Book tears down rock legend Spector’s `Wall of Sound’
In December 2002, the British journalist Mick Brown was driven by Phil Spector’s chauffeur in Phil Spector’s white Rolls-Royce to Phil Spector’s gloomy castle in Alhambra, for a spooky interview with Phil Spector, who wore black silk pajamas and made a grand entrance to the strains of Handel.
Two months later, Lana Clarkson, a tall blond actress who had starred in two “Barbarian Queen” movies and delivered the line “Hi” in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” died violently at the same house.
The opening chapter of Brown’s Spector biography insinuates that the visiting interviewer might also have been in peril.
But it was Spector, the tiny, Napoleonic, gun-toting rock ‘n’ roll genius who was in jeopardy on that day. Brown was in the midst of compiling a seriously damning, though not even actively malevolent, set of stories about the Spector life and oeuvre. Grouped together in the bloodcurdling biography “Tearing Down the Wall of Sound,” they add up to a portrait of pure self-interest and cruelty, tempered only slightly by the great musical achievements of Spector’s golden age in the early 1960s. This book would feel like a crime story even if its subject were not currently on trial for Clarkson’s murder.
Brown is not a muckraker. Nor is he really discovering anything new, at least not in the first half of Spector’s story. As many Spector acquaintances and scorched musical collaborators report, Spector’s autocratic nature was thought to have obvious sources. There was his father’s suicide (which led to the hit “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” with its title taken from Benjamin Spector’s gravestone). There were an overbearing mother and sister, Bertha and Shirley. There was also the possibility of inbreeding, since this rock maestro had both paternal and maternal grandfathers named George Spector and Phil’s parents were thought to be first cousins.
This first part of “Tearing Down the Wall of Sound,” is mostly devoted to explaining how the famous Wall of Sound was created. Brown underscores the cause-and-effect links between certain recordings, like the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby” with Spector’s production for the Ronettes, “Be My Baby,” or the Four Tops’ “Baby, I Need Your Loving” with the monster, Spector-produced Righteous Brothers hit, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.”
But just as the Spector mystique was being hyperbolically immortalized by Tom Wolfe’s 1964 magazine article “The First Tycoon of Teen,” the Spector career hit a ceiling. This book maintains that Spector, unlike some of the artists he disparages (notably the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson), began to stall as the world changed around him.
Professionally, he grew to be “like Sherlock Holmes without a case.” His attempted comebacks and collaborations (the most successful of which, in Brown’s opinion, being John Lennon’s “Imagine”) grew ever crazier.
Whatever the circumstances surrounding the deadly firing of a gun in Clarkson’s mouth in the early hours of Feb. 3, 2003, Spector’s initial response is telling. He felt annoyed. Clarkson, he said, had absolutely no right to blow her head off inside his castle.TEARING DOWN THE WALL OF SOUND:
The Rise and Fall
of Phil Spector
By Mick Brown
Alfred A. Knopf, 452 pp., $26.95