(Atco)
!!! A+ COMPILATION !!!
[A few things that should be addressed before we delve deeply into this: Although Back to Mono
, the definitive collection of Phil Spector's output as a singles producer during his reign at Philles Records, contains as its fourth disc his seminal seasonal LP A Christmas Gift for You
, we won't be addressing it here -- it's a classic and deserves its own review. Secondly, the grade above comes with a strong caveat that requires some explication; the first two discs of Back to Mono
are as sublime and expansive and valuable as popular recorded music gets. The third disc lands with a thud, something that will be explored below but hinges likely on your faithful reviewer's strong personal bias against both the Righteous Brothers and Ike & Tina Turner, performers who dominate that CD. The Crystals, the Ronettes, and Darlene Love are my domain; I can't bear to listen to the Righteous Brothers, finding them akin to nails on a chalkboard and an assurance of irrational risibility -- you cannot imagine how much I loathe them, along with the Mamas & the Papas and the Four Seasons probably the sole major early-to-mid '60s artists whose work is anathemic to me, and I can't exactly explain it so I don't intend to try too much. Ike and Tina, on the other hand, don't bother me as much as the material Spector gave them, which is overblown and stupid (every time someone says the execrable "River Deep Mountain High" is one of the best rock & roll songs ever recorded, a baby somewhere vomits; I'm serious). Why does this receive an A+, then? First of all, because the first two discs are flawless and Christmas Gift for You
's inclusion somewhat redeems the third; but also because, disregarding the rest of the LPs and his Apple Records material, this is in the ideal comprehensive document of Phil Spector's recorded career, and for historical interest alone it therefore deserves placement at the top of the pop music canon. Hope that makes sense.]
Seven inch 45rpm records were Phil Spector's medium; that's the beginning and end of it, and regardless of how much you may adore his work in any digital format it seems to leap up and sparkle with life the first time you hear it jump off a turntable. As a victory lap, though, the Philles boxed set
Back to Mono is an establishment of canon for the man who, after everything that's happened, remains unquestionably rock & roll's finest producer. All the spontaneous thrills and burstings of joy and desperation on the individual sides that powered through melodramatic teenage sorrows and sock hops lived in those old vinyl grooves, but it's when you take in these mass quantities of playful schlock stacked together all at once on a couple of CDs that you grasp for the first time just how incendiary this music was -- its toying with perception, its brutal and truthful darkness as a profound illustration of mammoth adolescent emotions and urges. Beyond any technical achievement, what Spector had was a one-up over any Freedian Clarkian sense of youth as fertile ground for moneymaking.
Spector believed in his audience as half of his art, because he understood and responded to the depths of how the problems of a lovesick boy or girl feel so magnified and beautiful. Maybe he responded too closely, to too great an extent, but this was his artistic domain -- expounding upon the inner lives of his singers and their fans by expressing it as a cacophony of urgent, damaged noise behind anthemic hooks and boy-girl lyrics raised to highest honesty and art by his stable of gifted singers, who could make the most trite turn of phrase magic, who can make grownups weak-kneed and misty-eyed with their deeply convicted interpretations of sing-song simple ideas.
The brooding, ominous personality of the producer provides a reasonable enough theory on what led him to this great skill, along with his eventual undoing. Rejecting the conventional and high-minded both, he approaches the essence of rock & roll's five prior years from the opposite direction -- no-brow and vital, young and exuberant and sexy, but baroque, demented, kitschy and ornate with an intimidating independence and determination of spirit that makes anything outwardly ridiculous about it
right and chilling, because it so courageously defines, over and over again, the experience of first love and first pratfall. Spector was clearly an asshole all along, but one thing he never did, not a single time, is talk down to the people who bought his records. He was right there with them all, feeling every heart-leaping impulse and blue-balled disappointment. Take this to its conclusion: like so many artists, he felt things too much, things he had no business feeling, and it bled through his work and destroyed him, in the fucked up process bringing us roughly a dozen of the most monumentally stunning moments in the pop music idiom.
