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Genius - Svengali – Murderer – Phil Spector

From being recognized as the

• Genius behind the creation of ‘The Wall of Sound’

To a :-
• Svengali A person who, with evil intent, tries to persuade another to do what is desired: “a crafty Svengali who lures talented people with grand promises yet gives them little lasting operational authority” like how he treated his ex wife Ronnie Spector nee Bennett

To a :-
• Murderer – convicted of putting a loaded gun in the mouth of actress Lana Clarkson and pulling the trigger

Such is the life of Phil Spector!

Website Quote ‘The Independent’

It was, of course, a tragedy waiting to happen. As the saying goes, a gun brandished in the first act always goes off in the third, and Phil Spector had brandished far too many guns in his strange and colourful career for one of them not to eventually go off in the wrong place – which turned out to be the inside of unfortunate actress Lana Clarkson's mouth. As soon as the first news reports started to seep through from Los Angeles, music industry insiders around the globe – not to mention those only conversant with its feverishly cultivated mulch of myth and legend – sighed and thought to themselves, "well, it was only a matter of time".
Many had imagined that the story would run differently, that it would be Spector's mouth around the gun-barrel; obituaries had surely been written preparing for this eventuality, depicting the one-time "tycoon of teen" as a tortured genius driven to self-destruction by a cruel industry. In the event, it was an innocent, largely unknown, victim whose obituary was triggered by Spector's paranoid gunplay. Stock obituaries of the man himself, by contrast, have doubtless been dusted off and given a rather different slant.
Even cod psychologists with only the flimsiest grasp of the human psyche can tell that Spector suffers from some kind of Napoleon complex. A small, sickly boy suffering from both asthma and diabetes, Spector's childhood was marked by the competing effects of maternal mollycoddling and playground bullying at the hands of fellow pupils; but it was his father's sudden, incomprehensible suicide when young Phil was aged 10 that effectively blighted not just his youth but his entire life.
When the family moved to California shortly afterwards, he became a loner, listening obsessively to R&B and the new strains of rock 'n' roll broadcast on late-night radio. When, a few years later, he formed his own group, The Teddy Bears, the first single he wrote and recorded with them was "To Know Him Is To Love Him", a title derived from the epitaph on his father's tombstone. Recorded for $40 at Gold Star Studio in Los Angeles, it was an instant chart-topping hit, confirming Spector's bullish belief in his own genius, and furnishing him with the leverage to pursue a career in the music industry. He was just 18 years old, but like some orphaned child soldier in an African civil war, he soon acquired the status and power of a four-star general, despite appearing to have developed little or no sense of human empathy.
In the studio he called the shots, controlling huge armies of session-players like a musical Napoleon waging war through superior force rather than strategic subtlety. He would routinely employ phalanxes of the same instrument – five guitars, three pianos, two drums, four or five horns, and Sonny Bono battering away at various percussion – to create the congealed musical mass that became known as his Wall Of Sound.
He was undoubtedly a musical genius: both Brian Wilson and The Beatles believed that to be the case, and between them they probably knew as much about pop genius as any in their era. But it was a genius only of a specific sort, with a formula which proved spectacularly effective when wielded in the right way, at the right time, with the right artist and material. But if your requirement was not the bludgeoning, Wagnerian steamroller of Phil's Wall Of Sound, it was pointless expecting his particular genius to be able to adapt to your demands.
Not that anyone "demanded" anything of Phil Spector, of course. Such was his Midas-like string of hits through the early Sixties that nobody in the industry would gainsay either his methods or his increasingly aberrant behaviour. Guns became a common fixture at Spector sessions, often ill-advisedly mixed with alcohol and his natural, dark temper as he sought to emphasise his complete control over matters.
He was no less a control-freak in his personal life. He married Ronnie Bennett, lead singer on hits by The Ronettes and others, but treated her like a possession, locking her away in his mansion, and even hiding her shoes so she couldn't walk out on him. The same applied to his children, who, ferried to and from school by bodyguards, were denied the basic warmth of childhood friendship, locked away in their individual rooms and not allowed to play, even with each other. The resulting mental scars were evident in a recent, damning documentary in which one, when asked why he hadn't subsequently sued his adoptive father, replied that he was simply no match for Spector in terms of money, ruthlessness or spite. What was the point?
the complete quote
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/spector-the-untouchable-ndash-until-it-was-too-late-1668861.html

Happened on April 15, 2009

Location: North America: United States: Los Angeles

Topics: News: Crime: Murder

Listed on April 16, 2009 04:53:57 AM

Last updated on March 19, 2010 08:39:24 AM

Submitted by Activists

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