Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector Unabridged Edition

This is a book you won't be able to put down once you get started reading it!!! I didn't know anything at all about the personal life of Mr. Spector and little knowledge of his rise/fall in the music industry until I purchased this book. Mr. Brown didn't leave anything out in his research on the life of Mr. Phil-if he did, I would be moderately surprised! If you don't read this book sometime along the way, you have missed out! So "fasten your seat-belts" and take a ride "on-the-reading" as they say and get ready for an adventure you won't forget!!!

Tearing Down The Wall Of Sound is a balanced presentation of the Phil Spector story. He was a very complicated man who, at the age of nine years old, was traumatized by his father's suicide. Spector idolized his father and spent the rest of his life engaged in conflicts with those closest to him (his mother, sister, wives, etc.). He was a brilliant musician who treated his session players with respect. However, he treated all of his singers as disposable chattel as he was obsessed with his fame and stature in the pop music scene and did not want them to get the primary credit for his hit records. This book presents both sides of this complex individual; the hard detailed work he put into his revolutionary productions, his musical genius, and his ability to push the musical envelope. On the other hand, his callous treatment of most people he was involved with is detailed as well. Brown presents Spector as a bi-polar user of most of the people he personally knew. He did, however, lionize Lenny Bruce and John Lennon and treated them (and their legacy) with the utmost respect. The book makes an interesting point regarding his musical legacy. Most people regard "River Deep, Mountain High" as the pinnacle of his career. However, the author makes a convincing point that his greatest achievement is "You've Lost That Loving Feeling". Like most biographies of 1960's musical legends who peaked early, his story gets tedious from around the mid-1970's onwards as he spirals downward and deeper into a morass of unchecked mental illness. Brown gives numerous accounts of incidences where he threatened to kill various women. The book ends before his second murder trial. This is a very compelling account of a conflicted, unhappy musical genius. Here's hoping that Spector gets the proper psychological treatment he so obviously requires while spending the rest of his life in prison.

I've read them all, and this is both the best-researched and best-written biography of Phil Spector. I got a fuller picture of Spector, the (troubled, neurotic, brilliant, unstable) man than I have from any other book. In addition, the author places Spector's work in its proper historic perspective, with great insights into the shifting world of pop music, from Spector's rise in the early 60s through his decline in the 70s. He interviewed many of those who helped to create the "wall of sound," so we get a good idea of how the Spector classics came to be, as well as innumerable amusing, interesting or, at times, appalling anecdotes. If you love Spector's music, or 60s pop in general, this is a must-read.

Phil Spector is easily one of the best producers in the history of rock and pop. His meteoric rise to stardom in the New York Music scene in the early 60s was legendary as was his work with the Crystals, the Ronettes, John Lennon and George Harrison. Unfortunately, his personal life was as disastrous as his professional life was stellar. This book dispassionately chronicles Spector's life from a child who endured his father's suicide to the accusations of murder which he eventually succumbed to. A sad, tragic story of yet another individual who seemed to have the world but really couldn't stop the demons from consuming him.....

Before reading this book, I had no idea which version of the Lana Clarkson story to believe: Did Phil Spector kill her, or did she commit suicide? After reading it, there is little doubt.Brown does an excellent job of tracing Spector's life, and of giving us a glimpse of the recording industry in the golden age of rock and roll. But his signal achievement -- and I would guess, the primary purpose of the book -- is to establish a clear pattern of behavior over a several-decade period. Brown has documented so many examples of Spector's bizarre habit over the years of locking people inside his house when they expressed a desire to leave, and threatening them with firearms, that an eventual tragic ending seemed inevitable. (Indeed, one wonders why it didn't happen sooner.) Further, the idea that a young woman who displayed no evidence of depression, let alone suicidal ideation, would enter the house of a man she had met for the first time, and kill herself in the entryway as he stood directly in front of her (as evidenced by the blood spray on his coat), with that man's gun, is preposterous on its face.Phil Spector is of course a tragic figure, the classic self-isolating genius; a man so afraid of being alone that he forcibly prevented guests from leaving his home, but so afraid of interpersonal relationships that he could not allow anyone to get close enough to help him find enduring relief from his mental illness or his alcoholism, despite an army of psychiatrists and a polypharmacy of psychoactive medications. Perhaps now, within the California correctional system, he will finally find the help he needs. It's just a shame that an innocent young woman had to die in the process.

In the early 1960s I was one of the kids for whom Phil Spector produced his little symphonies, and they became so embedded in my life that even now I feel the thrill of adolescent longing when I hear the Crystals, the Ronettes, or the Righteous Brothers.Not the overwrought, empty sound of Ike and Tina Turner's River Deep, Mountain High, however. And it marked the tumbling down of Spector's great invention, the Wall of Sound. It also marked the beginning of Spector's long descent into madness, as he travelled from being merely crazy into a vortex of pills, booze, paranoia, and guns. He locked himself away in castles, until he was locked away in somewhere even more impregnable.Mick Brown is an outstanding journalist and writer, and this account tracks Spector from his earliest days. He perhaps had insanity hard-wired into him. His parents were first cousins, his father killed himself, his sister was in and out of mental health institutions, and his poor mother smothered her son the record producer with unwanted love.Brown interviewed Spector only a few short weeks before the shooting of Lana Clarkson, the fatally last in a long line of girls who found themselves viewing Phil from the wrong end of a gun. Brown also attended Spector's trial.The book coincidentally throws into almost comic relief some of the vagaries of the Californian judicial system. Spector's defence counsel absences himself from much of the trial while he sets up his own TV reality show. Phil appears in a selection of improbable wigs, the most awe inspiring being a giant blond Afro, and is at times so unsteady on his feet that one observer records he looks like he might fall off his shoes. The jury is apparently unable to comprehend that a blood-spattered Spector, clutching a revolver and telling his chauffeur that he thinks he just killed somebody, had actually killed somebody, and fails to come to a verdict.A retrial had to take place before they put Phil somewhere that involved a wall, but not of sound. Brown's book is a masterpiece of rock 'n' roll biography.

Mick Brown is a sterling writer, both as an author and a journalist. He tackles his subject here with ferocious insight and intelligence. Phil Spector, whose ability as a music producer sits in the highest place, is also a dark personality riddled with self-doubt and a measure of self-loathing that descends to the lowest levels. Ego on his scale is disturbingly chaotic and tends to threaten a peaceful order that the overwhelming majority of us subscribe to. But this ego has given birth to some of the most uplifting sounds in the pop pantheon. Mick Brown tells this story on a measured way, taking the reader through the fascinating but loopy career of the man whose mantra was that he wanted to give the world "little symphonies for the kids."

Great read. Boy, Phil Spector is a right looney. Some of his work is spectacular but his overall personality is pretty dismal and this book reflects it. It is a great read...

Charting Spector's rise from the Teddy-Bears to his demise in court, this book makes for a great reference tool for anyone who takes an interest in popular music. It is an unbiased look at his life told by the people who shared it with him and though he should be a totally unlikeable character, you get a sense of how he managed to control and manipulate people and an understanding of why he behaved the way he did; his subsequent jailing is the only way his story could have ended.

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.