So if you really look at the history of, say,
the 20th century, you can probably point to,
what, maybe three, four people who literally
invented a sound. A sound, yeah, not just a new
song. Right, not a new genre even, but a sonic
texture, something that just fundamentally changed
how we all hear music. It's a tragically short
list, and right at the top of it, for better
or worse, is Phil Spector. But the problem with
Spectre, and this is really why we're doing this
deep dive today, is that you can't separate the
sonic architecture from the, well... the psychological
architecture. The man who built the Wall of Sound,
this incredible Wagnerian, beautiful pop explosion,
is the exact same man who died in a prison hospital,
a convicted murderer, unable to even speak. It's
the ultimate paradox, isn't it? We always try
to do that thing, you know, separate the art
from the artist. You listen to the music, you
ignore the guy behind the curtain. But with Spectre...
I really don't think you can. The source material
we're looking at today, I mean, the biographies,
the core transcripts, the session logs, they
all point to one single unifying thread. Control.
Control. The absolute iron -fisted control he
exerted over every single note of music was the
exact same pathology that destroyed his life
and the lives of people around him. And that's
our mission today. We're not just going to recount.
a biography, you know, A to B to C, we're trying
to really understand the mechanism of that control.
How does a poor, bullied kid from the Bronx become
the tycoon of teen in just a few years? And then
the flip side, how does that same obsessive genius
curdle into something so... So dark and violent.
And we should give a fair warning to everyone
listening. We are absolutely going to geek out
on the technical side of things. The 1960s production
genius, the microphones, the arrangements, the
echo chambers. Oh, for sure. But to tell the
whole story, the second half of this dive has
to go to some incredibly dark places. We're talking
about abuse, isolation, and ultimately murder.
It's heavy stuff, but it's necessary. You can't
understand the ending of this story if you don't
really, really look at the very beginning. And
for Phil Spector, the beginning is defined by
a single shattering event. It really all starts
with the family dynamic. He's born Harvey Phillips
Spector, 1939, in the Bronx. Right. Russian -Jewish
immigrant family. And right away, there's this
feeling of... The family name wasn't even originally
Spector. It was something like Spectus or Spectors.
And it got anglicized at Ellis Island, you know,
the classic story. But there was a deeper secret
in the house, something that Spector himself
believed his whole life. The cousin theory. Yeah.
He grew up believing, and the sources we have
suggest this was a widely held, if whispered,
family belief that his parents were actually
first cousins. So imagine being a kid and hearing
that. Right from the jump, you feel genetically
compromised, like an outsider in your own bloodline.
Exactly. And he was a small kid, you know, asthmatic.
He got bullied relentlessly. He just had this
cloud over him. But the event that broke everything,
the trauma that you can argue runs through every
single record he ever produced, that happened
in 1949. His father, Benjamin Spector. Yeah.
His dad was a deeply troubled man. He was an
iron worker, but he was just drowning in debt.
And one morning, April 20th, he goes out to his
car. which is parked in the family's attached
garage. He starts the engine. And doesn't open
the garage door. Suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.
Phil was nine years old. Nine! Think about the
scale of that abandonment for a nine -year -old
boy. The father figure in your life just vanishes.
And the family, his mother Bertha and his older
sister Shirley, they don't handle it with, you
know, therapy and open discussion. Oh no, this
was the 1940s. They handle it with silence. And
then relocation. They pack up everything and
move across the country to Los Angeles in 1953.
Bertha gets a job as a seamstress. And Phil.
He basically becomes a ghost. He enrolls in Fairfax
High School. But he's invisible. He's the classic
kid in the corner with the asthma inhaler, terrified
of the world, carrying this massive unspoken
grief. Until he picks up a guitar. And this is,
I mean, it's almost a cliche, right? The instrument
as a shield? The thing that lets the quiet kid
finally speak? But for Spector, it wasn't just
about playing chords. It was about expression.
It was a way to process things. And he starts
to find his tribe. He falls in with this crew
of other outcasts and aspiring musicians, guys
who would become big names later, like Lou Adler
and Bruce Johnston. And this little community,
this kind of musical gang, it leads to the formation
of the Teddy Bears. And here's where I want to
just pause, because the story of their first
hit single is almost too perfect. It's so literary
it feels like it should be fiction, but it's
absolutely true. It's an incredible act of psychological
sublimation. It's 1958. Spector is 18 years old.
