Phil Spector
Once again, we must deal with balancing contribution and destruction
Apparently he died today at age 81 after a four-week bout with COVID-19.
He was serving a 19-years-to-life prison sentence for the 2003 murder of House of Blues hostess Lana Clarkson.
The question arises, as it has in cases such as those of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, regarding how to juxtapose an undeniably important body of pop-culture-level artistic work with acts in the course of the person’s life that were flat-out evil and went unrepented.
But there’s another level of context that bears examination in the case of Spector. He was one of the all-time top-tier members of the pantheon of architects of a pop-culture phenomenon called rock & roll. It’s a type of music, to be sure, but over the past seventy years it has proven to be a sociocultural force that has changed much about the way we live, interact and engage the world.
I say this as someone who began listening to the stuff in 1958, begin performing it in 1966, and who has taught a course in its history for 20 years at the local campus of a state university. And I’m here to tell you, I blow hot and cold as to whether rock’s impact on Western civilization’s direction has been for the good or not.
The term “rock and roll” had been around since the 1920s as a euphemism in blues lyrics for the sex act. It had also, however, etymologically derived from the the term “rocking and reeling,” which depicted the fervor with which congregants in certain kinds of black American church services worshipped.
It started to show up in the lyrics and even song titles of jump-blues records of the late 1940s. After the radio industry recognized the appeal of black popular music to both black and white youth, and especially after the first white genre within rock and roll - rockabilly - established its chart viability, the term quickly came to convey a set of musical conventions marked by simplicity, loudness and sensuality.
This is about when young Harvey Phillip Spector, a nervous, somewhat awkward Jewish mama’s boy in the Los Angeles area caught the rock bug. His doting mother and sister allowed him to stay up all night, holed up in his bedroom, playing his guitar and listening to the transistor radio. His mother even arranged for him to take guitar lessons from first-call session musician Howard Roberts, who thought Spector was about the strangest student he’d ever had. (Spector would arrive for a lesson and never take his guitar out of the case; he’d just ask Roberts to demonstrate things.) (Roberts would later play on Spector’s Wall of Sound sessions.)
With some school friends, he formed the Teddy Bears, a vocal trio whose lone nationwide hit, “To Know Him Is To Love Him,” written by Spector, got its title from the epitaph on Spector’s father’s grave. (The elder Spector had committed suicide when Phil was 9.)
He’d made enough of a splash in the music industry, though, that several heavy hitters, first in Los Angeles and then when he spent a few years in New York, took an interest in mentoring him. Lester Sill, Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, Ahmet Ertegun and Doc Pomus all took the time to show Phil the ropes.
Upon arriving in New York, he also, in short order, developed a reputation for stealing song ideas and otherwise undercutting collaborators on projects. He left both Liberty Records and Atlantic Records high and dry after signing contracts as a staff producer that included hefty advances, for which he never really delivered anything of consequence.
That’s because he was, behind those labels’ backs, working with Sill back on the west coast to form a label that came to be called Philles. Two black female vocal groups he’d seen at shows at the Paramount Theater, the Ronettes and the Crystals, so captivated his imagination that he signed them to Philles and arranged to fly them to Los Angeles to work at Gold Star Studio with engineer Larry Levine and the treasure trove of Wrecking Crew session talent that was available for a phone call.
Thus was the Wall of Sound born. Levine tried to convince Spector that now, in the early 1960s, when stereo was quickly becoming the norm, Levine could clean up the raw session tapes, separating the cacophony generated by the army of players Spector would amass in the studio into four tracks. Spector said no. He was adamant about the final product being in mono. He wanted it to come pouring out of teenagers’ transistor speakers like a cavernous roar.
Then came a broader notoriety. Spector was in the thick of the music industry, idolized by a young Brian Wilson, sought after by Brill Building songwriters who wanted some of their compositions to get that Wall of Sound treatment. His stable of Philles acts were a major presence on the ABC-TV series Shindig and the two legendary mid-60s television specials The T.A.M.I. Show and The Big T.N.T. Show. Additional Wall of Sound acts, such as the Righteous Brothers and the Ike & Tina Turner Review, expanded the sound’s chart presence.
Along the way, Lester Sill heard from Spector less and less and finally got a letter from Spector’s lawyer saying, in essence, “You are hereby elbowed out of the label. Here’s how much you will get as a severance settlement. End of story.”
