Darlene Love talks about Phil Spector (Rolling Stone article)

[msongs]

"without Phil Spector there would be no Darlene Love"

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/darlene-love-phil-spector-death-1115794/

[sweetloukillbot]

1. Without Phil Spector there'd still be a Lana Clarkson nt

[cwydro]

2. This,

So. This.

[ProfessorGAC]

3. Glad She's Doing OK

Spector is criminal slime, and I think overrated.
He ruined Let It Be, and nearly ruined that Eagles album until Glynn Johns saved the day.
People call it Wall of Sound. I hear Wall of Mush.

[Patterson]

4. Which Eagles album?

[ProfessorGAC]

5. Pretty Sure "One Of These Nights"

The story I heard was Spector didn't last long because Frey absolutely couldn't stand the sound.
Frey & Henley wanted to have a bigger, edgier sound (hence Leadon & Meissner out, Felder & Schmidt in).
But, Spector was mushing it up.
Same as the original release of Let It Be.
If you A/B the Spector & Johns version, they are night & day.
I don't think Johns was credited (might have been) but did it as a favor to Glenn & Don.
We never heard the Spectorized version because Frey refused to allow it to be released, and as usual, Henley had his back.

[Brother Buzz]

6. Was

He died yesterday, in prison.

The Wall of Sound was OK at the beginning, but Spector pushed it to far and really overproduced some shit

[ProfessorGAC]

7. Yeah, I Just Now Saw That

Between the time I posted and saw you're reply, I saw it in LBN.
There's always room for differences in taste.
I find none of his stuff good.
Roy Halee used a similar approach (The Boxer & Bridge Over Troubled Waters) but, there was much greater clarity, space and separation of parts.
Spector ran everything bass down treble up. Every part. There's no third dimension to the sound.

[Brother Buzz]

8. Spector's early work, using Gold Star Studios echo chamber, was pretty tight stuff

I wonder if bass down treble up was by design because it translated well to AM radio.

[ProfessorGAC]

9. That's A Big Part Of It

But, the radio was going to sound that way anyway. Especially in the car.
Why preemptively weaken the sound?
I think what you say is a motivation, but I don't think it makes sense.
And, as someone who used home gear that, in the 80s was about the same sophistication as what he had at Gold Star, I know that different tracks, different EQ is critical to getting depth.
Finally, the echo booth had curtains to change it's size, baffles to alter character, and multiple places to put the mikes.
Spector found one setting & used the same reverb times and densities on every track.
Hence, mushy.

[Denzil_DC]

11. I was going to make a similar observation.

The wall of sound approach was striking and more effective in the early to mid-60s because many people (especially younger people) weren't listening to music on anything like hi-fis. At best they might have something like a Dansette mono record player, otherwise they'd only hear the recordings on tinny transistor radios or, less often, on TV. All had relatively small speakers, so hearing a BIG, spacious sound (brought about by loads of reverb, doubling parts) come out of them was a novelty. Bass wasn't something they could reproduce very well, so focusing the action in the mid and high range made some sort of sense.

The problem was it tended to make songs he worked on sound much the same. That novelty eventually wore off, though it's remembered nostalgically by many, including musicians I respect. But it was Spector's trademark. He modified it for more modern equipment, but that was what he was always aiming for. "Less is more" was never his credo.

Like ProfessorGAC, I see Let It Be as a useful chance to compare his approach as a producer to more subtle treatments in the stripped-down Let It Be - Naked release. Take a song like "Long and Winding Road". It's never been a favourite of mine, but stripped of the overfussy string arrangements and astral choirs and all that bollocks, it's a far more intimate and engaging work, and jazzy subtleties come out in Macartney's piano part that were swamped in the earlier release.

It's such a contrast to the collaborative and sensitive approach The Beatles had enjoyed with George Martin. Spector was called in to do a rescue job on session tapes which were on the whole felt to be sub-par, but he made the arrangements and production too much about him, not enough about the songs.

[obamanut2012]

10. And Lana Clarkson would still be alive