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Bertha was controlling and protective, discouraging her son from having company and going out. The three bickered constantly, often blaming one another for Benjamin’s suicide. Sickly and slightly built, Spector was a social misfit during his first years at Fairfax High School, and at home he endured a stormy relationship with his mother and his sister, who later was committed to a mental institution. His father, Benjamin, an ironworker, died by suicide when his son was 9, and three years later his mother, Bertha, moved to an apartment in Los Angeles’ Fairfax district with Spector and his older sister, Shirley. “People tell me they idolize me, want to be like me, but I tell them, you don’t want my life,” Spector said. In an interview with journalist Mick Brown less than two months before Clarkson’s slaying, Spector talked about psychological struggles, saying that he was taking medication for schizophrenia and characterizing himself as bipolar. Spector was praised by friends for his wit, passion and intelligence, but he was also identified early as a complex and troubled man. To come out of a vacuum and force such changes at such speed, with such totality - even now it’s hard to conceive the force and self-belief it must have taken,” author Nik Cohn wrote after spending time with Spector in 1969. “Nobody, it’s fair to say, ever wrought deeper changes in the way the rock industry looked, felt, behaved. Though Spector appeared to be out of steam when his first hit era ended in 1966, he returned from seclusion in 1970 to collaborate with the Beatles, producing solo works by John Lennon and George Harrison and reassembling the music that became the group’s “Let It Be” album. In the studio, Spector awoke pop music from its early-1960s doldrums and crafted a sound that would influence record-making for generations, informing the music of such acts as the Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and David Bowie. He made the top 10 chart 14 times between 19, created a signature sonic avalanche in the studio known as “the Wall of Sound” and - record by record - revolutionized popular music. Stripped of his flamboyance and tassel of dark hair, he appeared to be just another senior citizen in prison photos - a balding man with a pair of hearing aids.īut in his prime, Spector was brash, driven and as much a star as the artists he produced. He was ultimately sentenced to 19 years to life in prison. Spector’s subsequent second-degree murder trials laid bare the producer’s erratic mood swings, darkening depression and isolation from an industry he once seemed to rule. Before he was transferred to a hospital, Spector had been an inmate at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton, which specializes in housing medically vulnerable people with existing health conditions, the corrections department said. Spector was hospitalized after becoming ill with COVID-19, said a source familiar with his medical condition who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter. For all the hit songs he drove up the charts, for all the power and wealth he amassed, for all the admiration he drew as he rearranged the pop music landscape, there was a darkness deep in Phil Spector’s soul that would forever shadow his genius.Įven as anthems such as the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin‘” erupted from radios across America, the acclaimed record producer was a brooding, manic man with a white-hot temper and a fondness for gunplay, all of which would manifest itself on a winter morning in 2003 when he fatally shot actress and nightclub hostess Lana Clarkson in the foyer of his castle-like mansion in Alhambra.ĭispatched to prison after being convicted of second-degree murder, Spector died Saturday while in custody in a Northern California hospital where he was being treated, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.