The first portions of
Back to Mono deal strictly with an incomplete, pre-Philles exploration of his gradually fine-tuned craft; selections of Ray Peterson ("Corrine, Corrina"), Ben E. King ("Spanish Harlem"), and Gene Pitney ("Every Breath I Take") seem to sail far afield of the Spector Wall of Sound, but what's interesting about them is how they hide the eccentricities that would become the artist's hallmarks soon enough. Peterson's song is all echo and frivolity until the lovably stifled attempt at a cathartic chorus; "Spanish Harlem" tries to shoehorn the great King into a slightly awkward dinner-music number that bursts into life at its elaborate bridge, all strings and woodwinds and King smiling his way through the murk like what-the-fuck; Pitney tries to wind his way around the dizzying "Breath," a song far beyond his vocal abilities, with a distractingly winding melody that Spector gleefully emphasizes. There are later doo wop interludes (the Alley Cats' oddball "Puddin' n' Tain," the Blue Jeans' frankly irresistible "Why Do Lovers Break Each Others' Hearts") and a baffling but curiously affecting version of "Zip a Dee Doo Dah," of all things, but the first evidence we get of anything resembling the Spector sound comes from an obscurity named Curtis Lee.
Lee's career doesn't seem to have made much of a blip on the radar beyond his brief association with Spector. The Arizona singer-songwriter penned a relatively conventional street-corner number called "Pretty Little Angel Eyes" and in 1961 Spector made some perverse magic of it, generating a top ten hit in the process; Lee is required by Spector not just to sing but to belt and project and yelp his way up and above and race around gallantly through the bombastic whack-a-mole backing track like he's hanging on for dear life. He's no better at catching his breath on the even stronger and wilder "Under the Moon of Love," a stridently raucous rocker that explodes with raunchy horns and crashing cymbals; sadly, this brilliant record wasn't a success and Spector moved on, Lee wandering off into the construction business. The point had been made, though -- with the proper mixture of the gifted and the selfless in his talent, Spector could get away with almost anything and stood a good chance of making commercial hay of it. Perhaps "Under the Moon of Love" had been a step too far for the conservative radio of '61, but no one who heard it could have denied it was striking, and Spector most of all had to have been aware that he'd essentially turned two nondescript Brill Building-esque singles into memorably sprightly entertainments that exploded with musical life. Lee seemed to audibly strain to keep up. Where could this take the boy wonder next?
It was later in 1961 that the 21 year-old Spector founded Philles Records (with a brief and ill-fated assist from Lester Sill). There would be moments when it would still seem fragile, when the juggernaut in waiting would falter and reveal a little too much of himself and his components -- the magic had a curtain. You can hear it in Darlene Love's sweetly bubbly "(Today I Met) The Boy I'm Gonna Marry"; the flawed Crystals obscurity "Girls Can Tell"; the charming throwback "You, Baby." Maybe there was something of the real Spector here, the traveling down a nonfunctioning rabbit hole that shows his subtle adherence to certain pop conventions, whose upending was the center of his prowess. That basis, though, of the fabric of pop and baroque as a reason for everything to follow is crucial; it's something to revel in as much as to rebel against, and reveling and rebelling are central to our teenage odyssey. You need some relief anyway. There's little relief once this gets moving.
If you want to jump to the real beginning of this story, open up disc two; you'll be skipping some crucial singles and undeniable classics that you must return to, but the wild disconcerting punch of everything, the uppercut to the heavens, starts with those unforgettable, heavenly, towering Hal Blaine drumbeats that open the Ronettes' "Be My Baby."
