There were seven words that were used, ironically and once in a while sincerely, about Phil Spector from the start of his career: “To know him is to love him.” They were the title of his first precocious hit.

Within a few years, Phil Spector was a cultural icon, a flamboyant impresario with an impressive string of hit singles, each one a maelstrom of emotion sung by a woman.

Strolling through the scene as a pop preeminence, dressed now like a gangster, now like a psychedelic leprechaun, Spector was memorably profiled by Tom Wolfe as “The First Tycoon of Teen,” and hung out with friends like Lenny Bruce, Dennis Hopper, and John Lennon.

Sentenced to 19 years to life, Spector spent the rest of his days in prison. His death was reported by California prison authorities today.

They are a dim part of the cultural landscape now; at the time, they created a new center of gravity for the world of pop.

Fewer understood that his father’s death came far too early, when his son, then Harvey Spector of the Bronx, was just 9 years old, and that it came from the father’s own hand, leaving a broken and dysfunctional family behind.

Phil Spector’s parents were both from the families of Ukrainian immigrants; oddly, both sides of his family had an Ukrainian name that transliterated to Spector when they came to the U.S.

While it was here that Spector put himself on his road to fame, his early teen years were difficult.

At some point he took on the name Phillip and began spelling it with two l’s.

There’s a reason for everything, and with Phil the reason he’s the way he is is all to do with his immediate family.” Mark Ribowsky’s 1984 biography of Spector, He’s a Rebel, begins with an epigraph from Oedipus Rex.

Outside of his other spectacular talents, Spector seems to have had innate precocity when it came to figuring out how a record got made — not exactly a typical skill of teenagers at the time.

With $40 from his bandmates, he took them to the Gold Star Studios, where they recorded a song called “Don’t You Worry My Little Pet.” He parlayed that into an agreement with a local record company to record a few more songs.

“Before the song was a hit, Phil used to come in and say ‘Anything doing today, Mr.

Leib, who was Spector’s best friend and protector in high school, says Spector promised him shared royalties for his contributions to “To Know Him.” Those never came.

Finally, Spector took his sister’s side as she increasingly terrorized Kleinbard; after Kleinbard got in a near-fatal car accident, Spector didn’t visit her in the hospital.

(Music-trivia fans will note that Kleinbard, under the name Carol Connors, would go on to become a successful songwriter on her own, and many years later would write the [highly marginal] lyrics to the theme from Rocky — and get an Oscar nomination.).

(Among other things, they’d worked with Duane Eddy, in Arizona, on early influential rock and roll hits like “Rumble.”) He essayed some followup singles, including an instrumental credited to Phil Harvey, and then in a group he called the Spectors Three, but they didn’t go anywhere.

To some he looked like Don Knotts; to others, Jiminy Cricket.

This went on and on and it was like a comedy act.

One evening, Spector finally succeeded in getting Leiber (the lyricist of the pair) alone, and the two began to work on a melody Spector had.

A female songwriter friend recalled Spector from these years for Mick Brown: “He would comb his hair and be so nervous and worried, and talk about how attractive this friend was and how handsome that one was, and this friend got on the football team when he was in high school, and he was jealous because he didn’t get this girl or that girl.

They are all considered part of the Brill Building song factory, though technically they worked down Broadway in another music-business building.

With “Spanish Harlem” proof that “To Know Him Is to Love Him” was not a fluke, Spector took on some projects on which he was officially a producer, and had two more hits in short order: For Ray Peterson, who’d had a hit with the lachrymose “Tell Laura I Love Her,” he took a traditional song called “Corrina Corrina” and took it into the top ten with a light but effective string section — and did the same with the doo-wop-y rave-up “Pretty Little Angel Eyes,” for a singer named Curtis Lee.

The group was then left to return to obscurity, while the production teams moved onto the next formula and the next group.” Spector worked initially with a New York female trio called the Crystals, and oversaw two quick hits for them: “There’s No Other (Like My Baby)” and “Uptown,” a Mann-Weil song with a novel, if slightly condescending, lyric from the point of view of a woman who watches her presumably Black boyfriend living in the different worlds of downtown (where he’s a “little man”) and uptown (“where he can hold his head up high”).

Phil Spector and Lester Sill christened their label Philles — i.e., “Phil” plus “Les,” not “Phillies.” This was the formal beginning of the Phil Spector era.

(Spector quickly took full possession of the label.) He came back to Los Angeles and fixated on Gold Star, the small studio where he had crafted “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” He began to assemble a corps of musicians who could help him achieve the increasingly ornate ambition he had for his next singles.

They would play for Spector and then, as word of his productions got around, for people like Brian Wilson, who would adopt the studio and the players as his own and create the Beach Boys’ most sprawling works there.

All of this took time, which itself was another Spector innovation.

And Spector finally had the control he wanted.

