Brian & Phil Spector

[kwan_dk]

Yet, I think it was Jack who crystallized the actual sound of Spector's Wall. Others could write charts to exploit it, or even to copy it, but it was Jack's arrangements along with the other pieces of the puzzle that just *nailed* it. I don't base this on anything but opinion, but I think the fact that Jack and Phil were both characters who marched to their own drummer made the "Wall" as edgy as it was.

Thanks for elaborating with your very well-written post, Guitarfool. And your opinion is certainly as valid as mine. Maybe more so since I'm not a musician and therefore probably can't pick up on some of the subtle differences between Nitzsche's arrangements and those of other arrangers.

[Don Malcolm]

Way back in the day when I was more deeply ensnared in what you might call the "theory of pop music history" the term we used for Spector and those who were touched by his work/followed his path was "saturation." It's too general a term, of course, and not precisely enough from the standpoint of actual musical analysis, but I think it still manages to capture what producers, bands, and songwriters (who were increasingly becoming interwoven) were chasing from, say, 1962-3 on into the end of the decade. The Spector incarnation of all that had its great engagement with the popular imagination in 1963-66, and the strategies/techniques for "saturation" changed/moved on.

One could argue that the Beatles manifested their love for Spector at what we can now see was "end times" for Phil ("River Deep Mountain High" was a smash in the UK, but he had no followup from that). Their application of it, as generated for them by George Martin etal, was their brand of psychedelia as manifested by Lennon, leading with "Tomorrow Never Knows" and right into Sgt. Pepper.

Clearly Pepper is not a "wall" production technique, but it appropriates similar strategies of saturation in the fact that instrumental interaction is massed/emphasized in unusual ways. The strategy was to add strange new sonic dimensions and feature them in order to create increasing intensity that, as has been noted in other posts here with respect to Brian's work, also contained nuance.

Brian moved through his Spector phase pretty rapidly, IMO--I think that by the time of Today! he'd already absorbed everything from it that was useful to him and he quickly stopped any form of outright imitation of the "wall." He's moved on to a new, more nuanced, more "fat-bass" dominant sound in '65, as we can hear in the SOT/UMs for Summer Days/Summer Nights. Comparing the arrangements of "Then I Kissed Her" to the original should be instructive as well. I think he gets Phil "out of his system" with "The Little Girl I Once Knew," which has the last vestiges of the Brill Building-L&S sax-based sound in it (listen to the backing track versions).

By the time we get to "Good Vibrations," Brian has moved into a different realm, with mosaic structures, "symphonic" changes of tempo, and ever more exotic instrument combinations competing for sonic attention. You know, I think Barney Hoskyns was close to having it right when he titled his book about the overall phase of LA music-making as Waiting for the Sun: if he'd stepped back from giving the Doors extra prominence by directly quoting their song title, and gone for a variant such as "Chasing the Sun" he'd have captured it perfectly--it would have captured the Icarus-like obsession with going higher and higher (which clearly took over both the lyrical and musical efforts of so many from 1966-71--though some folks, notably Brian, dropped out). By then, of course, Phil Spector had had his problematic association with the Beatles and that band was kaput.