Phil Spector, the eccentric and revolutionary music producer who transformed rock with his “Wall of Sound” method and who was later convicted of murder, died. He was 81 years old.
California state prison officials said he died on Saturday from natural causes in a hospital.
Spector was convicted of the murder of actress Lana Clarkson in 2003 at his castle-like mansion outside Los Angeles. After a trial in 2009, he was sentenced to 19 years in prison.
Although most sources provide Spector’s date of birth as 1940, she was listed as 1939 in court documents after his arrest. His lawyer later confirmed that date to the Associated Press.
AP
Clarkson, star of “Barbarian Queen” and other B films, was found shot to death in the foyer of Spector’s mansion on the hills overlooking the Alhambra, a modest suburban city on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
Until the actress’s death, which Spector said was an “accidental suicide”, few residents even knew the mansion belonged to the reclusive producer, who spent his remaining years in a prison hospital east of Stockton.
Decades earlier, Spector had been hailed as a visionary for channeling Wagner’s ambition into the three-minute song, creating the “Wall of Sound” that blended lively vocal harmonies with luxurious orchestral arrangements to produce pop monuments like “Da Doo Ron Ron”, “Be My Baby” and “He’s a rebel”.
He was the rare self-conscious artist in the early years of rock and cultivated an image of mystery and power with his dark tones and impassive expression.
Tom Wolfe declared him the “first adolescent tycoon”. Bruce Springsteen and Brian Wilson openly replicated his grandiose recording techniques and wide-eyed romanticism, and John Lennon called him “the greatest music producer of all time”.
The secret of its sound: an overdubbed attack of instruments, vocals and sound effects that changed the way pop records were recorded. He called the result “small symphonies for children”.
Around the age of 20, his “little symphonies” resulted in almost two dozen successful singles and made him a millionaire. “You Lost That Lovin ‘Feeling”, the lyrical ballad of the Righteous Brothers that topped the charts in 1965, was tabulated as the most played song on radio and television – counting the many cover versions – in the 20th century.
But thanks in part to the Beatles’ arrival, their success on the charts would soon disappear. When “River Deep-Mountain High”, a properly named 1966 release featuring Tina Turner, didn’t catch on, Spector shut down his record company and withdrew from the business for three years. He was going to produce the Beatles and Lennon, among others, but now he was serving artists, instead of the other way around.
In 1969, Spector was called to rescue the Beatles’ album “Let It Be”, a problematic “back to basics” production marked by differences within the band. Although Lennon praised Spector’s work, bandmate Paul McCartney was furious, especially when Spector added strings and a choir to McCartney’s “The Long and Winding Road”. Years later, McCartney would oversee a remastered “Let it Be”, removing Spector’s contributions.
A documentary on the production of Lennon’s 1971 album “Imagine” showed the ex-Beatle clearly in charge, nudging Spector with a backing vocal, a line that none of Spector’s early artists would dare to cross.
Spector worked on George Harrison’s acclaimed triple post-Beatles album, “All Things Must Pass”, co-produced Lennon’s “Imagine” and the less successful “Some Time in New York City”, which included Spector’s photo of a caption that said, “Meet him and love him.”
Spector also had a memorable role in cinema, a cameo as a drug dealer in “Easy Rider”. The producer himself was played by Al Pacino in a 2013 HBO movie.
The volume and violence of Spector’s music reflected a dark side that he could barely contain, even in his prime. He was imperious, temperamental and dangerous, remembered bitterly by Darlene Love, Ronnie Spector and others who worked with him.
Years of stories of his guns pointing at artists in the studio and threatening women would come back to haunt him after Clarkson’s death.
According to witnesses, she reluctantly agreed to accompany him home to the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, where she worked. Shortly after his arrival in the Alhambra, in the early hours of February 3, 2003, a driver reported Spector left the house holding a gun, with blood in his hands, and said to him: “I think I killed someone”.
Later, he would tell his friends that Clarkson had killed himself. The case was fraught with mystery and it took the authorities a year to open the charges. In the meantime, Spector remained free on $ 1 million bail.
When he was finally indicted for murder, he attacked the authorities, angrily telling reporters, “The actions of the prosecutor, like Hitler, and his riot thugs are reprehensible, unscrupulous and despicable.”
As a defendant, his eccentricity took center stage. He would arrive at the court for pre-trial hearings in theatrical clothing, usually with high-heeled boots, frock coats and wild-style wigs. He reached an audience in a chauffeur-driven Hummer.