Boom... boom boom, CHI / Boom... boom boom, CHI. And it's over, we're done, for the unstoppable five-times-over frenzy to follow: "Be My Baby" leads into "Then He Kissed Me" (Crystals) on into the spiritually ejaculatory "A Fine, Fine Boy" (Darlene Love) and back to the Ronettes for the warmth and leaping, ceiling-dance romance of "Baby, I Love You" and "I Wonder." A lot of the pre-Spector rock & roll tends to be very concise and clearheaded, while of course he intentionally made sludge, but in a manner beyond even the finest of all prior and concurrent girl-group pop (the Shangri-Las' output and the Chiffons' "One Fine Day" come closest) there’s something deeply and almost tormentingly affecting about the end result, cynically manufactured or not. To call it all grand seems reductive, to complain it's empty and disposable would be beside the point even if it weren't wrongheaded and incorrect. All the sweep and majesty you need to understand this man, his work, pop music, everything you love about everything, is here. If it was "manufactured," if you could "manufacture" this, there'd be no need ever to make much of anything else.
Spector's work -- and his faith in it -- must have been everything to him. There doesn't seem to have been another calling to match it for him, any other justification for turning away from his creepily insular and ultimately dangerous existence. He's a murderer, he put people in great danger, he was an abusive husband and a conniving dick, but his gift to us is still an unfettered thing made only stronger and more complex by its unwelcome newer context. The first record released on Philles Records defined much of what was to follow; after so much tentative milling about on other people's output, this would belong to him. "There's No Other (Like My Baby)" is credited to the Crystals, an elastic creation to be sure, and everything within its brief runtime is worked out to its most carefully tweaked detail. It opens with Patsy Wright issuing a mournful paean to a lover and then the Wall appears, the Wall of so much scorn and hope and thinkpiece scholarship -- here it's guitar, tambourines, drums, mostly voices: they seem to cascade and wash over you, releasing the title at highest volume and intensity "THEEEEREEEEE'S NO OTHHHERRR," shoving all else out of immediate consciousness, including the song's own erotically languid pace. In retrospect, you imagine it as a furious careen forth rather than a funeral march.
The distinction of elasticity afforded the Crystals seems to exist because Spector simply liked the name. "There's No Other" is in actuality a Crystals song. The next two masterpieces issued under their name are not. Spector didn't even write "He's a Rebel" (that would be Gene Pitney), but he stole and defined it, and it broke him through much more than it did the performer of the track. You're hearing no Crystals here (they couldn't make themselves available fast enough to please their dictatorial producer) but the irresistible Spector acolyte Darlene Love. This #1 hit made the Wall famous but is uncharacteristic in some ways, not ending with the absence of strings. Instead of exploding like "Be My Baby" or piledriving like the battering ram "Da Doo Ron Ron," it opens somewhat conventionally and is carried to intimidating emotional heights by Love, in a riveting performance. A sudden key change leading into the chorus drives us into the bliss where we remain.
If this doesn't epitomize Spector, and it probably doesn't, it still defines girl-group pop, music of producers and Brill songwriters that retains its perfectly-engineered vitality today becuase of its documentation of sheer feminity... and struggle. Ages before "Dancing in the Street" brought liberation to a forefront, Love's commentary here is not just on a yearning for the boy who is an individual but for individualism itself. The story in these songs is always the same; the parents don't want any part of it and our heroine is disgusted by the opposition. Spector's groups always had the deepest knack for teen emotion when the Shirelles and the Shangri-Las dwelled toward the tongue-in-cheek. Nearly all of his hits with the Ronettes, the Crystals, and Love live up to industry standards of simply intoxicating the listener with joy, but little else he did bursts forth with the manic energy of this track. It's a moment to which a person surrenders, wherever you are. There aren't many of those and you have to grab them while you can.
Even if Spector extended the urgency and enormity of his concept with "Be My Baby" and "Walking in the Rain," more sophisticated later works, the simplicity of this depth-charge was never matched. It was the first bolt of thunder in a decade that would soon afterward blanket the world again with "I Get Around" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand." Its message of bitterness and sweet, sweet euphoria is universal in a way that eradicates all intellectual rationalization, the same way the Beatles and Beach Boys would but somehow more directly. It's one of the most out and out brilliant pop recordings in history, and it must be turned up every single time.
