After “There is no other (Like My Baby)” and “Uptown” reached the Top 20, Spector was looking forward to the Crystals recording Gene Pitney’s composition “He is a rebel” immediately. To speed things up, he recruited the Blossoms, a well-known Los Angeles support group, and recorded them under the name of Crystals, with Darlene Wright (whose surname he changed to Love) in the lead. The record became Philles’ first hit. 1.
Mr. Spector shuffled his singers at will. He enlisted Ms. Love and another Blossom, Fanita James, to sing with Bobby Sheen on one of his most idiosyncratic hits, “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah”, credited to the group Bob B. Soxx and the Bluejeans. For the singles “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “Then He Kissed Me,” he re-enlisted the original Crystals, now with a new singer, Dolores Brooks, 15, known as LaLa. Both songs reached the Top 10.
The crystals, along with the Ronettes and Ms. Love, all performed in “A Christmas present for you from Phil Spector”, a collection of Christmas carols. The album, now considered a Spector masterpiece, was released on the day of Kennedy’s assassination. Mr. Spector withdrew it from the sale and sank without a trace.
With the Righteous Brothers, the sound wall took on very high heights, but Spector surpassed himself when he put Tina Turner in the studio in 1966 to record “River Deep, Mountain High”, which employed 21 musicians and an equal number of supporting vocalists.
The record reached the top of the British charts, but failed in the United States. Discouraged, Spector withdrew from the music market for several years and entered a decades-long decline marked by erratic behavior, often involving his extensive collection of firearms and drinking.
An affair with Ronettes singer Veronica Bennett, known as Ronnie, led to the end of their marriage. His turbulent marriage to Mrs. Bennett, narrated in his 1990 memoirs, “Be My Baby”, ended in divorce.