Tearing Down the Wall of Sound Quotes

“Profanity,” he said, “is the last refuge of the inarticulate prick.” And: “In a world where carpenters get resurrected, anything is fucking possible.” As long as you’ve got the timing right.”
― Mick Brown, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector

“This is absolute fucking nonsense. I don’t know what the fucking lady…what her problem is, but she wasn’t a security at the House of Blues and she’s a piece of shit. And I don’t know what her fucking problem was, but she certainly had no right to come to my fucking castle, blow her fucking head open and [indecipherable] a murder. What the fuck is wrong with you people?”
― Mick Brown, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector

“But then, what is happiness? It’s not a good woman, Phil Spector said, or a good man. It’s not money. It’s not hit records. “Happiness is when you feel pretty fucking good and you’ve no bad shit on your mind.” He closed his eyes. “A memory is a curse. Good health, bad memory, that’s about as happy as you’re going to fucking get, buddy…”
― Mick Brown, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector

“The white stations say it was too black, and the black stations say it was too white, so that record didn’t have a home. That’s what happened to ‘River Deep—Mountain High.”
― Mick Brown, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector

“shape and color were all but lost. It was the simulacrum of all Spector’s grandiosity, his overarching ambition; it was all his passion, his thirst for revenge and his madness. It was a record that swept you up into its peculiar psychosis and left you stunned and exhausted in its wake. You could be enthralled by it, moved by it, but you could never love it. “River Deep—Mountain High” was released on May 14, 1966. Billboard”
― Mick Brown, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector

“But the feeling I got was that Phil sort of realized that most of these people were around for the external rather than the internal, and he would have preferred that he wasn’t liked for the limousines and the money and all that. Phil would have really liked to be loved for himself.”
― Mick Brown, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector

“Spector’s visit to London had consolidated his position at the top of the music business tree. He had cemented friendships with the two biggest groups on the British music scene, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who would soon follow their British rivals to America. Spector was thrilled at the music, the breath of fresh air it carried. But he could little have imagined that the impending British Invasion was to prove the harbinger of his decline.”
― Mick Brown, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector

“But if Spector treated the musicians like kings, he showed less consideration for the singers. “The musicians were all pros,” says Levine. “The singers, for the most part, were just kids.” But Spector regarded them simply as components in the machine, useful only for as long as he needed them and eminently disposable if he didn’t.”
― Mick Brown, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector

“Spector could be imperious, dogmatic, demanding, but he knew how to create an atmosphere in the studio that would encourage the musicians to give of their best.”
― Mick Brown, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector

“Musicians respected him because he could play himself and understood the trials and tribulations of making music,” says Don Randi. “All the guitar players in particular loved to work for him because he understood the guitar better than any other producer, and he could play it so well.”
― Mick Brown, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector

“Black singers, he would later explain, have a way of expressing themselves “because of true suffering, natural suffering. Musically there are a lot of incredible white singers, too. It’s just that my soul probably lies somewhere in suffering, and I identify with people who suffer.”
― Mick Brown, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector

“More than most people, Spector understood that the history of American music was largely the story of white imitating or stealing from black.”
― Mick Brown, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector

“Within the music industry—if not to its black audience—this music was known as “race music,” until a reporter at Billboard magazine, Jerry Wexler, devised the more palatable, and evocative, term “rhythm and blues.”
― Mick Brown, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector

“He was particularly self-conscious about his hair, which was already beginning to thin and recede. He bought a special electric comb, fitted with a blue light, which was supposed to thicken hair and prevent hair loss, and he would run it through his hair constantly, examining himself in the mirror to see if it was having the desired effect.”
― Mick Brown, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector

“You count your success by how many enemies you’ve made” would become one of Phil Spector’s favorite maxims.”
― Mick Brown, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector

“When the news first broke about the Lana Clarkson killing, one prominent music business figure told me, there was a collective feeling of astonishment among Hollywood circles—“not that a dead body had been found in Phil Spector’s home, but that Phil was living out in Alhambra…Nobody lives in Alhambra.”
― Mick Brown, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector

“And it was very difficult because these people didn’t have that sense of destiny. They didn’t know they were producing art that would change the world. I knew.”
― Mick Brown, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector