Wrote Tom Wolfe in "The First Tycoon of Teen," chapter 5 of "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby."
The erstwhile teen genius died yesterday — at the age of 81. In prison. Of covid.
January 17, 2021
"He is only twenty-three years old, for godsake, the first millionaire businessman to rise up out of the teen-age netherworld, king of the rock and roll record producers...."
"Spector walks into the inner office, gingerly, like a cowboy, because of the way the English boots lift him up off the floor. He is slight, five feet seven, 130 pounds. His hair shakes faintly behind. It is a big room, like a living room, all beige except for nine gold-plated rock and roll records on the wall, some of Phil Spector’s 'goldies,' one million sales each. 'He’s a Rebel,' by the Crystals, 'Zip-a-dee-doo-dah,' by Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, 'Be My Baby,' by the Ronettes, 'Da Do Ron Ron,' 'Then He Kissed Me,' 'Uptown,' 'He’s Sure the Boy I Love,' all by the Crystals, 'Wait Til My Baby Gets Home,' by Darlene Love. And beige walls, beige telephones all over the place, a beige upright piano, beige paintings, beige tables... There have been teen-agers who have made a million dollars before, but invariably they are entertainers, they are steered by older people, such as the good Colonel Tom Parker steers Elvis Presley. But Phil Spector is the bona-fide Genius of Teen.... Anyway, Phil Spector likes this music. He genuinely likes it. He is not a short-armed fatty hustling nutball fads. 'I get a little angry when people say it’s bad music.... This music has a spontaneity that doesn’t exist in any other kind of music, and it’s what is here now. It’s unfair to classify it as rock and roll and condemn it. It has limited chord changes, and people are always saying the words are banal and why doesn’t anybody write lyrics like Cole Porter anymore, but we don’t have any presidents like Lincoln anymore, either. You know? Actually, it’s more like the blues. It’s pop blues. I feel it’s very American. It’s very today. It’s what people respond to today. It’s not just the kids. I hear cab drivers, everybody, listening to it.'"
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61 comments:
"The teen-age netherworld"?
Huh?
I guess it does make for an interesting SF premise, though.
It’s unfair to classify it as rock and roll and condemn it. It has limited chord changes, and people are always saying the words are banal and why doesn’t anybody write lyrics like Cole Porter anymore, but we don’t have any presidents like Lincoln anymore, either. You know?
Of Covid or with Covid?
It's nice that he changed the face of popular music, but on balance, I'd rather his erstwhile wife Ronnie hadn't been imprisoned for three years, and Lana Clarkson was still alive.
Good riddance.
Sonny Bono apprenticed to him.
Sonny Bono apprenticed to him.
Brian Wilson idolized him, and then, I think had the conviction that Spector was reading his mind in one of his crazier periods.
"In a brief statement, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said Spector died of natural causes at an outside hospital, and that his official cause of death will be determined by the medical examiner in the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Office." - Telegraph
T J Sawyer said...
Of Covid or with Covid?
That's what I say. IIRC, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's a while back.
Per Wikipedia he'd been in a prison hospital facility since 2013.
Insufferably overwritten, like all of Tom Wolfe's work.
Good riddance.
Lana Clarkson would be 58 today. She'll never see 81, and the last thing she probably saw was this degenerate.
I agree with Shane: Lana Clarkson was the name of his victim, and leaving her out of his obituary means you are pretending he just happened to live in prison for some reason.
"the good Colonel Tom Parker" ???
I’m a big fan of the work Spector did with The Crystals, The Ronettes, and the Righteous Brothers. But as much as I love Tina Turner, I cannot stand River Deep, Mountain High. I’ve heard people gush over that song, but it’s appeal has always been lost on me. Nonetheless, Spector was a major influence and a very talented producer. He was also a really tenth rate human being.
Spector did not have a good week in mid November, 2003. First, on November 17, 2003, Paul McCartney’s project to “undo” the work that Spector did on finishing The Beatles unfinished album “Let It Be” for release in 1970 by releasing “Let It Be...Naked” in the way McCartney had envisioned it when The Beatles were recording the album in early 1969. This basically repudiated by McCartney and Starr and Lennon’s and Harrison’s widows Spector’s work on the album using his “Wall of Sound” techniques (all four would have had to agree to McCartney doing this in order for it to have happened). Then three days later he was charged with Lana Clarkson’s murder that he was rightfully so convicted of in April 2009. Spector was a great talent as a record producer whose ego got the better of him eventually.