One notorious track — written by Carole King and her then-husband Gerry Goffin, no less — was unironically called “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss).” But the force of the women’s voices was undeniable; given the limited opportunities afforded women in the industry at the time, the platform Spector gave them was important.

By this time Spector had met Veronica Bennett, the dynamic leader of a trio of women singers called the Ronettes.

A song like “Be My Baby” penetrated the culture in other ways, as artists like Brian Wilson would testify:.

“I was driving down the street listening to the radio and the DJ came on and announced a new song [recalled Wilson in his autobiography].

Those drums were so huge the way that Phil Spector did them.

I played the beginning ten times until everyone in the room told me to stop, and then I played it ten more times.” The sounds on Spector records would spur Wilson to great creativity on Beach Boys works like “Good Vibrations” and the album Pet Sounds, and would in turn spur the competitiveness and creativity of the Beatles.

Spector almost always added his name to the credits with the songwriting teams he worked with — indeed, his name often came first.

Spector was also almost always credited as a co-writer of the song on the B-side as well.

(“If it starts sounding good, stop.”) Spector would then take the track and use that, and credit himself as the writer, instead of an actual song by a songwriter, as the B-side to the single, earning him another full songwriting royalty for the single.

That’s why you’ll see goofy Spector B-side titles like “Flip and Nitty” or even “Dr.

Kaplan’s Office.” (There’s an album of these tunes available on streaming services, credited to the Phil Spector Orchestra.).

So if “Be My Baby” sold (let’s say) a million copies, and if the royalty rate at the time was five cents per song per record sold, Mann and Weil’s official royalties might be $17,000 each for composing the song that actually generated the sales, which they would then split with Don Kirshner, whom they worked for.

at the time.

(And just to be clear, this is gravy money on top of what came in from the actual record sales to his company.).

Although he was a very successful producer at the time, his Wall of Sound girl-group hits constituted only five top-ten singles, with another eight top-40 tracks, with some of these hitting the lower reaches of the chart.

Of his classic tracks, only “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” perhaps — piffle taken from the soundtrack to the racist Disney film Song of the South — is an inferior song that Spector turned into a hit by reputation.

(That said, virtually all of those minor hits — like “Today I Met the Boy I’m Going to Marry,” by Darlene Love, which rose only to No. 39 at the time — have become pop classics.).

Spector loved Christmas songs, no matter his Jewish heritage, and identified with Irving Berlin, who had written “White Christmas,” the biggest Christmas song of all time.

The album, titled, pompously, A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector, was recorded in the summer of 1963 and featured 11 traditional Christmas songs, done Wall of Sound–style, and one powerful original, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” credited to Love as a solo performer.

The first of these came in 1964, when Beatlemania hit America.

No matter: The era of the girl group came to an abrupt end in April 1964, when the Beatles stacked the top five songs on the Billboard charts.

1 and in time grew to be a juggernaut, winning industry awards for being the most-played radio song of all time.

(He listed the time as 3:05 on the label.) From a later perspective we can see that the Righteous Brothers hits were a lucky replacement for his girl-group operation, and his four final hits as well — the last dwindling accomplishments of his classic period.

At the time, however, it seemed to be merely a continuation of Spector’s golden touch.

(He might have noticed as well that Berry Gordy’s Motown operation wasn’t bothered at all by the Beatles.) He’d spent some time in England with the Rolling Stones — Spector would later play guitar on “Play With Fire” — as well.

It is in this context that a key moment in his life transpired, and one of the most heavily mythologized moments in the early history of rock and roll: the single that drove Phil Spector out of the music business.

Spector decided he would construct the rock song of all rock songs, to be sung by her.

Sidelining Ike Turner as producer as part of the deal with a sizable payment (though Ike’s name would stay on the record), Spector worked with Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry for a song that could fulfill this mission.

Then came days of preparation.

As they rehearsed, however, she came to understand the respect Spector had for her voice.

And this was just a single — one side of a single.“ Turner said Spector made her sing the song “500,000 times” at a session that stretched all night, with just her, Spector, and engineer Larry Levine in the studio: “Pretty soon, I was drenched with sweat.

The result was “River Deep — Mountain High,” a decent song with a production over-the-top even by Spector standards; Turner’s performance is certainly dramatic as well, and holds its own.

The 25-year-old Spector took out an ad in the trade papers, offering an indigestible flailing attack at the U.S.

His ruthless business practices sometimes edged into outright cruelty: After “She’s a Rebel,” he made life miserable for Sill to the point where Spector could buy him out of Philles inexpensively, then never paid him.

A young David Geffen came into Spector’s orbit at the time.

In January 1965 Spector was rewarded with a profile, “The First Tycoon of Teen,” by Tom Wolfe, in the New York Herald Tribune, a highly prestigious paper (the progenitor of New York), and one that let people like Wolfe write in a highly impressionistic form.

