Product Description

In 2002, the reclusive and legendary record producer Phil Spector gave his first interview in twenty-five years to Mick Brown. The day after it was published, an actress named Lana Clarkson was shot dead in Spector's LA castle. This is Brown's odyssey into the strange life and times of Phil Spector. Beginning with that fateful meeting in Spector's home and going on to explore his colourful and extraordinary life and career, including the unfolding of the Clarkson case, this is one of the most bizarre and compelling stories in pop history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #132315 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

Review
'A remarkable book about fame, obsession, genius, money and madness this is the definitive study of the man *****' Observer 'Spector's life and work make an endlessly fascinating subject, and Brown's massive study does a terrific job a classic, very American tale of glory, conceit and ruin *****' Q 'A rare and wonderful mix of dogged research and vivid story-telling. Virtually every page carries a tale of farce or horror, or more often than not, both' Craig Brown's Book of the Week, Mail on Sunday 'A classic It's a triumph - beautifully written, utterly involving, scrupulously even-handed - and positions Brown shoulder-to-shoulder with the very best showbiz biographers' GQ

Telegraph, April 5th 2008
`Spector, his associates insist, has two distinct personalities. This exemplary biography, updated to cover the murder trial, gives both a careful hearing.'

Sunday Telegraph, April 6th 2008
`Tearing Down the Wall of Sound, which ends with Spector's infamous 2007 murder trial, is a painstaking, highly readable attempt to understand a flawed genius'

Customer Reviews

SPECTRE OF CONTROVERSY
'Tearing Down the Wall of Sound - The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector' is an up-to-date, even-handed and interesting biographical analysis of the man who brought us such 60s musical classics as 'Be My Baby,' 'You've Lost That Lovin Feeling' and 'River Deep, Mountain High' but who increasingly in his latter years become as much known for his eccentricities as for his musical legacy, culminating in his trial for the murder of model and actress Lana Clarkson in 2007.

The book starts in 2002 and Brown's interview with Spector for the Daily Telegraph, just weeks before the incident which eventuated in Miss Clarson's demise and ends with the trial which Brown frames as almost the logical conclusion to a life lead in an increasingly bizarre fashion. The middle section of the book, which takes up the larger part of the narrative, charts Spector's life up to that fateful encounter with Lana Clarkson.

A precocious Spector is shown emerging professionally in the late 1950s as a new era is dawning in popular music. Spector is the little nebbish Jewish kid and social outcast made good. The young man escaping from a unhappy childhood: living without a father, as a consequence of an unexplained suicide, and raised by a an over-protective mother. The picture which emerges in the book is that the well-spring of Spector's genius - the famous 'wall of sound' recordings which has influenced everyone from Brian Wilson to Bruce Springsteen to Jim Steinman to Glas Vegas - is the same source which has lead to Spector's demise.

The same obsessiveness and attention to detail which lead him to create a whole new way of making music - the 'Producer-as-star,' the 'studio-as-instrument' - and changed pop music forever in the the era immediately preceding the so-called 'British Invasion' by transmuting the base metal of pop music ephemera into something more grand, more befitting of Spector's vision of "little pocket symphonies for the kids," is shown as allowing itself to curdle into something more sinister in the wake of Spector's falling out of favour in the wake of the emergence of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Californian folk-rock scene.

The obsessiveness which drove Spector in his glory days seems to fester and mutate into neuroticism and paranoia as his triumphs become increasingly remote. Spector is shown as being driven by a huge inferiority complex which in his demise is increasingly manifest in manifold ways and not least in Spector's obsessions with guns. Something of a re-occuring theme in the book. Brown ends the book questioning why the trial for Lana Clarkson's murder which neither acquitted nor sentenced Spector (it ended in a mistrial) left so many unanswered questions. The biggest unanswered question remaining Spector himself, the Howard Hughes of Pop.

Arguably as good a literary musical bio as you will find written in the last few years; well written, well researched but maybe a tad too long. Well worth a read however for those interested in delving deeper into a slice of musical history and into the mind of a man increasingly at war with itself.

Mad, bad, and dangerous to know?
When I started writing this review, I intended to give the book only four stars. This was because I lost interest and stopped reading at the point when Spector virtually stopped producing, i.e. after the Ramones album. (All sympathy to the many who suffered Spector's excesses, especially Ronnie Spector and of course Lana Clarkson, but I could not maintain sufficient enthusiasm to read the long saga of the two decades of reclusion leading up to Lana Clarkson's murder.) To be fair to an excellent biography, I have to give it five stars.

I would highly recommend this book to music buffs, but particularly to fans of the Wall of Sound. Mick Brown is obviously a fan, and he devotes a lot of the book to the genesis of the technique. It would be very easy just to concentrate on the titanic sound, the Wall itself, but Brown takes time to show that the lyrics of many of the songs present just as idealised a picture of love (whether found or lost) as any other love songs of the 60s. He suggests that only in the songs could Spector find happiness; for example, the message of the love between him and Ronnie in Be My Baby and Baby I Love You lives forever in the recordings, whereas the relationship started to go pear-shaped as soon as they were married.

I thought I knew a fair amount about Spector, but Mick Brown filled in several gaps. For example:
-I knew that To Know Him is to Love Him was taken from the epitaph on Spector's father's gravestone, but not that his father had committed suicide
-Spector's Mother Bertha publishing company was named after his domineering mother, with whom he had a strong love-hate relationship
No surprise, then, that Brown gradually makes the case that Spector's demons originated largely from his dysfunctional family (Spector's sister had her own mental problems).

Exhaustive, tireless research supports the book, e.g. nearly five decades after the brief career of the Teddy Bears Brown tracked down, and interviewed at length, their lead singer, Annette Kleinbard (OK, she has had an extended career in the music business, but I suspect few in the UK other than the real anoraks would know the prehistory of the writer now known as Carol Connors.) Brown did hit a biographer's jackpot by securing an extended interview with Spector shortly before the Lana Clarkson murder case broke.

Several of the interviewees provide comments on the strength of Spector's musical talent, which was strong long before the Wall of Sound began.

Most of all, perhaps, the strength of this, like many good biographies, is placing the subject in the context of his contemporaries, rather than giving just a "monolithic" view.

Genius and lunatic
I've been reading Dominick Dunne's excellent review of Phil Spector's trial in Vanity Fair so when I saw this book I had to have it. Very detailed, but it skips along at a fair pace and gives an honest and often amusing insight into someone who is undoubtedly a genius but also a person with serious personality flaws to say the least. Since reading the book Phil Spector has, of course, been convicted and will serve serious jail time.