In the mid 1970s I read and re-read a book about Phil Spec­tor. It was a inspi­ra­tional book for me at that age. Out of His Head by for­mer (and later) Melody Maker edi­tor, and one of the most impor­tant music jour­nal­ists of his time, Richard Williams, was the first biog­ra­phy of Spec­tor and indeed one of the very ear­li­est seri­ous biogra­phies of a rock fig­ure that wasn’t all PR puffery and gloss (I’m think­ing of The Bea­t­les by Hunter Davies for exam­ple, which looked at the good bits and com­pletely ignored any­thing that wasn’t quite so, a lit­tle like the Bea­t­les own Anthol­ogy too).

Williams wrote the book pri­mar­ily about the man who made the music, and the music that the man made, the records that rede­fined what music pro­duc­tion was (Williams revis­its Spec­tor here, post trial). He com­pletely changed the way we cre­ate music and you hear his influ­ence in almost every pop and rock record made to this day; and not only that, if it wasn’t enough, he also invented the con­cept of the pro­ducer as an artist, not just a man (or woman) who sits in the booth and works out the bal­ance between instru­ments, and he did this from his very first record­ing with the post-doo wop­pers, The Teddy Bears, in 1958.

Joe Meek, in the UK, was a lit­tle later but did much the same, although he didn’t cause any­thing like the musi­cal shock­waves that Spec­tor did, even if he was arguably even cra­zier, and, yes, he took a life too.

When it came to The Bea­t­les, nei­ther Lennon nor Har­ri­son had, by their own words, ever been pro­duced as such as they were by Spec­tor, a decade after his girl group period began, when he moulded what were for both, their finest solo records and rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent to those six­ties pop sym­phonies but no less brilliant.

Spector’s life and the life he enforced on oth­ers seems most demented and har­row­ing when you look at the life of poor Ron­nie Spec­tor, who’s own book is pretty heavy read­ing. There is also a chap­ter in another book, Josh Alan Friedman’s Tell The Truth Until They Bleed, where a tragic Ron­nie Spec­tor, divorced from Phil, bro­ken and still in her early twen­ties, is, with yet another of the end­less stream of no-name rocker boyfriends that she tagged on to or vice versa, stag­ger­ing from oldies gig to oldies gig for a pit­tance, when, it can be said with some con­fi­dence that she pos­sessed and maybe still does, one of the great­est female voices of her gen­er­a­tion. Few come close, and those records, every one, the hits, the flops and the ones that seem to have com­pletely slipped through the cracks before they were even released, are majes­tic sym­phonic pop mas­ter­pieces that can tear at your soul, and in my case, aged 16 when I first heard them, very much did.

I’ve just fin­ished another Spec­tor book, Mick Brown’s Tear­ing Down The Wall Of Sound, which does just that, tears down the myth far more thor­oughly than any of the ear­lier books, by mak­ing the story of cre­ation of that music almost inci­den­tal to the mon­ster that cre­ated it, as if the music was an inevitable by-product of the hor­ror of his life. It’s the story of the human train-wreck that Phil Spec­tor was from that very first record through to the mur­der that even­tu­ally ended the his own life as well (unless by some mir­a­cle the appeal due shortly allows him to walk, it is after all Cal­i­for­nia). The over­whelm­ing tragedy is that he caused pain for just about every­one he touched, he was in every way pos­si­ble, a mon­ster and a mon­ster for some fifty years.

But amongst all that there are still those mind-boggling records and I remain as con­fused as ever as to how we treat things like this. Do we dis­miss the music, wipe the tracks I’ve posted below from pop music’s his­toric record. No, I think not, it wasn’t even really a ques­tion for me as The Fab­u­lous Ronettes Fea­tur­ing Veron­ica is still an album I would hap­pily spend the rest of my days with, but it’s a ques­tion raised by one of the projects I’m work­ing on at the moment (and, no, I’m not about to make a record with Ronnie..I wish) and thus I voiced it.

In the mean­time, the music stands, I guess, and I’m hap­pily, and with­out guilt, going to post these wonders:

The big hit from Ron­nie etc:

A cou­ple of (tow­er­ing) non-hits from The Ronettes:

A song from The Check­mates Ltd, which was really no longer of its time when Spec­tor released it in ’67, but sounds pretty fine 43 years on:

A snip­pet of Spec­tor in the studio:

And this throughly bizarre video where the odi­ous, con­victed, and jailed for under­age sex in a very preda­tory way, Jonathan King, pays trib­ute to the mur­derer Phil Spec­tor, which is only really topped by the fact that Spec­tor is, they say, in the same cell­block as Charles Man­son, who so wanted to be a Beach Boy, a band who’s music cen­tre was besot­ted with Spec­tor, so much so he had trou­ble speak­ing in his pres­ence for years.

This odd matchup does, as way of jus­ti­fy­ing its inclu­sion, use as audio, another won­der­ful Spec­tor pro­duced track, from The Check­mates Ltd (a band who’s one big hit, Black Pearl was also a big hit for the NZ band Moana & The Moa Hunters in the early 1990s), Love Is All I Have to Give:

It really is too odd.…

A fas­ci­nat­ing 1968 inter­view with Lennon, away from the scream­ing hordes (although with­out said scream­ing hordes of course he’d likely never have been a posi­tion to write, or, more, pub­lish his two books).

The things that hit me before 16…

Parts of this have been edited out recently for the much derided new car ad that Yoko seems to have been happy to license. I like Yoko Ono, always have, but have to ques­tion her judg­ment from time to time.  Maybe she needs to find her­self in the com­pany of oth­ers who do just that every now and then.

While the Bea­t­les were busy re-inventing pop­u­lar music as we know it, they still had time to send out a Christ­mas record every year.

Merry Xmas y’all