The producer made countless contributions to music, but his ego overshadowed them all.
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They were the title of his first precocious hit.
1 on the national pop charts.
Sentenced to 19 years to life, Spector spent the rest of his days in prison.
His death was reported by California prison authorities today.
He had apparently contracted COVID in prison and had been contending with it for the past month.
HIs death ends a bizarre story of genius and mental illness.
Spector sensed the need and had the innate skills to create a new form of music to realize them.
The result was an emotionalism on a scale that simply had never been conceived of before.
At the same time, he was a true musician.
The top-tier session players he worked with said he could have had a career as a professional jazz guitarist.
He would stop a recording session if a singer was off pitch.
He had a vast knowledge and affection for R&B by Black artists.
And yet the darkness was always there to those who looked.
Why his father committed suicide is unknown.
She went to work as a seamstress.
Spector was quite short, with a weak chin and a pronounced, almost absurd Bronx accent.
(His voice was in a Stan Freberg or Im depraved on account Im deprived!
He obsessed about his looks, particularly his hair.
At some point he took on the name Phillip and began spelling it with twols.
His mother insisted on calling him Harvey.
The family fought with a blistering toxicity.
And then he would say, Daddy killed himself because of you.
Your mother tells you this, you attack back with that.
They would just attack each other all the time.
Mark Ribowskys 1984 biography of Spector,Hes a Rebel, begins with an epigraph fromOedipus Rex.
Spector had a fun and ingratiating side, when he chose to turn it on.
He eventually met Kessel, who became Spectors in into the world of elite L.A. musicians.
The four began harmonizing together, with Spector instinctively taking charge.
He parlayed that into an agreement with a local record company to record a few more songs.
For the B-side of Pet they sang another Spector tune and arrangement.
Then it started catching on in the Midwest.
Dick Clark showcased it onAmerican Bandstand,and then extended an invitation for the band to appear.
Two months later, in December of 1958, To Know Him Is to Love Him became a No.
1 hit, a spot it held for three weeks.
It apparently eventually sold 1.4 million copies.
He starts calling Herb Hey, you.
You never saw such a complete change.
Goldstein got a lawyer and ended up getting royalties.
Ironically, Spector was absorbing his own lessons about the music business.
1 song was minimal.
The Teddy Bears didnt have another hit.
After that Spector hooked up with producers Lester Sill and Lee Hazelwood.
What Spector did get from Sill was entree to some top music-makers in New York.
He was soon sporting a cape and walking around with a briefcase.
To some he looked like Don Knotts; to others, Jiminy Cricket.
(My sisters in an asylum, and shes the sane one in the family.)
He kept looking at himself in a mirror and combing his hair with a brush.
This went on and on and it was like a comedy act.
Up and down, up and down.
This was still the formative days of the music; there were no Beatles, Stones, or Motown.
But I think he had a terrific rage and anger that he didnt look like Tarzan.
The company was called Aldon, and was co-owned by Don Kirshner, who oversaw a lucrative publishing empire.
The song made it almost to the top ten.
This scheme eventually blew up in his face.
Two stories unfolded over the next five or six years.
One was Spectors growth and success as a producer.
Phil Spector and Lester Sill christened their label Philles i.e., Phil plus Les, not Phillies.
This was the formal beginning of the Phil Spector era.
(Spector quickly took full possession of the label.)
While they had no formal name, in the future they would be called the Wrecking Crew.
(The vocals could be recorded separately.)
(One of his tricks: taking the cymbals away from the drummers.)
All of this took time, which itself was another Spector innovation.
The result was a lot of noise, by the recording standards of the time.
But something else was there as well.
And Spector finally had the control he wanted.
Artists were expendable and, if needed, re-nameable as well.
(Wright discovered shed been rechristened Darlene Love.)
The result, on record, was something plainly different from the other manifestations of the girl groups.
In a Spector recording, the artists themselves were disposable, but their voices were not.
The hits came in an 18-month flurry.
Hes a Rebel was not the first girl-group hit, but it was a clarion call.
None of Spectors famous songs were particularly feminist in nature.
3 on the pop charts.
Be My Baby was perhaps Spectors most profound melding of a voice and a production.
(Bennett did all the backing vocals as well.)
It just knocked me out.
I think I said something out loud, even though I was the only one in the car.
I said, What in the heck?
I tried to figure out how all the instruments were working.
Later he recalled being at a party at the home of Three Dog Nights Danny Hutton.
Those drums were so huge the way that Phil Spector did them.
