Back to Mono

Spector, Phil

album cover

The Wall of Sound

More is always more in the musical schemes of Phil Spector. Whenever you hear a '60s-era production with echoey voices, five or six guitar parts, nearly as many keyboards, and perfectly aligned maracas and other percussion shaking and rattling underneath, it's safe to assume that the enigmatic Spector created it, or inspired it. The Bronx-born, L.A.-based multi-instrumentalist revolutionized record production with his elaborate multitracking, which became immortally known as the "Wall of Sound." Spector himself was more loquacious, saying he specialized in "little symphonies for the kids," calling his sound a "Wagnerian approach to rock and roll."

Spector's first hit, with his own group the Teddy Bears, came in 1958, when he was still in high school; he appropriated the thought inscribed on his father's gravestone ("To Know Him Was to Love Him") as the chorus of a song, and had a Top 10 hit. After a short try at college (UCLA), Spector dedicated himself to the music business. His break came in 1960, when some L.A. producers he'd been apprenticing with sent him to New York to work with the song-writing team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Spector hit it off with the pair right away, cowriting "Spanish Harlem" with Leiber, which became a hit for Ben E. King, and playing the guitar break in the middle of the Drifters' "On Broadway." Spector formed his first record company in 1961 (Philles Records), to showcase the talents of a girl group known as the Crystals.

Over the next three years, Spector was responsible for twenty successive smash hits, from the Crystals' "Da Doo Ron Ron" to the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" to Darlene Love's "Chapel of Love" to the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'."

These and many more towering productions are collected in the chronologically arranged mega-anthology Back to Mono, which offers splendid transfers of the original hits. That dizzyingly dense sound you hear on CD is exactly what Spector heard in the control room, and (mostly) what made it onto those jukebox 45s.

The producer, whose sound directly influenced Brian Wilson during the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds days, didn't stay on top forever. After one track he considered his best work—"River Deep, Mountain High," which he recorded with Tina Turner singing—didn't connect in the U.S., Spector became a producer for hire, working on John Lennon's Imagine, George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, and Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies' Man. Eventually, Spector became a recluse, and he was later charged with murder in a 2003 shooting at his mock castle near L.A.

Back to Mono is not only wall-to-wall with wall-of-sound hits, it also includes all of A Christmas Gift for You, arguably the most exuberant holiday set in rock history.

Genre: Rock
Released: 1991, Abkco
Key Tracks: All of them.
Next Stop: Various Artists: The Brill Building Sound
After That: Burt Bacharach: The Look of Love
Book Pages: 728–729

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About 1,000 Recordings

Celebrate the joy, the revelation, the mystery, the fun, the sheer shivers-up-the-spine pleasure of great music.

Essential operas. Milestone rock albums. An education in the blues. The world of world. Classical from Bach to Bartók to Beethoven to Brahms. And dozens of unexpected gems, surprising discoveries, and long-lost masterpieces.

This is an online version of the list (published alphabetically in the book). The entries in the book break down genre bias and broaden every listener’s horizons—think Miles Davis to Claude Debussy to the melodic story-songs of The Decemberists. And the writing is passionate, informed, opinionated.

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