As soon as the 2007 trial began, however, he lowered the tone of his suit. It ended in a 10-2 stalemate inclined towards conviction. Her defense argued that the actress, dismayed by her career decline, shot herself through the mouth. A new trial started in October 2008.
Harvey Phillip Spector, in his 60s when he was charged with murder, was born on December 26, 1939, in the Bronx neighborhood of New York. Bernard Spector, his father, was a blacksmith. His mother, Bertha, was a seamstress. In 1947, Spector’s father committed suicide because of family debts, an event that would shape his son’s life in many ways.
Four years later, Spector’s mother moved with her family to Los Angeles, where Phil studied at Fairfax High School, located in a mostly Jewish neighborhood on the outskirts of Hollywood. For decades, the school has been a source of future musical talents. In Fairfax, Spector performed at talent shows and formed a group called Teddy Bears with friends.
He was reserved and insecure, but his musical skills were obvious. He had perfect pitch and easily learned to play various instruments. He was just 17 when his group recorded their first successful single, a romantic ballad written and produced by Spector that would become a pop classic: “To know him is to love him”, was inspired by the inscription on his father’s headstone.
A short, skinny child with big dreams and growing demons, Spector went on to attend the University of California, Los Angeles, for a year before returning to New York. He briefly considered becoming a French interpreter at the United Nations before engaging with musicians at the celebrated Brill building in New York. The Broadway building was then at the heart of the popular music Tin Pan Alley, where writers, composers, singers and musicians produced hit songs.
He started working with famous composers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who met at Fairfax High a few years before Spector’s arrival. In the end, he found his niche in production. During this period, he also co-wrote the hit “Spanish Harlem,” with Ben E. King, and played lead guitar on Drifters “On Broadway”.
“I had come back to New York from California, where there were all those green lawns and trees, and there was just that poverty and decay in Harlem,” he would later recall. “Music was an expression of hope and faith for young people in Harlem … that better times would come.”
For a time he had his own production company, Philles Records, with partner Lester Silles, where he developed his characteristic sound. He brought together respected studio musicians like arranger Jack Nitzsche, guitarist Tommy Tedesco, pianist Leon Russell and drummer Hal Blaine, and took breaks for Glen Campbell, Sonny Bono and Bono’s future wife, Cher.
In the early 1960s, he hit after hit and a notable failure: the album “A Christmas Gift to You”, tragically released on November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated, the worst moment possible for such a joyous record. “A Christmas Gift”, with the Ronettes singing “Frosty the Snowman” and Love’s version of “White Christmas”, is now considered a classic and perennial radio favorite during the holiday season.
Spector’s home life, along with his career, ended up falling apart. After her first marriage to Annette Merar ended, Ronettes’ singer Ronnie Bennett became his girlfriend and muse. He married her in 1968 and they adopted three children. But she divorced him after six years, claiming in a memoir that he kept her prisoner in her mansion, where she said he kept a gold coffin in the basement and said he would kill her and put her in it if she tried to leave he.
When the Ronettes were introduced to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, Spector sent his congratulations. But in an acceptance speech from his ex-wife, she never mentioned it while thanking several other people.
Darlene Love also quarreled with him, accusing Spector of not crediting his vocals on “He’s a rebel” and other songs, but she praised him when she was introduced to the Hall.
Spector himself became a member of the Hall in 1989. As their marriages deteriorated, artists also began to stop working with Spector and musical styles passed through him.
He preferred singles to albums, calling the latter “Two hits and 10 pieces of trash”. He initially refused to record his music in multichannel stereo, claiming that the process damaged the sound. A retrospective of Spector’s box was called “Back to Mono”.
By the mid-1970s, Spector had already withdrawn from the music market. He occasionally emerged to work on special projects, including Leonard Cohen’s album, “Death of a Ladies’ Man” and “End of the Century” by the Ramones. Both were hampered by reports of Spector’s instability.
In 1973, Lennon worked on an oldies rock ‘n roll album with Spector, only to make Spector disappear with the tapes. The finished work, “Rock ‘n’ Roll”, was not released until 1975.
In 1982, Spector married Janis Lynn Zavala and the couple had twins, Nicole and Phillip Jr. The boy died at the age of 10 from leukemia.
Six months before his first murder trial began, Spector married Rachelle Short, a 26-year-old singer and actress who accompanied him to court every day. He filed for divorce in 2016.
In a 2005 court testimony, he testified that he had taken medication for manic depression for eight years.
“No sleep, depression, mood swings, mood swings, difficult to live with, difficult to concentrate, just difficult – a difficult time to go through life,” he said. “I was called a genius and I think a genius is not there all the time and has almost insanity.”