"The erstwhile teen genius died yesterday — at the age of 81. In prison. Of covid."
This most succinct 2020 sentence ever printed.
The man had undeniable talent. His contributions are part of our culture. There's some unsubstantiated rumor that great artists are the unelected legislators of mankind. Hardly. The ability to find just the right chord changes is a skill that is not transferable to other areas of existence.....He had money and influence but was not able to leverage these assets in furtherance of his libido. Granted he was fairly ugly but so was Harvey Weinstein and Harvey never found it necessary to shoot women If only Phil had treated women with the tact and discretion of Harvey Weinstein, he might have died a free man.....On the plus side, so far as I know, he never preached to us about politics, so he did have some humility.
Really don't like that era in pop music.
It was so refreshing when the Brit stuff came along.
He won't be missed, much like OJ won't be missed.
"we don’t have any presidents like Lincoln anymore, either"
No, we don't. We got Joseph R. Biden. Progress!
Question: would Joe B. be able to read the second inaugural address without stumbling?
"Granted he was fairly ugly but so was Harvey Weinstein and Harvey never found it necessary to shoot women If only Phil had treated women with the tact and discretion of Harvey Weinstein, he might have died a free man..."
Let's ignore what a complete sh*t of a person this comment makes you, and address the substance of it: Weinstein is a ginormous bear of a man who could easily overpower most women, and Spector was a waifly midget who was unlikely to be able to physically overpower anyone. I'd suggest that's the only real difference between them, and why Spector felt the need to use a firearm when women spurned him.
He did what was easily the best Christmas album of the rock 'n roll era. And produced George Harrison's "What Is Life," which was recently turn into a very sweet "official" video:
https://youtu.be/fiH9edd25Bc
And he paved the way to ABBA.
Another "genius" with evident mental health problems. Helluva a way to live...and die.
@Blair: Carter's Little Liver Pills can help supplement a lack of iron in the diet.
"Naked" pretty well vindicated Spector's work on LIB.
Which does nothing to make him not an awful man.
Who the hell serves ten years for murder anymore?
He had great hair.....
how talented do you have to be, for people to gloss over your murders?
@Churchy LaFemme:
"Naked" pretty well vindicated Spector's work on LIB.
Which does nothing to make him not an awful man.
I've never quite understood why people conflate these two ideas. Good people can make bad art, and bad people can make good art.
Nowhere was this more bizarrely on display than when Michael Jackson fans descended on the Santa Barbara courthouse in 2005 to wave signs and sing songs in support of Jackson while giddily hoping to win the raffle for one of the few available courtroom seats. What a bunch of freaks.
gilbar said...
how talented do you have to be, for people to gloss over your murders?
Don't have to have any talent at all. Just have to be a cop-killer, or a mass-murderer, such as Che.
@alanc709:
Don't have to have any talent at all. Just have to be a cop-killer, or a mass-murderer, such as Che.
Or essentially any US president since McKinley.
Spector co-wrote “A Rose in Spanish Harlem” which was a great song.
Nobody knows what the fuck happened that night in his house, but everyone who worked with him for any length has a story about getting scared shitless while Spector waved a gun around.
Stephen Merritt hardest hit.
"He had great hair....."
He had bad toupees.
I worked in the courthouse during the Spector trial and remember seeing Michelle Phillips sitting on a bench in the hallway outside the courtroom during a recess. She didn't look like she was there in a show of support.
"the good Colonel Tom Parker" ???
He had a great rejoinder when anyone would question his handling of Elvis: "When I met Elvis, he had a million dollars worth of talent. He now has a million dollars".
Spector co-wrote “A Rose in Spanish Harlem” which was a great song.
The best version I ever heard was on an audiophile, pristine recording by David Mamet's wife, Rebecca Pidgeon.
Rebecca Pidgeon - Spanish Harlem
Spector co-wrote “A Rose in Spanish Harlem” which was a great song.
