fairfax, Los Angeles four years later, this 13-year-old kid set about transforming himself. He learned the accordion, took guitar lessons from jazzers Howard Roberts and Barney Kessel, and formed The Teddy Bears with two classmates. Local radio play for their 45 To Know Him Is To Love Him – the title adapted from the inscription on Spector’s father’s headstone – landed them a slot on American Bandstand and a million-selling Billboard Number 1 in 1958.

After that, things moved fast. Spector helped write Spanish Harlem for Ben E King, played the guitar solo on The Drifters’ On Broadway, was hired as Ahmet Ertegun’s PA at Atlantic Records and started producing hits such as Ray Peterson’s Corinna, Corinna and Gene Pitney’s Every Breath I Take. In 1961 he co-founded his Philles Records label.

How to write about that sound Spector created at Hollywood’s Gold Star studios? Firstly, like so many great American cultural products of the 20th century, it was art born of the factory system. For each track, Spector employed crack LA session players the Wrecking Crew, who he crammed into

Gold Star’s tiny Studio A and

Producer-turned-killer Phil Spector died on January 16.

worked them through repeated rehearsals until they lost their individualism. Throw in Gold Star’s unique ceramic echo chambers and you get that booming, reverberating roar, simultaneously upfront and remote, euphoric yet utterly forlorn.

Secondly were the husband-and-wife songwriting teams Spector worked with. Through Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Spector had hit songs that contained a vital female perspective, songs forever caught between romance and heartbreak, love and obsession, devotion and danger – the real and vivid life of the teenage mind.

Thirdly were the voices – Darlene Love, The Crystals’ ‘LaLa’ Brooks, The Ronettes’ Ronnie Bennett – voices rich in innocence and experience, comfort and pain, that have accrued a certain eerie majesty down the years, Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’ making them sound simultaneously more confined and more defiant than ever.

It couldn’t last. Ike & Tina Turner’s 1966 Philles release, River Deep – Mountain High, flopped in the US. Maybe its sound was too overwhelming, or maybe an increasingly arrogant Spector had finally been blacklisted by the DJs and journalists he treated with contempt. Speaking to writer Richard Williams, Jeff Barry has a simpler explanation: “The mix on River Deep is terrible. He buried the lead. Listen to his records in sequence, the lead goes further and further in. He is saying: ‘It is not the song… listen to those strings… listen to that bass sound.’” Listen to me.

River Deep’s failure sent Spector into a tailspin. Retreating to his mansion, deep in depression, obsessively rewatching Citizen Kane, he began to emotionally punish his new bride Ronnie, surrounding their house with barbed wire and guard dogs, and forbidding her to record or perform live.

Madness and paranoia, what Spector called “[the] devils inside that fight me”, began to gain dominion. A seeming way out came in 1970 with the invite to remix The Beatles’ stalled Get Back LP. The string-soaked result, retitled Let It Be, is now regarded as an anomaly, its place in the canon effectively erased after 2003’s de-Spectored release Let it Be Naked.

Spector continued to work with high profile artists in the ’70s, most notably John Lennon and George Harrison on Plastic Ono

Band and All Things Must Pass, but the productions became murkier, more leaden and cloistered and, as with Leonard Cohen’s

Death Of A Ladies’ Man and the Ramones’ End Of The Century, came with long nights of psychological torture in which the producer would hold his exhausted musicians at gunpoint to exact one final run-through.

Some turned their back on him, some fled, some weren’t so lucky. Ronnie Spector escaped in 1972, and in 1998 testified that he had frequently threatened to kill her. The same fate befell female guests who visited him throughout the ’80s and ’90s, the majority too afraid to bring legal proceedings.

In 1998 Spector retreated to a mock chateau, Pyrenees Castle, in the run-down Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra, where he continued to live out his paranoid lifestyle. That’s where actress and fashion model Lana Clarkson was found murdered on February 8, 2003. Imprisoned in 2009 for her killing, Spector died at the California Health Care prison hospital from complications of Covid-19. This year, a 50th Anniversary edition of All

Things Must Pass will be released stripped of Spector’s production. In March, the Ramones’

End Of The Century will be similarly exised, with Rick Rubin and Ed Stasium at the controls. Maybe there will be those who’ll seek to erase those Crystals, Ronettes and Darlene Love 7-inchers, unaware that because of those female voices, the massed ranks of the Wrecking Crew and those vivid lyrics of lived teenage experience, those songs have always existed beyond Spector’s wall, and always will.

“[He was] someone who’d go down in flames to be known.” DON KIRSHNER