The other side of Phil Spector http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/14/richard-williams-on-phil-spector
Phil Spector biographer Richard Williams remembers the producer as an insecure genius worshipped by John Lennon Richard Williams Tuesday 14 April 2009 The man who occasionally pulled guns on his artists, who retreated to his hilltop chateau for years on end and was last night found guilty of murdering a Hollywood actor, is what we would have called, in the days of seven-inch 45 rpm singles, the B-side of Phil Spector. Flip the disc and you get the A-side, the man John Lennon invited me to meet in the autumn of 1971 when the two of them were recording a new single during the former Beatle's first week of residence in New York. Spector, a spindly figure no more than 5ft 6in tall, arrived at the Record Plant studio on West 44th Street in a black limousine, wearing aviator shades and a neatly pressed denim jacket with a "Back to Mono" button on the lapel. Lennon and Yoko Ono were already waiting inside. "I want five rhythm guitarists," Spector had demanded when told that the Plastic Ono Band consisted of only four musicians plus Ono. "Get me some percussion! Bells! Celeste! Chimes!" His high voice had taken on a light scouse inflection, slightly camp. Earlier I had asked Spector's colleagues from the golden years how he went about constructing the Wall of Sound. Among them was Jeff Barry, the co-writer of Da Doo Ron Ron, Then He Kissed Me and Be My Baby. "It was basically a formula," Barry said. "You're going to have four or five guitars lined up, gut-string guitars, and they're going to follow the chords, nothing tricky. You're going to use two basses in fifths, with the same type of line, and strings. There would be six or seven horns, adding the little punches, and there would be the formula percussion instruments the little bells, the shakers, the tambourines. "Then Phil used his own formula for echo, and some overtone effects with the strings. But by and large there was a formula arrangement to create a formula sound." But now it was five years since Spector's last big hit, five years since he retired in disgust after the American record industry took revenge on his refusal to play the payola game. He was 26 years old then, already a multimillionaire, and he walked away. So it was big news when The Beatles brought him back. To Lennon and George Harrison, working with Spector was like washing themselves in the stream of pure pop music. Like Lennon and Harrison, Spector had grown up with his ears full of Eddie Cochran and the Del-Vikings. He was one of them. Watching Lennon and Spector work together, it was fascinating to see how readily The Beatle ceded control to pop music's ultimate control freak. Spector's authority was absolute and his precision unyielding. When he heard something he liked, his enthusiasm blazed. "More echo on the piano," he would shout to the engineer, leaping to his feet, his arms windmilling. "More echo. More ... more ... more! That's it. Beautiful." His mind running at a different speed from that of anyone else in the room, Spector took a minute to transform the happy hootenanny-style strumming into a brilliant wash of colour. As the engineers played it back, Lennon and Spector danced round the control room, arms around each other's shoulders. Already Spector was thinking not just of sound, but of arrangement. Inside his head, he was taking those guitar chords and moulding, blending and transforming them into the subliminal basis of the record. He called his records "little symphonies for the kids". "Making something good was always more important than success," he told me. "The fact that it was successful was just the icing on the cake. Because if I didn't make anything that was better, I might as well have left it to Fats Domino." Weeks later, in London, there were glimpses of a different Spector. On a couple of long evenings in his hotel suite, as darkness fell over Park Lane, an outrageous fantasist emerged. This was the mask of a lonely and insecure man for whom no degree of acclaim and material success could quite override the tragedy of his father's suicide or the mental scars of humiliations at the hands of bigger and stronger boys during his school days. Spector's finest records those tumultuous epics that attracted comparisons with Wagner gave a generation of adolescents a soundtrack to their lives. For him they were art, no question. But also the best revenge. -- Out of His Head, Richard Williams' biography of Phil Spector, will be republished later this year . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
