Phil Spector, Pop Music Hitmaker Convicted of Murder, Dies at 81
Jan 18 2021, 7:16 AM
January 17 2021, 9:57 PM
January 18 2021, 7:16 AM
(Bloomberg) Phil Spector, the music producer who went from the Wall of Sound to the walls of a California prison cell, has died. He was 81.
(Bloomberg) Phil Spector, the music producer who went from the Wall of Sound to the walls of a California prison cell, has died. He was 81.
Spector died on Saturday morning at an outside hospital, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement on Sunday. A medical examiner from the San Joaquin County Sheriffâs Office will determine the official cause of death. TMZ reported that Spector died from Covid-related complications after being transferred from his prison cell.
Phil Spector, music producer convicted of murder, dies at 81 after contracting Covid-19
Music producer Phil Spector looks up during his murder trial in Superior Court July 10, 2007, in Los Angeles. (Gabriel Bouys-Pool/Getty Images/TNS)
LOS ANGELES For all the hit songs he drove up the charts, for all the power and wealth he amassed, for all the admiration he drew as he rearranged the pop music landscape, there was a darkness deep in Phil Spector’s soul that would forever shadow his genius.
Even as anthems such the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin” erupted from radios across America, the acclaimed record producer was a brooding, manic man with a white-hot temper and a fondness for gunplay, all of which would manifest itself on a winter morning in 2003 when he fatally shot actress and nightclub hostess Lana Clarkson in the foyer of his castle-like mansion in Alhambra.
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Phil Spector, who has died from Covid-19 aged 81, was a highly gifted record producer and songwriter whose recordings in the 1960s, and later with the Beatles, revolutionised pop music, but whose talents were undermined by a mercurial temperament that would lead to him twice standing trial for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson.
In his heyday in the early 1960s, Spector pioneered what became known as “The Wall of Sound”, producing some of the most exhilarating and uplifting recordings ever heard in pop music, including Be My Baby by the Ronettes and Da Do Ron Ron by the Crystals. In the 1970s he went on to work with the Beatles, producing John Lennon’s anthemic Imagine and George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord.
Spector was convicted of murdering actress Lana Clarkson in 2003 at his castle-like mansion on the edge of Los Angeles. After a trial in 2009, he was sentenced to 19 years to life.