He's trying to write a song for his little high
school group. And he can't get his father out
of his head. Specifically, he's thinking about
a trip they took back to the cemetery in New
York after his father died. He's picturing the
tombstone. And he remembers the epitaph carved
into the stone. The epitaph on Benjamin Spector's
grave read, To know him was to love him. Which
is, I mean, what a phrase. And he takes that
phrase, which, let's be honest, was probably
a lie because his father was a troubled, difficult
man who ultimately abandoned them. And he performs
this amazing psychological trick. He twists it.
He changes the tense. To know him is to love
him. He takes his profound, complicated grief
for a dead father and he repackages it. He turns
it into a sweet, innocent teenage love ballad
about a high school boyfriend. That is a staggering
pivot for an 18 -year -old. He didn't just process
his trauma. He monetized it. He turned it into
a product. And they record it for a tiny label,
Era Records. And it doesn't just do okay. It
slowly climbs the charts and goes all the way
to number one on the Billboard Hot 100. It sells
over a million copies. Can you imagine the dopamine
hit from that? You are a bleed, asthmatic, fatherless
kid, and suddenly the entire country is singing
your private pain. But they think they're singing
about a high school crush. That has to fundamentally
rewire your brain. It validated him completely.
But here's the catch, and it's a big one. The
Teddy Bears were not a very good band. Not at
all. They were a vehicle for that one perfect
song. They went on tour, and Spector hated it.
He absolutely despised the lack of control in
a live performance. The acoustics were bad, the
audience was unpredictable, the band made mistakes.
He wasn't in charge of the sound. Right, and
he realized very, very quickly. I don't want
to be the puppet on the stage. I want to be the
puppet master in the booth. He wants to be in
the control room. Exactly. So the band breaks
up by 1959. The follow -up singles flop. Spector
dusts himself off and decides he needs a real
education, not college. He goes to the real University
of Pop Music at the time. The Brill Building.
He moves to New York and basically forces his
way into the orbit of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.
The absolute gods of that era. These guys wrote
Hound Dog, Jailhouse Rock, Stand By Me. They
were the architects of rock and roll songwriting.
And Spector becomes their apprentice. And this
is such a crucial period that often gets overlooked.
He wasn't just fetching coffee and watching from
the sidelines. He was a session musician. He
was in the room playing on these records. That's
Phil Spector playing the guitar solo on the Drifters
on Broadway. It is. And he co -wrote Spanish
Harlem with Jerry Leiber for Benny King. Wait,
he co -wrote Spanish Harlem? That's a classic.
It's a standard. And while he's doing all this,
he's watching Leiber and Stoller work. He's absorbing
everything. He's seeing how they manage the musicians,
how they structure a three -minute drama, how
they build a song. But he's also seeing what
they aren't doing. He thinks they're still too
traditional. He thinks they're still just recording
a band in a room, and he's hearing something
bigger in his head, something thicker, more orchestral.
So he takes this incredible crash course in pop
production, goes back to L .A., and in 1961,
he makes a move that is just unprecedented for
a guy his age. He co -founds his own record label,
Phil's Records. Phil plus his other mentor, Lester
Sill. He is 21 years old. 21. He is the youngest
record label owner in the United States. And
now, for the first time, he has total, absolute
autonomy. And this is where his business strategy
completely breaks from the norm. At the time,
the industry model was basically throw spaghetti
at the wall and see what sticks. Right. You sign
20 acts, you release 50 singles, and you just
pray that three of them become hits. It was a
volume game. Spector looked at that model and
said, that's stupid. That's inefficient. He went
for extreme scarcity. He wanted to release very
few records, but he wanted every single one of
them to be a smash hit. He treated pop music
not as a disposable commodity, but as a major
artistic event. Each single was like a movie
premiere. And to make sure they were hits, he
had to control the product from conception to
consumption. Right. Which brings us to the invention
he's most famous for. The wall of sound. The
wall of sound. Now, I really want to break this
down technically because people use that term
so loosely today to just mean, you know, loud
music. But in 1962, this was a very specific,
almost scientific acoustic formula. His pitch
was little symphonies for the kids. That was
the phrase he used. He wanted the grandeur and
the emotional weight of a Wagner opera, but he
wanted it compressed into a three minute, 45
RPM single. And it all started with the personnel.
