To Know, Know, Know Him is to Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

 The next book off the shelf is Mick Brown's Tearing Down the Wall of Sound, the Rise and Fall of Phil Spector. The main reason for it is to see what connection can be made between creative genius and madness.

The answer, as much as there is one, is the obsessive nature and the inferiority complex. Spector was small and not an athletic type and his immigrant, Jewish background only compounded his outsider status at school. He gained some cachet by being funny and became a very good guitar player but his wiseguy schtick and shallow relationships didn't endear him to everyone he met. He listened to the doo-wop records on the radio all the time and gained a deep understanding of how they were made. He had precocious success as a songwriter aged only 18 with To Know Him is To Love Him, taken from his father's gravestone that said 'To Know Him Was To Love Him' after which his career stalled until he served an apprenticeship with Leiber and Stoller and then promptly moved on when he'd learnt enough from them.

It's a finely-written and detailed book, most compelling for its account of those early 'hit factory' days of American pop music with sightings of so many big names in their formative years. Did you know that Little Eva, of The Locomotion, was Carole King's baby-sitter. And, were you aware of this saccharine masterpiece,

 

I'm fairly sure we should hate that record but there's enough in the 'amazing production', the arrangement and some perfect way in which it is almost too good at being what it set out to be that it is possible to excuse its excesses and see in it where Be My Baby came from. Stephin Merritt would love to have written that for 69 Love Songs and if he had, we would know it was darkly ironic pastiche but for Phil Spector it was a significant step on the way to his first Rolls Royce and his mansion.

I've got as far as the chapter where he's going to create The Ronettes, who were his masterpiece but led to an extension of his controlling personality. Ronnie's book explains how there were plenty more Ronettes tracks recorded but Spector wouldn't release them because he could see her becoming more important than him and he couldn't have that.

As well as making a seminal contribution to how pop records were made, like Roy Wood's taking up of the 'wall of sound' in such long ago nostalgia as Angel Fingers, Spector kept alive the USA's love affair with the gun that is costing innocent lives increasingly still now. If that's the price of 'genius', it isn't worth paying but what was Lana Clarkson, his ultimate victim, thinking when she went back to his place. It's the same question as that which Robin Givens or Desiree Washington might have benefitted from asking themselves before being blinded by Mike Tyson's large fortune rather than seeing him as a volatile and dangerous man.

Phil Spector worked with Tina Turner. We'll see what the book says about that soon enough but, having been married to Ike, she was in a better position than most to ask What's Love Got To Do With It.

I think I've got a few more chapters of industry insiders making glamorous pop confections before it goes horribly wrong. It might not go so wrong until the last few chapters. He got a double helping out of Baby, I Love You by producing the binary opposite of The Ronettes, The Ramones, doing it to almost equally spell-binding effect but, no, Dee Dee Ramone reported that he 'pulled a gun' on them.

 

It's not easy to assimilate why people - and it is 'men', usually, if that is still an allowable gender - feel so inadequate that they need a gun. Or, to lesser extents, a big house, a fast car or an aggressive-looking dog. It must be possible to make great pop records without shooting people.    

But, for my purposes, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound is a brilliant book.

At what cost great art comes, and I'm allowing Phil Spector all the credit for making Be My Baby, perhaps we could have managed without some of it. The history of Tamla Motown isn't all delightful reading but it didn't ever reach quite such levels of mania and horror. However, every bit of silver lining comes with its own bit of cloud.