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Fifty years ago, pop music historian Nik Cohn wrote: “When you've made your millions and landed your monster hits, what's next?

What do you do with the fifty years of age until you die? ”The musicians and composers, lyricists and producers whom Cohn meant were around thirty at the time.

Men like Phil Spector, who got rich with love songs.

"But only now my love has grown / And it gets stronger in every way / And it gets deeper, let me say / And it gets higher day by day / And do I love you, my oh my / Yeah, river deep, mountain high - yeah, yeah, yeah / If I lost you would I cry / Oh how I love you baby / Baby, baby, baby. "

Deeper than the river and bigger than the mountains was love in Phil Spector's songs from "To Know Him Is to Love Him" ​​to "Be My Baby" to "River Deep - Mountain High" between the fifties and sixties.

What else came next?

He went insane.

He became a legend.

He lived alone in a castle in California.

Five decades later, Phil Spector has now died, in prison where he had sat for manslaughter for eleven years, possibly of Corona.

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"AWopBopaLooBop ALopBamBoom", Nik Cohn's history book, was an obituary for the post-war years and innocence.

The story of Phil Spector reads like one of the longer footnotes: Born in 1939 in the Bronx on Boxing Day as the son of a Jewish steelworker who took his own life nine years after Phil was born.

Phil becomes a difficult child.

The mother blames him for the death of the father and breadwinner of the family.

At 17, Phil founded the band The Teddy Bears, he sings in the background and plays the guitar.

His father's tombstone reads: "To Know Him Is to Love Him".

Phil Spector made his first hit out of the line in 1958.

He won't get rich.

The money disappears with the music publisher and the record company.

Phil is hired as assistant to songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, co-writes Ben E. King's hit "Spanish Harlem," studio guitarist for the Drifters and Topnotes, and is rewarded with his own recording studio, Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles , and their own record company called Philles Records.

Phil becomes a record producer and world famous for his multi-track, multi-layered recordings, the "Wall of Sound".

Due to his walls of sound, the songs no longer seem like hits, but, as he says himself, like “symphonies for children”.

He has Bob B. Soxx & The Blue Jeans sing "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zipa-dee-aay / My, my, my, my, my, my what a wonderful day", but also a song for his psychotherapist.

The Crystals sing "Da Doo Ron Ron", but also lines like "He Hit Me (And it Felt Like a Kiss)".

And it's not just sung about by the blows and the kisses.

Tina Turner has to sing with "River Deep - Mountain High" against a roaring orchestra and two raging men, against Ike Turner and Phil Spector - the "Tycoon of Teens", as Tom Wolfe pays tribute to him.

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Phil Spector produces the Righteous Brothers and even prefers girl bands like The Ronettes, for whom he writes “Be My Baby”.

He disbanded the trio and married the singer Victoria Ronnie Bennett, had his house, yard and studio fenced in with barbed wire and equipped with surveillance cameras.

He orders a glass Snow White coffin for Ronnie Spector, his wife.

After surviving six years of marriage, she says, “I think Phil was a pretty normal person early in his career.

But then they started to write that he was a genius and he said, 'Yeah!

I'm a genius!'

Then it was said that he was a crazy genius.

So he became a crazy genius. "

So the story was already told between the sixties and seventies, after the millions and the monster hits.

Then the last manager of the Beatles, Allen Klein, came and booked the genius to save "Let It Be", the swan song of the greatest band in the world, and to wall them musically in their legacy.

Strings, wind instruments, choirs.

There are film recordings with John Lennon and George Harrison addressing him as "Beatle Phil", but already without Paul McCartney.

Spector produced records for George Harrison, "All Things Must Pass" and the concert for Bangladesh, as well as "Imagine" for John Lennon and the retro album "Rock 'n' Roll", which Lennon had to record a second time without him after Spector first opened shot him and then piled up with the tapes.

When John Lennon and George Harrison were no longer alive, Paul McCartney produced "Let It Be" again as "Let it Be ... Naked", without sound walls.

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Phil Spector haunted the pop business of the 1970s as a gnome with sunglasses, a plush wig and a loaded pistol.

Even Leonard Cohen got the horror in his voice when he was supposed to sing his sinister pieces for "Death of a Ladies' Man" with the gun to his temple.

Cohen later declared: "He never endured strange shadows in his own darkness."

Pop music was getting on in years, and if anyone seemed to be in possession of the elixir of youth, it was the crazy alchemist and magician in his studio, his torture chamber, as the musicians called it.

The Ramones liked Phil Spector's songs from the past, Spector liked the Ramones because they liked him.

After four punk records Dee Dee, Johnny, Joey and Marky promised a record full of nice, dirty pop songs for the dawning eighties.

"End of the Century" was created like all Phil Spector albums back then.

With his pistols released, he watched the Ramones strike a chord for eight hours until he was seated.

"A dwarf on heels meters high, under a wig like a monchhichi and with four claws in his tiny fists," wrote Johnny Ramone in his memoir.

“But the chord sounded really good on the album.” How Yoko Ono was able to complete “Season of Glass”, their Requiem for John Lennon, with Phil Spector in 1981, is one of the unfathomable secrets of pop history.

Then the producer withdrew to his castle and listened exclusively to classical music via his own satellite system.

The "Castle Pyrenees" in Alhambra, a suburb of Los Angeles, became a place like Elvis' Graceland, Michael Jackson's Neverland, the ranch of Howard Hughes and the Dakota Building in New York for Yoko Ono and John Lennon.

A stronghold against all ghosts that you yourself called or that were called from all over the world.

Anyone who was allowed to enter the Pyrenees Castle, like Tom Cruise, who wanted to make a film about Phil Spector and play the most influential record producer of all time, could at least report that the landlord also enjoyed watching old films, preferably "Citizen Kane".

In February 2003, Phil Spector left his fortress, was chauffeured through the bars of Hollywood and returned to his hermitage with a VIP hostess and actress.

In the morning she was dead, shot with a pistol from Phil Spector's collection.

In court, he said, as if he had just composed a song, "She kissed my gun." The jury sentenced him to 2028 imprisonment for manslaughter.

Does someone like Phil Spector deserve an obituary as a master of the love song?

As a producer, he was the father of all producers.

Some, like Rick Rubin or Dr.

Dre, make sure that the music fits the musician like a tailor-made suit.

Some, like Pharell Williams or Brian Eno, deliver ready-made music.

And some, like Butch Vig and Qunicy Jones, take pride in the fact that the music, every record and product, sounds like them.

Phil Spector founded and united all three schools.

His wall of sound may have been a "Wagnerian approach to rock 'n' roll" with its layers, its sound effects and its percussion.

In the fifties and sixties it was the perfect pop music for the transistor radios, jukeboxes, mobile mono-record players and their listeners.

As the songs got longer and the rooms deeper, he withdrew.

Today the pieces are getting shorter again and the sounds more compressed in the new walls of sound of the digital world.

Music is far from dead.

Phil Spector once said about the death of pop music: “It is as if someone had died, and people cannot think of anything better than, 'He died!

He died!'

to scream. ”He was 81 years old.