phil spectre
― estela, Monday, 18 January 2021 00:51 (three years ago) link
Turd > polished turd.
xp
― pomenitul, Monday, 18 January 2021 00:53 (three years ago) link
Stinks either way.
― Waterloo Subset (Tom D.), Monday, 18 January 2021 00:54 (three years ago) link
Phil S.P.E.C.T.R.E
― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Monday, 18 January 2021 00:55 (three years ago) link
vvg vg
― estela, Monday, 18 January 2021 01:02 (three years ago) link
:D
― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Monday, 18 January 2021 01:35 (three years ago) link
Obv it's up to the individual as to where they draw the line regarding this, but many of those records he worked on are truly joyful music - in large part because of the contributions of other people - and I don't want to let this evil fuck's awfulness stop me from enjoying them. I do respect the choice of anyone else to listen to what they want to of course, for whatever reason.
― a degree in bullshit from glasters uni (Matt #2), Monday, 18 January 2021 01:40 (three years ago) link
There was a thread on this subject a few weeks ago...it's going to come up with so many people now (though few as horrifying as Spector).
Someone asked Greil Marcus about Van Morrison (his COVID songs, which I have no interest in hearing) in an e-mail to the Marcus site a couple of weeks ago. I thought the last line of his response was good: "Put on some Van Morrison. Something long. Just let it play. See if it’s still part of you, or if you have to turn it off."
― clemenza, Monday, 18 January 2021 02:03 (three years ago) link
many of those records he worked on are truly joyful music - in large part because of the contributions of other people - and I don't want to let this evil fuck's awfulness stop me from enjoying them
He may ultimately be the "auteur," but those records also belong to Ronnie, Darlene Love and everyone else who sang them. As Darlene Love's lawyer put it to Spector (when he claimed that he didn't owe her shit, as in royalties), if she wasn't that important, why not release an instrumental? She talked about it in far more detail today than Ronnie, but everyone was proud of those records - it's part of their life's work and it's arguably their legacy. They always meant the world to them. The fact that Love couldn't get credit for many of the records she sang, they way she was denied royalties that were entitled to her, the way Spector tried to control her - even attempting litigation to prevent her from singing the hits he claimed he alone "owned" - that shit hurt as much as anything else he's done. When she won her court battles, she got everything she wanted - not just money, but recognition and the right to sing whatever she wanted. So don't feel bad about enjoying them because think of everything she and others went through to not only get their due but stake their claim to that work.
― birdistheword, Monday, 18 January 2021 02:44 (three years ago) link
If Eno or Rick Rubin were murderous psychopaths then I might be playing "grey area" on this, but packing a room full of musicians doesn't really make the dude a production genius or anything. The people who came after completely outclassed him in every way-- Ashford & Simpson, Harvey Fuqua, idk, this guy has always been musical fool's gold afaic. There is no Spector recording that I find interesting from a production perspective in any way. I'll save my mental gymnastics for when Robert Blake dies
― flamboyant goon tie included, Monday, 18 January 2021 03:12 (three years ago) link
I think his apotheosis was Death of a Ladies' Man. I can't imagine anyone else writing and recording that album. I suspect it was as close as he got to making a record of his own.
― Halfway there but for you, Monday, 18 January 2021 03:22 (three years ago) link
packing a room full of musicians doesn't really make the dude a production genius or anything
I'm not especially a fan of the wall of sound aesthetic either but isn't the 'genius' in part that he did something that was counterintuitive and contrary to most standard ideas about good recording and mixing and still made it work?
― Inside there's a box and that box has another box within (Sund4r), Monday, 18 January 2021 03:34 (three years ago) link
Pretty much. Saying he was merely "packing a room full of musicians" completely misses the point (partly because EVERY pop star of that era packed their studios with musicians). A lot of what Brian Wilson did for the Beach Boys came out of his unorthodox methods, which generally degraded and distorted the sound to an extreme degree. It was called a "wall of sound" because instruments were basically squashed together to the point where the sound of two different instruments playing the same notes or chords were no longer distinguishable. A ton of echo, a ton of dubbing and re-dubbing, a ton of compression - he didn't want listeners to be able to pick out different elements like you would on a hi-fi record of a small orchestra, he made something close to monolithic and overwhelming. It can be soggy and bathetic - despite a few masterpieces, most of his recordings with the Righteous Brothers and Ike & Tina Turner tracks were NOT really good - but he produced at least two dozen stone-cold classics on top of the rare Christmas LP that holds up as a great album.
― birdistheword, Monday, 18 January 2021 04:39 (three years ago) link
Not an exact analogy, but this reminds me a bit of the Welles/Mankiewicz debate over Citizen Kane.
― clemenza, Monday, 18 January 2021 04:59 (three years ago) link
Not much of a real debate over Welles/Mankiewicz, that was only turned into one due to lazy speculation. Anyone who bothered to research the production documents like every draft that's been turned in could see how much of Mankiewicz's work was changed.
