LITTLE ROCK — Before I get into my review of the new boxed set
Phil Spector Presents The Philles Album Collection
(Phil Spector Records/Sony Legacy, $54.99), I want to talk about something I saw on Facebook recently.
Someone posted on their wall the observation that “Hitler was a crappy artist” and “Charles Manson was a terrible musician” and wondered if there wasn’t some correlation between a lack of talent and a twisted soul.
That there isn’t a link seems obvious to me; the status update is a little smug and a lot wrong. Picasso might not have been a murderer, but plenty will tell you he was a monster. Ty Cobb might have been a murderer — his genius and nastiness are long established. It’s not too much to say that “good artists” are stereotyped as less than complete people; the idea is that they give themselves over completely to their process and product, while skimping on human connection.
Besides, Hitler wasn’t that bad a painter (there’s something naive and even tender about the work that’s survived) and Manson’s “Cease to Exist” was recorded by the Beach Boys (as “Never Learn Not to Love”). In his autobiography, Alvin Karpis — the bank robbing “public enemy” who was “personally” arrested by J. Edgar Hoover in 1936, an act that catapulted the FBI director into the national spotlight (and is re-enacted in Clint Eastwood’s new movie J. Edgar) — taught the young Manson to play guitar while they were incarcerated in a Washington state prison. In his autobiography, Karpis remembered Manson as “unusually meek and mild for a convict” with a “pleasant voice and a pleasing personality.”
Manson’s singing voice is arguably better than Phil Spector’s.
To write about Spector is to write about the lies of beauty, which we believe despite the evidence of our experience. Listening to the recently released Phil Spector Presents The Philles Album Collection, it’s easy to forget you’re listening to the work of a murderer, of an unstable, reckless man who even before being convicted of murdering B-movie actress Lana Clarkson was notable for having pulled a gun on the Beatles and the Ramones.
You likely know a little bit about him — at least the story about how he cribbed the title of his first hit, “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” from his father’s tombstone. (Dad committed suicide when Phil was 9, sitting in a parked, running car in front of the family home in broad daylight, a hose pumping carbon monoxide into the vehicle’s interior.)
Spector recorded “To Know Him Is to Love Him” with a group of Los Angeles high school friends, who called themselves the Teddy Bears. It went to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart in December 1958.
But Spector — who suffered from stage fright and was never much of a performer — preferred working behind the scenes. Within a year, after a flop follow-up single and a desultory album, the Teddy Bears disbanded and Spector was a part-time court stenographer and University of California, Los Angeles student who was hanging around Los Angeles studios, learning his trade from independent producers Lee Hazlewood and Lester Sill.
In 1960, Spector produced four hit records: Ray Peterson’s “Corrina, Corrina,” Curtis Lee’s “Pretty Little Angel Eyes,” the Paris Sisters’ “I Love How You Love Me” and Ben E. King’s “Spanish Harlem,” which he co-wrote. The next year he formed Philles Records with Sill and began to codify his dense “wall of sound” formula.
In a sense, it was a simple idea. Spector crammed a small symphony into his small Hollywood studio, employing several acoustic and electric guitarists, two or three pianists, two bassists, two drummers, a handful of percussionists, background singers and more on each track. Layers would be overdubbed over layers until the individual instruments seemed to merge and bleed into one greasy, pounding wave of noise. This created a signature sound, far more distinctive than the voices of the interchangeable lead singers that rode on top of the crescendo.
Over the next three years Philles cranked out 20 hits — like The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and “Walking in the Rain,” Darlene Love’s “(Today I Met) the Boy I’m Gonna Marry” and “Wait ’til My Bobby Gets Home” and the Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me” and “Da Doo Ron Ron” — hooky and dynamically compressed, each sounding like the others while at the same time retaining a uniqueness. They were perfect for AM radio and sounded great blasting through the tinny speakers in a teenager’s car.
A clearly smitten Tom Wolfe gushed about Spector in a 1964 profile for the
International Herald Tribune
called “The First Tycoon of Teen,” which presented the record producer as “a flowering genius” who had risen to be “the most glorious expression” of the then-nascent rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, “the first boy to become a millionaire within America’s teenage netherworld.” (Spector’s music has aged a lot better than Wolfe’s prose.)
Comprised of the first six original Philles albums — The Crystals Twist Uptown, He’s a Rebel by the Crystals, Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans’ Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, The Crystals Sing The Greatest Hits Vol. 1, the compilation record Philles Records Presents Today’s Hits, Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica and a newly collected CD of Spector’s instrumental flip-sides, in mini-replica LP sleeves — the set is aimed at nostalgic baby boomers. Casual listeners might be better served by any number of less comprehensive Spector collections, such as Sony Legacy’s double-CD collection The Essential Phil Spector.
Philles was not a company interested in producing coherent albums. One of the first things you might notice is a certain laissez faire capitalist approach to the way the original “albums” were compiled. Nine of the songs on The Crystals Twist Uptown also appear on He’s a Rebel and The Crystals Sing The Greatest Hits Vol. 1 contains only one Crystals track (the indispensable “Da Doo Ron Ron”) that doesn’t appear on one of the other albums, plus four tracks by the Ronettes.
So while the albums actually reflect the originals, highlighting Spector’s fidelity to the single as his chief product and his willingness to exploit the unsuspecting consumer, some folks are likely to be confused. Especially if they usually feed CDs into their computers for one-time ripping and rely on digital files for their actual music — there’s a lot of duplication here and the new disc of instrumentals doesn’t really compensate.
But there is plenty here that argues for a transcendent specificity of vision we might call genius. Spector’s sound has been often echoed and imitated, but no one has ever captured the fresh sonic shock of these Philles recordings. Spector’s later work feels mannered by contrast, the bombast of the arrangements comically baroque.
Spector wasn’t much of a lyricist, and a kind of prescient ugliness peeks through when the Crystals’ Barbara Alston prayerfully assays the Carole King and Gerry Goffin miscalculation “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)” but even that seems like a naive, innocent sentiment — teenage dreams realized by some precocious, nerdy, stage-shy boy.
But monsters can make symphonies too.
E-mail:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Style, Pages 51 on 12/04/2011