He didn't use small, tight rock and roll bands.
He assembled a collective of LA's best session
players. The Wrecking Crew. The legendary Wrecking
True, Hal Blaine on drums, the incredible Carole
Kay on bass, Larry Nechtel on keys, Glen Campbell
on guitar. These were mostly jazz players. I
mean, these guys could play anything you put
in front of them. But Spector didn't want them
to play like individual jazz musicians showing
off their chops. He wanted them to play as a
single massive organism. So in a normal session
back then, you'd have one guitar, one bass, one
piano, a drum kit. Spector would book three piano
players. Four or five guitarists. Two, sometimes
three bassists. And here's the crucial part.
They weren't playing complex harmonies or counter
melodies against each other. No, they were all
playing the exact same notes at the exact same
time. So from a physics standpoint, what does
that do to the sound? Because if you have three
pianos all playing a C chord, it doesn't just
sound like one really light piano, right? It
completely changes the timbre, the character
of the sound. Because no two human beings can
hit a piano key or pluck a guitar string at the
exact same microsecond. So you get these tiny,
almost imperceptible delays, milliseconds of
difference between each player. It blurs the
attack of the note. It blurs the attack and it
creates this incredible thick wash of tone. it
stops sounding like a piano and a guitar, and
it starts sounding like this new hybrid instrument
that you've never heard before. It creates a
texture where you can't easily pick out the individual
instruments anymore. Precisely. It becomes a
wall of sound. And then you factor in the room.
He worked almost exclusively at Gold Star Studios
in Los Angeles, specifically Studio A. And it
was a small room. famously small tiny and he
would cram 20 30 musicians into this little room
violins next to the drums horns next to the guitars
there was no isolation so you're getting incredible
microphone bleed the drum mic is picking up the
guitars the vocal mic is picking up the percussion
which is the exact opposite of how modern recording
works yeah today it's all about isolation Separation.
Getting a clean signal for each instrument. Spector
wanted the opposite. He wanted the bleed. He
wanted the air in the room to be completely saturated
with sound before it even hit a microphone. And
then the secret sauce. The echo chambers. And
again, we're not talking about digital reverb
plugins that you just click on a computer. These
were physical rooms. Oh, yeah. Goldstar had these
legendary trapezoidal concrete basements. Spector
would take the audio from the live studio performance,
pump it down into these concrete rooms through
massive speakers, record the sound of it bouncing
off the concrete walls. Which would create this
huge, muddy, beautiful decay. And then he would
fold that wet, messy, gorgeous echo back on top
of the original mix. So you have the blurred
instruments, the microphone bleed, and this thick
layer of natural concrete reverb slathered over
everything. It's impossibly dense. And on top
of all that, he insisted on recording and mixing
in mono. Which is such a key point because by
the early 60s, the world was moving to stereo.
That was the new exciting technology. Why did
he fight so hard for mono? Control. 100 % control.
If you're listening to a record in Scario, you,
the listener, have a little bit of agency. You
can sit closer to the left speaker or the right
speaker. You can perceive the separation of the
instruments. In mono, there's nowhere to go.
The producer decides the exact balance of every
single element. The sound comes out of the speaker
as a single, unified, indivisible block. You
hear exactly what Phil Spector wants you to hear
in the exact way he wants you to hear it. There
is no other option. It's basically authoritarian
audio engineering. That is the perfect way to
put it. And my God, did it work. The output from
Fela's records from 1962 to 1965 is just an unbelievable
run of hits. You start with the crystals. And
right away, with their first big hit, He's a
Rebel, you see the control in action. Because
the source material confirms that wasn't actually
the crystals singing on the record. Not at all.
Specker was in a rush. He heard another producer
was about to release a version of the song, and
he had to beat them to the charts. He was in
L .A., but the Crystals, the actual group, were
on the road in New York. So what does he do?
He doesn't care. He just grabs a local L .A.
group, Barleen Love and the Blossoms, has them
sing the track, and he slaps the Crystals on
the label and releases it. The name of the artist
didn't matter. The brand was a Phil Spector production.
