Had Phil Spector died in a pre-#MeToo world, the barrage of articles about his legacy might have been presented with a different, slightly less scathing tone. But with the obligation presently at hand for everyone to address “complicated” or “problematic” artists, most glaringly the white male ones, we’re instead given such titles as, “Phil Spector Defined the Toxic Music Svengali–A Figure That Persists Today” and “Phil Spector Wasn’t A Flawed Genius–He Was A Murderer.”
It seems with all the invective required to tarnish Spector for being abusive (to say the least) toward women, little room has been left to acknowledge that he did very much pioneer pop music. And while some would say, “That’s the issue, were it not for him, maybe we wouldn’t have our Dr. Lukes of the present,” the truth is, the music industry (and any industry for that matter, whether arts-related or not) was always going to be a hotbed of psychopathy. And that was regardless of whether or not Spector came along to invent an entirely new sound–one that defined the songs of the 1960s and beyond. Granted, his innovation would not have been as successful without Ronnie Bennett, the lead singer of the girl group that would make him a bona fide household name, The Ronettes. With “Be My Baby,” Spector crystallized the sonic archetype of what the “wall of sound” meant.
Wanting to bring a “Wagnerian” approach to rock n’ roll, Spector’s obsessive nature was present from the outset of his career, when he “created” his first group, the Teddy Bears. Fresh out of Fairfax High School (for Spector’s mother had transferred them out of the Bronx after his father, Benjamin, killed himself), in a twist of irony, Spector enrolled briefly at LACC to study court stenography, spurred by his own interest in criminal cases. Luckily, the pop music career path took off for him instead. Or perhaps unluckily for some women, who would take the prosperity of having their talent recognized with the overbearing personality of Phil, wanting to impose his own artistic vision onto every song. Which again, set a new gold standard for what popular music could be. Before Spector, the only composers who got recognition for popular hits were the more “elevated” George Gershwin (having the sense to “de-Jew” by changing his name from Gershowitz) or Cole Porter. Spector, constantly feeling second-rate even in the face of all those hit records, knew he was still not seen by “the Establishment” as worthy. And some aspect of that most definitely had to do with him being Jewish, therefore “lesser than.”
Rejection was the running theme of Spector’s life, and it turned him bitter as it would anyone. The psychological effects of ostracism invariably lead to aggressive behavior, depression, rage and feelings of extreme alienation from society. This was the message Spector was met with again and again during his formative years, turning to the one thing that made him “hip” in high school: his musical aptitude.
What’s more, every song title, every sentiment expressed in these songs bears the mark of the tragic fate of being forever doomed to a life of lovelessness–and the worst kind: unrequited. His first number one hit charting when he was nineteen years old, “To Know Him Is To Love Him” would serve as something of an ironic track later on, as Spector’s volatility became more prevalent and widely known. Yet at the time, in 1958, Spector still had plenty of lucidity in his eyes, as evident during their live performance on The Perry Como Show. After the stark and simple delivery, with Spector being the sole band member to play an instrument, Perry Como underscores to the audience, “Phil is the one that wrote the song.” This said upon introducing the three members of the band. One can see his eyes light up at the credit given, as though it is his first time truly experiencing something like the love he wanted from his own father (albeit in the form of the ultra-diluted and erratic adulation of the public). It’s in this moment that Spector’s desire to make a permanent name for himself in the music business is captured. And while the Teddy Bears had their fairy tale success with “To Know Him Is To Love Him” (based on the epitaph of Benjamin Spector’s grave, which read: “Ben Spector. Father. Husband. To Know Him Was To Love Him”–a testament to Phil’s predilection for neurotic creepiness), Annette Kleinbard (later to become Carol Connors) and Marshall Leib (who would produce sporadically in the 60s) were no longer relevant to whatever Spector’s next move was going to be. Whatever it was, he needed to ensure it would make him a legend, perhaps foolishly believing that legends are never lonely or, worse still, rejected.
By the age of twenty-one, he became the sole owner of Philles Records, after buying out his partner, Lester Sills. It was one of the first overt tales of money and success quickly going to one’s head, yet, at the same time, Spector didn’t fall down the rabbit hole of excess via drugs or over-spending (unless it was on the productions costs themselves), instead continuing to focus on and fine-tune his craft. Later, he would remark of his most renowned innovation in pop music, “I was looking for a sound, a sound so strong that if the material was not the greatest, the sound would carry the record. It was a case of augmenting, augmenting. It all fit together like a jigsaw.”
Considering pop was deemed frivolous and throwaway precisely because it seemed to speak solely to teens, Spector wanted all the more to prove its value, which was, in essence, an extension of trying to prove his own. This was the niche he had “made it” in, and he wanted the world to understand that it was, in fact, art. As Mick Brown would put it in Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector, “In a period when most people, even those who made it, regarded pop as disposable ephemera, Phil Spector alone dared to believe it could be art.”
After the Wall of Sound technique took over the radio airwaves and jukeboxes, the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson (a fellow “crazy” with manic depression) himself would later gush of the new technique, “In the ’40s and ’50s, arrangements were considered, ‘OK here, listen to that French horn’ or ‘listen to this string section now.’ It was all a definite sound. There weren’t combinations of sound and, with the advent of Phil Spector, we find sound combinations, which–scientifically speaking–is a brilliant aspect of sound production.”
