Phil Spector. (Photo by John Michael Smith via Wikimedia)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Spector died Saturday at a hospital in French Camp, California of COVID 19 complications, the New York Times quoted his daughter, Nicole Audrey Spector, as saying.<\/p>\n
Spector was born into a Jewish family in the Bronx. His father committed suicide when Spector was 8 years old, and his mother moved the family to Los Angeles, where they settled in Fairfax, a neighborhood with a substantial Jewish population.<\/p>\n
He formed a band, the Teddy Bears, at Fairfax High School, famous for the number of its graduates who entered the entertainment business. They scored a hit with a song he wrote, \u201cTo Know Him is to Love Him,\u201d the epitaph on his father\u2019s grave.<\/p>\n
Mentored by the seminal rock\u2019n\u2019roll writers, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller \u2014 who also were Jewish \u2014 Spector soon made his name as a producer whose distinction was to front singers with big voices and expansive ranges against a \u201cwall of sound\u201d \u2014 layers on layers of instruments and choralists.<\/p>\n
The effect was at once alienating and deeply emotional, pleadings for attention from inside a remote echo chamber.<\/p>\n
The Crystals, the Ronettes, the Righteous Brothers, Darlene Love were all products of his factory, and the giants of the era, including the Beach Boys and the Beatles, admired and emulated him. Classics he produced and co-wrote include \u201cBe My Baby,\u201d \u201cYou\u2019ve Lost That Loving Feeling\u201d and \u201cThen He Kissed Me.\u201d<\/p>\n
His 1963 album, featuring an array of the artists he produced, \u201cA Christmas Gift For You from Phil Spector,\u201d was released the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The album disappeared. As the years passed, aficionados pressed for its reissue and it is now considered perhaps the best of the Christmas album genre, including Love\u2019s signature song, \u201cChristmas (Baby Please Come Home).\u201d<\/p>\n
Spector\u2019s whiz kid rise became an emblem of Black-Jewish collaboration in the 1960s; his second wife was Black and in 1969 he joined two other Jewish songwriters in writing and producing \u201cBlack Pearl\u201d for Sonny Charles and the Checkmates. The song was a defiant repudiation of the prevalent standards of beauty in America that marginalized Black women. \u201cYou\u2019ll never win a beauty show, No they won\u2019t pick you, But you\u2019re my Miss America, I love you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Spector married the Ronettes lead singer, Veronica Bennett, in 1968. She later described an abusive husband whom she said she nonetheless deeply loved. She fled him in 1972.<\/p>\n
\u201cMeeting him and falling in love was like a fairytale,\u201d she said Saturday in a Facebook post. \u201cThe magical music we were able to make together, was inspired by our love. I loved him madly, and gave my heart and soul to him. As I said many times while he was alive, he was a brilliant producer, but a lousy husband. Unfortunately Phil was not able to live and function outside of the recording studio.<\/p>\n
Darkness set in, many lives were damaged.\u201d<\/p>\n
Spector devolved into a cycle of career revival and scandal and tragedy. He had twins with a girlfriend, Janis Zavala, and the son, Phil Jr., died of cancer at age 9. Nicole, his daughter, survives him.<\/p>\n
In 2003, Spector returned to his palatial mansion in Alhambra, a city in Los Angeles County, with Lana Clarkson, an actress who worked as a hostess at a nightclub. He came out of his house, holding a revolver, saying \u201cI think I killed somebody.\u201d He was tried twice and convicted in 2009 of second-degree murder and sentenced to 19 years-to-life.<\/p>\n
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