Being a genius and being a vile asshole, I think, can be looked at as independent traits. But as soon as I read about him on TMZ I pictured myself spending the next few days saying “No, I said he was one of the best/most influential music producers ever, I didn’t say he was a good person and I’m not defending his actions, I’m just saying he was talented”. Because I can think of a few people in my life that, if I were to bring up how talented he is (was), their response is going to be ‘oh, so you think he’s a good person? You think it was okay what he did to Ronnie [or any number of other people]’.
Back in the early days, more or less pre-Beatles, the vast majority of songs were done by singers rather than groups. The singers were disposable, interchangeable cogs in the music machine. Producers wrote or found the original song, hired the musicians, wrote the arrangements, created the sound, and then brought in the singers - who may or may not have been the people listed publicly on the label of the release - and told them exactly how to sing the song. They decided what songs to release, what went on A- and B-sides, and who got credited. They had all the power. That’s why very few names lasted more than a few singles.
The Beatles changed all that, first by becoming partners with George Martin, then taking control of sessions with Martin doing their bidding, and finally launching the era in which groups either produced themselves or selected their producer, and controlled every aspect of their sound and careers.
That doesn’t apply to manufactured boy and girl groups or to a lot of singers who are the products of prominent producers. You could call that the difference between pop and rock, although it’s really more mixed and complicated than that.
Hey, Cosby’s standup was genius…
By the way, I’m SO glad that The Beatles released Let It Be… Naked, a redo/remix with all of Spector’s “lush strings” stripped out.
(McCartney’s idea… he’d always hated Spector’s trademark “Wall Of Sound”, especially how it mucked up The Long And Winding Road.)
Listen to about fifty of Rudy van Gelder’s albums on Blue Note, then come back and ask again.
I been Lou Adlered. Barry Sadlered.
Well, I paid all the dues I want to pay.
That was my first thought.
Has he ever explained what happened when he killed Lana?
She was shot in the mouth and had all her front teeth blown out.
I believe his story was they were playing around with the gun and it went off when she “kissed” it.
Yes. A little more info can be found in this old thread:
I’ve met his son. I never got to know the son very well, but he seemed like a nice person.
Minority opinion I’m sure, but I always felt that Spector’s production ruined Harrison’s "All Things Must Pas"s album.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. May God have mercy on his rotted soul.
Spector worked with the Beatles during their heroin period. Nothing else explains it.
Great producer, shitty human being.
When he was right, he was brilliant. When he was wrong, the results sucked. Sometimes you got both on the same album.
Take The Ramones’ End of the Century. Compare the demo of Danny Says to the Spectorized version. Spector’s decision the slow down he tempo, and the crystal-clear guitar work at the beginning elevates the song far above the standard 1-2-3-Fah! fare and has led to it being a fan favorite for decades. The ludicrous everything-but-the-kitchen-sink overproduction on Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio? absolutely works.
But… slowing down and adding sound effects to Rock and Roll High School destroyed the rerecording, making it vastly inferior to the original soundtrack version. And as for Baby, I Love You - Joey should have saved that for a solo album.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that Phil Spector produced the Ramones and Phil Ramone did not.
You share that minority with the late George Harrison. Though he probably wouldn’t say ruined (and neither would I). But certainly weakened. I have the remastered 30th edition and he mentions in the liner notes being rather regretful that he went along with Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’. It was the in thing sonically at the time but as a technique it sorta intentionally muddied a lot of the background instrumentation.
Are we back to that? I read somewhere that the current modus operandi is to get a good-looking chick who can more or less sing, put her in front of a microphone and clean up the result with auto-tune, then add a backing track with various electronic beeps and boops. We’re back to the era of novelty records. A similar comment was the most songs now sound very similar, due to this treatment.
There is a long, long list of people with stories of Spector pulling a gun on them including Lennon, Debbie Harry, The Ramones, and Leonard Cohen. Tbh I’m surprised he didn’t shoot someone earlier.
Yeah, both Dee Dee and Johnny Ramone said publicly that Spector effectively held the band hostage at gunpoint for several hours one night.
Only Phil Spector would use a gun when a pizza and airplane glue would have sufficed.