In the wake of something that strong, you can tend to miss the breadth of its surroundings at first glance, but take a breath and take the songs one at a time. From the fake Crystals, now a third band yet, "He's Sure the Boy I Love" charms like mad with its overwhelmed dedication to impassioned love of few resources, audacious enough to proclaim he sure ain't that boy, but he's the one they love, the payoff being that moment of sincere liftoff when this semi-anonymous group lets loose with "When he holds me tight, everything's right, crazy as it seems" and everything seems weightless, coasting onward to "Heartbreaker" with its soft sock hop tough talk and ingeniously enveloping hooks and changes. The iterations of Spector's crown jewel the Ronettes and their showpiece Veronica (later known as Ronnie Spector) croon and wail through the splendidly bleak, devastated "Why Don't They Let Us Fall in Love," the room full of clatter against the most epic of Shadow Morton-like slowdances on "(The Best Part of) Breakin' Up," and the immense chamber pop of "Do I Love You?" Darlene Love reappears on the stunning "Wait Till My Bobby Gets Home," the complete upheaval of workmanlike lyrics with vocal dedication and a gently bent, absorbing melody, and the full-on release of bumping, complex energy "Stumble and Fall." These are all low-tier Spector but stand easily amongst his large collection of lost classics. There was a period when he was doing everything the right way, when he had the Midas touch. Somewhere buried in all this, he even improves on a Beatles song (the already stellar "Hold Me Tight") by giving it new light, layering, and a magnificently nuanced vocal performance through an assist from total obscurities the Treasures.
But when the producer pushed himself, and hard, the magic came. The magic pieces, the half-dozen or so liberating and unshakeable masterpieces, are carefully paced on
Back to Mono but they are so insistent when they appear they seem poised to break the bleachers, crash through the floor. It's only by giving vent to the base impulses they exhibit that Spector became more than a great producer and actually someone powerful, crafting a canon that's still the peak of emotional pop music. Rooted in its time but hardly trapped in it, this material only offers the caveat that this kind of artistic stretching and confidence also led Spector down an increasingly narrow and finally disappointing path. In its moment, though, these were the records, this was the sound. It cannot be a coincidence that five of Spector's six best productions and compositions were cowritten by his ideal collaborators, Jeff Barrie and Ellie Greenwich, whose peak is shared with him.
When it opens, the Crystals' "Da Doo Ron Ron" comes across as an explosion in progress. Unhinged rolling piano and an undercurrent of pregnant menace push upward until the drumroll consumes, and then, more breathless than ever: "Met him on a Monday and my heart stood still / Da doo ron ron ron, da doo ron ron / Somebody told me that his name was Bill / Da doo ron ron ron, da doo ron ron." You can almost hear the puffed-up disapproval of the parents of the girls seeking Bill and the parents of the teenagers dancing to this, smirking and shaking their heads at the banality of the lyric, the banality to which the song itself immediately surrenders, with no thought given in either direction by the delirious beauty of the vocals. That's why the crucial moment is the defiant, ecstatic underlining. "
Yes, my heart stood still," they expound grinning, "
yes, his name was Bill." His name was Bill! Indeed! That's all that's required, we're done here, the complete maxing out of rock & roll as all-powerful force of the quietly inward-looking and extroverted obnoxious alike is sealed forever, the spinning around leaping about of being here, alive, in love, young, whatever, even if you're not one or all of the above of those. Sterile, overstuffed production nothing; this is lively, as lively as anything can be.
The other Crystals masterpiece is a more emotionally restrained but equally breathless, magnified affair. "Then He Kissed Me" features one of the most heavenly of all Wrecking Crew arrangements, and a sumptuously romantic (less exuberant, more reflective) bit of high storytelling from first encounter to first kiss to being his bride, and always being right by his side. All the while the Crew persists with castinets, the ambiance of a world deeply sheltered off from all outside, like that of the young heart in a fit of lust or love or the panic of either. Spector, his co-composers, his musicians, and the Crystals are careful not to give the tension a moment to explode. It's all detail, all careful crafting; the rest is elsewhere, the celebratory, knowing outburst of every promise and hope and lovesick need. It's by the Ronettes and it's called "Be My Baby," and maybe it's the best pop song ever recorded and maybe it isn't, but the people who say it is are not off their rockers.
