The musician who became The Beatles’ lifelong enemy: “I hate it”
It didn’t normally take long for The Beatles to find the right sound for whatever they were working on.
Even if they had a hand from George Martin in their early days, some of the biggest parts of their career came from them working off each other to fill out their harmonies and get the perfect sound for what their songs were supposed to be. They didn’t know where their muse would take them from one album to the next, but they did at least have a sense of when some songs weren’t working and when it was time to lose some of the dead weight that was clogging up their recording sessions.
But towards the end, they had already attracted a few too many leeches to Apple Records. Allen Klein was already exploiting for as much as he could, and ‘Magic Alex’ had been a massive bullshit artist from the beginning, trying to make “state of the art” equipment for them, but around the time of Let It Be, McCartney was already starting to see the beginning of the end when he heard what Phil Spector was doing to his songs.
Spector had been known for having some of the best pop songs of all time under his belt, but McCartney was so angry with the way that he handled ‘The Long and Winding Road’ that he ended up sending a letter in protest. You’d think that it would have been a minor gripe, but since Macca had enough animosity towards the mix to release his own version on Let It Be…Naked, it was clear that he still held on to a little bit of a grudge after years away.
Then again, Macca was being painted as the villain of the band by the time they broke up, so surely the rest of the group liked Spector, right? Well, not really. Even though John Lennon began his relationship with Spector pretty well, his Rock ‘n’ Roll album was when his official falling out began. Spector wanted to take control of the sessions, and after running off with the tapes after some of the sessions were done, Lennon had to virtually sit on his hands before getting to release the damn thing.
Oh, and did I mention that Spector was a bit trigger-happy as well? His criminal behaviour is well-documented now, but hearing about him firing a gun in the studio and damaging Lennon’s hearing was as good a sign as any that the honeymoon period was over. But when the most reserved Beatle began to have problems with Spector, that’s when most people realised that they had made a mistake.
Spector was the one who was going to help bring George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass to life, and it’s not like he didn’t go all out. All of that signature echo and reverb was on the vocals, and while it sounded close to what Harrison had heard in the past, he remembered cringing while listening to ‘Wah-Wah’ with Eric Clapton, saying, “It sounded nice in the studio, no echo on it or anything. We went in to listen to it, and I thought, ‘I hate it. It’s so horrible’. Then Eric [Clapton] said, ‘Oh, I love it’. So I said, ‘Well, you can have it on your album then’, but I grew to like it.”
As for Ringo Starr, the jury’s still out on what he thought of working with Spector, but it’s not like he had that high an opinion of him behind the scenes or anything. Even when Spector slapped his name on top of Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, Starr felt that the producer didn’t need to be there, saying, “I have no memory of Phil being at the sessions. I remember he came in later, but when I think of Phil, I don’t think, ‘Oh, he produced this record.’”
So while the Fab Four won the hearts and minds of so many people, there was no reason to think that Spector was going to be on any of their favourites lists after spending some time with him. But, hey, it’s not easy to get on the bad side of every single one of The Beatles in one fell swoop, either. Congratulations, I guess.
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