Phil Spector is dead at 81.
Can we call him a genius now without feeling icky?
Talented guy too bad he was a nut job and killed somebody.
I hope someone cancels his $2 million check to Trump for a pardon.
I don’t know. It’s my understanding he was always kind of a creepy guy.
Famous now for his “Wall of Sod”…
A talented sociopath.
For some reason radio stations refused to play this song that he produced:
A few glory years and then a long life better left unsaid.
Unfortunately, not an unusual arc for supertalented artists.
“California Health Care Facility inmate Phillip Spector was pronounced deceased of natural causes at 6:35 p.m. on Saturday, January 16, 2021, at an outside hospital.”
I didn’t know natural causes was even on the list of possibilities.
There are a lot of them about. I don’t wish anyone dead but I am optimistically putting Roman Polanski in my 2021 dead pool.
Stranger
He was a brilliant producer and arranger at one point, no doubt, but he was a vile, manipulative excuse for a human being for much (if not all) of his life, and I, too, have a hard time mourning his death.
And after around ‘68 or ‘69 he wasn’t really that great of a producer. John Lennon, George Harrison, the Ramones, etc. all succeed despite him, not because of him.
He died from COVID, according to Wikipedia.
Rereading the story of the murder, it’s astonishing that by putting up $1 million in bail he got to go free for four years between the murder and his first trial.
How much does a “producer” typically influence a song or album? I’m not sure what the actual role of a music producer is. I guess I had previously thought it was like a movie producer (more of a money thing than a creative thing).
I think it’s closer to a movie director, in terms of direct oversight of the creative & technical process. Or a combination of the director & producer roles in a movie.
Record producers typically have a lot of creative input, and are usually deeply involved in the recording and mixing of an album, working hand in hand with the musicians through the process. Musicians often choose to work with particular producers due to their reputations, or specific styles that they have.
In Spector’s case, he was apparently a control freak (among his many other awful personality traits), and demanded complete control over the entire process.
In Spector’s early days it meant arranging and mixing the music without having to negotiate the finished product with the artists at all. Of course he couldn’t do that with a former Beatle or almost any post-1970 artist.
There was also this Goffin-King song
Producing the Ramones “End of the Century “ album, he had Johnny Ramone play one chord, listen to it for 90 minutes and then have Johnny play the same chord again so he could listen to it again.
I believe this falls under the legal thesis of “different rules for the rich.”
Stranger