Phil Spector's dead to me now

And of course the legal judgement stinks.

He produced a Celine Dion album in 1994/5. He saw her performing "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" on Letterman, asked to work with her, recorded stuff Celine's people thought was terrible, but he threatened to release it one day (he paid for/owns the recordings), and that their collaboration would "put her on the covers of Time and Newsweek" simultaneously. That was in 1996. He's been laying low since then.

The Spector/Ramones colaboration is absolutley fucking fantastic, and Alex is Believing The Hype (tm)

The Righteous Brothers might not have been hip, but they certainly were great.

I'm buying both of those albums, oh yes I am.

Uhhh....no, Alex greatly prefers the Ramones' earlier work. END OF THE CENTURY is a botched abortion of an album, full stop. I put it to you, Daniel, that *YOU* are Believing the Hype for singing the praises of Spector, when in truth he's a washed-up, reclusive has-been.

"End Of The Century"- the ultimate love letter to early 60's Pop (best period in popular music evah), wonderfully overproduced, overblown, over-everything. I've a friend who's constantly getting into an argument with some guy who says that "The Ramones were just sped up Beach Boys"- this album proves that guy right, and is all the better for it.

Btw, what hype is this that that refers to Spector as anything other than a has-been, Alex? And since when does reclusive = not worth singing the praises of?

Spector being a recluse is incidental. That he's washed-up and overrated was the point.

TMFTML
http://intonation.blogspot.com

Both of those bands are just ditch weeds to me, a wall full of anything probably won't make it much better.

Yes yes, I understand that - but my question is that what direction *could* they have taken that you would've approved of...? Because as great as those early albums are (and they are GREAT) they couldn't just keep doing that over and over without becoming (even more of) a cartoon, and a boring one to boot. The Spector thing seems like a logical progression to me, and I think he actually expanded their sound very nicely (a point on which we obviously disagree). But if not Spector, and not Brain Drain - what were there other options? Make a political Clash-style record? Go all post-punk-y and get some Reggae? Synths? I mean come on...

Now dead to all of us...

https://www.tmz.com/2021/01/17/phil-spector-dead-dies-81/

Poor old soul..

Not Spector, obv. The one(s) that got miffed when he produced The Vines/Starsailor, I mean. He still had a long way down to go.

damn taken from us much too late

I didn't know this

As the 1970s progressed, Spector became increasingly reclusive. The most probable and significant reason for his withdrawal, according to biographer Dave Thompson, was that in 1974 he was seriously injured when he was thrown through the windshield of his car in a crash in Hollywood.[citation needed] According to a contemporary report published in the New Musical Express,[citation needed] Spector was almost killed, and it was only because the attending police officer detected a faint pulse that Spector was not declared dead at the scene. He was admitted to the UCLA Medical Center on the night of March 31, 1974, suffering serious head injuries that required several hours of surgery, with over 300 stitches to his face and more than 400 to the back of his head.[54] His head injuries, Thompson suggests, were the reason that Spector began his habit of wearing outlandish wigs in later years.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/arts/music/phil-spector-dead.html

His death was confirmed in a statement from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The department said he died “at an outside hospital,” and did not give a cause.

NY Times not yet trusting tmz re Covid complications

Let's also remember the creators whose names are not as famous because Spector mastered the producer-as-star persona and often is seen as the one genius behind his studio's songs. Like songwriter Ellie Greenwich: POLL: Greatest Ellie Greenwich-penned song

Yeah of course.

Yesterday I almost started a thread based on “I Can Hear Music.”

Was just ranting a bit on FB and Twitter about this but Larry Levine is the real guy to remember here

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-may-13-me-levine13-story.html

I've got a friend that once played a gig backing some version of the Crystals with one original member. He asked her if she had any good Phil Spector stories, and her response was "*Are* there any good Phil Spector stories?"

You've Lost That Livin' Feeling.

Funnily enough I was listening to the album he recorded with Dion last night.

i grew up with my parents pushing the wall of sound retrospective on me from about thirteen. i started recording bands around the same time. used to joke about getting the gun out a lot. the ronettes, crystals, righteous brothers and the wrecking crew et al gave some of the most phenomenal studio performances in recording history, yet many of their names are not credited nor celebrated. i believe these records would have been just as special without spector. somebody would have recorded them, anyway. he didn't play shit. he didn't engineer shit. he barely even wrote shit. i'm glad the music industry and production process has evolved to largely eradicate figurehead middlemen to whom artistic merit is accredited. fuck every and any record producer who attempts to create a legacy from trying to claim it, let alone egomaniacal murderers. celebrate ronnie spector, celebrate the writers & performers who put their souls into these songs while likely tolerating spectors bullshit. good riddance. brian wilson done your magic trick better anyway.

so... Wall Of Silence headline?

