Harvey Phillip Spector was born into a lower middle class Jewish family on December 20, 1940, in the Bronx, New York, on December 26, 1940. His parents were first cousins, a fact that he later admitted in a newspaper interview, “might have had something to do with what I am or who I became.” His father committed suicide because of family indebtedness when Phil was only nine years of age, and this profoundly affected his personality. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1953 to make a new start.
As a young boy, he served as an apprentice under Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, and he learned much about the music industry while they were producing successful rock and roll groups like “The Drifters”. It is Spector, in fact, who plays the guitar solo at the end of their hit song, “On Broadway.” The title of his first hit song, “To Know Him Is To Love Him”, came from the words written on his father’s tombstone. He was a rich but very troubled youth, and he maintained a personal bodyguard since his late teens after he was attacked in a men’s room when a prank went too far.
A clever and talented promoter with a keen eye for talent, it was Spector who gave Cher her first recording experience when she was 16, after Sonny Bono approached him with the idea of using his girlfriend for a singing session. In the mid 1960s, Spector recorded a song with Tina Turner and paid Ike Turner $10,000 to stay away from the recording sessions. He single-handedly created the “Wall of Sound”, an effect that became widely copied by many rock groups in the 1960s and 1970s.
He preferred working with groups rather than individuals and he promoted several rock groups including the “The Ronettes”, making them a great commercial success. In 1968, he married the lead singer, Veronica Yvette Bennett, “the original bad girl of rock n’ roll”. The couple divorced in 1974 with charges that he kept his wife a virtual prisoner on their property. Spector has fathered five children: Gary, Louis, Donte, Nicole and Phillip.
Phil Spector is a troubled man who knows no peace of mind. Currently awaiting trial for the murder of actress, Lana Clarkson, he remains a tortured enigma and the warped personification of the American dream gone awry.
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