“Every baroque period has a flowering genius who rises up as the most glorious expression of its style of life — in latter-day Rome, the Emperor Commodus; in Renaissance Italy, Benvenuto Cellini; in late Augustan England, the Earl of Chesterfield; in the sal volatile Victorian age, Dante Gabriel Rossetti; in late-fancy neo-Greek Federal America, Thomas Jefferson; and in Teen America, Phil Spector is the bona-fide Genius of Teen.”.

Much later, Sonny Bono, who had worked for Spector at the time, would tell biographer Ribowsky what really happened the day Spector had the plane turn around:.

So they came back to the gate, which is against all regulations, threw him off, and banned him from flyin’ American Airlines ever again.

Over the years friends had watched him initiate altercations in public spaces; now Spector had helpers to get him out of trouble.

— but then Spector insisted it had to be done in New York instead of Los Angeles, with little notice and no time for Annette’s family and friends to travel there.

(“A man of prodigious jealousy,” Keith Richards put it, admitting he’d been in love with Bennett at the time, and that later he’d have an affair with her.) After various feints to get around Bennett’s mother, who would have no part of anything but a real marriage, Spector finally got married to Bennett; her mother was there, but not the other Ronettes?

Phil didn’t record with her again for three years; his one effort with her, “You Came, You Saw, You Conquered,” was a flop and is forgotten today.

Ronnie’s marriage to Phil Spector was the death sentence for her career; he had sidelined one of the most vibrant voices of her generation.

Some biographies say that Ronnie adopted a baby boy, Donte, on her own, but it’s not clear if that was actually the case or whether the couple had done the adoption together; a few months later, she found that Phil had adopted two boys on his own.

It was like somebody who feels so insecure and frightened inside.

There are many pointillistic views of the Phil Spector phenomenon, but just about everyone agrees that he was not just a mean drunk but an irrational and intolerable one.

He also added what are invariably referred to as the “heavenly choirs,” most glaringly on “Road.” (Outside voices had never been heard on a Beatles record before.) It worked, in one sense: Spector could point out that the recast “Long and Winding Road” and the title song were No.

Many years later, McCartney masterminded the release of Let It Be … Naked without Spector’s enhancements.

Lennon was taken with the producer, those who were there said, and treated Spector like royalty.

Spector also produced George Harrison’s epic and great-sounding All Things Must Pass album, Harrison’s own artistic high point, though Harrison discovered that it would take Spector some number of hours, and a large number of cherry brandies, before he would get to work each night.

Lennon came back to Spector a few years later, for what was supposed to be a covers album of rock and roll classics and which would eventually duly be released under the name Rock ‘n’ Roll.

“I would say Hitlerian, the atmosphere was one of guns,” Leonard Cohen, who shared a manager with Spector, later said.

Cher was living with David Geffen, by that time a mogul himself on a level far outstripping Spector.

In the studio, a struggling Spector took out his insecurities on Geffen, at one point punching him.

When you see Phil screaming with bulging red eyes, it’s like seeing Satan.’”.

And finally, at the end of the decade, most notoriously came a collaboration with the Ramones.

Spector drove the band to distraction during the recording, at one point keeping them at gunpoint at his home — and then disappeared with the band’s tapes for six months.

After the Ramones, there was a break in the life of Phil Spector.

Spector was suddenly a dad and something like a partner.

In later years he acknowledged that during this time he was under care for manic depression, if not full-blown schizophrenia.

Those close to Spector point to the traumatic disappearance of his father as evidence that one of the triggers of his mental condition was death.

“The most obscene and vile word in the language,” Spector would say later, “is dead.”.

If you wanted to create an impression on visitors — and Phil Spector was very much that person — you could force them to be dropped out at the foot of a steep set of stairs they would have to scale to get to the front door, even if it were raining.

Donte, the first child Ronnie Spector and he had adopted, had showed up at a local police station in West Los Angeles in 1980 and said he was being mistreated; he went to live in New York with his mother, but then came back to L.A., and ended up living with Spector’s mother.

Nothing came of it.

[Michelle Phillips said:] “They came into the living room and Phil was standing there with the gun?

She was working as a hostess in the VIP section of the House of Blues on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip the night Spector came in, very late in the evening of February 2

A sense of what Spector’s life was like at the time can be inferred from the fact that he had already been through two failed dates that night, along with some large amount of tequila

The driver testified later he’d heard a shot; some time later, Spector came out, dazed, telling the driver, “I think I killed someone.” He was holding a gun, and had Clarkson’s blood on his hands

She died of a gunshot to her head, and though she hasn’t yet become a corpus delicti — whatever happened, it happened on February 3, and nobody’s been charged with any crime at all, not yet — she did wind up dead, which is one heck of a kicker to the Phil Spector story, which wasn’t exactly lacking Gothic before that

He was finally convicted in April 2009, and sentenced the next month to 15 years to life for the murder and an additional four years for the use of the gun