Spector was also almost always credited as a co-writer of the song on the B-side as well.
Once he got established, the songs on the B-side disappeared, replaced by instrumentals.
Hed get one of his assistants to go into the studio and craft an aimless tune.
(If it starts sounding good, stop.)
Thats why youll see goofy Spector B-side titles like Flip and Nitty or even Dr. Kaplans Office.
(Theres an album of these tunes available on streaming services, credited to the Phil Spector Orchestra.)
And Spector, of course, owned his own publishing company.
Spector did produce hits; but some writing on Spector overstates his chart success.
(Thats a bit less than what a single midlevel Motown act might have accomplished.)
And there are very few hidden gems in the few albums Spector put out.
Second-tier tracks by even the Ronettes like Paradise are interesting but not essential.
His production often overwhelms slighter songs.
39 at the time have become pop classics.)
Along the way, he kept working on his public image.
One of his weirder projects was a Christmas album.
The first of these came in 1964, when Beatlemania hit America.
Spector had built his career on those groups; he might have ended up as pop roadkill as well.
The first of these spent three weeks at No.
(He listed the time as 3:05 on the label.)
At the time, however, it seemed to be merely a continuation of Spectors golden touch.
But Spector could intuit that the music was changing.
Spector made a somewhat bizarre appearance in a rock and roll concert film for which he was a co-producer.
It was calledThe Big T.N.T.
In the resulting film, the Ike and Tina Turner Revue stole the show.
He became fixated on Tina Turner, probably the most dynamic singer in the music at the time.
Spector decided he would construct the rock song of all rock songs, to be sung by her.
But now friendship had given way to estrangement.
Then came days of preparation.
She looked askance at his odd hair, ostentatious clothes, unhealthy complexion and weird behavior.
He would pick up an apple core from an ashtray and eat it.
I thought that was nasty!
As they rehearsed, however, she came to understand the respect Spector had for her voice.
There were nearly two dozen musicians in the tiny, sweltering studio; the production went on and on.
In those days you could make five albums for $20,000.
And this was just a single one side of a single.
Initial plays to industry insiders got a great response.
But the world was different in 1966.
It was the year of Paint It Black and Eight Miles High,Pet SoundsandRevolver.
The record appeared briefly at the bottom of the Billboard Hot 200 in the U.S. and that was it.
Turner herself felt the record was too Black for white radio and too white for Black radio.
To some, the record was just too noisy.
Ironically, the single did quite well in England, going almost to No.
Instead Spector recorded a single titled Screw You and made only one copy.
It was indeed a big fuck you to the person whose connections had made Spectors career.
On the personal level, friends, partners and lovers would be summarily abused and dropped.
A young David Geffen came into Spectors orbit at the time.
The event is portrayed a little bit more favorably toward the subject than the hysterical outburst warranted.
He was screaming, Im not flyin on this plane!
These people are losers and the planes not gonna make it!
Phil always thought the people he thought were losers were cursed.
They took his credit cards and took down all his identification, everything.
They hated him, and I think they fired the pilot for bringin the plane back.
She found him out cold, on a lounge seat at the same gate.
Calling Sonny, she said, Hes asleep and a crowd of people are lookin at him.
Phil, put it on, she told him.
Finally, he changed both, adopting shoes with two-inch heels and wearing wigs.
Clothes got even more flamboyant.
He adopted a brace of bodyguards, used not for his protection but muscle.
Other incidents suggest anger and resentment.
His relationships with women from the start were off.
His first marriage was to an early L.A. girlfriend, Annette Mehar.
As soon as we were married everything started going to hell.
The marriage lasted a year.
Phil seemed to thrive on destroying his opponent, even if it was his wife, she reflected.
Back in L.A., he rented a mansion in Beverly Hills just above the Sunset Strip.
Bennett was his next big relationship.
Ronnie filed for divorce three months after the marriage, but the pair reconciled.
They slipped into a toxic and increasingly embittered and contentious lifestyle.
They rarely went out.
Ronnie was monitored by Phils staff and later claimed that she was sometimes not permitted to leave the mansion.
She sank into a debilitating alcoholism.
He wrote Fuck You on all of Ronnies alimony checks.
And there was little Phillip my God, he looked so lost.
And I thought, Who would want this?
What are you doing here?
What is this big lonesome?
I mean, do you like this?
Because I would never want to be here.
Its too big, too cold, too lonesome.
Like, who gives a shit?
Does that actually make you feel big about yourself?
It was like somebody who feels so insecure and frightened inside.