Spector had developed an obsession with Veronica Bennett, lead singer of the Ronettes. That’s actually how he met the Beatles. The Ronettes got the chance in January 1964 to go to the UK to be the warmup act on a Rolling Stones national tour, and Phil wasn’t about to let the object of his all-consuming desire spend weeks among these exotic long-haired British Invasion fellows without his being around to supervise. While in London, he met the Stones and their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, and The Beatles and their manager, Brian Epstein. The Beatles were booked to come to the US in early February for some Ed Sullivan Show appearances, concerts and press conferences. They invited Phil to join them on the plane for their first transatlantic trip so they could pick his brain about American culture.
He married Ronnie in 1968. The marriage lasted four years and included the adoption of twin children. It was also a classic case of a domineering husband who never let his wife out of the house, who made her feel that her entire worth hinged on him controlling her life. She escaped, barefoot, in 1972.
Various other rock genres- the aforementioned British Invasion, as well as Motown and folk-rock - captivated young audiences and the Wall of Sound played itself out. By the very late 1960s, he was living as a recluse with Ronnie, making the occasional pop-culture appearance such as playing the cocaine kingpin in the airport scene at the beginning of the movie Easy Rider.
Then The Beatles summoned him back to England to produce the Let It Be album, their first project to use a producer other than George Martin since 1961. He stayed on, producing such post-Beatle records as George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and John Lennon’s Instant Karma and Imagine.
In the 1970s and 80s he was occasionally brought out of seclusion to produce albums for acts ranging from Leonard Cohen to The Ramones. Stories circulated about him waving guns around, even shooting holes in studio ceilings.
All his old yes men and gofers had drifted away. He was pretty well isolated.
When he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in the 1990s, he gave a truly warm and gracious speech, spending a great deal of it on his fond memories of how Brill Building songwriter Doc Pomus had taken him under his wing when he’d first come to New York as an aspiring industry figure.
The murder of actress Lana Clarkson, who had played in some low-budget action movies but now needed to supplement her income with the nightclub-hostess gig, took place in the early morning hours of February 3, 2003, in the entryway to his Alhambra, California mansion.
Music-world buzz at the time was that Spector wasn’t drinking and that he’d been behaving himself lately. Alas, he then started frequenting the House of Blues near his home. The previous night, he’d been seen chatting up Clarkson. In fact, they were the last two on the premises when Spector’s driver came to pick them up and take them back to Spector’s place.
Spector called the police pretty shortly after shooting her. At first, he wanted to claim that she’d committed suicide, but that story didn’t hold up.
The trajectory of Spector’s life beckons us to ask a few questions:
What role did the primal and instant gratification that is the essence of rock & roll, in all periods and genres, play in setting Spector’s life on the course it took?
He seemed to have a personality that made people want to indulge him, set him up with everything he needed to do what he wanted to do. And he’d routinely throw them under the bus after they’d done so. Was it the sheer force of his personality that allowed him to get away with it for years?
Why has it become ever more necessary over the last century for us to separate the artist’s art from his or her flaws as a human being? Why has all pretense of dignified comportment and heeding of long-established norms disappeared since rock came to define our entire culture’s aesthetic baseline?
A while back, I listened to Bill Cosby’s 1963 album “I Started Out As I Child.” There’s no denying it, it’s damn funny. The guy had a gift.
That was also the zenith of Spector’s classic Wall of Sound era. “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “Be My Baby” came out that year. The Christmas album that December.
By 1963, our society had become steeped in celebrity adulation. That must be a strange experience, having people find you fascinating before you even converse with them, having them get some kind of exhilaration from your physical presence.
I think some people get to where they count on that seeing them through. They feel like they can entertain their devils without a great deal of consequences, because they are so firmly entrenched in the national consciousness and the radiance of legend status that they hope it will shield them.
In Spector’s case, it led to dying alone in prison.
The title of the 1970 album Spector produced for George Harrison, All Things Must Pass, may be worth mentioning here. All things really do pass, don’t they? Our greatest achievements and the fruits of our folly.
And all that’s left is each of us, stepping into that eternal daylight by ourselves, for a reckoning with the one who created us, an accounting for what we did with that greatest of gifts we’ve been given, our lives.