A producer's cowriter-credit on a song may or may not actually mean anything. I'm not saying he didn't deserve it -- I don't know any of the backstory in this case, but the songwriting credits are assigned for many other reasons than "this guy wrote the song".
Wall of Hooey.
If blowing a woman's brains out against a fake stucco wall in your foyer doesn't exclude one from being left to rot forgotten in a dank cell, I don't know what does.
Spector was a force. But I preferred the work of Jack Nitzsche.
Phil Spector was a psychopath but so were Caravaggio and Bernini. Here are two radically different versions of Spector's "To Know Him Is to Love Him," inspired by words on his father's tombstone:
Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris & Linda Ronstadt
Amy Winehouse
He's when cynicism really starts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOPDzD_P9gg
You got to carry on - buck, see the the sun, live
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvGCOXahbcc
The dark clouds are simmering, nothing to do with you, my son, as if brooding, by God meant something. His frown is my clown. I bought clippers, from Amazon, my son, but I have no guts to use them. I will learn. I will learn. Almost cut my hair!
Everything is dieing. I can't stand it, can't sit it, can't couch it. The moruns that occupy my world. I'm to fast for them. It's the 'clever' ones I'm afraid of.
Dear friend,
Isn’t it possible that you, my dear, misunderstood who or what I was (think of Villon):
Item: That beautiful women are the imago of the goddess, muse
Item: That I believe all beautiful women should acknowledge me , as such, too
Item: That everyone should have a long memory and never forget anything
Item: That such is true of me
Item: That, however long my memory, I neither forgive nor not forgive, whomsoever fails me
Item: All people fail me
Item: Forgiveness is divine but forgetting is one human art we can learn
Item: I miss you
Martina.
I – that am rudely stamp'd, and want loves majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph -
I – that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That Dogs bark at me as I halt by them -
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity.
W. Shakespeare Richard III, vs 16-27.
1
Something strange. The chipped value of buildings
That are always odd because they're historical.
A vague memory of my grandmother saying ' Hello'
And her 'permanent' counsel house being taken away
As soon as she died. Or my mother,
Seeing faces In the stonework of an obscure yard
And me having to rescue her and no gratitude
And I didn't expect it. Madness is it's own reward.
For once bowing to the inevitable and bleedingly obvious.
Just like buildings that bow at your command:
Are somewhat obvious, chipped and broken.
I'm not ugly - i'm pretty pretty.If I say so.
2
Happiness is like a very good morning.
Waking up in laundered sheets, knowing the birds
Sing in those pretty trees you saw yesterday,
Knowing a cooked breakfast is on the table
And, no matter what you've done (within reason!)
They'll still smile and say "Hi" and what a fool.
After breakfast and if it's not raining,
You'll walk into the garden and laugh at the sky.
3
The sun shines on even the terribly ugly.
The violence perfectly real. The shabby Inns
I have collected. Walking the other side of a sea wall
I am protected from a bay that is tame and beautiful.
4
Broken, the if smile and tomorrow you will know
Who loves you – no one. Everyone smiles in Morecambe.
To die a kind of 'get-in'. Like smiling at the bottom
Of our world. You cannot smile upwards, can you?
Eyeless in Gaza, I squint and grasp blindly
For this mornings coffee. The noise and rumble.
A newspaper boy running past. My French friend
Comes in to tell me his office is packing up and going back
To Paris. How cowardly. And I’ve been here before.
In Alexandria, for instance.
5
I broke my smile waiting for yesterday.
Martina, you think it easy, making this sun shine?
Were as thunder and clouds come every day.
Everything I can do except hold your hand.
6
It was easy to be at the edge of the world,
See the sun slide in with the blue and gold tip of a wing
Like the Angels that must have visited me in my prison
Of heretofore – a former Morecambe whose Streets were called
Clarendon, Westminster, Balmoral and this was the "West End"
A different exile. All exiles are equal. But that one bullied forward
And this, self imposed. The cries are equally as barren and threatening.
The hope equally as meaningless. I got out last time by a kind of
Alacrity, a jumping into the barrel which others began to roll.
This time, there are no others. The same barren hope, though.