The singers were just another instrument, totally
interchangeable parts in his machine. That's
exactly how he viewed them. And then you get
this string of classics. Do, Ron, Ron. Then he
kissed me, and then he finds what he considers
the crown jewel of his sonic empire, the Ronettes.
And specifically, their lead singer, Veronica
Bennett, Ronnie. Her voice just obsessed him.
It had this perfect blend of girlish innocence
and raw, streetwise power. He hears her, and
he thinks, this is it. This is the instrument
I've been waiting for. And he builds his masterpiece
around her, Be My Baby. That opening drum beat,
boom, boom, boom, clap. It's the heartbeat of
the 1960s, Hal Blaine's drumming. And Brian Wilson
of the Beach Boys famously called Be My Baby
the greatest pop record ever made. He said he
listened to it a thousand times, trying to figure
out how Spector did it. It's the absolute perfection
of the Wallace sound formula. He went to number
two on the charts. And this run of hits solidified
Spector as not just a guy who made records, but
as a cultural force. He was changing the very
sound of popular music. And he reaches the absolute
commercial peak with the Righteous Brothers.
You've lost that love and feeling. Phila's record's
second number one single. But look at the legacy
of that song. Up until 2019, it was the single
most played song on American radio and television
in history. Man, staggering. And at the time,
it was almost four minutes long, which was considered
commercial suicide for a pop single. So what
did Spector do? He lied. He printed the running
time on the record's label as 3 .05 so that radio
DJs wouldn't be scared off and would actually
play it. It's just constant manipulation. He
was manipulating the singers, the musicians,
the DJs, the listeners, even time itself. And
we can't talk about this golden era without mentioning
the Christmas album, A Christmas Gift for You
from Phyllis Records. Because today, we listen
to Darlene Love singing Christmas, Baby Please
Come Home, and it feels absolutely timeless.
It's a holiday staple. But the release timing
was one of the most tragic coincidences in music
history. It was released on November 20th, 1963.
The day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Talk
about the air getting sucked out of the room.
The entire nation was in mourning. Absolutely
no one was in the mood to hear these bombastic,
joyous, wall of sound. Christmas carols. The
album completely tanked. It was a total commercial
failure. It took decades for it to be reevaluated
and recognized as the masterpiece it is. But
for Spector, who believed he had the Midas touch,
these little failures, these moments where he
couldn't control the world, they started to chip
away at his armor. And you see his obsession
with control in this other weird little detail
from that era, the B -sides of his records. I
love this because it shows his complete disdain
for the rules of the industry. He was basically
trolling the DJs. He was terrified that a disc
jockey might accidentally flip the record over
and play the B side, and maybe that would become
the hit by mistake and he would lose control
of the narrative. So he made the B sides. Unlistenable
on purpose. He recorded intentional garbage.
Just throw away instrumental tracks that went
nowhere. He'd give them joke titles, too. There's
one called Dr. Kaplan's Office. Named after his
psychiatrist. Exactly. He made the B -sides unplayable
to force everyone to focus only on his art, the
A -side. It's just control, control, control
at every level. But you can only manipulate reality
for so long before reality pushes back. And the
big pushback came in 1966. The record was River
Deep Mountain High. This is the pivot point.
This is the moment the whole simulation breaks
down for him. He signs Ike and Tina Turner. Or
really since Tina. He didn't care about Ike at
all. He famously paid Ike something like $20
,000 just to stay out of the studio during the
sessions. He just wanted Tina's voice. He wanted
to build the ultimate monument to himself to
the wall of sound using her incredible voice
as the final perfect instrument. and he sweats
blood over this track he works on it for weeks
he uses a massive orchestra he considers it his
magnum opus the greatest thing he has ever created
he releases it fully expecting the world to just
bow down in awe and in the united states It charts
at number 88. 88. That's not a flop. That's a
public rejection. It shattered him. It did well
in the UK. It went to number three there. But
in America, the culture had moved on. The Beatles
were getting experimental. Bob Dylan had gone
electric. The Motown sound was slick and sophisticated.
Spectre's melodramatic teenage symphonies were
starting to sound, well, a little dated. And
because his entire ego, his entire identity was
constructed around this idea of being the infallible
genius who controlled the charts, This failure
didn't just make him sad or disappointed, it
made him retreat. He basically takes his ball
and goes home. He shuts down Philly's records.
