Phil Spector, music producer convicted of murder, dies at 81 after contracting COVID-19 [Los Angeles Times :: BC-SPECTOR-OBIT-1ST-LEDE:LA]
LOS ANGELES Phil Spector, the visionary record producer who revolutionized pop music in the early 1960s with his majestic sound and fierce ambition but spent his final years behind bars after shooting and killing an aspiring actress in his Alhambra mansion, has died in a hospital after becoming infected with the coronavirus. He was 81.
Spector died Saturday of natural causes, said the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The medical examiner in the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office will investigate his death, the department said.
Phil Spector, the music producer who transformed rock music with his “Wall of Sound” method and who later was convicted of murder, has died at 81 years of age as of Saturday, Jan. 16, 2021.
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.
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.