Wrestling With the Complicated Legacy of Phil Spector

Songwriting is a form of myth-making, done in code.

For an impressive stretch of the 1960s, Phil Spector was the rare (arguably only) pop music empresario who had end-to-end control of an extensive myth-fabricating apparatus: He developed the chiming songs and found the artists to sing them, framed every aspect of orchestration and production, concerned himself with the imaging and the marketing.

Spector died in prison Saturday of COVID-19, while serving a life sentence for the 2003 murder of Lana Clarkson. The obituaries have been tortured exercises, measuring the legacy of pop music’s first auteur against his violence, volatile nature and eccentricities. There’s been smart discussion of his dense and elaborately layered productions (the “Wall of Sound”), alongside accounts of the murder and the pain he caused former wives and associates during a later period of his life that is regularly described as “troubled.”

Surveying a life like that, the temptation is to cancel the art and ship it out with the artist, as some have done with other flawed creators. In an extraordinary statement on her Facebook page, the former Ronettes lead singer Ronnie Spector, who was married to Spector from 1968 until 1974, suggests a more compartmentalized approach. "Phil was not able to live and function outside of the recording studio,” she wrote. She doesn’t rehash specifics of the abuse she suffered (she shared that in her 1990 memoir Be My Baby), saying only “Darkness set in, many lives were damaged." Then she adds this: "I still smile whenever I hear the music we made together, and always will. The music will be forever."

That’s the thing: Phil Spector’s shadow is not easily erased. Because of the particular myths he made, the vignettes spun into tightly choreographed three-minute bursts of exuberance. It’s no crime to smile when the Ronettes’ “Christmas (Baby Please Come On)” rumbles in to start the holiday season, or when the melancholy opening of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” appears, beckoning from a realm of melodic pop grace that seems very far away today.

Even if you somehow excised sing-song incantations like “Be My Baby” and more nuanced gems like “Spanish Harlem” (both co-written by Spector) from the collective consciousness, Phil Spector would be there as a hovering presence, trailblazer, influence. His notions about storytelling and drama in song were embraced – and then extended – by many of his Brill Building collaborators, among them Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and Carole King and Gerry Goffin. Likewise Spector’s sonic ideas about the use of bells and orchestral instruments inspired Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and Bruce Springsteen and many others to enlarge the canvas of pop music. Spector would be monumental if he’d only participated in writing “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Ike and Tina Turner hit, with Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry. He’s part of the tangled web of acrimony surrounding the end of the Beatles and vital to several subsequent solo projects by its members, including George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass.

Just last year, deep in the credits of John Prine’s final studio album The Tree Of Forgiveness was a fresh reminder of Spector’s unusual reach: A co-writing credit from a session decades before.

Spector and Prine wrote “'If You Don't Want My Love” for Prine’s 1978 Bruised Orange album, which was produced by Steve Goodman. It’s a characteristically terse Prine song with something deep and almost haunting in the margins – the Spector touch. In an interview with American Songwriter magazine, Prine fixed the moment of inspiration as around 4 in the morning on the night he met Spector (and bodyguards) at his house. They’d just been talking, and as Prine was putting his coat on, Spector handed him a guitar and sat at the piano. “We came up with the first couple lines and he insisted that we repeat them, over and over. He said it would be very effective,” Prine recalled in 2018, marveling at the specificity of Spector’s idea for a still-gestating myth. “And that was on my way out the door….As soon as he sat down and had a musical instrument, he was normal. That's the way he was. He was just a plain old genius."

Some time later, Prine returned to Spector’s place to play him the finished version of “If You Don’t Want My Love,” and while there, the two wrote another song, “God Only Knows.” Prine shelved it at the time, because he didn’t think it was complete, and returned to it with help from Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires. Their version on The Tree of Forgiveness is rendered as a homily of sorts, told from the perspective of an older person reckoning with the good and evil he’s done. The opening couplet: “God Only Knows the price that you pay for the ones you hurt along the way.”

Hearing it again, after Spector’s death, I was struck by Prine’s weary delivery. He doesn’t mention Spector but at times seems to be looking in his direction, trying like the rest of us to reconcile those pulse-quickening heart-gladdening myths in sound with the reality of the man’s menace. Some things can’t be neatly resolved.

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