He becomes a recluse. He withdraws into his mansion
and starts getting weird. I mean, weirder. We
see him pop up in a cameo in the 1969 movie Easy
Rider playing a drug dealer, which feels a little
on the nose in retrospect. But really, for a
few years, he's in a self -imposed exile. Until
the biggest man in the world realizes they have
a problem so big that only Phil Spector can solve
it. The Beatles. 1970. This is the infamous let
it be disaster. It was an absolute mess. The
original get back sessions were just hours and
hours of tape of the band arguing, playing half
finished songs with terrible vibes. The band
had essentially given up and abandoned the whole
project. So Alan Klein, their manager at the
time, brings Spector over to England, dumps these
tapes in his lap and basically says, can you
make an album out of this junk? And this is one
of the most polarizing moments in rock history,
because for half the world. Specifically, he
desecrated it for Paul McCartney. Oh, Paul was
infuriated. You listen to a song like The Long
and Winding Road. Paul wrote a simple, beautiful,
sparse piano ballad. Spector gets his hands on
it. And what does he do? He specterizes it. He
adds a massive string orchestra. He adds a heavenly
choir. He adds harps. He slathers it in the wall
of sound. McCartney hated it. He felt it was
pure schmaltz. But John Lennon. Lennon loved
it. Lennon publicly defended him. He famously
said Spector took the shittiest load of badly
recorded shit and made it into something listenable.
And this act aligned Spector firmly with the
Lennon and Harrison camp in the post -Beatle
Civil War. Which leads directly to his work on
George Harrison's solo masterpiece, All Things
Must Pass. My sweet lord. That is pure, unadulterated
wall of sound. It's lush, it's spiritual, it's
absolute massive. And he produces linen solo
stuff. Like, imagine. But while the music was
still succeeding, Spector's personal behavior
in the studio was deteriorating. The alcohol
consumption was just skyrocketing and the guns
started to come out. This is the era of the gun.
It stops being a quirky rumor and starts being
a daily occupational hazard for anyone working
with him. There's the famous story from the sessions
for John Lennon's rock and roll album in 1973.
The sessions were already chaotic, fueled by
drugs and alcohol. Spector shows up one day dressed
as a surgeon, another day as a karate master.
He's drinking brandy constantly. And then he
pulls out a handgun. and he fires it into the
ceiling of the control room right next to john
lennon's head And Lennon, in his typical dry
way, apparently yelled, Phil, if you're going
to kill me, kill me. But don't fuck with my ears.
I need those. It's a great line, but think about
the reality of that situation. The producer is
firing a live weapon in a soundproof room. This
isn't just eccentricity anymore. This is a full
-blown mental health crisis playing out in public.
And then, as if that's not enough, he steals
the master tapes from the session. He literally
holds them hostage until Capitol Records pays
him a hefty ransom for their return. It's a complete
breakdown of all professional norms. But then
in 1974, the breakdown becomes brutally physical.
The car crash. Yeah. In Hollywood, he has a terrible
accident. He's not wearing a seatbelt and he's
thrown through the windshield of his car. The
injuries are horrific. Something like 300 stitches
in his face, 400 in the back of his head. And
the source material really suggests that this
is the moment the Phil Spector character takes
over completely. The mask becomes the face. The
head injuries were extremely serious. And to
cover the scars, he starts wearing these wigs,
these massive, bizarre, outlandish wigs. But
they become more than a covering. They become
part of the armor. He's hiding behind the hair,
hiding behind the dark glasses, hiding behind
the walls of his mansion. And the music starts
to suffer for it. He tries to launch a new label,
Warner Spector, but it goes nowhere. He produces
an album for Leonard Cohen, Death of a Lady's
Man. And he essentially holds Cohen hostage during
the process. He locks him out of the mixing sessions.
Cohen couldn't even hear his own songs being
mixed. Nope. Spector reportedly had armed bodyguards
at the studio door to keep him out. Cohen later
called the result grotesque, but also semi -virtuous.