― birdistheword, Monday, 18 January 2021 05:13 (three years ago) link
The debate goes on--someone turned it into a movie. (I mean, I side with Welles too, but it's there.)
― clemenza, Monday, 18 January 2021 05:22 (three years ago) link
Well, the movie got raked over the coals for it. Fincher and the producer eventually backpedaled and downplayed that idea when the NY Times interviewed them about it. (In the end, the best defense they had was that the film was from Mank's skewed POV, hence it was what he wrongly believed.)
― birdistheword, Monday, 18 January 2021 05:38 (three years ago) link
Bringing it back to Spector and the question of authorship, I don't think there's necessarily a standard formula that can be applied. Ultimately you have to weigh the work on a case-by-case basis. For example, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Elligton Songbook is Ella's album only in the sense that she's the primary artist. Duke and Strayhorn wrote and arranged all the music, it's their band...I have no problem grouping it with other Ellington album when considering that body of work. But the album is centered on Ella's vocal interpretations of those songs. It's mainly about her singing. With Spector's '60s records, I think the balance is tilted more towards Spector because that big sound is the main focus of those records IMHO. I still think of them as Ronettes or Crystals or Darlene Love records, but when you string them all together, they all have a unifying sound that comes straight out of the production. You could say the same for, say, a Motown record but with Spector that authorship has been defined by a single person rather than a team/label. He's not the sole artist, but he's the primary voice.
― birdistheword, Monday, 18 January 2021 05:53 (three years ago) link
"voice" in a figurative sense, not in the literal sense as in singing of course
― birdistheword, Monday, 18 January 2021 05:55 (three years ago) link
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/darlene-love-phil-spector-death-1115794/
― "what are you DOING to fleetwood mac??" (C. Grisso/McCain), Monday, 18 January 2021 06:48 (three years ago) link
I don't hear it! If we're gonna pit murderous record producers head-to-head, I find so much more interest and innovation in Joe Meek's production. And I can't think of any other producer who failed at their job so spectacularly as he did w Cohen, with The Beatles-- it's particularly amazing how he took Ramones and turned their stoopid into just stupid. I like his work on the two Plastic Ono albums, good collaboration, there, and that's all there is for me with Spector; I admit I never listened to the Christmas album tho
― flamboyant goon tie included, Monday, 18 January 2021 12:09 (three years ago) link
Terrible person etc. but his initial work (i.e the Back To Mono boxset) was fantastic (with the input of many others of course).Regarding his work with Lennon, I remember the original take for "Instant Karma", before production, and it's borderline terrible ! Somehow I can't find it back on YouTube.
― AlXTC from Paris, Monday, 18 January 2021 12:54 (three years ago) link
I like his work on the two Plastic Ono albums, good collaboration, there, and that's all there is for me with Spector;
Lennon later claimed he and Yoko did most of the actual "production."
― meticulously crafted, socially responsible, morally upsta (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 18 January 2021 13:07 (three years ago) link
http://www.wildwaynerocks.com/amityville7.jpg
I can't weigh in on the novelty or skill of his productions, but as a master of coaxing pathos from teenage dreams, he's up there with the doo-wop masters themselves. RIP.
― All cars are bad (Euler), Monday, 18 January 2021 13:22 (three years ago) link
initial work (i.e the Back To Mono boxset)yeah, I figured that release, Ronnie's distressing memoir and general listener interest had clearly resolved together to settle this 30 years ago: a solid few fistfuls of pop singles (directed by him, if that fits better than "produced" for some) and one great LP from 1961-66, then a full-time abusive lunatic after that. He obviously had some quality of charisma that would keep the likes of Lennon and Cohen in the studio in between screaming fits and firing guns, but probably the same kind that also let him charm strange women home to then terrorise overnight, for decades. (Possibly targeting both at low points of mental health and substance abuse? The Ramones collectively seem fragile enough to be susceptible to an abuser generally.)
― shivers me timber (sic), Monday, 18 January 2021 13:48 (three years ago) link
...of remarkable pop singles...
― shivers me timber (sic), Monday, 18 January 2021 13:49 (three years ago) link
fgti otm. The best Spector cuts succeed on account of the songwriting/performance and despite the production. I can’t think of a single one where a remix isn’t/wouldn’t be preferable. I mentioned All Things Must Pass upthread – if, as I suspect, a leaner new mix will be released this year, my ears may finally be able to make peace with it. Conceptually, Spector’s overwrought Wagnerian/Brucknerian shtick was indeed quite novel at the time, and the fact that it occasionally borders on the saturation of noise even more so, but (musical) execution was not his strong suit.
― pomenitul, Monday, 18 January 2021 14:06 (three years ago) link
Strongly disagree with "despite the production." I think the Rolling Stone piece above (by Darlene Love) gets at both sides of the equation nicely: the visionary inside the studio, the awful person outside of it. He even tried to prevent her from appearing on Letterman, where whole new generations got to discover her (not to mention the income).
