LOS ANGELES (AP) – Phil Spector is considered a man with two different personas: The late music producer is considered a rock ‘n’ roll genius who enhances the genre with his “Wall of Sound” style in the 1960s and created hits for several big names from the Beatles to Tina Turner.
But while Spector made his mark as a revolutionary music producer, the stories of him waving guns for recording artists and being convicted of murder overshadowed his artistry.
California prison officials say Spector died Saturday at age 81 of natural causes in a hospital. He was convicted of the 2003 murder of actress Lana Clarkson in his castle-like mansion on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Following a trial in 2009, he was sentenced to 19 years in prison.
The reaction to Spector’s death aroused mixed feelings about his life and legacy.
Some praised his early contributions to rock music, while others struggled to forgive his erratic past.
Beach Boys musician Al Jardine said it will be “Nice to just remember him for his songs and production talents.” He said The Ronettes’ song “Be My Baby,” produced and co-written by Spector, inspired his brother Brian Wilson.
Stevie Van Zandt of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band calls Spector a “genius who clashes irreparably.”
“He was the best example that art was always better than the artist,” Zandt said Twitter. He added that Spector “made some of the greatest reports in history based on the salvation of love, while all his life he was unable to give or receive love.”
Meanwhile, host Drew Carey, ‘The Price is Right’, targeted Spector, calling him a ‘killer and an insulting maniac’.
“I wish he would have gotten the mental health help he so desperately needed, but he didn’t,” the comedian said. social media. ‘And instead of (asterisk) just pulling (asterisk) guns on people in anger or for pleasure, he killed one of them. Good ear for music, I’ll give it to you. ”
Spector’s ex-wife, Ronnie Spector, remembered him on Sunday as a ‘brilliant producer but a bad man’. She was the lead singer of the Ronettes.
“Unfortunately, Phil could not live and function outside the recording studio,” she wrote on Instagram. ‘Darkness has dawned, many lives have been damaged. I still smile when I hear the music we made together and will always do. The music will last forever. ”
But Darlene Love, who sang a number of Spector’s hits from ‘He’s a Rebel’ and ‘He’s Sure the Boy I Love’, followed a different approach despite her problematic relationship with the producer. She felt sad after hearing her son’s death from Spector.
“It was sad because of what Spector did, the amazing music he created, and he spent almost 20 years of his life in prison,” said Love, who admitted that during her singing career, Spector tried to “to control my talent”. She said Spector sometimes has a dangerous temperament, but she tried to remember the positive.
“I hope people do not remember the reason why he spent those years in prison, but more or less what he did for rock ‘n’ roll,” she continues. ‘He changed the sound of rock’ n ‘roll. This is what made me sad. ”
Spector was seen as a visionary for channeling Wagner’s ambition into the three-minute song, which created the ‘Wall of Sound’ in the 1960s.
Bruce Springsteen and Wilson openly repeated his grandiose recording techniques and wide-eyed romance and John Lennon calls him ‘the greatest record producer ever’.
But the multiple stories about how Spector takes up guns to artists in the studio and threatens women will haunt him again after Clarkson’s death.
Clarkson, a star of ‘Barbarian Queen’ and other B-movies, was shot dead in the foyer of Spector’s mansion in the hills overlooking the Alhambra, a modest suburban city on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
Until the death of the actress, who Spector claims was an ‘accidental suicide’, few residents even knew that the mansion belonged to the secluded producer, who spent his remaining years in a prison hospital east of Stockton.
Spector was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. But eventually, his recording artists stopped working with him and musical styles passed him by.
“He destroyed him in the most heinous way,” said David Thompson, author of “Wall of Pain: The Biography of Phil Spector,” in 2004. ‘But we have to separate the two. There are so many people who once had reverence, and then we find out that they did something terrible. It erases all their achievements. I do not agree with that. ”
Thompson said Spector’s biography was one of his most difficult to write because he only wanted to focus on the music. But as he worked on the book, he found out about Spector’s conviction.
“It was a hard balance,” he said. “I wanted to write about the music, just what he did, what he created and what he gave us. But you had to balance it with the terrible things he did. ‘