Keen on music – jazz and rhythm and blues in particular – from an early age, he learned to play a variety of instruments, including the accordion and the French horn, and for his 13th birthday his mother gave him a guitar. While Bertha took jobs as a seamstress and as a bookkeeper, her son, now demanding to be addressed as “Phillip” (with two ls), attended Fairfax High school. Four years later, in the hope of making a fresh start, Bertha took her two children to Los Angeles, where they settled in the Fairfax district, a Jewish enclave. A small, chubby child who suffered from asthma and an allergy to sunlight, the young Harvey (as he was then known) was nine years old when his father, an ironworker who occasionally suffered from depression, parked the family car a few miles from their home, connected a rubber pipe from the exhaust to the interior, closed the windows, and died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Harvey Philip Spector was born in the Bronx, New York, to Ben and Bertha Spector, the descendants of Russian Jews. Spector, left, with George Harrison, an ardent admirer of this work, in the late 60s. The result, titled Let It Be, may have dismayed Paul McCartney (who later authorised the release of an undoctored version of the album), but Lennon and Harrison both went on to invite Spector to collaborate on their subsequent solo albums, including the former’s Imagine and the latter’s All Things Must Pass, both hugely successful. John Lennon and George Harrison were ardent admirers of his early records and in 1969 they invited him to rescue a haphazard collection of material from the Beatles’ last studio recordings and to turn it into an acceptable album. His career as a hit-maker began in 1958 and came to a sudden halt in 1966, but his work influenced artists from Brian Wilson to Bruce Springsteen and attracted enduring loyalty, not least through the efforts of the British-based Phil Spector Appreciation Society. He reached a creative peak in 1964, with the Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, and two years later with Ike and Tina Turner’s River Deep – Mountain High. Days would be spent on the creation of a three-minute pop record aimed at teenagers, but the value of his work was apparent in a richness, complexity and power that enhanced rather than obscured the simple message of the songs. Many of them, such as the Crystals’ He’s a Rebel, Da Doo Ron Ron and Then He Kissed Me, and the Ronettes’ Be My Baby and Baby I Love You, set the appealing voices of New York girl groups against a grandiose background that became known as the “wall of sound”, created through lavish use of instrumental resources.Ī devotee of the sort of creative excess associated with Richard Wagner and Cecil B DeMille, Spector hired guitarists, bassists, drummers, pianists, percussionists and saxophonists by the dozen, rehearsing them and putting them through a recording process involving endless adjustments and retakes. To pop fans who grew up in the 1960s, his name will always be synonymous with recordings that embodied both the music’s early innocence and its increasing sense of adventure. Even his friends were wary of his sudden, irrational rages, fuelled by alcohol and a neurotic compulsion to repay slights real or imagined, recent or historic. Stories of his manipulative, paranoid behaviour were endlessly recycled: they included the time he ordered a scheduled flight to be stopped on the runway to allow him to disembark, the violent jealousy that made a virtual prisoner of his second wife, the constant presence of silent bodyguards and the habit of pulling guns on the artists whose recordings he supervised. During his months in court, Spector paraded a succession of increasingly elaborate wigs, his appearance supporting the popular image of him as an eccentric recluse and the real-life model for Z-Man Barzell, the crazed record producer at the centre of Russ Meyer’s film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
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