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Rating: Warning to readers: everything that will be covered on this page will be excessive, plethoric, and overabundant.
Just like a monumental work consisting of 73 songs contained in four CDs (only one of which reproduces an original album), with 45 artists involved and divided into 17 different social reasons, an army of 230 musicians including regular and occasional session musicians.
Just like the character in question. A smug, arrogant, megalomaniac, neurolabile, despotic and violent individual, with the habit of pulling out a big caliber revolver to solve matters - for confirmation, ask Leonard Cohen - and for this inclination, he also had his fair share of legal troubles. Someone who at 18 recorded his first and only record and didn’t earn a thing from it, but shortly after had already founded his own label and, by writing and producing songs for others, by the age of 21 had earned the first of a long series of millions of dollars. Someone who gave prestige and success to a profession previously considered bureaucratic or slightly more. Someone who represented the first and only case in the history of music - not only that of the youth - where the producer became much more important than the artists, creating what could rightfully be called an unmistakable "trademark". Someone who at 26 (this year turning 70...), disdained by his first failures, closed that factory for good, occasionally returning to interact and very controversially in rock events, but that's another story. And then, practically, silence.
It requires an effort of imagination to truly understand who Philip Harvey Spector was and what he represented. Namely, the age of innocence. Of rock and of those who listened to it. So much so that one of the most fitting definitions to describe him is the one that stands out in the accompanying booklet of the box set in question, which can be considered the definitive reorder of his work: "America's first teen-age tycoon", the teen-age tycoon. He who, as we have said, could just be considered a slightly older brother to those teenagers. He was the Bill Gates or Steve Jobs - take your pick...- of the early Sixties, for that generation of young Americans that the generation of young Italians to which the undersigned belonged could only idolize years later through American Graffiti or, more popularly, Happy Days. It is in that happy and carefree context that we must immerse ourselves, among the High School parties, the drive-ins that smell of fried food, the six-meter-long convertible Buicks and Pontiacs, the ponytails, the colored socks, and the loafers of the sixteen-year-olds of that time. It was those boys and girls who kept feeding dimes into the juke-boxes, making them happy on the sound of songs by Crystals, Ronettes, Darlene Love, Gene Pitney, Righteous Brothers, Modern Folk Quartet, Ike & Tina Turner and others. Pop miniatures that talked of declarations of love, of first kisses and even something more, of unhappy relationships contested by parents, of tender neighborhood hooligans, of young lovers who had to leave to serve as soldiers. And with these simple but universal topics, they ferried doo-wop into light pop and from this into the soul of the Golden Age, becoming the soundtrack of the existence of a "bubble-gum" generation. All wrapped up in the "wall of sound" of Phil Spector. In reality, they were all Phil Spector's songs.
Besides imagination, one would also need virgin ears to fully appreciate. I know it is difficult to wipe our minds clean from all the hard rock, nu-soul, punk, new and no-wave, electrobeat, hip-hop, grunge, and math-rock that has permeated us thus far. Musically, we should be able to possess the virgin ears - and not only...- of those teenagers. We would then hear how a light little song, treated by the little man behind the console perpetually in sunglasses, became a small symphony of two and a half minutes, with a sound that, without even using the tricks of stereophony, layered bit by bit, weaving in a delicate web solo voices and choirs, strings and horns of supreme elegance, rhythms, and percussion of disarming simplicity but also of absolute functionality (consider the basic "tum, tu-tum-cha" of the fabulous Hal Blaine that introduces Be my baby). An effect simultaneously sweet and imposing, achieved by doubling or even tripling the use of drums and percussion, with the use of background choirs becoming additional instruments, finishing every single interlock to almost obsessive perfection (here the Ramones seem to know something about it, forced during the recording sessions of "End of the Century" to work for over thirteen hours on a single chord). This is the Spector method, a method that, were we in classical, would range from Mozart to Wagner, performing the miracle of perfectly combining such different sensibilities. A method that, it bears repeating, made every single song he produced (he even wrote some) a Phil Spector song.
Once our ears have been thus cleansed, the party can then begin. And it will be a never-ending party, based on ultra-famous tracks that we will finally hear coming from a stereo and not from a commercial short or while you’re watching a movie. It’s pointless to name one title over another because there’s no point in listing the songs of a juke-box. We’ll even have as a bonus what Brian Wilson called the most beautiful Christmas album in history. Dated 1963 and performed as it seems appropriate by the artists of his stable, "A Christmas gift for you" is a deal of 12 covers of Christmas carols plus a beautiful original track, all together encapsulating the quintessence of pop according to Spector. Needless to say, even these well-known standards become in his hands new and very personal material. A masterpiece that had the only flaw of being released on the same day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
How beautiful youth is, that nevertheless flees...
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