Blast from the past

Tearing Down The Wall Of Sound: The Rise And Fall Of Phil Spector

By Mick Brown

454 pages, Knopf Books

Send lawyers, guns and money, the shit has hit the fan.   — Warren Zevon

There are so many scary moments in Mick Brown’s Phil Spector biography Tearing Down the Wall of Sound that it’s hard to pick the scariest. Perhaps the most cryptically funny one involves Canadian singer/poet Leonard Cohen, whose 1978 album “Death of a Ladies’ Man” was produced by the ‘60s hit record maker. As Cohen recounts it, Spector came into the strained recording sessions one day, placed one arm around the songwriter’s shoulder and, with the other hand, stuck a pistol barrel in Cohen’s neck. “Leonard, I love you,” Spector reportedly said. Cohen slowly pushed the pistol barrel away and said, “I hope you do, Phil.”

Tearing Down the Wall of Sound is loaded (no pun intended) with anecdotes about Spector’s fondness for handguns. It’s an affection (or affectation) traced back to his early days as a celebrity hit producer — the 5’3” “Tycoon of Teen” (as journalist Tom Wolfe put it) who racked up 25 hit records between 1960 and ’65, who perfected the “girl group” sound with The Ronettes and The Crystals, who invented the “Wall of Sound” recording technique that has never been equaled (but will forever be imitated) and who surrounded himself with bodyguards and increasingly insulated himself in a California mansion with an ever-growing arsenal of handguns.

Another oft-told tale comes from Joey Ramone, the Ramones singer who says Spector locked the members of the punk inside a control booth and held them at gunpoint while recording 1980’s “End of the Century.”

Well, all those stories are pretty funny. At least until somebody gets hurt.

On Feb. 1, 2003, around 5:30 a.m., Spector was arrested in his California mansion for his alleged role in the death of B-movie actress Lana Clarkson, who had been working as a hostess at the House of Blues on the night Spector met her and invited her back to the mansion for a nightcap. At this point, Spector’s lifetime of control, often sought while holding a pistol, blew apart like a house of cards. Mick Brown, a UK journalist, was one of the few writers granted access to Spector in the years prior to Clarkson’s death. He paints the producer as a troubled man, perhaps a genius, who knew early on what he was good at and wanted to do: he wanted to make records. A difficult family life in Brooklyn — Phil’s dad killed himself via carbon monoxide poisoning when he was eight; his mother hectored and belittled Spector up until adulthood — shaped him in ways best left to psychiatrists to fathom.

But the diminutive Spector was nervy and talented: he learned guitar, and hung around record studios, absorbing recording technique and itching for the day he could record his first hit. That was To Know Him Is To Love Him in 1958, a doo-wop song that cribbed its title from Phil’s dad’s tombstone. Spector was smart enough at an early age to know that he needed to have his name on the records, not only as a writer, but as a producer, to amass a fortune in royalties. He developed a control freak’s working habits, literally taking home with him the acetates from every recording session at the end of the night — a practice that drove record companies and rock stars like John Lennon insane.

But in only a few years, working out of a cramped Hollywood studio called Gold Star, Spector produced hit after hit, developing an audacious and overpowering sound. The “Wall of Sound” came from doubling, even tripling musicians, layering three guitarists, two piano lines, three drummers, all bleeding into a powerful, trembling mono mix that delivered a hammer blow that sounded great even on tinny car radio speakers. Early hits included Spanish Harlem, He’s A Rebel, Da Doo Ron Ron, Be My Baby, On Broadway and others.

