Phil Spector's dead to me now

Not an exact analogy, but this reminds me a bit of the Welles/Mankiewicz debate over Citizen Kane.

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.

The debate goes on--someone turned it into a movie. (I mean, I side with Welles too, but it's there.)

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.)

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.

"voice" in a figurative sense, not in the literal sense as in singing of course

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/darlene-love-phil-spector-death-1115794/

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?

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

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.

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."

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.

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.)

...of remarkable pop singles...

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.

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).

_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."

That's good to know! I love both those albums but haven't done any research on their history

Certainly sounds that way

birdistheword at 10:39 17 Jan 21

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?

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

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 !).

i keep hearing this thread title to Celine Dion's voice

"Phil Spector's dead
Phil Spector's dead to me nowwwwwwwwww"

I listened to the Xmas album this holidays through Spotify/a cheap bluetooth speaker and it sounded great.

closest we can get now

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

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

. 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?

(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.