Not excusing Phil by any means, but I thought for decades that he had severe untreated mental illness. I always find it sad that some celebrities can fly above getting help that would dramatically change their lives. A woman lost her life over his psychosis. No winners here.

Even musically he was up and down, genius one moment, bizarre and inchorenet the next.

Just a sad and twisted story.

Plus his Father's suicide when he was ten. At 18 "To Know Him Is To Love Him" got released, but at what age did he write the song? Really good song IMO.

To Know Him Was To Love Him

They are the words on his father Ben Spector's headstone ...



ROCKMAN



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2021-01-18 23:03 by Rockman.

Quote
Maindefender
No direct comments from the Stones??

why would there be? Apart from a brief jam/writing session at the start of their career, there's no musical or personal connection other than Mick, Keith and Brian getting off (or trying to) with The Ronettes.

Interesting article here, see how BBC had to quickly change their headline on his death, first headline he was ‘flawed’ but they quickly changed that to murderer!!
Astonishing journalism

[www.bbc.co.uk]

Also interesting to read the Guardian report BBC mentions.

Seems plenty of journalists struggle to report the whole truth, as if his crimes got in the way of their quickly scribbled report of his musical achievements

Quote
Rockman
To Know Him Is To Love Him

They are the words on his father Ben Spector's headstone ...

To Know Him Was To Love Him



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2021-01-18 22:54 by Maindefender.

CorrectO ... my mistake....



ROCKMAN

Quote
ycagwywpmd
Interesting article here, see how BBC had to quickly change their headline on his death, first headline he was ‘flawed’ but they quickly changed that to murderer!!
Astonishing journalism

[www.bbc.co.uk]

Also interesting to read the Guardian report BBC mentions.

Seems plenty of journalists struggle to report the whole truth, as if his crimes got in the way of their quickly scribbled report of his musical achievements

From the article, in their Spector bio:

"But after the commercial failure of Tina Turner's River Deep, Mountain High, he largely withdrew from public life"

What? I remember that as being a big hit (by Ike and Tina), constantly on the radio--in fact, I remember seeing the Ike and Tina Turner Revue opening for the Stones at the Albert Hall and wondering how on earth they were going to be able to play River Deep, Mountain High live (answer, amazingly well). Was it not a hit in the US or something?

Quote
Aquamarine

Quote
ycagwywpmd
Interesting article here, see how BBC had to quickly change their headline on his death, first headline he was ‘flawed’ but they quickly changed that to murderer!!
Astonishing journalism

[www.bbc.co.uk]

Also interesting to read the Guardian report BBC mentions.

Seems plenty of journalists struggle to report the whole truth, as if his crimes got in the way of their quickly scribbled report of his musical achievements

From the article, in their Spector bio:

"But after the commercial failure of Tina Turner's River Deep, Mountain High, he largely withdrew from public life"

What? I remember that as being a big hit (by Ike and Tina), constantly on the radio--in fact, I remember seeing the Ike and Tina Turner Revue opening for the Stones at the Albert Hall and wondering how on earth they were going to be able to play River Deep, Mountain High live (answer, amazingly well). Was it not a hit in the US or something?

No, it wasn't a hit in the US - from the Variety magazine article posted on page one of this thread. Spector: Producer/Murderer

"However, in 1966, Spector and Philles began to hit the skids. The British Invasion — led by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the latter of whom invited Spector to their sessions — had pushed girl-group pop off the charts (some obvious impact on soul’s Motown Sound notwithstanding), and Spector’s opulent style had begun to sound dated. Even his devotion to monophonic sound was being challenged by the growing acceptance of stereo recording. However, the producer envisioned a personal renaissance in the form of a single by the husband-and-wife R&B duo Ike and Tina Turner.

Cut at great cost with an army of session musicians at Gold Star, the volcanic “River Deep — Mountain High” was released with a flourish in May 1966.
However, while it managed to reach No. 3 in the U.K., the single bombed domestically, peaking at No. 88 and falling off the charts after just four weeks".

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

Quote
Rockman
Heard River Deep Mountain High
in a coastal restaurant a few days ago ....