All this made Spector a very rich man, a millionaire at 20, which was unheard of in rock ‘n’ roll at the time. But while Spector could be generous, lavishing $200 tips on waiters and waitresses for instance, he was less than generous with his singers, usually black females, who had to sue the producer three decades later to recover millions in unpaid record royalties. One female black singer, Ronnie Spector (nee Veronica Bennett), fared even worse: she married Spector, an experience she details in her own memoir, Be My Baby, that focuses on the producer’s jealous rages, his tendency to lock her inside the mansion and wave guns around, and her own descent into alcoholism. When they inevitably divorced, a judge ordered Spector to pay $2,500 per month in child support. He had the first payment delivered to her — in nickels. (Later, Spector sent alimony checks to Ronnie with a custom-made stamp message — “F*** OFF” — pressed on the back.)

Spector’s eccentricities could be endearing to supporters — and though he seems to have screwed over a lot of record company titans in his day, Spector still seems to have solid supporters — but his paranoid and perfectionist tendencies made him one of the most mythologized, if not demonized, figures in the recording industry. Rage seems to be his primary motivation, Brown finds: rage at losing his father, or at losing his hair; rage at being short, or for not possessing matinee idol looks. But mostly, it seems, rage at being misunderstood and underestimated — first by his own mother, then by the record industry, which had little vision beyond making disposable, fast-selling pop records.

It has to be said that Spector’s sound, though it belongs to a very specific moment of the past, has had a huge effect on rock ‘n’ roll recording. You can look at the Wall of Sound’s effect on Brian Wilson (whom Spector belittles, calls untalented), on the Beatles (whom Spector produced, both as a band and on hit solo records), on the Glam Rock sound (heavy on the slapback echo and huge drum sound), and even on some punk bands (The Ramones’ sound was based in ‘60s-style street-corner rock). A record like Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans’ deconstructed Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah (1963) still seems as heavy as any trip-hop production today. Even bands like Britain’s Spiritualized seem enamored of the lush production scale of Phil Spector’s records. And it hasn’t hurt the producer that his songs have graced enough lucrative movie soundtracks (Dirty Dancing, Ghost, Top Gun, among others) and TV commercials to keep him ensconced in a comfortable mansion for the rest of his days.

All of this depends, of course, on whether Spector spends the next 10 to 15 years in prison for second-degree murder. The public was shocked when Spector first reemerged from the shadows as a celebrity murder suspect — not because of the charges, but because of the towering gray Albert Einstein wig that he chose to wear in court during his arraignment hearing. (Having read enough about Spector, the wig seems like a courtroom strategy: get enough people talking about the now-reclusive producer and you make it harder to find impartial jurors.)

Reading Tearing Down the Wall of Sound, you feel it was really only a matter of time before something bad happened around Phil Spector.

According to Brown, Alhambra police warned the record mogul “again and again” about brandishing weapons at unsuspecting guests in his home. At the time of his arrest, Spector had at least 12 handguns in his home, plus a pump-action shotgun that he, at an earlier point, reportedly pulled on a guest who was trying to make her exit to the driveway.

The real poser for jurors is deciding if Spector is guilty of second-degree murder or if, as his high-priced defense team would have it, a complete stranger, Clarkson, followed Spector back inside his mansion early one morning and chose to commit suicide in his foyer by sitting in a comfortable chair and shooting herself in the mouth. (Spector denies the gun is his, though the make and ammo type are the same as other guns found in his home.)

A history of pulling guns on people — not to mention a pattern of barring visitors and guests from leaving his mansion ­— is the kind of thing people familiar with TV courtroom dramas will recognize as “irrelevant” or “circumstantial” at best. And in fact Brown, who points out that a planned film biography on Spector’s life had been considered by Tom Cruise’s production company but “they didn’t know how to end it,” unwisely chose to go to print with his bio before the record tycoon’s trial began. Perhaps a verdict — guilty or innocent — would have provided the ending this book cries out for.

As it turns out, Spector’s case ended in a mistrial in Sept. 2007. Jurors had “reached an impasse” and were stuck on a 10 guilty/two not guilty vote. But Spector will apparently be tried again. Juror selection for a new trial began last month. 

One thing seems clear. Phil Spector is unlikely to be making any new hit records in the foreseeable future, whatever the outcome of the case.