7
London was so vast you could meander
Through it's soul and it wouldn't know:
Going up to the Contemporary Poets Library
And coming down with a big red book and no-one knowing
What you had – until, you were so drunk, you talked
To the girl in the peep show, studying law, and
She quoted you Pound. So, ashamed and knowing
No drink would help you, your feet twisted and turned
Back to the ugliness of Catford and Lewisham.
This was the way, the Tao which you disrupted, my love.
For a moment, for a couple of months, but not for ever.
8
The nights are coming in and close, like a black storm:
To stand high and old and curl up and fall – like paper burning:
The words that had meant so much, the honesty – and the lies.
Guilt shredded through the afternoon and, in the evening, just rest,
Exhaustion, overwhelmed by everything that is wrong.
9
The violence outside is always a beating postponed:
The gimp mask just falls away from your face
And you wear the usual garb and just walk out into the sunlight:
Blinding and bleaching and a judgment you can't take
You have begun to smile at the alleged children
That other people have. Tomorrow, but today,
You will gather those judgments and cans and bottles and yourself,
As if you were trash. How to live? The kind of joke I began with.
Asking questions. Who are you?
10
How does hope get us there?
No cars run on hope - is it carbon free? -
My boiler buggers on hope and if I ask my feet
Their twisted but somewhat sensible way is
"Out of the door!" and as quick as is legal.
Hope is a bully.
11
Happiness is what happiness does. It seems to appear
In other people. They smile a lot and have children.
A smile is a grimace like the grave. I wish to see
Certain smiles, I've hunted them out. I have an APB on smiles.
We should not appear in the same room, because my 'appearance'
Embarrasses you. Peering into the dark corners of my room
You assume this is me. Well it is. The coach is waiting for you
And our sadness, too. After you have gone, will I not follow?
12
The assumptions we have followed are rather strange?
Just to assume you are good, a man, just and beautiful,
As you did assume, must make you pretty ridiculous,
A laughing stock, a freak. To assume anything means
To assume to much. To assume everything or nothing.
13
I walk down my street and my courage fails,
Has failed. It isn't that the key in my hand
Will no longer work – the police and the other
Officious guardians of our fate will have
'Permission' to slot in the key and turn the key
And open that garden of butterfly's and June days
But also muddy winters and alone London -
But I am now excluded and know that,
Whatever I do, as a human being, is suspicious.
So cowardly, I divert to the local pub and smoke
My death giving fag outside.
14
Everything said forgets it's bonne chance
Of an accident that broke my screen as I was
Driving through the dead skirts of Paris:
Where the car must turn but doesn't to the heart of
Those streets smiling and forgetting.
Broken
Beneath that bridge and our youth on its hands and knees
Or back there, the half green lawn, and where jokes
Where a plenty and didn't need to be remembered.
I thought, something strange, like hope might brew
As when – I bought a house, I sawed the wood,
And the place disappeared beneath me.
15
To go home is a good choice – to ignore
What is obvious: The woman you love distressed
And, obviously, needing your help. You smile
In the corners of your couch and cry sometimes
Very hot, sentimental tears. Hatred in your own room
Feels better than hatred in theirs. An illusion
Only oblivion will cover. 'Like snow, like ice.'
16
The minimal that is required is to love.
But only one without love could make such a statement,
Be conscious of such a requirement. Innocent of heart
But dead. I am Lazarus come back to tell you all
Or Jonah, spewed upon a beach, refusing still
Those words that came from God. Or being
In the belly of the whale, drumming his indigestion,
With the oil cans, the plastic bags, the half eaten fish,
The etc detritus of being human, I, inhuman,
Wallow in this strange, submarine defeat.
I like it down here. Hows it up there?
17
Everything you thought was wrong was wrong.
Your awkward smile that misremembered me,
Your false laugh at remembering. Kicking the frost
From our feet and fearing to look at each other
We boiled with a kind of love. Soured in a bag
The homeless that asked us to look at them.
It's not pretty, poverty. It's not pretty, your smile.
Englishman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbre5Fs9m8I
The sweat on my back is a kind of"
Too look for who?"
"For you." "Cheap shot" and then she's gone.
"who?" I shout after her "Who?"
That's not what I wrote
Take me out tonight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMwTNaLwEkc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_ZhEGb61bU
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