An amazing record ... It still hit with
such power right thru to those final few seconds
where even the music collapses and seems to fall
to the floor like it is beaten by the power of it all .... CLASSIC

I loved so many of the records he produced but none more than River Deep, Mountain High. Brilliant, explosive, with the incredible crescendo at the end.

If anyone saw Bad Times At the El Royals, you must have noticed that the record producer was a Phil Spector clone, down to producing a Ronettes- like group.

Overproduced muck with incredibly muddy sound and instruments colliding with each other masquerading as something special. When the car AM radio hit the skids as the most common denominator for music reproduction, so did the Wall of Sound sound. Thats what he produced for, long after that was viable.

And I doubt anyone is going to say about Phil what they put on his pop's gravestone. Present or past tense.

jb

Oh no! Anyway...

How can you not like "Be My Baby"??? C'monnnnn



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2021-01-19 02:11 by ryanpow.

Quote
Hairball

Quote
Aquamarine

Quote
ycagwywpmd
Interesting article here, see how BBC had to quickly change their headline on his death, first headline he was ‘flawed’ but they quickly changed that to murderer!!
Astonishing journalism

[www.bbc.co.uk]

Also interesting to read the Guardian report BBC mentions.

Seems plenty of journalists struggle to report the whole truth, as if his crimes got in the way of their quickly scribbled report of his musical achievements

From the article, in their Spector bio:

"But after the commercial failure of Tina Turner's River Deep, Mountain High, he largely withdrew from public life"

What? I remember that as being a big hit (by Ike and Tina), constantly on the radio--in fact, I remember seeing the Ike and Tina Turner Revue opening for the Stones at the Albert Hall and wondering how on earth they were going to be able to play River Deep, Mountain High live (answer, amazingly well). Was it not a hit in the US or something?

No, it wasn't a hit in the US - from the Variety magazine article posted on page one of this thread. Spector: Producer/Murderer

"However, in 1966, Spector and Philles began to hit the skids. The British Invasion — led by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the latter of whom invited Spector to their sessions — had pushed girl-group pop off the charts (some obvious impact on soul’s Motown Sound notwithstanding), and Spector’s opulent style had begun to sound dated. Even his devotion to monophonic sound was being challenged by the growing acceptance of stereo recording. However, the producer envisioned a personal renaissance in the form of a single by the husband-and-wife R&B duo Ike and Tina Turner.

Cut at great cost with an army of session musicians at Gold Star, the volcanic “River Deep — Mountain High” was released with a flourish in May 1966.
However, while it managed to reach No. 3 in the U.K., the single bombed domestically, peaking at No. 88 and falling off the charts after just four weeks".

Wow, I had no idea, thanks for the info. Shows how we were getting completely different perspectives on different sides of the pond at that time.

He played maracas on Little by Little.

ROCKMAN



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2021-01-19 04:59 by Rockman.

I remember him for his small role in Easy Rider, a film I watched many times.

[m.youtube.com]

[www.theguardian.com]

Phil Spector defined the toxic music svengali – a figure that persists today
Laura Snapes

Spector, who has died aged 81, created a culture of cruelty that was seen by the music industry as a symptom of genius. It’s a scenario that has played out again and again.

The list of abuses Phil Spector doled out to his ex-wife Ronnie Spector is horrifying. He threatened to display her dead body in a glass-lidded gold coffin if she ever left him; he wouldn’t let her wear shoes in the house in case she ran away, and he put barbed wire and guard dogs around his mansion to make sure that she couldn’t. On the rare occasion he allowed her out alone, she had to drive alongside a life-sized dummy of Spector, cigarette in its mouth. Thanks more to luck than mercy, she escaped barefoot through a broken window.

Just as horrifying is the list of artists who continued to seek Spector’s studio magic despite common knowledge of his menacing behaviour: the Beatles, John Lennon, Dion, Leonard Cohen, the Ramones. After a period of estrangement, his brief turn-of-the-millennium revival was short-lived: Celine Dion and Starsailor both ended up firing him. In a Guardian interview from 2003, shortly after Spector was arrested for the murder of Lana Clarkson, the Wigan band’s frontman James Walsh expressed concern that, were Spector innocent, he might be traumatised by the arrest. “It wasn’t nice seeing him like that,” he said of a photograph of Spector being led away by police. You hope he never saw a picture of the murder scene, Clarkson’s broken teeth sprayed around the carpet after Spector shot her in the mouth. (In a statement released after Spector’s conviction, Walsh said “It is hard for me to pass judgment on whether he is guilty or innocent.”)

