Dream lover phil spectre archive#
Photograph: Tom Sheehan/Sony Music Archive via Getty Images The svengali’s ex-wife Ronnie Spector, in 1977. Where Spector’s famous “boom-cha-boom-cha” drum sound on Be My Baby (played by Hal Blaine) instantly summons a pristine moment in pop history, Spector’s living legacy is that of music industry abuse going unchecked because the art is perceived as worth it – or worse, considered “proof” of wild and untameable genius.
The combination created a pernicious infamy: if the songs are so majestic, then the behaviour must be justifiable. They are inextricable from his everyday barbarism, waving guns around and holding them to musicians’ heads to enforce his will. Spector is known as the innovator of the “wall of sound” recording technique and countless moments of pop sublimity. ( In a statement released after Spector’s conviction, Walsh said “It is hard for me to pass judgment on whether he is guilty or innocent.”) You hope he never saw a picture of the murder scene, Clarkson’s broken teeth sprayed around the carpet after Spector shot her in the mouth. “It wasn’t nice seeing him like that,” he said of a photograph of Spector being led away by police. In a Guardian interview from 2003, shortly after Spector was arrested for the murder of Lana Clarkson, the Wigan band’s frontman James Walsh expressed concern that, were Spector innocent, he might be traumatised by the arrest. After a period of estrangement, his brief turn-of-the-millennium revival was short-lived: Celine Dion and Starsailor both ended up firing him.
Just as horrifying is the list of artists who continued to seek Spector’s studio magic despite common knowledge of his menacing behaviour: the Beatles, John Lennon, Dion, Leonard Cohen, the Ramones.
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