Tearing Down the Wall of Sound The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector

Chapter 1: "Mr. Spector Likes People to Walk Up" On an unseasonably warm day in December 2002 I found myself sitting in a room at the Hyatt Hotel on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, waiting for Phil Spector to call. It had been thirty-six hours since I'd arrived in Los Angeles, to find a message telling me that my meeting with Spector, which had taken some three months to arrange, and was scheduled to take place the following day, had been "postponed." It was as if all my worst fears had come to pass. Between 1961 and 1966, Spector's so-called Wall of Sound made him the most successful pop-record producer in the world, with more than twenty Top 40 hits by such artists as the Crystals, the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers. In the words of the writer Tom Wolfe, Spector was the "first tycoon of teen"a mercurial and combustible mixture of genius and hustler, a precocious, brilliant and off-the-wall visionary who would change the face of pop music forever. In a period when most people, even those who made it, regarded pop as disposable ephemera, Phil Spector alone dared to believe it could be art. Marshaling armies of guitars and keyboards and brass and drums, celestial sleighbells, and voices keening like angels, he made records of a hitherto unconceived-of grandeur and majesty, elevating the themes of teenage love and heartache to the epic proportions of Wagnerian opera"little symphonies for the kids," as he put it. Spector crammed emotion into a bottle and uncorked itthe clamorous, joyous noise of a small tyrant unleashing his vision, his revenge, on the world. When, in the late '60s, musical fashion overtook his Wall of Sound, Spector moved on to the biggest pop group in the world, the Beatles. He rescued their valedictory album,Let It Be. He producedImaginefor John Lennon, and "My Sweet Lord" for George Harrison. Then began the long, slow retreat. In 1979 Spector produced his last album, for the punk rock group the Ramones. And then he was gone. The architect of the Wall of Sound vanished behind another wallof barbed-wire fences, guard dogs and Keep Out: Armed Response signs, of stories about guns and craziness, rumor, half-truth and legendmuch of it, it seemed, of Spector's own creation. The "tycoon of teen" became rock and roll's most enigmatic recluse. When in the autumn of 2002 I first contacted Spector, he had not given a major interview in some twenty-five years, and to arrange a meeting involved delicate and protracted negotiations. Letters were dispatched back and forth. Michelle Blaine, Spector's personal assistant, and the daughter of Hal Blaine, the drummer who had played on all of Spector's greatest hits through the '60s, happened to be passing through London, and we met for tea at a Mayfair hotel. She was fiercely protective of her employer. What exactly would be the thrust of the interview? Was I familiar with Mr. Spector's records? How familiar? What had I read about Mr. Spector? I would be aware that there had been a great deal of misreporting about Mr. Spector's life and affairsgossip, scandal; talk of guns, of crazinessall of it exaggeration, myth and lies. Mr. Spector would not countenance any interview that proceeded along those lines. A week later I was informed that Spector had agreed to talk. My elation was immediately tempered by a deep foreboding that the interview would almost certainly never happen. It was almost to be expected, then, that I should be told on my arrival in Los Angeles that our meeting had been "postponed." I sat in my room, awaiting the call that I was now convinced would never come. And then the telephone rang.Brown, Mick is the author of 'Tearing Down the Wall of Sound The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector', published 2007 under ISBN 9781400042197 and ISBN 1400042194.