Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector - Mick Brown Audiobook

Written by Mick Brown
Read by Ray Porter
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 17 hours 35 minutes
Date of release: 2007

Phil Spector, born in the Bronx in 1940, grew up an outsider despised by his peers. Yet after his family moved to California, he learned everything he could about music, formed a band, and had a number-one hit with “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” He quickly became the top producer of early rock and roll and the originator of such girl groups as the Ronettes. He was a millionaire by age 21 and owned his own record label by 22. Hit followed hit, and for all of them he used a new recording style and technique called the “wall of sound.”

But the reign of the boy-man who owned pop music seemed doomed by the “British Invasion,” and Spector spiraled into paranoid isolation and peculiar behavior. Though he seemed to improve for a time, and even returned to the recording studio to work, his renascence didn’t last, and in 2003, the actress Lana Clarkson was found at his home, dead from a gunshot wound.

In Tearing Down the Wall of Sound, Mick Brown, who was the last journalist to interview Spector before his arrest, tells the full story of the troubled musical genius.