Phil Spector: a resonance that goes beyond his own music

Producer Phil Spector with the Ronettes in 1963 Photo: Getty

As in literature Gabriel García Márquez defined magical realism, in cinema John Ford the western genre and in Pablo Picasso painting cubism, Phil Spector defined a type of pop.

His work, marked by orchestral exuberance and sentimental drama, marked a before and after in popular music.

The

adjective

is applied to understand capital productions, abrupt and absorbing instrumental outbursts, which engulf the listener as in a dream.

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Known as the Wall of Sound, its sound curtain was the product of many hours of work, which left the musicians exhausted, in the production studio, coupling instruments of all kinds, doubling and tripling them, like “pieces of a puzzle that they end up fitting in ”, in his own words.

The result was a barrage of sound that turned pop into a condensation of romance and sex, love and breakup, pure emotion overflowing to define a first kiss (

by The Crystals), or a crush (

, by The Ronettes or

by Darlene Love).

Spector's symphonies gave an irreplaceable color to the boom in youth culture of the golden 1960s.

Some called him the Van Gogh of pop culture.

If the Dutch painter adored colors and did visual magic with them, Spector was able to extract all the intensity of the sound, creating songs that were full of dazzling brilliance.

That search of wanting to capture every last flash of sound obsessed Brian Wilson, who defined

as "the best song of all time."

From the

sound

, the genius of the Beach Boys drew the lessons that led him to record with an orchestra of more than 40 musicians

, considered one of the great top works of pop and that would force the Beatles to put the batteries in the recording studio to record

George Harrison himself alone also took good note of these productions.

Like Brian Wilson, Bruce Springsteen was also obsessed with Spector.

He sought his particular wall of sound for his

wild and romantic

on

the record that catapulted him to fame and brought a new innocence to rock.

Somehow, artists and rock bands who wanted to recreate moments of great instrumental drama resorted to the

style

and his trail was seen in groups such as Buffalo Springfield, Billy Joel, Blondie, Ramones, Electric Light Orchestra, Supertramp, Scott Walker or The Magnetic Fields.

Even the operettas so characteristic of the most ravishing Roy Orbison owed something to Spector.

And from the nineties all the

exemplified by bands like The Chesterfield Kings, to snipers of all kinds of rock, like Nick Curran or Ezra Furman offered notes of a sound that has not expired more than half a century later.

As the musician and writer Bob Stanley said in his book

(Turner), Spector's goal was not to capture reality, but to improve it.

An eagerness that a mind as unbalanced and manic as that of this crazy-haired producer only knew how to do in songs.