At the time, it seemed an ignoble fate for someone who had once presided over a succession of era-defining classics, whose work spurred Brian Wilson into creating the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, regularly heralded as the greatest album of all time, and whose 60s sound you heard echoes of everywhere, not least in the blare of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. He ended his recording career being fired by, of all people, British indie rock band Starsailor. The rest of his career yielded only scattered moments that suggested his former greatness, most notably the tracks he recorded for Dion’s Born To Be With You in 1975. His production of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass was similarly controversial – “Too much echo,” Harrison complained years later, his son Dhani claiming that “making the album sound clearer was one of my dad’s greatest wishes” – but his work on Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band and Imagine albums was fantastic: stark, minimal, the opposite of what you might expect, with only the fabulously explosive drums on the 1970 single Instant Karma! an echo of his 60s work. The source material wasn’t their finest – John Lennon memorably called it “the shittiest load of badly recorded shit with a lousy feeling to it ever” – but nevertheless, Spector submerged good songs in inappropriate orchestral and choral syrup. His next high-profile job, on the Beatles’ Let It Be, was a mess. The US failure of the latter sent Spector into a tailspin from which he never truly recovered. They never sound over the top or claustrophobic, with the possible exception of Ike and Tina Turner’s River Deep, Mountain High – Spector’s favourite among his works, but a song that might have benefited from a more stripped-back approach. He was somehow capable of creating singles that were sonically dense but also had a sense of space. They barrel gleefully along, even the gloomiest of his ballads – the Ronettes’ extraordinary Is This What I Get for Loving You? and I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine, the latter arguably the artistic pinnacle of the Wall of Sound years – feel remarkably light on their feet. But Spector’s excess baggage never weighed his records down. A lot of attention is understandably drawn by Spector’s tendency to overload as a producer – the umpteen musicians required to make his singles, the doubling and tripling up of instrumentation. ![]() As writer Sean O’Hagan once noted, in a sense even the extraordinary music he made between 19 was an “act of revenge on a world that had wounded him beyond repair as a child” every hit a vindication that he hoped would assuage his own deep-rooted feelings of inferiority.īut He’s a Rebel, Da Doo Ron Ron and Be My Baby don’t sound like acts of revenge they sound utterly joyful, innocent. The stories about recording sessions that had gone wildly awry were legion too: he shot a gun into the ceiling of LA’s A&M Studios while working with John Lennon in 1973 he pointed a loaded gun at Leonard Cohen’s throat – Cohen subsequently compared him to Hitler – and according to their bassist, Dee Dee, he held the Ramones hostage at gunpoint during the making of 1980s End of the Century. “I thought, ‘Wow, where did that come from?’” ![]() “I had dinner with him the first day he arrived in New York, and he said to me that his sister was in an asylum and she was the sane one in the family,” he recalled. ![]() Spector, he suggested, had been in trouble from the start. Like a lot of people who knew Spector, Pitney seemed horrified yet oddly unsurprised at this turn of events, as if something like that was bound to happen sooner or later: the booze, the drugs, the evident instability, the obsession with guns and the history of violence towards women. And, moreover, Spector was, as Pitney put it, “kind of a hot news item”: he was awaiting trial for murder. A year before that, he’d sung Every Breath I Take, which, with its rumbling timpani, overload of backing vocals and dramatic orchestration, was one of the few early Spector productions to hint at the more-is-more Wall of Sound approach that would make him a legend. He had written Spector’s real breakthrough record – the Crystals’ 1962 No 1 He’s a Rebel – unequivocally one of the greatest singles in pop history, a perfect cocktail of soaring melody, echo-drenched production and Darlene Love’s exuberant vocal. Three years before his death in 2006, I interviewed Gene Pitney.
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