Producer Phil Spector, the legendary studio revolutionary from the 60s and 70s who ended his life in prison for a 2003 murder, died. He was 81 years old.
“Phillip Spector, 80, was pronounced dead of natural causes at 6:35 pm on Saturday, January 16, 2021, in an outside hospital. Your official cause of death will be determined by the coroner of the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office, ”says the statement from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
It was not clear why the prison system listed a different age.
TMZ reported that he had recently been hospitalized with COVID complications.
Biographer Richard Williams noted that Spector alone “transformed the producer from an obscure backstage boy … into a figure whose role is similar to that of a film director”.
Their medium was a series of bombastic, cavernous-sounding singles that transformed anguished love songs into highly orchestrated three-minute operas – or, in Spector’s own memorable description, “little symphonies for children.” His flamboyant style – dubbed “Wall of Sound” – influenced contemporaries like Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys, and later acolytes like Bruce Springsteen.
The lucrative string of hits from the 60s on his Philles label with Crystals, Bob B. Soxx and Blue Jeans, Darlene Love, the Righteous Brothers and the Ronettes led Tom Wolfe to call him “the teenager’s first tycoon” in a famous 1964 profile.
The resounding flop of his 1966 magnum opus, “River Deep, Mountain High” by Ike & Tina Turner, took his career off the rails, but he recovered with a controversial remix of “Let It Be” by the Beatles and productions for John Lennon and George Harrison.
Spector, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, did little work since the early 1980s, as tales of his increasingly erratic and violent behavior spread throughout the industry. On February 3, 2003, he was arrested after actress Lana Clarkson was found shot to death in his home. After a trial overturned in 2007, Spector was tried again in 2009 and convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 19 years in prison.
He was born Harvey Phillip Spector in the Bronx. When he was 8, his father killed himself and his mother later moved with his family to Los Angeles, where he started attending Fairfax High in 1954. The school’s former students included composers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller , who would play an important role in his childhood career.
Spector’s musical vision developed early: he took guitar lessons with Barney Kessel and Howard Roberts, who would become members of the Wrecking Crew, the powerful studio band in their most famous recordings. While studying at LA City College, he started attending Gold Star Studios, the Hollywood facility famous for its echo chamber, which would be the location of his epoch-making sessions.
In 1958, Spector collected $ 40 for a Gold Star session with his vocal trio, Teddy Bears, which included friends Marshall Leib and Annette Kleinbard. A breathy ballad, with lyrics inspired by the inscription on Spector’s father’s headstone, was recorded; issued by Dore Records, “To know him is to love him” reached number one that fall, selling about 1.4 million copies.
Other successes by Teddy Bears did not materialize in Imperial, and the act fragmented. Spector recorded briefly for LA producer-editor Lester Sill and Lee Hazlewood as the Spectors Three. Sill recommended Spector to Leiber and Stoller, installed at the Brill Building in New York, as successful producers and screenwriters, and the 19-year-old went east.
During his two years of apprenticeship at the Big Apple, Spector co-wrote Ben E. King’s 1960 hit “Spanish Harlem”, worked as a guitarist, produced Ruth Brown and La Vern Baker for Atlantic and briefly served as head of A&R at Atlantic. He also produced “Every Breath I Take” by Gene Pitney for Musicor and “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” by Curtis Lee, a 7th place hit for Dunes.
In 1961, Spector returned to Los Angeles, where he produced the 5th single “I Love How You Love Me” from the Paris Sisters for the Gregmark de Sill label. Spector and Sill later established the Philles label as an outlet for Spector’s production.
Spector reached the top 20 in 1962 with “There is no other (Like My Baby)” and “Uptown” by the Crystals, but jumped to the top spot with the vocal group’s ode to teen crime “He’s a rebel”. By the time the last album reached its peak, Spector bought Sill’s participation in Philles and established his sound production mark – immense, percussive, densely orchestrated (usually by arranger Jack Nitzsche) and over-the-top.
Successes kept coming. “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” (No. 8, 1962), by Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, an idiosyncratic cover of a song from Disney’s “Song of the South”, introduced the former member of Blossoms Darlene Love as a main voice; it would also supply energy to the crystals “Da Doo Ron Ron” (No. 3, 1963) and “Then He Kissed Me” (No. 6, 1963) and would have its own minor Philles hits.
Spector’s Sound Wall found its maximum expression in the work of the Ronettes, a family trio created in New York led by Veronica “Ronnie” Bennett, whose powerful and tremulous main vocals defined them as much as their beehive and eyeliner-style eyeliner hairstyles. The group jumped to second place in 1963 with “Be My Baby”, the most dramatic and thunderous of Spector’s first productions. (Director Martin Scorsese unforgettablely used the music under the credits of “Mean Streets” in 1973.)
The Ronettes achieved some minor hits from Philles’ top 40 – “Baby I Love You”, “The Best Part of Breaking Up”, “Do I Love You?”, “Walking in the Rain” – and were featured on the seasonal show Spector’s 1963 album “A Christmas Gift to You”, which went rigid at launch, but later became a Christmas pattern. In 1965, they appeared on “The Big TNT Show”, a filmed show produced by Spector.