― clemenza, Monday, 18 January 2021 14:11 (three years ago) link
_I like his work on the two Plastic Ono albums, good collaboration, there, and that's all there is for me with Spector; _Lennon later claimed he and Yoko did most of the actual "production."
― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Monday, 18 January 2021 14:20 (three years ago) link
That's good to know! I love both those albums but haven't done any research on their history
― flamboyant goon tie included, Monday, 18 January 2021 14:28 (three years ago) link
Certainly sounds that way
― Next Time Might Be Hammer Time (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 18 January 2021 15:25 (three years ago) link
birdistheword at 10:39 17 Jan 21I'm not especially a fan of the wall of sound aesthetic either but isn't the 'genius' in part that he did something that was counterintuitive and contrary to most standard ideas about good recording and mixing and still made it work?Pretty much. Saying he was merely "packing a room full of musicians" completely misses the point (partly because EVERY pop star of that era packed their studios with musicians). A lot of what Brian Wilson did for the Beach Boys came out of his unorthodox methods, which generally degraded and distorted the sound to an extreme degree. It was called a "wall of sound" because instruments were basically squashed together to the point where the sound of two different instruments playing the same notes or chords were no longer distinguishable. A ton of echo, a ton of dubbing and re-dubbing, a ton of compression - he didn't want listeners to be able to pick out different elements like you would on a hi-fi record of a small orchestra, he made something close to monolithic and overwhelming. It can be soggy and bathetic - despite a few masterpieces, most of his recordings with the Righteous Brothers and Ike & Tina Turner tracks were NOT really good - but he produced at least two dozen stone-cold classics on top of the rare Christmas LP that holds up as a great album.
I think the musical insight was the fact the made the music for the medium, small AM radios, rather than try to make it for nice speakers, he just exaggerated the audio effect, the heavy compression that AM has, he made it to pop on small mono speakers
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, 18 January 2021 15:32 (three years ago) link
Yeah the small speakers/cars radio is certainly key to understand his sound : these songs were made to sound great on these very limited/lowfi speakers (not that they sound bad on hifi though but they may lack subtlety !).
― AlXTC from Paris, Monday, 18 January 2021 16:00 (three years ago) link
i keep hearing this thread title to Celine Dion's voice
"Phil Spector's deadPhil Spector's dead to me nowwwwwwwwww"
― Looking for Cape Penis house (Neanderthal), Monday, 18 January 2021 16:23 (three years ago) link
I listened to the Xmas album this holidays through Spotify/a cheap bluetooth speaker and it sounded great. closest we can get now
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, 18 January 2021 16:36 (three years ago) link
Not once have I ever heard any of the Back to Mono stuff and thought it sounded bad, or could be improved.
Fun to listen to some of the circulated outtakes. It's kind of like listening to the Carl Stalling stuff, or "Pet Sounds" sessions, where you hear this big familiar dense thing get stopped and started on a dime by this huge group of talented musicians. Good banter, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPnFt1AJ_d0
― Josh in Chicago, Monday, 18 January 2021 16:49 (three years ago) link
If you listen at 1:56:06, Lennon discusses the uh hectic recording of Rock and Roll, during which sessions Spector ran off with the tapes. Lennon does a spot-on impression too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls8yjYKT6hA
― meticulously crafted, socially responsible, morally upsta (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 18 January 2021 16:55 (three years ago) link
. A ton of echo, a ton of dubbing and re-dubbing, a ton of compression - he didn't want listeners to be able to pick out different elements like you would on a hi-fi record of a small orchestra, he made something close to monolithic and overwhelming.
wasn't this motivated in part by trying to create a big, powerful sound over weak AM radio waves?
― treeship., Monday, 18 January 2021 17:18 (three years ago) link
(xpost) Spector does a good Lennon, too, in the documentary from a few years ago.
― clemenza, Monday, 18 January 2021 17:57 (three years ago) link
The Motown production teams were similarly motivated and, iirc, had a tinny AM-transistor-radio-sounding speaker installed in the studio to evaluate mixes.
― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Monday, 18 January 2021 18:21 (three years ago) link
I assume it's really similar to listening to a mix through a set or ear pods to hear how they sound today.
― Josh in Chicago, Monday, 18 January 2021 18:24 (three years ago) link
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.
― birdistheword, Monday, 18 January 2021 19:24 (three years ago) link
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.
― birdistheword, Monday, 18 January 2021 19:27 (three years ago) link
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.
― birdistheword, Monday, 18 January 2021 19:30 (three years ago) link
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.
― AlXTC from Paris, Monday, 18 January 2021 19:34 (three years ago) link
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.
― birdistheword, Monday, 18 January 2021 19:44 (three years ago) link
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
― Fenners' Pen (jim in vancouver), Monday, 18 January 2021 19:47 (three years ago) link
Spector even
― Fenners' Pen (jim in vancouver), Monday, 18 January 2021 19:48 (three years ago) link
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.)
― birdistheword, Monday, 18 January 2021 19:51 (three years ago) link
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."
― Josh in Chicago, Monday, 18 January 2021 19:57 (three years ago) link