He was completely baffled by it. It's like he
was trying to prove that he didn't need the artist
at all anymore. The producer was the only one
who mattered. Which leads to maybe the strangest
pairing of all, the Ramones. End of the century,
1979. Punk rock meets the wall of sound. It's
oil and water. The Ramones were all about speed,
efficiency, three chords, no frills. Spectre
was the king of tedious, layered, obsessive perfectionism.
And again, the guns came out. Dee Ramone claimed
in his book that Spector pulled a gun on him
when he tried to leave the mansion one night,
pointed it right at his chest and said, you're
not going anywhere. He allegedly forced Johnny
Ramone to play the opening chord of Rock and
Roll High School over and over and over again
for eight straight hours until he got the exact
sound he wanted. It's that same control impulse
again. He's treating the Ramones like he treated
the Wrecking Crew. But these are New York punk
rockers. They don't take orders like that. The
final album is... It's a fascinating lesson.
And strangely enough, it became the Ramones'
highest charting record. But the cost was high.
It solidified Spector's reputation as a talented,
dangerous man to work with. And after that, he
basically disappears for almost 20 years. But
while the recording studios were quiet, the house
was not. And this is where we have to pivot to
the victims of his control. because while he
was waving guns at John Lennon and D .D. Ramone,
he was doing much, much worse to the people he
claimed to love. I have to talk about Ronnie.
Ronnie Bennett, the voice of Be My Baby. They
finally married in 1968. And her memoir, also
called Be My Baby, it reads like a gothic horror
novel. It's absolutely terrifying. He moved her
into his 23 -room mansion in Beverly Hills and
then systematically turned it into a prison.
He had barbed wire fences installed. He had guard
dogs patrolling the grounds. He confiscated her.
shoes so she couldn't run outside he completely
isolated her from her family from her friends
he forbid her from performing and then there
was the coffin the glass coffin he bought a gold
coffin with a glass top and kept it in the basement
and he told her explicitly if you ever try to
leave me i will kill you and display your body
in this coffin that's not a bad marriage that
is a hostage situation she eventually escaped
in 1972 She had to do it with the help of her
mother. She literally broke out of the house
barefoot and ran for her life. In the divorce
settlement, this part is just heartbreaking.
He threatened to hire a hitman to kill her unless
she signed away all of her future record earnings.
So she gave up millions of dollars just to get
away from him alive. She had to buy her own freedom.
And it wasn't just Ronnie. They adopted three
children, Dante, Louie, and Gary. Years later,
his adopted son Dante came forward with his own
stories. He described being locked in his room
for days at a time, being blindfolded. This objected
to bizarre, ritualistic abuse. He called mansion
a concentration camp. It paints this horrifying
picture of a man who needed absolute dominion
over every living thing in his orbit. If he couldn't
control the public's taste in music anymore,
he would control his wife and his children with
absolute unimaginable terror. And he got away
with it for decades. That's the thing that's
so chilling. He was rich, he was famous, he was
a genius. So people looked the other way. They
just said, oh, that's just Phil being Phil. He
called himself borderline insane in a deposition
years later. He admitted he had devils inside
him. But he was still walking free, still living
in his bizarre mansion, the Pyrenees Castle up
in Alhambra, a literal castle on a hill looking
down on everyone else. Until the night of February
3, 2003. The night the music and his freedom
stopped for good. and the night lana clarkson's
life ended lana clarkson was a 40 year old actress
she'd had some success in the 80s she was the
star of roger corman's cult film barbarian queen
but by 2003 her career had stalled and she was
working as a hostess at the house of blues in
west hollywood specter comes in that night he's
drinking he meets her and at the end of the night
he persuades her to come back to the castle for
one last drink a truly fateful decision they
get to the castle and around 5 a .m A single
gunshot rings out. The physical evidence is crucial
here. Lana Clarkson was found dead, slumped in
a chair in the foyer of the mansion. She had
a single gunshot wound to the mouth. And Spector
is there, of course. But the smoking gun almost
literally was the key witness. Spector's driver,
Adriano D'Souza. He was waiting outside in the
limousine. And what did he see and hear? He testified
that Spector came out the back door with a gun
in his hand and said five words that would ultimately
seal his fate. I think I killed somebody. I think
I killed somebody. It is very, very hard to walk
that statement back. But Spector tried. Or rather,
his incredibly high -priced legal team tried.
