Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector
Mick Brown
(Bloomsbury, £16.99)
5 stars
Even by the extravagant standards of contemporary celebrity gothic, Phil Spector's fall from grace has been dramatic. It could yet end with the man who many believe to be the world's greatest record producer living out the rest of his life behind bars.
Spector is on bail on a murder charge after Lana Clarkson, a little-known actress was found with gunshot wounds to the mouth and head in his home in the early hours of 3 February, 2003. Four years on, his trial is only set to start now. Thus Mick Brown's riveting new book, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound, is being published without its real denouement. It hardly matters: the tale Brown tells is so extraordinary, its subject so bizarre, that it grips from start to finish.
The book's genesis is an odd one. Brown was originally dispatched to Los Angeles to interview the reclusive Spector in December 2002. They spent several hours in conversation, each one marked by the automated voice of Spector's talking wristwatch. 'I have devils inside me,' Spector confessed. 'I'm my own worst enemy.... To all intents and purposes I would say I am probably relatively insane...'
Just two days after his feature was published, under the headline, 'Found: Pop's Lost Genius', Brown was sitting in his office when the news broke that a woman had been found dead in Spector's house. 'For a terrible moment,' he writes, 'a scene flashed across my mind. Somehow, Spector had read my piece, disliked it intensely, and, in a moment of madness ... taken revenge on his assistant.'
That Brown considered this dreadful scenario a distinct possibility gives some indication of the impression that Spector made on him. It was the same one he left on many people, even some of those who thought themselves closest to him. No one, though, as Brown's book attests, ever really got that close to Phil Spector.
He was born Harvey Philip Spector in the South Bronx, on 26 December 1939 (not 1940, as has been reported), a birthday he shared, as Brown dryly notes, with Mao Zedong. Spector's childhood was blighted by the sudden and unexplained suicide of his father when he was 10. The family moved to California soon afterwards, which exacerbated the boy's already profound sense of not belonging. Both pampered and bullied by an over-possessive mother, picked on at school, and suffering from asthma and diabetes, Spector spent an inordinate amount of his teens in his bedroom listening to the raw new music played late at night on the radio. His first group, the Teddy Bears, in which he played guitar, was named in homage to an Elvis song, but his real talent, it emerged, was as an architect of sound.
The group raised $40 to record their first single in the small Gold Star studios in Los Angeles in 1958. Written by the 18-year-old Spector, it was called 'To Know Him is to Love Him', the title a slight variation on the epitaph on his father's gravestone. In the studio, he meticulously created the song's structure, the slow beginning moving into a soaring mid-section, the chorus embellished by soft, echoing vocal harmonies. The result, though hastily assembled, still sounds oddly unearthly nearly 50 years later. Though released as a B-side, it topped the US charts.
'The small, significant, put-upon boy had proved everyone wrong,' writes Brown. 'Success now went to his head like helium.'
From that moment, Spector became a control freak, both inside and outside the studio; a man for whom every ensuing pop hit would be a vindication, and yet for whom nothing - not the acclaim of the public, nor the respect of his peers, nor the amassing of great wealth - would ever banish those deep-rooted feelings of inferiority. It is one of the great ironies of pop that Spector's songs, those yearning, overloaded and yet often innocent-sounding, teenage anthems he constructed around the voices of the Crystals, the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers in the Sixties, were, on one deep level, acts of revenge on a world that had wounded him beyond repair as a child.
Nearly every friend and associate that Brown tracks down is willing to acknowledge Spector's singular artistic genius, while attesting to his dreadfulness as a human being. Paranoid, megalomaniacal and vindictive, Spector's often spectacular lack of empathy does seem to suggest that the obsessiveness which underpinned his creativity also undermined his humanity. His urge to control manifested itself most dramatically in his relationships with women, whom he simultaneously worshipped and utterly distrusted. He kept his wife, Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes, locked in their mansion for weeks on end, only allowing her out for a drive when he had installed an inflatable life-size model of himself in the passenger seat.
In business, too, Spector was ruthless in the extreme. He routinely altered the writing credits on songs he had produced to include himself, and seemed to regard the paying of royalties, like so much else, as a personal affront. And yet, for all that, he was an undisputed genius; pop's first studio auteur. Brown, long one of Britain's most authoritative and incisive music writers, brilliantly recreates the atmosphere of camaraderie and dogged labour that went into creating Spector's 'Wall of Sound', one of the key signatures of 20th-century pop music. 'Spector did not want displays of virtuosity,' he writes, 'nor was he interested in the individual sound of the instrument, only its integral value to the sound as a whole.'
In the studio, at least for a short, golden period in the early Sixties, Spector reshaped the contours of the pop song in dramatic fashion. He created what he called 'teen symphonies for the kids', but, in his head, he was competing with Beethoven and Mozart.
The coming of the Beatles signalled the beginning of the end of his reign. In the space of a few years, the 'Wall of Sound' had turned into a prison that kept Spector locked firmly in the pop past. At the end of the decade, though, it was the Beatles who opened the door for his return. He received a summons from John Lennon, who wanted him to 'rescue' the Beatles' flawed swan song, Let it Be. Lennon's decision incensed Paul McCartney. It is hard not to see Spector's unnecessarily baroque reworking of McCartney's spartan and plaintive title song as a belated act of revenge.
Lennon, though, remained in awe of Spector, and, for once, the feeling was reciprocated. The Imagine album is perhaps the one and only time that Spector collaborated with anyone in the true sense of the word. One one level, it is the coming-together of two damaged and abandoned children who, when they weren't trying to outdo each other in the alcohol stakes, communicated on some deep, unspoken level that Spector would never find with any other artist. Not even the shock of seeing Spector suddenly pull out a gun and fire it into the studio ceiling dented Lennon's hero worship. (Guns were brandished by Spector in subsequent troubled studio sessions with both Leonard Cohen, who described the atmosphere around Spector as 'post-Wagnerian ... Hitlerian', and with the Ramones, one of whom, the street-smart, ex-hustler, Joey, simply shrugged and dared Spector to shoot him.)
Those gunshots fired in anger, though, were auguries. Despite years of psychoanalysis, Spector never managed to assuage his childhood demons. In decline, like Elvis Presley, he retreated behind the sealed gates of a mansion, surrounded by an ever-changing retinue of minions. The panoply of prescribed drugs detailed by his lawyers after his arrest is also of Presleyian proportions, but it seems to have been alcohol that really exacerbated his troubles.
Ultimately, the myth of Phil Spector - the tortured artist, the madman genius, the twisted recluse - was played out with dreadful consequences. And, whatever the outcome of the trial, it is Lana Clarkson - and not, despite what his warped mind might tell him, Phil Spector - who is the ultimate victim of that myth. Brown's final chapters make for a sobering read, the clinical language of the pathologist and the police report more shocking in its detail than any of the excesses recounted previously.
In the end, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound is a remarkable book about, among other things, fame, obsession, genius, money and madness. It paints the fullest picture yet of a man who, whether creating some of the greatest pop music of all time, or destroying the lives of those closest to him, seems to have existed in a continuous state of mental agitation. The Phil Spector story still awaits its ending. In the meantime, this is the definitive study of the man, and the myth that engulfed him.