Phil Spector, one of the most influential and successful record producers in rock 'n' roll, who generated a string of hits in the early 1960s defined by the lavish instrumental treatment known as the wall of sound, but whose life was upended when he was sentenced to prison for the murder of a woman at his home, died Saturday. He was 81.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement that he had died "at an outside hospital." The statement did not give a cause.
Spector had been serving a prison sentence since 2009 for the murder of Lana Clarkson, a nightclub hostess whom he had taken to his home after a night of drinking in 2003. Los Angeles police found her slumped in a chair in the foyer, dead from a single bullet wound to the head.
Spector scored his first No. 1 hit when he was still in his teens. With the Teddy Bears, a group he formed with two school friends, he recorded the dreamy ballad "To Know Him Is To Love Him." Released in August 1958, it sold more than 1 million records after the group appeared on the popular TV show "American Bandstand," with Spector playing guitar and singing backup.
After learning the ropes as a record producer, Spector, the central figure in Tom Wolfe's 1965 essay "The First Tycoon of Teen," became a one-man hit factory. Between 1960 and '65, he placed 24 records in the Top 40, many of them classics.
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His 13 Top 10 singles included some of the quintessential "girl group" songs of the era: "He's a Rebel," "Uptown," "Then He Kissed Me" and "Da Doo Ron Ron" by the Crystals, and "Be My Baby" and "Walking in the Rain" by the Ronettes.
For the Righteous Brothers he produced "Unchained Melody" and "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling," a No. 1 hit that became the 20th century's most-played song on radio and television, according to BMI.
Spector single-handedly created the image of the record producer as auteur, a creative force equal to or even greater than his artists, with an instantly identifiable aural brand.
"There were songwriter-producers before him, but no one did the whole thing like Phil," songwriter and producer Jerry Leiber told Rolling Stone in 2005.
Spector's signature was the wall of sound, perfected at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles.
With dozens of musicians and backup singers packed into the cramped quarters, Spector layered multiple guitars, basses and keyboards over one another and applied a shimmering gloss of strings. This sonic wave assumed even grander proportions when channeled through Gold Star's resonant echo chambers.
"The records are built like a Wagner opera," Spector told The Evening Standard of London in 1964. "They start simply and they end with dynamic force, meaning and purpose. It's in the mind, I dreamed it up. It's like art movies."
The wall of sound profoundly influenced a host of producers and rock groups, from the Beach Boys to Bruce Springsteen.
"He was everything," Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys told an interviewer for the British documentary "Endless Harmony: The Beach Boys Story." He called Spector "the biggest inspiration in my entire life." To John Lennon, he was "the greatest record producer ever."
After the Teddy Bears disbanded in 1959, Spector turned to producing and found a mentor in Lester Sill, who had helped Leiber and his partner, Mike Stoller, get started in the music business. Sill arranged for Spector to work with the two men at Atlantic Records in a brief but crucial apprenticeship where their use of strings and heavy instrumentation became part of his repertoire.
LANA CLARKSON'S DEATH
In the early hours of Feb. 3, 2003, Spector, after drinking heavily, drove to his home in Alhambra, Calif., with Lana Clarkson, a struggling actress he had just met at the House of Blues, where she worked as a hostess. His chauffeur, waiting behind the house, later testified that he heard a popping sound, after which Spector emerged, a revolver in his hand, and said, "I think I killed somebody."
The police found Clarkson slumped in a chair in the foyer, fatally shot in the mouth with a single bullet.
Spector was charged with second-degree murder. His defense argued that Clarkson, depressed about her failed acting career, had killed herself.
A first trial, in 2007, ended in a hung jury. Spector was retried in 2009 and found guilty. He received a sentence of 19 years to life, which he was serving at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton. Because of his declining health, he had been moved from the California State Prison in Corcoran in 2014.
"He added a drama to music that I don't think existed before him," record producer Jimmy Iovine told Rolling Stone in 1990. "Making dark records and pop records are separate things. When you can combine the two worlds, you've achieved greatness. He not only achieved it; he basically invented it."
Information on his survivors was not immediately available.