Philles had a big reward for the last time with the Righteous Brothers. The blue-eyed soul duo of Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield recorded without distinction for Moonglow Records. But they immediately scored with Spector in 1964 with the hit # 1 “You lost that loving feeling” – BMI’s most played song in the 20th century. He was succeeded in a quick order by “Just Once in My Life” (No. 9), “Unchained Melody” (No. 4) and “Ebb Tide” (No. 5). (“Unchained Melody” returned to the top 20 twice in 1990, after being used in the hit feature film “Ghost”.)
However, in 1966, Spector and Philles started to skid. The British Invasion – led by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the last of which invited Spector to their sessions – pushed the pop girl-group off the charts (despite some obvious impact on soul’s Motown Sound), and Spector’s opulent style began to dated sound. Even his devotion to monophonic sound was being challenged by the growing acceptance of stereo recording. However, the producer envisioned a personal revival in the form of a single from the couple R&B Ike and Tina Turner.
Cut at great cost with an army of session musicians at Gold Star, the volcanic “River Deep, Mountain High” was launched with a flourish in May 1966. However, although it managed to reach number 3 in the UK, the single bombed internally, reaching 88th position and falling on the charts after just four weeks.
Philles released his last single in October 1966. The Righteous Brothers, the Ronettes and Darlene Love, whose careers were incorporated into their work with Spector on the label, were all later included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003, 2007 and 2010, respectively.
It would take a few years for Spector’s career to reignite. In the meantime, after divorcing his first wife Annette in 1966, he married Ronnie Bennett of the Ronettes. (The couple’s tumultuous life, circumscribed by Spector’s terrible jealousy, ended in divorce in 1974; Ronnie Spector told his side of the story in his chilling 1990 book, “Be My Baby”.) In 1969, Spector had a special appearance without words like a drug dealer on Dennis Hopper’s “Easy Rider”. A production contract with A&M earned him success in 13th “Black Pearl” by Sonny Charles & the Checkmates in 1969.
In 1970, Beatles manager Allen Klein asked Spector to London, where he produced “Instant Karma”, John Lennon’s first solo single under his own name. With the task of remixing the project back to the Beatles basics, “Get Back”, the producer spread strings, horns and choirs on the tracks “Let It Be” and “The Long and Winding Road”. Although the last number became Fab Four’s last No. 1 single, Spector was universally attacked when the album “Let It Be” was released in 1970.
Despite criticism, Spector maintained strong creative relationships with two ex-Beatles. He produced George Harrison’s luminous three-LP solo album in 1970, “All Things Must Pass”, which reached number one, and the 1971 live star set, “The Concert For Bangla Desh”, which won a Grammy as album of the year.
His work with Lennon was equally fruitful, although less consistent and considerably more tense. Spector directed Lennon’s albums “Plastic Ono Band” (No. 6, 1970) and “Imagine” (No. 1, 1971), the last of which contained the much-loved title song. He also produced Lennon-Yoko Ono’s happy single “Happy Xmas (War is Over)”.
Spector also tracked the politically unprepared Lennon-Ono collection “Some Time in New York City” (1972). Sessions for Lennon’s return album with rock ‘n’ roll covers during the musician’s “lost weekend” in 1973 in Los Angeles turned into chaos and reports of occasional shootings by the producer. Spector ran away with the tapes; after a prolonged legal conflict, an album, “Rock ‘n’ Roll”, was released in 1975, employing only four Spector tracks. In the mid-1970s, an agreement with the international arm of Warner Bros. kept Spector in the studio producing singles by Cher and Harry Nilsson and a set by Dion, “Born to Be With You”.
Spector’s life, already deeply marked by paranoia, continued to darken, and employing him became dangerous. As a freelancer, he produced Leonard Cohen’s 1977 album, “Death of a Ladies’ Man”; during the sessions, Spector drew a gun, pointed it at Cohen’s chest and said, “I love you Leonard”, to which the singer-songwriter replied coldly, “I hope so, Phil.” Firearms were also shown during the arduous recording of the Ramones’ 1980 album “End of the Century”, Spector’s last major production. He was credited with the work on the 1981 release of Ono, “Season of Glass”, but his contributions were minimal.
Except for the production of a pair of tracks for the English band Starsailor in 2003, an increasingly reclusive Spector had virtually disappeared from view before the shocking murder of Lana Clarkson that year.
The producer picked up the former movie star B at the House of Blues in West Hollywood, where she worked as a hostess, and took her to her mansion in Alhambra, where she was killed by a single shot to the head. At the trial, Spector’s defense team claimed that Clarkson had killed himself. A tied jury – 10-2 for conviction – forced a retrial, in which Spector was convicted. Appeals from higher courts were rejected. Shortly after Spector’s conviction, Sony Music’s Legacy division announced an agreement to license the long-sold-out producer Philles catalog; a series of compilations and a boxed set followed in 2011. An HBO docudrama focusing on the Clarkson case, starring Al Pacino as Spector and written and directed by David Mamet, aired on the cable web in 2013.
Spector leaves his wife Rachelle, a vocalist whose 2010 debut album, “Out of My Chelle”, he produced while on bail between his two trials; three children adopted during his marriage to Ronnie Spector; and a daughter born to ex-girlfriend Janis Zavala.