Spector is known as the innovator of the “wall of sound” recording technique and countless moments of pop sublimity. They are inextricable from his everyday barbarism, waving guns around and holding them to musicians’ heads to enforce his will. The combination created a pernicious infamy: if the songs are so majestic, then the behaviour must be justifiable. Where Spector’s famous “boom-cha-boom-cha” drum sound on Be My Baby (played by Hal Blaine) instantly summons a pristine moment in pop history, Spector’s living legacy is that of music industry abuse going unchecked because the art is perceived as worth it – or worse, considered “proof” of wild and untameable genius.

Spector created not just a sound but the enduring paradigm of the exploitative music svengali whose work is too lucrative for him to be held to account, his victims little more than unfortunate collateral. Kim Fowley, svengali for rock band the Runaways, flaunted his sexual exploitation of underage girls – he posted an advert in an LA zine calling for a “blond, blue-eye sex-dog” girlfriend aged 18 or under – and in 1975 allegedly raped 14-year-old inebriated Runaways member Jackie Fuchs, inviting other men to join in. Lou Pearlman, the impresario who created Backstreet Boys and ‘NSync, was known for being inappropriately tactile and invasive. Then CEO of Sony Music, Tommy Mottola said it was “absolutely wrong and inappropriate” for him to get involved with his young signing Mariah Carey, but did so anyway. After they married, Carey said that he imprisoned her in their home and controlled every detail of her life. In his 2013 memoir, Mottola wrote: “If it seemed like I was controlling, let me apologise again. Was I obsessive? Yes. But that was also part of the reason for her success.”

Those stories emerged after the deaths or lapsed heydays of the accused. More recent examples play on fan and media complicity. It was well known that R Kelly married Aaliyah when she was underage – he produced her debut album, Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number – and rumours of his predation on young Black girls in Chicago were rife. This was treated like comic trivia, an attitude the R&B star exploited with his brazenly absurd persona, until the persistence of reporter Jim DeRogatis made the appalling allegations impossible to disregard. (Kelly is in jail awaiting trial and has pleaded not guilty to more than 20 charges of sexual abuse.) Ryan Adams “dangled career opportunities while simultaneously pursuing female artists for sex”, according to a 2019 New York Times report. Still, the Telegraph wrote when the allegations first surfaced, if we “expect our artists to be paragons … we are not just going to be very disappointed, we are going to be stuck with a lot of mediocre art”. The ends justify the means.

Adams is one of the few music industry figures who have been publicly accused and experienced diminished standing post-#MeToo. Twenty women have accused Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons of sexual assault, which he denies. The Grammy-winning producer Detail, who co-wrote Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Drunk in Love, had to pay $15m to a model and aspiring singer who won her lawsuit accusing him of rape and sexual and emotional abuse in 2019. Last August he was arrested on 17 counts of sexual assault, and later pleaded not guilty.

The music industry has been paying lip service to diversifying the male-dominated world of production for years, albeit to little change. A study of the 700 biggest pop songs in the US between the years 2012 and 2018 found that just 2% of the songs’ producers were women. Perhaps greater gender representation would collapse the existing power dynamic that leaves especially young women vulnerable. “There would always be the suggestion of something,” Ellie Goulding recently told the Guardian of her early experiences with producers – whether intoxication or sexual manipulation. But enacting change would require overhauling the industry’s conception of pop mythos.

Not all producers are violent predators, but the role offers ample cover for anyone who chooses to exploit it. The scarcity myth – that bankable producers are like gold dust, and few are good enough to join their ranks – stokes the concept of unimpeachable genius and makes a supposedly risky commercial prospect of expanding the field; the first woman or non-binary producer to helm a major album that flopped would confirm their peer group as a liability. The male genius at the boards lends an aura of gravity and steadiness in contrast to the fickle fleet of young faces who front his songs. He seldom gives interviews to preserve the so-called mystery of his craft. He can cultivate a king-making sound across an array of artists, becoming a cost-effective and reliable source of revenue as artists fall in and out of fashion. Bad behaviour taking place behind the scenes isn’t as commercially toxic as public-facing infractions. He is a protected commodity.