Wrecking crew is recognized more in the past decade for sure especially since the documentary.

it astounds me that it took an entire fucking documentary to shine a light on world-class musicians of several decades

i believe these records would have been just as special without spector. somebody would have recorded them, anyway.

Agree that Spector has been over-glorified at the expense of everyone else who worked on the records but isn't this going too far? Didn't he often commission the songs, participate in the writing process, match them to the groups, assemble the sessions - seems likely that some of those records would not have been made.

Spector played some guitar and piano iirc, but regardless there is little doubt the maniac still had a lot of control over the final form and sounds of those recordings if not, you know, exactly where to put the mic or whatever. This is not to discredit the incredible singers and musicians and engineers and others involved in making the albums sound the way they do, but that goes for everything from the Byrds to the Beach Boys to "Thriller" to literally hundreds of remarkable recordings made with the invaluable assistance of session musicians and behind the scenes assistants. Scam or no, Phil Spector was maybe the first to elevate the role of producer from technician to auteur, and there is little doubt that folks from Brian Eno to Rick Rubin owe him a debt in that regard even if both similarly neither play nor engineer shit.

(xpost) Spector does a good Lennon, too, in the documentary from a few years ago.

wasn't this motivated in part by trying to create a big, powerful sound over weak AM radio waves?

The Motown production teams were similarly motivated and, iirc, had a tinny AM-transistor-radio-sounding speaker installed in the studio to evaluate mixes.

I assume it's really similar to listening to a mix through a set or ear pods to hear how they sound today.

Yeah, let me clarify something - I don't think these records sound "bad" aesthetically. They're great records mainly for the way they sound. The reason I leaned on negative terminology was to emphasize why those records were unique and why Spector's methods were unorthodox. If you read Geoff Emerick's book on the Beatles, he talks about a similar thing - a lot of what they did wasn't for audio fidelity, and because of that, their methods went against a lot of rules at EMI and conventional wisdom among engineers. Spector's innovations were probably less likely to come from an engineer alone because even if it was to their taste, someone in that position would risk getting fired or losing future job prospects if they applied the same methods to a record produced by someone else.

SOME of the things Spector did may have been to accommodate AM radio, especially at the mastering stage. (Levine reportedly dubbed all of their final mixes down one more time with a hard EQ pattern and a shot compression. This is generally what you do with a cutting master, but to them this was THE master, not a dub, and it's what's typically used for any reissue.) I don't think they were unique in that regard. A lot of people making teen pop records then had the same idea - it sounds great in the studio, but how does it sound over the airwaves and out of a radio? That's why you had some engineers who would rig up something that could broadcast a tape playback to a radio. (It's not just the speaker, the transmission alone makes a difference in how you hear something on the radio.)

I would argue that the most extreme and characteristic aspects of his records had little to do with radio presentation. It's possible that was on his mind as he developed that overall sound, but he stuck with it long after AM radio was no longer a major factor. Even when he does a more stripped down album like Imagine (which he did actually produce), he still "degrades" the sound in the same exact way. Listen to the 2000 remix, which is a lot clearer, and you get a sense of how much compression, EQ, etc. was added at the mixing stage alone. You hear a lot of the same sound on the Dion and the Leonard Cohen albums, and even the Ramones album from 1980.

It may be helpful to listen to his earlier records on the box set (the first ones he actually produced), and then jump to something like Baby I Love You or You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling. It's an enormous difference. As a producer, he basically started as a Leiber & Stoller protégé, and it shows - he's doing the sweet soul music they perfected with the Drifters. Within a few years, that big, reverberating monolithic sound is in place.

Re: Plastic Ono Band, he did play piano on "Love" and he was heavily involved in the mixing, but yes, otherwise he was MIA for most of the sessions. As a joke, Lennon even rented a billboard, asking Spector to come back and produce his album. "Instant Karma!" is Spector's greatest Beatle-related production. Lennon actually got the personnel, consciously loading up musicians to simulate what he thought was essential to the "wall of sound," but everything else was Spector. His orchestrations on Let It Be suck, but they sound like standard schmaltz - he didn't try to engineer them into a wall of sound. When Lennon brought him in for "Instant Karma!" he asked Lennon what he wanted and he was told to make it like his old records, and that's what we get - huge difference.