They immediately began spinning a story that
Lana Clarkson was depressed about her career,
that she was unstable, and that she had grabbed
the gun and shot herself. An accidental suicide.
Spector even gave an interview to Esquire magazine
where he used the revolting phrase that she kissed
the gun. It's the ultimate act of control, isn't
it? Trying to rewrite the narrative of a woman's
violent death to protect your own ego. The legal
battle that followed was a total circus. The
first trial in 2007 was televised. It was a spectacle.
Spectre would show up in court every day wearing
a different, more outlandish wig, a huge afro
one day, a Beatles -style mop top the next. It
felt like sick performance art. And it almost
worked. That first trial resulted in a mistrial.
The jury was hung 10 to 2 in favor of conviction,
but they couldn't get a unanimous verdict. He
came that close to walking free. He almost did.
But the state decided to try him again in 2008.
This time, there were no cameras in the courtroom.
It was just about the facts. And the prosecution
brought in a string of other women who testified
that Phil Spector had a clear pattern of behavior,
pulling guns on them when they tried to leave
his home. And that pattern was just too much
for the second jury to ignore the verdict. Guilty.
Second -degree murder, plus a charge for using
a firearm in the commission of a crime. He was
sentenced to 19 years to life in prison. So the
man who built the legendary Wall of Sound ends
his life behind four walls of concrete. He was
sent to the California Healthcare Facility, which
is a prison for inmates with long -term medical
needs. And the decline was rapid and shocking.
You look at the mugshots from 2013 -2014. He's
completely unrecognizable. The wigs are gone.
He's bald, frail. And he just looks terrified.
And the final irony of his life is just, it's
so heavy. The man who gave the world the loudest,
most dense, most powerful voice in pop music
lost his own voice. Laryngeal papillomatosis.
It's a disease that causes tumors to grow on
the larynx. He lost the ability to speak in 2014.
He spent the last six or seven years of his life
in complete silence. And then the final blow,
the pandemic. In December of 2020, he contracted
COVID -19. He died from complications of the
disease on January 16, 2021. He was 81 years
old. Dying in a prison hospital alone, in silence,
there's no grandeur to it. It's a pathetic, miserable
end. Which brings us to the hard job, the job
we promised to do at the start of this. We have
to look at the legacy. Because you can't tell
the story of rock and roll without Phil Spector,
but you also can't tell the story of Phil Spector
without the murder of Lana Clarkson. It is the
ultimate dilemma. Musically, his impact is, it's
just incalculable. He didn't just produce songs.
He redefined what a producer was. Before him,
producers were mostly documentarians. Their job
was just to capture the sound of the band playing.
Spector made the producer the star, the artist,
the auteur. The band was just paint. He was the
painter. Exactly. Without Phil Spector, you don't
get Brian Wilson getting obsessed and making
pet sounds. You probably don't get Bruce Springsteen
making Born to Run with its own version of a
wall of sound. You don't get the whole shoegaze
genre bands like My Bloody Valentine or the Jesus
and Mary Chain who took that idea of a dense
wall of noise and ran with it. His influence
is everywhere. He's in the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, a Grammy
Trustees Award winner. He is. But when he died,
the reaction from the world was, understandably,
very complicated. Ronnie Spector, his ex -wife,
released a statement that I think really sums
it up perfectly. She said he was a brilliant
producer, but a lousy husband. That might be
the understatement of the century. And his biographer,
Mick Brown, who wrote this definitive book about
him, said we have to acknowledge the musical
genius and the scaly night -crawling pod as one
and the same. You can't separate them because
they grew from the exact same soil. And that's
the thought I really want to leave our listeners
with today. We spent a lot of time talking about
the wall of sound. It was dense. It was impenetrable.
It was totally controlling. Every single sonic
frequency was filled so that no silence, no outside
air could get in. It was a fortress of sound.
All a fortress. Phil Spector treated the recording
studio as an instrument to control every single
detail of his environment. And you have to wonder,
was that wall really just a musical triumph?
Or was it a psychological fortress that he was
building to keep the world and maybe his own
demons out? And ultimately, did that same obsessive
need for absolute control, that wall he built
around himself, is that what turned into the
very prison that he eventually died in? A prison
of sound that became a prison of concrete. It's
a profound and horrifying tragedy of his own
making.