Phil Spector: Sound of the Sixties

Music producer Phil Spector’s story is already very familiar and was covered so thoroughly in Mick Brown’s 2007 Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector that MacLeod’s adoring fan’s notes lack any startling revelations or new material. MacLeod (Leaders of the Pack: Girl Groups of the 1960s) dutifully chronicles Spector’s life and work from his early years and his growing love of music to his technical wizardry, work with the Beatles and John Lennon, and crash into disgrace after he was convicted of murdering actress Lana Clarkson in 2003. MacLeod stitches together a pastiche of quotations from other books and articles, and his generalizations about music and culture—such as Spector’s music bringing about more racial awareness—are unconvincing. MacLeod’s thin book certainly reminds readers of Spector’s musical genius and his lasting contributions to rock and roll and pop music, and it serves as a helpful introductory survey to the best work on Spector, but it lacks the depth and the insight to make it anything other than a superficial appraisal. [em](Nov.) [/em]