Pop stars – especially female pop stars – are frequently maligned for making music that requires the involvement of a dozen or more people, as if it undermines their artistry. (Just read the comments beneath any positive Guardian pop review.) Producers are fetishised as auteurs, yet they are also nothing without a talented artist and songwriter (often the same person), without session musicians, engineers and mixers. The “lone genius” narrative masterminded by publicist Derek Taylor for Brian Wilson as he embraced the possibilities of production in the mid-60s was immediately destructive to Wilson’s psyche and creativity, yet it abides 55 years later.

A more collectivist view is necessary to deflate this worship and not put one person’s commercial potential ahead of another’s wellbeing. “We were seen as employees, not artists,” Ronnie Spector told the Telegraph in 2014. “I can’t speak for all the girls but I always saw myself as an artist. That’s why I think I’m still alive – to say we girls have to stick up for ourselves.” Until the industry sticks up for them, too, there will always be more men to assume Spector’s mantle.

There is a certain soon outgoing prez who fits the mold precisely, though it is uncertain what "art" exactly he created.

jb

blah blah blah.

What a troubled complicated man. Listen, he's done at least one thing almost all of us love, I just assume that thing is different for everything, and for many a whole career of memorable music. I mean, Bruce Springsteen strove for Phil Spector's sound with Born To Run. He's such a part of the musical history of the 1960s and 70s. Long before he went to jail, we all knew what he did to Ronnie Spector, or his propensity for guns with guys like John Lennon in the studio. Guy was an absolute freak but I would think a true genius even though the word gets thrown around too frequently. He fits the unique type. I will absolutely remember his music, but that is definitely the only positive thing about him.

Quote
jbwelda
Overproduced muck with incredibly muddy sound and instruments colliding with each other masquerading as something special. When the car AM radio hit the skids as the most common denominator for music reproduction, so did the Wall of Sound sound. Thats what he produced for, long after that was viable.

And I doubt anyone is going to say about Phil what they put on his pop's gravestone. Present or past tense.

jb

Nicely put.
Stereo killed the radio star.

Paint a cheesy bargain basement afro wig on him and he's golden.

jb

Is that the last time Keith wore a tie?

ROCKMAN

interesting reminiscence from andrew loog oldham, sent to bob lefsetz after he posted a piece on PS:

"From: Andrew Loog Oldham
Re: Phil Spector

As you and i have discussed i knew phil, the stones did too, before the tom wolfe casting, before the madness and the medication, before the silly old man trolled out in his viagra limousine much too late at night.

The man who brought good cheer and maracas to "not fade away" at regent sound on london's denmark street in february of '64 ; who, when bill and charlie were knackered and had gone back to the hotel, played bass as jack nitzsche played harpsichord to keith's accoustic as jagger sang and made "play with fire" forever at 5am at RCA on sunset and iver.

This was before the recognition set in like a permanent wound to the soul, before the medication de- wired an already fragile system. One of the last straws was attempting to record a UK university band, Starsailor. Spector was back at the location of his earlier Harrison and Lennon triumphs, and sometimes you cannot go home again. Phil had been sober a few years, he returned to LA and Dan Tana's, defeated and started drinking again. As any knowing alcoholic will tell you you may have stopped drinking but your body did not. Lana Clarkson was only a couple of drinks away.

You write perfectly of the Lennon collaboration. An added ingredient to that mix was probably that Phil would have to be on his better behavior. One of John's gifts was that he could whack you with a word. And with Phil he did just that.

RIP Lana Clarkson and RIP Phil, who died many years before.

I saw a recent prison mugshot of Phil. He looked better than I'd seen him look in yonks. Perhaps he'd been unable to self- medicate in jail...

One 45rpm to add to your list. "Try some, Buy Some" by Ronnie Spector on the Apple label; in Bowie's Top Ten as well.

Abrazo, ALO"

Keith has worn an assortment of ties since then.

jb

Thanks rayrad ......

wondered when ALO would comment .......



ROCKMAN

Its strange how Spector's life
is so similar to that of UK record producer Joe Meek .....



ROCKMAN