Start intellectually; the record's fascinating. You can study its components and marvel at how well and seamlessly it works, how much its sounds and structure and strange seduction apply together in equal measure to render something like perfection of its kind. But no one's going to be able to avoid surrendering long enough to think too much about all of that. Once those drum hits are over, Ronnie appears. You start to want to hold on tight to every phrase as she wraps her words around you, defining a permanent American myth with each all-important second. She begins by forging her way through that winding track of a melody: "the night we met, I knew I needed you so." The drums continue, the piano pounds, she cuts through it all. The way she sings "never let you go," tentative but in command, marks her the powerful figure of this recording. She does battle with her producer until all we hear is her insistence: "be my little baby," making a point as much of her own independence as of her wanting of you, the budding sexuality and open-armed romance all of a piece with this most shattering and wondrous of melodies, the sense of euophoria when the strings overtake on the bridge as the nearly shapeless backing vocals swirl around. It's a concoction, something otherworldly. Even the lyrics bear the mark of something more affected and scarred than usual; there are too many details ("for every kiss you give me, I'll give you three") for this not to have meant something, too much desperation to illustrate a want. Not one of the involved parties -- Phil Spector, the Ronettes, Barry/Greenwich, the Wrecking Crew -- would ever improve upon this embrace of human comfort.
Which isn't to say they didn't try. In some sense, the far less popular "Baby, I Love You' is the artistic equal of "Be My Baby" -- and in its romantic longing and spirited, closely connected documentation of busy bustling love itself, it may be superior. This is owed largely to Ronnie Bennett's superlative performance, less erotic but crucially earthier than on "Be My Baby," and considerably more revealing. She doesn't get herself tripped or muddied up in the prisms and filters of Brill Building songwriting that surround her, she finds a way to make these abstract words function as an act of direct messaging on her part, as an honestly felt and achingly real love song that elevates the excessive traditionalism of its lyric by presenting us with a singer who feels and understands every word, every syllable in its most immense possible glory. And it's inescapable to continually use the word "catharsis" in regard to Spector's work, but no matter; the catharsis in this chorus, in that simple and humane gesture of the flabbergasting "baby, I love you" that seems to bottom out into some heretofore unknown canyon beyond the wintry urgency of the verses, is a moment of such sincere and selfless affection it can choke you up after a hundred times to know these emotions exist, that they're possible, that it takes so much work and noise to even begin to explain what they feel like.
A third Ronettes treasure, "I Wonder," deserves treatment alongside its more famous brethren, here for its audaciously piled-on arrangement and the edgiest expression of desire ever felt from Ronnie's vocal chords. As for Darlene Love's triumphant peak, a concurrent and also commercially disappointing release, it's best perhaps to let Greil Marcus have the floor:
It is overwhelming. Its momentum is unbreakable, the backup singing full of delight and wisdom and humor, and the vocal is -- well, it is that utopia of feeling. It is Darlene, telling us about her fine fine boy. She's full of pride; most of girl group rock is music of pain and longing, of pining away, but there isn't a hint of that here. Darlene has what she wants and she knows what he's worth -- after about ten seconds, so do you, and you'll never forget it. Church bells ring (that's not a metaphor, they do
) and the whole disc seems to physically jump. It never stops. And the message? What does girl group rock say? What does it come down to? What is its mystery of life? "He even takes me places and buys me things / But love is more important than a diamond ring."