Yet even through the clamor of the Wall of Sound, everything about Spector’s work still screams above all the instrumentation, “I’m damaged, please love me! And if you don’t, I’ll just have to make you.” Likely stemming from the early trauma of his father committing suicide (via the classic method, “kissing the exhaust pipe” of his car), Spector seemed to be searching for a love lost, whether as a result of the idea that his dad couldn’t bother to find enough reason to stick around because of him or the lack of the sort of nurturing he needed from his remaining parent–which bore the style of stiflement rather than the kind of nurturing that could help a child grow as opposed to retreat. To boot, Spector’s own form of suffocating, Elmyra-esque love could have only been learned and absorbed from his matriarch. But this is the kind of love that is never well-received. Thusly, it’s clear that the songs Spector released were merely narratives he wished he himself could live out–talk of marital bliss, “forever” and rapturous monogamy were dreams Phil wanted for himself, yet, at the same time, the view people had of him as a freak or an outsider only fueled the flame of his response being to show them just how monstrous he could be if that was the “spectacle” (“Spector-acle”?) they wanted him to live up to. After all, it would play into Phil’s perverse need for approval of some kind, wouldn’t it?
During his last interview before the murder that would put a permanent stain that blemished all the work he had done prior to that moment, he seemed very self-aware, noting, “Insane is a hard word, but it’s manic depressive, bipolar. I take medication for schizophrenia, but I wouldn’t say I’m schizophrenic. But I have a bipolar personality, which is strange. I have devils inside that fight me. And I’m my own worst enemy.” Talking of therapy, which he began in 1960, when it was still taboo in America (for everyone, apparently, except hyper-neurotic Jews), Spector addressed continuing to go to it because, “There’s something I’d either not accepted, or I’m not prepared to accept or live with in my life, that I don’t know about perhaps, that I’m facing now. To all intents and purposes I would say I’m probably relatively insane, to an extent. To an extent. But I can function in the world.” Said the person who had retreated into his Alhambra mansion long ago. Dubbed the “Pyrénées castle,” Spector’s sequestering in San Gabriel Valley added further to his “kooky” aura. Why not Beverly Hills? The Hollywood Hills? Or Malibu? Well, because Spector could not “function in the world.” Even with the armor of being among the coterie of eccentric celebrities expected to inhabit the county of L.A.
Speaking of armor, he had two suits of them in the house on display, looking as rusty and dilapidated as he did at the time. The house, it appeared, had plenty of shades of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson)–who herself was compared to Miss Havisham in Great Expectations by Sunset Boulevard’s narrator, Joe Gillis (William Holden). Therefore, it feels like more than an ironic coincidence that, just as Norma, Phil, too, should be obliged to shoot a guest who probably turned him down sexually. Pride truly is a deadly sin.
It was Kim Fowley (best known for producing The Runaways), a more overt physical abuser than Spector, who would say that pop is “music for lonely people, made by other lonely people.” How tailored an aphorism indeed to Phil indeed. Yet the more ostracized he felt, the more he was driven to create work that would make him feel accepted, dubbed “worthy.” As he said in Vikram Jayanti’s 2009 documentary, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector, “I always wanted to be accepted by the Establishment. I just was a loner and accepted the fact that I would never be accepted by the Establishment.” This leads to another downfall characteristic of his: constantly comparing himself to others with such remarks as, “They never treated me with the same respect that they did Berlin. Or Gershwin.” And don’t get him started on Tony Bennett (no relation to Ronnie, obviously). For him the entire trial about Lana Clarkson’s death or murder, depending who you ask, was about putting the freak in the freak show. Cutting him down to size and reminding him that he was still just a poor, fatherless Jewish boy playing pretend at grandeur.
Spector lamented, “There are certain people that will never get their due.” Because the media, the great puppeteer of the public, decided they don’t like you. You’re too weird, or too out there to be characterized as “likeable” any longer. Spector would also bring up Woody Allen (which, of course, didn’t help his cause then and doesn’t now) as an example before the Dylan Farrow thing got re-stoked anew after 2017, stating of the auteur, “Woody Allen will always be a pervert… He did not marry his daughter, but it will always be in the public’s mind because he was accused. You can never live down–I mean, if they like ya, they won’t talk about it.” Just like they don’t talk about Tony Bennett’s drug days of the 70s because it’s not in line with the cute, cuddly persona of the present. But here you have two Jewish neurotic “freaks” constantly going outside the Establishment with the subjects they address in their work. Things that “polite society” does not like to acknowledge. Maybe they did the things they’re accused of and yet, at the same time, enough reasonable doubt exists to make one question if the truth is being skewed through the media lens of anti-“freak,” anti-Jewish, anti-enfant terrible sentiment.
As for Spector, with regard to losing his father, he stated he still missed him, and that, “I miss what I would have been with him. My life might have been completely different.” Maybe he wouldn’t have been so toxic, maybe he would have been able to carry on in a healthy relationship as opposed to an abusive and oppressive one.
