LOS ANGELES • Phil Spector - one of the most influential and successful record producers in rock 'n' roll, who generated a string of hits in the early 1960s defined by the lavish instrumental treatment known as the wall of sound, but who was jailed for murder - died last Saturday. He was 81.
The cause was complications of Covid-19, said his daughter Nicole.
Spector had been serving a prison sentence since 2009 for the murder of nightclub hostess Lana Clarkson, whom he had taken to his home after a night of drinking in 2003. Los Angeles police found her slumped in a chair in the foyer, dead from a single bullet wound to the head.
Spector scored his first No. 1 hit when he was still in his teens. With the Teddy Bears, a group he formed with two school friends, he recorded the dreamy ballad To Know Him Is To Love Him.
Released in August 1958, it sold more than a million records after the group appeared on the popular television show American Bandstand (1952 to 1989).
After learning the ropes as a record producer, Spector became a one-man hit factory. Between 1960 and 1965, he placed 24 records in the Top 40, many of them classics.
His 13 Top 10 singles included some of the quintessential "girl group" songs of the era: He's A Rebel, Uptown, Then He Kissed Me and Da Doo Ron Ron by the Crystals, and Be My Baby and Walking In The Rain by the Ronettes.
For the Righteous Brothers, he produced Unchained Melody and You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling, a No. 1 hit that became the 20th century's most-played song on radio and TV, according to BMI.
Spector's signature technique was the wall of sound, perfected at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles, where he worked with engineer Larry Levine, arranger Jack Nitzsche and a team of musicians.
With the Righteous Brothers, the wall of sound assumed towering heights - but Spector surpassed himself when he put singer Tina Turner in the studio in 1966 to record River Deep, Mountain High, which employed 21 musicians and an equal number of back-up vocalists.
The record rose to the upper reaches of the British charts but flopped in the United States.
Dismayed, Spector withdrew from the music business for years and entered a decades-long decline marked by erratic behaviour, often involving his extensive handgun collection and heavy drinking.
An affair with the lead singer of the Ronettes - Veronica Bennett, known as Ronnie - led to the breakup of Spector's marriage. His turbulent marriage to Bennett, chronicled in her 1990 memoir Be My Baby, ended in divorce.
The breakup of The Beatles in 1970 gave Spector a brief second life. Mr Allen Klein, The Beatles' manager, asked Spector to deal with the unfinished recordings the group had made at Apple Records' studios in London the previous January.
The resulting album, Let It Be, led to a series of collaborations with John Lennon and George Harrison.
Spector was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. A boxed set of his recordings from 1958 to 1969, Phil Spector: Back To Mono, was released by Phil Spector Records in 1991.
In addition to his daughter Nicole, Spector is survived by his partner, Ms Janis Zavala, among others.
NYTIMES