The peak of the Spector sound and iconography came in 1964 with his magnum opus "Walking in the Rain," a Ronettes song he wrote with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill. After an opening crash of thunder, Ronnie's cronies
doo-doo-doo-doo on symphonically as she attempts once and for all to pack it all in the same place, to define the heady and impossible in the door-locked room of teenage mourning as a piece of popular entertainment. It's a spectacle, but it's also moving -- the tune strikes out and wipes away, the tears and memories almost tangible. For all the greeting card tropes of the words, what we really have is an intensely relatable piece of writing that effortlessly conjures up the eerily familiar, sending us down into a dirge that simultaneously attracts and repels us. We wanted to get inside "Be My Baby" and live in it, throw our arms out at celebrate; all you can do with "Walking in the Rain" is marvel at the immaculate fact of its creation and feel everything it wants you to feel, which is a lot. It's a masterpiece among masterpieces, something more to so many degrees than another girl group pop single.
What good is all this purity and respect, this resonant drama, if it ties itself inexorably to the early '60s? Except for the fact that it’s one channel instead of two, it doesn’t. To this day the material humbles. Even the songs that were stepping stones in the career are haunting and surge with full-blooded angst. Spector redefined the portrayal of human life in pop music, and no one’s been able to duplicate his success without overcoming the sincerity with unearned melodrama or, worse yet, failing to find the fun in either. The performers enliven these songs, but he was the auteur. He also was a violent man -- an abusive, threatening, murderous asshole. The most important figure for the evolution of pop music as a sonic miracle, yes, but a man derailed by demons. If you listen carefully enough, you can hear them, almost back to the beginning of his career.
The first ghosts on
Back to Mono are a pair of significant debuts for Spector -- his first major recording, and his first sizable hit as a producer. We're traveling far back into a musty distance to hear "To Know Him Is to Love Him" (title taken from the likely apocryphal epitaph of Spector's father), the legendarily chilling classic recorded by Spector's performing unit the Teddy Bears; the song's beautiful but it stands off eerily aside, a humming indulgence of the hushed and tentative, the vaguely unhinged. "Why can't he see?" it demands. "How blind can he be?" The Paris Sisters' "I Love How You Love Me," arguably the song that put the producer on the map as a major talent, has the same quality of a certain old-world, haunted pessimism -- a loving macabre like Poe's "Ligeia," something tremendously sad and lilting and devastating about it. You can hear it on the difficult but worthwhile Darlene Love oddity "Strange Love," the chilling forgotten Ronettes duet of "When I Saw You" and the stirring "Keep on Dancing," the genuinely unnerving solo Ronnie deconstruction of the Students' signature "So Young," the surreal and splendid but utterly incongruous unissued Modern Folk Quartet side "This Could Be the Night," a song that seems to be playing from many miles away, urging you to come closer, surely to meet some unfortunate fate if you try. Perhaps it's all our imagination, though I don't really think so; Spector was already exorcising something, something that'd blossom into the unspeakable. At one crucial, terrifying, unforgettable, and oddly brilliant moment, he (along with Gerry Goffin and Carole King) makes it explicit.
Written as a document of domestic violence (specifically that suffered at the hands of underrated pop star Little Eva), freely interpreted as a sadomasochistic anthem, but presented by Spector with irresponsible William Castle trickery and slithery fear, "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)" is the most uncompromised and horrendously disturbing of all Spector's works. It's also masterful, a work of psychotic mad pop genius that's as addictive, revealing, and cunningly vital as it is morally suspect. Against militaristic backing and a spare, tense drip, the familiar and mortifying tale is told: she knows he loves her because he hits, and by the end, when he hits her she is "glad," Spector sweeping up the climax with a wildly inappropriate sensual rush borrowed from Roy Orbison's "Running Scared." The song's ingenious because like just one other of its period (Lesley Gore's "You Don't Own Me") it takes the format of the girl group itself and takes it to the end it's always implied: the freakish adherence to a patriarchal authority, either drowning or drowned out by a winking and mindbending subversion -- Spector daring us to celebrate the batterer, the victim, the Stepford Wife, the fiercely independent escapee, the fucked-up screaming match of a relationship you simply know the song documents with perfectly reasonable accuracy. By inviting us to recoil and celebrate and drench ourselves in these filthy emotions, Spector makes clear we're not safe from the disparate power of his impulse and influence. It's exhilarating; if only it had merely been an outlet in recorded music. If only it weren't obvious beyond a doubt now that when we hear this, however much Goffin and King may have been complicit, we are hearing the first pangs of an act of brutality that would take a life away -- a life no number of Philles 45s and Walls of Sound will ever have the energy and capability in them to bring back.