Anyway, he was a great producer, but again, as mentioned many times before, great artists aren't necessarily the people we'd like them to be in their private lives (or even public lives). Spector, Ike Turner, etc. are all lousy shits and rightfully belonged in jail. They don't deserve to be celebrated as people but you have to accept their contributions to popular music, which are pretty enormous.

Actually "Baby I Love You" and "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" shouldn't be in italics - I'm talking about the singles, not any LP's that may have the same name.

Also, to be fair, "Across the Universe" was actually heavily processed compared to "The Long and Winding Road" et al. It's more like the wall of sound and it's also probably the ONE track that may have benefitted from all those overdubs, though I'm still on the fence about that. Lennon loved it though.

Yeah it’s too bad that raw version of « Instant Karma » is not available anymore because you realize how the production really made it great.

FWIW, a new All Things Must Pass mix is scheduled to be released this year. It was delayed from last year due to COVID because it was originally planned as a 50th anniversary project.

I don't know enough about the sessions to say for sure, but it always sounded like a strange case of an artist hiring a producer who was completely wrong for what they wanted, and wrong in a way that should have been predictable. The only other case I can think of where you had an artist and producer in a similar situation with equal authority over a project is Dylan and Lanois on Time Out of Mind. In both cases, you have long established individuals who were at a point where nobody says "no" to them, and yet they were at odds over how the album should sound.

Anyway, Harrison complained many times that he hated reverb and wished the album sounded differently. He even said he imagined it being more like the Band (as in the eponymous "brown" album or Music from Big Pink), but why the hell would he hire Phil Spector? I would think someone would have a good answer to that, but I've never seen one.

I think all things must pass sounds abominable. I remember reading that Harrison hired Spector's to "give him a hand" with producing but specter just got shit-canned on brandy the whole time. Still seems to have put his mark all over it

Spector even

I actually think it works MOST of the time...a bit overdone and some arrangements are flat out schmaltzy like the title track, but the idea of building a cathedral-like sound over spiritually-minded songs isn't a bad one. "What Is Life" alone sounds fantastic.

(Forgot to mention above, I don't count Oh Mercy because Dylan didn't know Lanois would be so unyielding. He was also more open to ideas after what he considered a bad run of albums where he struggled to figure out how to make a modern-sounding album. With Time Out of Mind he knew what he wanted, which is basically the sound of every album he's done since.)

I think All Things Must Pass sounds great, and was never going to sound like the Band.

Time Out of Mind, btw, the story I heard is that Lanois had a second studio going on where he could mess with the tracks. That is, Dylan heard the "clean" stuff but Lanois wasn't done with it yet. And it sounds great, too, imo. I mean, as if Dylan (or anyone else at his level who complains about a producer messing up their album) did not have the power to say "no."

How's *the* Steve Hoffman's bootleg remaster of All Things Must Pass?

I haven't been compelled to give End of the Century a listen for the first time in almost 40 years. I loved it at the time, but I was still in the relatively early throes of Ramones worship, who my friend Peter got me onto in 1979 (smalltown life). My favourite was "Danny Says." I'm looking at the song titles and not being flooded with great memories--I think I'll let it be, to coin a phrase.

Time Out of Mind, btw, the story I heard is that Lanois had a second studio going on where he could mess with the tracks. That is, Dylan heard the "clean" stuff but Lanois wasn't done with it yet. And it sounds great, too, imo. I mean, as if Dylan (or anyone else at his level who complains about a producer messing up their album) did not have the power to say "no."

I like the album as is too, but I also prefer some of the "less-produced" recordings on Tell Tale Signs and elsewhere (specifically the early recording of "Can't Wait," "Red River Shore," the "Cold Irons Bound" from Masked & Anonymous and the faster live rendition of "Highlands"), I think they're better even if what they released was still good.

Dylan and Lanois argued a LOT though, especially on that album. They've both talked about this in separate interviews since then. I think people can understand that on a very basic level - even if you're in a position where you have the ultimate authority, I'm sure you can understand what it's like to give in a little when you're constantly butting heads with someone you don't want to fire. Dylan once said he didn't feel the least bit satisfied even after 1) getting his first platinum album in decades and 2) winning his first major Grammy awards for it because it always sounded to him like someone's trying to steer it one way and someone else is trying to steer it another way.

