PHIL SPECTOR

“He was everything…the biggest inspiration in my entire life.”

— -Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys

“…the greatest record producer ever.”

— -John Lennon

“Phil’s records felt like near chaos, violence covered in sugar and candy…little three-minute orgasms, followed by oblivion. And Phil’s greatest lesson was sound. Sound is its own language.”

— -Bruce Springsteen

“There were songwriter-producers before him, but no one did the whole thing like Phil.”

— -Jerry Leiber, songwriter and producer

“The records are built like a Wagner opera. They start simply and they end with dynamic force, meaning and purpose. It’s in the mind, I dreamed it up. It’s like art movies.”

— -Phil Spector describing his signature, the ‘Wall of Sound’

“He added a drama to music that I don’t think existed before him. Making dark records and pop records are separate things. When you can combine the two worlds, you’ve achieved greatness. He not only achieved it, he basically invented it.”

— -Jimmy Iovine, record producer

“A genius irredeemably conflicted, he was the ultimate example of the Art always being better than the Artist, having made some of the greatest records in history based on the salvation of love while remaining incapable of giving or receiving love his whole life.”

— -Stevie Van Zandt

It was all drama with Harvey Philip Spector, born on December 26, 1939 to a lower-middle-class family in the Bronx.

His life was tumultuous and ultimately tragic.

As groundbreaking and grandiose as his studio accomplishments were, they ultimately became second-fiddle material in the wake of his 2009 conviction for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson.

His father, Benjamin, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was a union ironworker who committed suicide when the boy was 8.

His mother, Bertha, moved him and his sister Shirley to Los Angeles, where she worked as a seamstress and later a bookkeeper.

Spector began his career in 1958 as co-founder, guitarist and vocalist of the Teddy Bears, a group he formed with two high school friends, Marshall Lieb and Annette Kleinbard, writing their U.S. number-one single, “To Know Him Is To Love Him,” the title of which was taken from the inscription on his father’s gravestone.

Released in 1958, it sold more than a million records after the group appeared on American Bandstand, with Spector playing guitar and singing backup.

After the Teddy Bears disbanded in 1959, he turned to producing.

In 1960, he co-founded Philles Records with one-time mentor Lester Sill (melding their first names) and at the age of 21, became the youngest-ever U.S. label owner, to that point in time.

Sill, who helped Jerry Leiber and his partner, Mike Stoller, get a start in the music business, arranged for Spector to work with the two men at Atlantic, where their use of strings and heavy instrumentation became part of the Spector repertoire.

“Spanish Harlem,” the title of Ben E. King’s 1960 hit which Spector and Leiber helped write and produce for Atco Record — an imprint of Atlantic Records — helped him on his way.

Spector adopted what he famously referred to as “a Wagnerian approach to rock & roll,” describing the hit records he assembled in the Sixties for artists like the Ronettes, the Crystals, Darlene Love and the Righteous Brothers as “little symphonies for the kids.”

His productions were dense and orchestral, building layer upon layer of guitars, horns, keyboards, strings and percussion, often with multiple instruments playing the same note in unison.

The songs he selected were dizzyingly romantic, typically written by the greatest of the Brill Building songwriters, and his classic recordings relied on the brilliant contributions of a set of musicians dubbed the “Wrecking Crew,” a loose collective of session musicians widely revered by industry insiders.

(Drummer Hal Blaine’s four-beat intro to the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” is considered one of the most distinctive song intros in rock & roll history).

Spector’s reputation as a producer was burgeoning as he focused his attention on the original girl vocal group, the Crystals, who had hits with “There’s No Other (Like My Baby)” and “Uptown.”

But after a third single, the controversial “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)” flopped, Spector fired the Crystals and replaced them with singer Love and her backups, the Blossoms.

Summarily dictatorial and mercurial executive decisions of the sort, would become a hallmark of his career.

This particular personnel change worked.

The new Crystals’ first single, the million-selling “He’s a Rebel,” became Philles’ first Number One single and just a year after forming the label, Spector bought out Lester Sill’s share.