Other harsh, ugly discomforts are simply the often intriguing sound of mild artistic stumbling: Crystals failures "Uptown," "All Grown Up," and "Little Boy" are more awkward than embarrassing; "Soldier Baby of Mine" and "Woman in Love" just stretch Ronnie Bennett a little farther than she's built to handle; the Bob B. Soxx number "Not Too Young to Get Married" is bouncy in a most irritably insistent fashion; and a curious Darlene Love edition of future Dixie Cups hit "Chapel of Love" feels like the victim of a haphazard arrangement. Most of the time, the Wrecking Crew, the various singers, and Jack Nitzsche keep Spector from falling into indulgence across the bulk of the Philles singles discography. There are two solid discs here of peerless music.
The downfall, as mentioned, comes suddenly and overtakes the final hour, and doesn't bear a lot of summarizing and diagnostics here. The Barry/Weill/Spector mishmash "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" became not just a breakthrough for the Righteous Brothers but one of the most popular songs in the history of radio, almost certainly the commercial peak of Spector's career; the problem is, like all of Spector's cuts from this point and most of the Righteous Brothers' output generally, it's a huge kicthen-sink mess. Having mastered at last with "Walking in the Rain" the splendid use of every noise and strange aural quirk to fully sell the personal undercurrent of his songs, he evidently convinced himself by 1965 that a shorter route to such business was simply to make no artsitic decisions whatsoever, to simply put every terrible and screeching noise he could think of and pile it all up. People dug the insipidly plodding result, for whatever reason, but it sounds awful today. By the bridge of "Lovin' Feeling," when the drums have lost all semblance of structure and the two vocalists are just competing to see who can tunelessly scream "BABYYY!" louder, the need to run screaming into the night matches even Spector's need to rivet and glue us. None of the other Righteous tracks here are any better, and indeed some (like the appallingly turgid "Just Once in My Life") are worse yet; there's no break in the overstuffing. Spector was preoccupied soon enough with trying to turn soul-singing marrieds Ike and Tina Turner into his messengers, but the results are equally muddled for all their towering ambition. At the same time, Spector's work for the Ronettes and his other stable members suffers -- the songs are still full of vitality and hooks, but they're almost invariably too long, some approaching the four-minute mark, and the producer's way around a sense of real loss or longing and musical bliss seems lost in his own constant desire to top himself. The third disc of
Back to Mono travels meanderingly from irritating to unlistenable but remains overly busy throughout.
There was still great work in his future by the end of the '60s; he would collaborate memorably with John Lennon and (less fruitfully) George Harrison, would form something worth hearing if not savoring out of the Beatles' fragmented
Get Back sessions, would make sleazy singer-songwriter heaven a reality with Leonard Cohen, would connect all manner of rock & pop degrees with the Ramones, would even try and make Dion hip again. But it was an artist's game by then; the strange short-lived world of the mad scientist producer-composer had long passed its window. It's hard to even explain what Phil Spector was in his prime now, except to say that if you have a good oldies station in your town (which it's a good bet you don't), he's bound to be a hero of yours. Or maybe it's sufficient just to say
"I'll be certain he's my guy by the things he'll like to do, like walking in the rain, and wishing on the stars up above... and being so in love."
[Some elements of the above material were previously posted in other venues. The Greil Marcus extract is from his Girl Groups chapter of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll.]