Harrison's official site used to sell a hi-res version of the album. 24/96 I believe. Just find that, you can't do better.

I didn't know the Ramones' music until long after they broke up. In retrospect, it's one of their better post-'70s albums, but I could see how a lot of critics may have been unkind when it immediately followed four classics (five if you include the live album) that remain their absolute best work, IMHO. To be really unkind, it was the start of a gradual decline, barring Too Tough to Die. But it's got some great stuff on it, especially "Danny Says" which is my favorite track off there too.

I'm pretty sure I've read a quote from Harrison from around 1970 saying he didn't like the clean, contemporary production of the era, and hired Spector specifically for the density and opacity of his sound.

So what drew Lennon to repeatedly work with Spector?

it always sounded to him like someone's trying to steer it one way and someone else is trying to steer it another way.

Or maybe that was another quality that makes it great? Even so, we're talking about an inscrutable guy that had already gone with Lanois once before, and, for that matter, famously shelved tons of his own good stuff, do dunno if even Dylan knows best. Though Dylan has done such a good job as Jack Frost that I wish he would produce other people. Or, you know, hire out his ace band and top-notch engineers.

Phil Spector's greatest sin is that he was not Steve Albini.

Very informative thread! Didn't know all that about Time Out of Mind, but Dylan writes thoughtfully about the making of Oh Mercy in Chronicles, explaining his position on what he was going for, but sympathetic to Lanois' frustration as well (might should have been one produced by Jack Frost AKA BD, but yeah he was trying to figure out how to make acceptably modern records---before going back to the Mississippi Sheiks etc., which seems to have helped lead him toward his 00s Americana grooves).

I would take Dylan's production from Love and Theft on over Lanois' production, period.

Yeah. Of course there was also the influential success of his old sideman T-Bone Burnett, via suprise hit of O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack etc., so that may have helped him (self-assurance and critical/commerical-sucess-wise) move past the Lanois-associated trend-dominated era.

So what drew Lennon to repeatedly work with Spector?

No idea, but Lennon got along with him, idolized his early records and liked what he did on Let It Be and "Instant Karma!" so it never seemed strange that he would hire him for other stuff.

Or maybe that was another quality that makes it great? Even so, we're talking about an inscrutable guy that had already gone with Lanois once before, and, for that matter, famously shelved tons of his own good stuff, do dunno if even Dylan knows best. Though Dylan has done such a good job as Jack Frost that I wish he would produce other people. Or, you know, hire out his ace band and top-notch engineers.

Probably, I mean Dylan has clearly struggled with making records before. By that, I mean people around him see him trying to figure out what he wants and not knowing. Al Kooper said Dylan drove him crazy on New Morning because it seemed like he was changing his mind every day, and he also suggested that the bad reviews for Self Portrait was the main catalyst, which undermines the myth that Dylan purposely put out a bad album (as well as Dylan's own claim that he purposely put out a collection of songs that would "evaporate" when he released New Morning). I think the world of Dylan but the guy's still human, he has doubts like every other artist.

Dylan's main engineer is Chris Shaw, and he works on a lot of stuff (https://www.chrisshawmix.com/), and guys like Larry Campbell, Charlie Sexton et al have gone on to tour with other people and produce other records.

Is Larry Campbell the guy who is the Levon proxy in Robbie Robertson’s Once Were Brothers?

I'll add that the controversial side of Spector's work (not him as a terrible person, just his work) is the legacy of heavy-handed producers. That remains a polarizing topic in terms of what a producer should be. But more invisible producers don't get the press that someone like Lanois gets, and when you look at the paychecks they get and the high profile they have, it's not hard to understand why some people want to be producers like that.

I haven't seen Once Were Brothers but Campbell joined up with Levon Helm after Dylan, they were close collaborators too until Levon died.

Yeah, I think it's more about whatever restores Dylan's xxxp self-assurance in the studio (incl. how those songs should go/how can he finish them, which is certainly a thing mentioned in Chronicles and demonstrated on The Cutting Edge--and something on Tell-Tale Signs: he stops playing, and somebody asks, "Is that it?" and he says, "I don't know." How those good-to-great tracks ended up alone together maybe, though figuring out why he left some things in the can, compared to shit that made the albums, is always--well, he sometimes overthinks--but what can self-consciousness be like, if you are carrying that Bob Dylan mask and legacy around--?)