At 21 years old in 1960, Phil Spector was a millionaire.

Spector was to become rock & roll’s first superstar producer — ”the first tycoon of teen” as a 1964 Tom Wolfe profile dubbed him.

He held his own against the British Invasion of ’64, producing even more hits for the Ronettes, and in 1965 he turned his attention to a male duo called the Righteous Brothers.

The group’s “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” sold over 2 million copies and became Philles’ third Number One hit.

Facing criticism that his productions were increasingly time-consuming, overly ambitious and even bloated, and bitterly disappointed in 1966 that Ike & Tina Turner’s “River Deep — Mountain High” — which he considered his masterpiece — stalled at #88 in the U.S.(though it would hit #3 in the U.K.), Spector secluded himself in his Hollywood mansion for nearly two years.

Re-emerging in 1969 and securely back in the production saddle, he hooked up with the Beatles.

Predictably, it was not all strawberries (or peaches) and cream.

George Harrison and John Lennon were far more enamored with Spector than Paul McCartney, who was unimpressed and then downright angry with his string-heavy treatment of tracks such as “The Long and Winding Road.”

McCartney had composed the song as a simple piano ballad during some of the Beatles’ most tumultuous times.

Spector, in an effort to achieve and perpetuate his now-famous ‘Wall of Sound’ technique, took overdubbing to a new level.

On “The Long and Winding Road,” he wanted to overdub orchestra and choir but there weren’t available tracks on the tape.

No problem for Spector, who wiped one of McCartney’s two vocal tracks to put the orchestra on, without telling him.

Harps, horns, an orchestra and women’s choir were added.

When Apple Corps sent McCartney the pre-release acetate of the song, he was furious, livid in fact.

Rage consumed him.

What he heard and perceived as an injustice to his artistry, was one thing.

Proceeding without his permission was another.

“No one had asked me what I thought. I couldn’t believe it,” McCartney said. “I would never have female voices on a Beatles record.”

Witnessing the manipulation of his art prompted McCartney to write a scathing letter to Allen Klein, a Beatles manager.

It read:

“Dear Sir,

In future, no one will be allowed to add or subtract from a recording of one of my songs without my permission.

I had considered orchestrating ‘The Long and Winding Road’ but I had decided against it.

I, therefore, want it altered to these specifications:

1. Strings, horns, voices and all added noises to be reduced in volume.

2. Vocal and Beatle instrumentation to be brought up in volume.

3. Harp to be removed completely at the end of the song and original piano notes to be substituted.

4. Don’t ever do it again.

Signed,

Paul McCartney

c.c. Phil Spector; John Eastman”

The song, as McCartney intended it, eventually saw the light of day as part of the Beatles’ Anthology 3 compilation album.

The volatile Spector had completely alienated him.

It wasn’t the first time that had been the case with others, certainly.

And sure as shootin’ — pardon the expression — it wouldn’t be the last.

Lana Jean Clarkson — were she up and taking nourishment — could attest to that.

On the morning of February 3, 2003, American actress Lana Clarkson was found dead in the Pyrenees Castle, the Alhambra, California mansion of Phil Spector.

In the earlier hours of that morning, Clarkson had met Spector while working at the House of Blues in Los Angeles.

They left together in Spector’s limousine and went inside, while his driver waited in the vehicle.

About an hour later, the driver heard a gunshot, before Spector exited the premises from a back door with a gun.

“I think I just shot her,” Spector was quoted as saying, according to affidavits.

Later, he said that Clarkson’s death was an “accidental suicide,” and that she “kissed the gun.”

Spector was tried for the murder of Clarkson in 2007.

On September 26 of that year, a mistrial was declared due to a hung jury, with ten of twelve jurors favoring conviction.

He was tried again for second-degree murder — generally a common law murder, not an aggravated form — on October 20, 2008.

On April 13, 2009, the jury found Spector guilty of murdering Clarkson.

On May 29, 2009, he was sentenced to nineteen years to life in state prison.

Phil Spector, musical genius and impresario, died in a prison hospital on January 16, 2021.

He was 81.

[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in January 2021.]