A madman, a terrible human being and a murderer, but he produced some of the most majestic moments in pop, not to forget his crucial influence on another troubled (but peaceful) genius, Brian Wilson.
That’s a bit different, I think.
van Gelder would have said that he was primarily a recording engineer, trying to capture, not create, the sounds made by the musicians he recorded.
Critics might disagree, but that’s how he saw himself. He certainly wasn’t telling, say, John Coltrane how to play on Blue Train, or bringing in a bunch of extra session musicians to create a bigger sound for Miles Davis’s legendary quintet, or writing arrangements for the Modern Jazz Quartet.
Where as River Deep Mountain High, for example, is as much a Phil Spector record as it is a Tina Turner record. Probably even more Spector than Turner.
Was watching futurama last night this scene seems fitting to Phil Spector:
If we’re talking about mainstream pop music, then, yes, we sort of are. There’s a handful of producers (most of them Scandinavian) who are largely responsible for writing and producing a large proportion of pop hits. They write the songs, and decide which singer gets each song. And, they liberally steal from each other, following a particular formula for what makes for a hit song.
In a perfect world, Phil Ramone would have produced The Spectres
Very much so in a huge number of cases. Rick Beato explains why songs of today don’t appeal to old rockers for exactly these reasons.
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