FWIW, Lenny Kaye was interviewed once for a book on Todd Rundgren since he produced an LP for Patti Smith (not one of my favorites, but it has a few of her best recordings like "Dancing Barefoot"). This always stuck out for me:

"I learned [Todd's] philosophy which is, and something I’ve repeated many a time to any band I’ve produced with, it’s a great aphorism which is: ‘If you know what you want, I’ll get it for you. If you don’t know what you want, I’ll do it for you.’ And that’s pretty much the job of a producer, and producers like it when artists have ideas."

https://pulmyears.wordpress.com/2010/09/29/wizard-wednesdays-dancing-barefoot-at-lenny-kayes/

Time Out of Mind is Lanois' nadir: fog machines and smoke to obscure how underwritten and uninteresting half of Dylan's songs are.

No idea why anyone would have a problem with "End of the Century". It's good!

I don't remember TOOM well enough to say (although it seemed like he got so depressed that he found his way to humor, "Erica Jong" and all), but if DL did obscure it well enough to get for inst Album Of The Year at the Grammys, wouldn't that kind of shit-shining be worth considering as successful production?

It's like looking for a ring amid the brambles and thickets but realizing there is no ring.

Oh well, life's a journey.

Life’s an illusion
Love is a dream

No idea why anyone would have a problem with "End of the Century". It's good!

xp And "h'mmm, good shit-shining!" might've gotten him even more work (if that's what he did, or some needy stars thought he did).

But then compared to what came after, of course...

James, compare that w their Laswellization, Too Tough To Die, and please let us know what you think (I've never heard either, but better you than me).

Per Dow’s request, I just switched over to listen to the first track of Too Tough to Die and am about to switch right back.

Re: _Plastic Ono Band_, he did play piano on "Love" and he was heavily involved in the mixing, but yes, otherwise he was MIA for most of the sessions. As a joke, Lennon even rented a billboard, asking Spector to come back and produce his album.

(It's not just the speaker, the transmission alone makes a difference in how you hear something on the radio.)

Wow

Speaking of reputations, that album was produced by Andy Johns, whose name as engineer is on several of the greatest rock albums ever made. And yet the band claims he would pass out drinking wine and that they produced it themselves.

I love the sound of Time Out of Mind, and if that is Lanois's nadir, then hats off to that guy.

I’m onto side two of End of the Century. It’s okay, but honestly it’s making me want to listen to The Undertones.

“Rock ‘N’ Rock High School” being the umpteenth song with RnR in the title and/or lyric that doesn’t quite measure up, although perhaps it’s better than most. Now songs about funk otoh...

I listened to this record this morning, the echoed booming of the drums was the most notably Spectorian attribute of the punkier tracks.

I love the sound of Time Out of Mind, and if that is Lanois's nadir, then hats off to that guy.

Same here. The only track I thoroughly dislike is "Make You Feel My Love" (it should've been replaced by "Red River Shore"), but otherwise the less ambitious songs ("Dirt Road Blues," "Million Miles" and "'Til I Fell in Love with You") sound like great mood pieces. They make me wish Augie Meyers had played on more Dylan albums - Love and Theft is the only other one that features him.

Dylan wanted him on Modern Times, but weather conditions prevented Meyers from making the trip up from Texas.

Bill Wyman's new article for NYMag is pretty damn good: https://www.vulture.com/article/phil-spector-music-producer-murderer-obituary.html#_ga=2.227531550.2076685399.1611222315-356502157.1611222315

re End Of The Century, I've never heard it on vinyl, so I don't know how it originally sounded, but in the 90s I had it on CD and it sounded really muddy. I sold that off and bought the remastered version in the early 00s and it was a massive improvement. now I like it more than Road To Ruin tbh.

Bill Wyman article good but

Ellie Greenwich and Phil Barry

Plus they worked for Leiber and Stoller and so they were actually in the Brill Building proper.

Also, LaLa Brooks sang “Da Doo Ron Ron,” which is not noted.

A couple of those lost Celine Dion tracks actually leaked. Not surprisingly, they're pure schlock, but if I had to sit through her records, the first track would be almost tolerable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pvvOnWOMTs