In December 2002, the reclusive, deeply weird record producer Phil Spector allowed British journalist Mick Brown into his castle in Alhambra, Calif., for a remarkably candid, scary interview.
Spector was the creator of his Philles record company’s densely symphonic “Wall of Sound,” the foundation of such famous early-1960s pop hits as “He’s a Rebel,” “Be My Baby” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin.”
But by the time of Brown’s visit, Spector mostly was a faded memory to the public; he hadn’t done anything important for decades.
During an all-nighter, Spector confided, “I have devils inside that fight me. And I’m my own worst enemy.” It took Brown until Feb. 1 to get his article published as the cover story in the Daily Telegraph magazine, under the headline: “Found: Pop’s Lost Genius.”
Early on the morning of Feb. 3, 2003, actress Lana Clarkson was discovered shot to death in that same castle after accompanying Spector home. The producer, more lost than ever, is on trial for her murder. He claims she killed herself. He’s back in the news big-time.
This would seem to make Brown the ideal biographer for Spector, because he would have the “Rosebud”-like motivation to not only find the source of those devils, but also to show how they slowly, methodically came to dominate and paralyze him at his creative peak and render him prone to acts of cruelty and violence, especially to women and especially with guns. (Brown examines the facts surrounding the Clarkson case but fortunately doesn’t render his own verdict.)
But for all his knowledge about Spector, Brown can’t go that psychologically deep in figuring him out.
He certainly is good at imposing some chronological order and journalistic clarity on Spector’s messy, once flamboyantly busy and then secretive life. He does a better job at that than Mark Ribowsky did in his earlier, recently updated “He’s a Rebel” biography, although Ribowsky has great information not included here.
And there are some interesting observations about why Spector turned out so troubled. Spector himself ponders the genetic impact of his parents’ being first cousins. Alcoholism took its toll. There is also the fact his father committed suicide when Spector was 9 years old.
But early on, he used that tragedy to create art – his first hit record as a member of the Teddy Bears, “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” (The title was paraphrased from the epitaph on his father’s gravestone.)
He was still a teenager at the time, the trauma still fresh. Why he was less able to do that as he got older, succumbing to those “devils,” is not answered here.
It’s as if at a certain age in the mid-1960s, after he had become “The First Tycoon of Teen,” according to a gullible 1965 profile by Tom Wolfe, he set out to make sure his gravestone would read: “To Know Him Was to Be Scared of Him.”
Still, Spector’s life in music is a fascinating one. It’s explored with diligence here, and his contribution to popular music is made clear. Brown quotes producer Jerry Wexler saying that Spector was the first “producer as star, as artist, as unifying force.”
Maybe Spector was headed for an inevitable fall when, in the late 1960s, his kind of pop-symphony productions fell out of favor. Although John Lennon and George Harrison helped him make a comeback in the early 1970s by having him produce their records, by then he was less important than the artists.
Unlike Ken Emerson, whose “Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era” covers some of the same early-1960s territory, Brown can’t offer revelatory critical insights into which of Spector’s classic productions stand up best today and why.
But the cavalcade of lives that Spector touched, for better or worse, is just amazing – his former wife Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes, Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertugen, Ike and Tina Turner, Lenny Bruce, Nancy Sinatra, Dennis Hopper, Cher, even Celine Dion, who Spector tried to produce as part of a flop 1990s comeback.
Oh yes. And Lana Clarkson.
Steven Rosen is a freelance writer in Cincinnati.
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NONFICTION
Tearing Down the Wall of Sound
The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector
By Mick Brown
$26.95
