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The Music Producers Series: Phil Spector

There are always plenty of music threads revolving around bands, songs, and albums. But the producers rarely get any love, even though at times they’re the true authors of the sound. It’s different for every producer – some are more hands-on than others – but I’d like to kick off this series with the guy I think is the single most talented musician in the history of American pop and rock. Please, other posters should do threads on their favorite producers; the only one I am liable to write about is Phil Spector.

Also: I am writing this post in bits and pieces while I have a few minutes here and there, so apologies in advance if it’s not as cohesive as I’d like.

A little background on Phil Spector. He was born in Brooklyn to a Jewish family in 1940, then moved to Los Angeles where he grew up and went to high school. His father committed suicide when Phil was 8 years old, by driving alone and pulling the car over to the side of the road, hooking a hose up to the exhaust pipe, and filling the interior of the car with carbon monoxide. When Spector was a teenager, he wrote a song about his father, naming it after the inscription on the tombstone (which read: To Know Him Was To Love Him). Spector’s song was a love song from a girl to a boy called “To Know Him Is To Love Him,” and Spector wrote it in the middle of the night. He called his best friend Marshall at the crack of dawn, woke him up, and played the song for him over the phone.

A little while later, Marshall, Phil, and a girl Phil liked all went into the studio and paid some dude $30 or something to get an hour of recording time. They did “To Know Him Is To Love Him” and somehow the demo got played on the radio and remarkably became a #1 single. That started Spector’s producing career.

He ended up going to New York and working at the Brill Building, which is where all the great songwriters of the 1950s were working. Spector, as a teenager, studied under the great minds of music and quickly rose to fame. He had balls too: when he showed up as a kid in New York, he would say, “I came here from California to make hits.” His first claim to fame was “He’s a Rebel” in 1962 (I think, sorry I can’t check all these dates) recorded by The Crystals.

Spector defined himself in 1963 while at Gold Star studios in Hollywood. It was a small recording space with a low ceiling. Spector crammed it with more musicians than anyone imagined could fit in there. He had dozens of percussionists, strings, horns, and guitars. And he had them play all at once rather than one at a time, their sounds bouncing off the walls and ceiling into each other’s microphones. That mic sound was then sent through an echo chamber and funneled into one track – always recording in mono – and that became the “wall of sound” Spector is famous for. He did this for a song called “Da Doo Ron Ron” that, if you listen to it today, still sounds like the most phenomenal breakthrough in rock and roll you could possibly imagine.

Once he started working with hottie Ronnie Bennett and The Ronettes, he was unstoppable. “Be My Baby” was another classic, as was “Baby I Love You” and “And Then He Kissed Me,” my favorite Crystals song. But he didn’t stop with the girl groups. He recorded with the Righteous Brothers and did “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” and “Unchained Melody,” two more classics people fell in love with around the time of Top Gun and Ghost.

His influence spread far and wide. There would be no Brian Wilson or Pet Sounds without Spector. Sonny Bono and Cher, two kids who watched Spector at work in the early ‘60s, recorded their biggest hit “I Got You Babe” using his wall of sound approach.

But Spector was insane. He was a musical genius for sure – in fact, the first version of “Lovin’ Feeling” was fast, like an Everly Brothers song. He slowed it down and slowed it down and slowed it down until it became the gut-wrenching classic it is today. And when he recorded the most expensive single ever produced (at its time), the amazingly great “River Deep Mountain High” with Tina Turner, he turned into a lunatic in the studio. He made Turner perform the track so many times that they went deep into the night. Without air conditioning in 1968, Tina was so hot and sweaty she ended up taking her shirt off. And, in the middle of the night, singing in nothing but a bra, she belted out the performance that is on that track today – still a masterpiece if you listen to it.

There are stories of Spector being so wrapped up in his music that he would go to the fridge to take out some pastrami and leave his wallet in there, then spending days looking for his lost wallet. He wouldn’t let his wife Ronnie leave the house so he took all her shoes. And of course we all know he became such a weird recluse in recent years that he took to shooting some Hollywood starlet in the face with one of his many guns at his mansion.

But despite his lunacy, he had the best ear for music of any producer in existence. When the Beatles broke up, Spector took over for George Martin and produced their farewell Let It Be album. He made George Harrison’s solo records as well as John Lennon’s Imagine. He even recorded with The Ramones, producing their greatest song ever: “Do You Remember Rock N Roll Radio?” I challenge anyone to go listen to that Ramones song and find something wrong with it. The blast of horns and drums, along with the vocals, make it the single pinnacle of American punk music history. “It’s the end, the end of the ‘70s/ It’s the end, the end of the century.”

The thing I love about Spector is that he just had that sixth sense for what would make a record sparkle. When he heard stuff like “Da Doo Ron Ron” played back, he would turn to his engineers and say “Do you know what that sound is? Coming out of that speaker? That is solid gold coming out of that speaker.” He orchestrated entire symphonies to back up stupid 2-minute pop songs. His lyrics were primitive in their simplicity, but his melodies and harmonies and instrumentation were as complex as anything in the musical landscape. He truly authored his songs no matter who wrote or performed it; he had that much creative control. Whatever Stanley Kubrick was to cinema, Phil Spector was to pop music.

For those of you unfamiliar with the sound of Phil Spector, I recommend either a) just buying his box set called Back To Mono; or b) hunting down these 10 songs to get a taste of what a genius he was:

Da Doo Ron Ron (The Crystals)
Do You Remember Rock N Roll Radio (The Ramones)
Then He Kissed Me (The Crystals)
River Deep-Mountain High (Tina Turner)
Black Pearl (Sonny Charles and the Checkmates)
You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' (The Righteous Brothers)
I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine (Ronnie Spector)
To Know Him Is To Love Him (The Teddy Bears)
Baby, I Love You (The Ronettes)
Unchained Melody (The Righteous Brothers)