It was, however, this mercurial artist’s temperament that found him an immediate affinity with John Lennon. After repairing the Let It Be tapes (which McCartney, contrary Mary that he is, would later undo by releasing Let It Be… Naked), he would go on to collaborate separately with Lennon on a number of records, but the most iconic was his first solo effort, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, featuring the song we’ll all be hearing for eternity (no matter how much celebrities cock it up for “charity”), “Imagine. The work he did with Lennon likely couldn’t have been understood half as well by anyone else–for Lennon, too, bore the mark of a traumatic childhood. Phil’s work on such tracks as “Mother” (the lyrics of which could have easily been about Phil’s own father) and “Crippled Inside” are particularly notable for their lyrical content and the accompanying morose quality of the instrumentation as Lennon shrugs, “You can’t hide when you’re crippled inside.” The chipper tone lends it the sardonic sense of humor that perhaps only Brits and Jews understand best.
Spector, despite his deep insecurities, knew that his contributions to music were monumental, commenting on what separated him from others, “Most producers don’t create. They interpret. When I went into the studio, I created a sound that I wanted to hear.”
And he wanted to hear it so badly that he would wield a gun at people menacingly in the studio to get it out of them, man or woman. Unlike, say, Michael Jackson, who was a pederast, Spector’s great crime was serving as the “template” for how a producer could treat any woman he “discovered.” Imposing his vision and will upon her until finally getting a marriage out of it with Ronnie. His notorious warning to her being that he would kill her and display her in the gold coffin with a glass top in the basement if she ever tried to leave him didn’t make for great evidence in terms of disproving his violent nature in the Lana Clarkson case either.
However, the 60s and 70s–particularly in Los Angeles–seemed to espouse a time when people were allowed to be “freaks” in the music industry. To let their volatility flow as freely as the music. It was part of the “creative genius” trope. In the present, that has been written off as a symptom of accepting patriarchy and misogyny without challenging it. But feminism of the moment has gone to another extreme during which men are a gender to be billed as the inferior. It’s gone on a Valerie Solanas track, and not without being warranted. With this in mind, though, one can’t help but think that the rage and disgust directed at Spector all the more as time goes by is a side effect of adhering to the current social mores being hammered into our heads. The ones that tell us we cannot appreciate the art as we tear down the artist. And whatever anyone says, Spector was an artist. Moreover, as he pointed out, “I have not been made a doctorate at any college and Bill Cosby has.”
Another contrast between the two, apart from Spector vs. Cosby “creep factor,” is that while Cosby seemed to stick to the family-friendly cookie cutter shtick, Spector’s approach to his medium was always challenging and adversarial. It was precisely because he wanted to be part of the Establishment that he did whatever he could to get its attention. Working with Black musicians and turning them into successes felt like a further fuck you to the old guard, as well as the fact that both Phil and the Black girl groups he promoted were outsiders, ostracized when people weren’t enjoying their music.
The same formula only slightly more experimental went into Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High,” except this time, there was no warm reception or success to back up Spector’s usual brand of bravado and eccentricity. It was this “failure” (though the track reached number one in the UK) that led Spector to close his studio and recoil from the spotlight, reemerging only to lend his help to The Beatles (whether as a collective or individual members, namely John and George). It was as though he was having the epiphany that with the end of the 60s, he didn’t quite fit into music’s new path anymore (in a sense, it’s tantamount to Matthew Weiner killing off Betty Draper because she was not meant to exist in the 70s). Granted, he still came out in several cases, including for Leonard Cohen and The Ramones.
It’s more than slightly eerie that Spector also helped John write “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” considering what would end up happening to Lana Clarkson. A cliche of the Hollywood machine chewing up young women and spitting “old” ones out (old at forty, in Hollywood time). Whether Spector helped the meat machine grind her through is, again, still some matter of conjecture. It seemed as though something more “freak accident-ish” happened than plain murder, though it’s more than likely Clarkson immediately regretted her decision to accompany Spector to his mansion in the late hours of February 3, 2003.
His decision to show up in court with his now notorious and still mocked Afro look appeared, in many regards, to be Spector saying, “Okay, you want a monster and a freak? Let me put on the whole show for you.” What did he want? Love. The whole time, that was what the indefatigable need to keep producing represented, so as to keep receiving the accolades and the reassurance that at least his listeners loved him. Alas, the more he sought it (especially from tangible people in his life) in his own suffocating manner, the more others recoiled. This applied in realms both personal and professional.
As his obituary in The Guardian notes, “To Spector, the identity of the artist was subordinate to the sound: Tomorrow’s Sound Today, as it said on the sleeve of every Philles record.” His identity was the one he wanted to take precedence above all else, and yet, in order to be in a relationship, there has to be a certain amount of equality, rather than subjugation. It was a further dichotomy that despite wanting to work in the shadows of his profession, he also deeply wanted the acclaim that came with being the singer on stage–almost as though he wasn’t quite sure he was ever worthy of taking that spotlight. In the actions he displayed toward others, he was decidedly determined to make certain no one else saw him as worthy either.
