“A great artist”: John Lennon believed Phil Spector gave new life to his music
The years before and after The Beatles started might as well be considered BC and AD for modern pop music. There had been songs that made people want to dance before the Fab Four found their way onto the hit parade, but looking at how pop music has grown since, they seem to have left their mark on pretty much every facet of the charts. Although John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote songs that made people feel alive, Lennon thought that things would still sound too lifeless without the right producer.
Looking at how Lennon started his career, though, he never claimed to know the first thing about what a studio environment was supposed to be. The Beatles were about as garage rock as it got back in the day, and that meant whistling through most of their albums in the midst of touring rather than relying on what might happen if they miked the bass drum in a different way or played something backwards.
While their songs were still fantastic, they would have been nothing without George Martin’s help. Martin was the parental figure to the group whenever they started performing in the studio, and since he had vast musical knowledge, it wasn’t out of the question for him to ask them to try out classical instruments or see what could be done if they added some other instrumentation into the mix.
By the end of the group’s tenure, though, Lennon wanted some fresh blood behind the board. He had spent the lion’s share of his career at Martin’s side, but whereas McCartney normally got the results he wanted whenever working with him, Lennon would go into experimental territory and end up getting severe pushback at every turn. So who else to man the production board other than Phil Spector?
After all, the man had been behind the massive walls of sound that became the soundtrack of teenage radio, and listening to what he had done for everyone from The Ronnettes to Ike and Tina Turner meant his track record was rock solid. That works well on paper, but looking back on Let It Be, it’s clear Spector ruined the record, putting a lot of syrupy strings behind their best ballads and making sure everything sounded super compressed with no real artistic body to it.
Still, Lennon remained defiantly proud to work with Spector, eventually complementing him for how he enhanced what he and Yoko would do on their respective Plastic Ono Band albums, saying, “Phil is, I believe, a great artist. We’ve done quite a few tracks together, Yoko and I, and she’d be encouraging me in the other room and all that. And we were just lagging, and Phil moved in and brought in a new life to it because we were getting heavy.”
If the stories behind recording Rock ‘n’ Roll are to be believed, that honeymoon period didn’t last that long. Since Spector recorded many rock and roll standards, this should have worked, but hearing Lennon get into arguments with him and the producer eventually running off with the tapes doesn’t exactly make for the best recording environment.
So, while Spector is far from the best partner Lennon ever had, his songs can’t be discounted, either. Things were bound to get a little bit dark when working on their later albums, but Spector at least made sure to make things sound somewhat clean whenever he put on one of his classics.
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