It made me so very sad.
In the wake of River Deep Mountain High, Spector let Philles sit unattended.
A few producing gigs for A&M records went nowhere.
Toward the end of the 1960s he had started drinking.
This affliction, particularly, would help turn the 1970s into a curious maelstrom of success and decay.
In the U.K. the stories about his dwindling powers had not spread.
Instead, Paul McCartney put the band through its paces forAbbey Road.
(Phase One, in which Doris gets her oats.)
He also added what are invariably referred to as the heavenly choirs, most glaringly on Road.
(Outside voices had never been heard on a Beatles record before.)
1 singles in the U.S., ending the bands career at a peak.
That did not assuage McCartneys well-known disdain for the productions.
Many years later, McCartney masterminded the release ofLet It Be … Nakedwithout Spectors enhancements.
During this work, Spector established a relationship with John Lennon and George Harrison.
He helped Lennon maneuver the studio and produce one of his most memorable solo singles, Instant Karma.
Lennon was taken with the producer, those who were there said, and treated Spector like royalty.
Spectors Beatles association gave him at least another decade of credibility.
(Harrison, certainly, would do much worse.)
Back home, Spector got himself remunerative production deals with first A&M, and then Warner Brothers.
Nothing came of either.
In the end, few usable tracks were left.
The gun incidents with Lennon werent unusual.
I mean, thats what was really going on, guns.
The music was subsidiary, an enterprise.
There were guns everywhere.
While they were leaving the Polo Lounge, Spector got into an altercation with a woman outside.
He pulled a gun on her, much to Kleinbards horror.
Cher was living with David Geffen, by that time a mogul himself on a level far outstripping Spector.
In the studio, a struggling Spector took out his insecurities on Geffen, at one point punching him.
Geffen would feature in rants throughout Spectors life.
Mick Brownpaints the period this way: Those close to Spector noticed a pattern.
He would drink to a point of near insensibility, and was prone to furious rages.
Phil could out-scream anybody I knew, [said one friend].
When you see Phil screaming with bulging red eyes, its like seeing Satan.
And finally, at the end of the decade, most notoriously came a collaboration with the Ramones.
The recording, however, was not a happy experience for the Ramones themselves.
After the Ramones, there was a break in the life of Phil Spector.
He went quiet, doing little for ten years.
He also hid the fact that he had had twins with her, in 1981.
Spector was suddenly a dad and something like a partner.
His personality seemed to shift.
He doted on the kids, within certain Spectorian parameters: No Disneyland, no beach.
The family moved out of Beverly Hills to a more remote but still elaborate expanse in Pasadena.
As the decade wore on the brilliant businessman discovered his late manager had been embezzling from him.
He went to his induction ceremony drunk, and embarrassed himself at his acceptance speech.
In 1980 Lennon was killed.
In early 1991, Spectors songwriting friend Doc Pomus died.
The events that led to the death of Clarkson in 2003 perhaps started that year.
The child was the same age Spector had been when his father died.
It was widely accepted among Spectors acquaintances that the death of his son left him bereft.
The most obscene and vile word in the language, Spector would say later, isdead.
He left his home in Pasadena, leaving behind some unexplained animosity toward the town.
(If I owned both hell and Pasadena, Id sell Pasadena and live in hell.)
He apparently lived for the next few years in New York.
Coming back to L.A. in 1998, he found a house worthy of his psyche a veritable castle.
The home had eight bedrooms and presented itself in a foreboding way at the top of the spacious grounds.
Spectors last few years as a free man were bleak.
Nothing came of it.
Spectors antics with guns had gone on for decades.
And they said, Mr. Spector, put the gun down.
So he rather reluctantly put the gun down.
And they said, Is anybody here being held against their will?
And Ann and I put up our hands.
They said, Would you two come with us, kindly.
When they got to his house, the driver later testified, Clarkson said, This wont be long.
He was holding a gun, and had Clarksons blood on his hands.
The police found Clarkson in his front hallway; shed been shot in the mouth.
Spector, exercised, told police that the shooting had been an accident.
Spector was allowed out on bail.
He was free to travel to New York.
A longEsquirearticle by Scott Rabb chronicled a night of partying there with David Letterman bandleader Paul Shaffer and others.
Along the way he produced an album for her.
Title:Out of My Chelle.
The trial started in 2007.
It ended in a mistrial and everything started over.
Once he was imprisoned, his new wife took over managing his affairs.
After claiming she was spending too much money, Spector divorced her from jail.
