Mick Brown

Phil Spector, born in the Bronx in 1939, 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, originator of such girl groups as the Ronettes, a millionaire by twenty-one, and the owner of his own record label by twenty-two. He scored hit after hit using a new technique called the "wall of sound."

But the reign of the boy-man who owned pop culture seemed doomed by the "British Invasion," and he spiraled into paranoid isolation and peculiar behavior. Though he seemed to improve for a time, even returning to the recording studio to work, it didn't last—in 2003 the actress Lana Clarkson was found dead in his home, killed by gunshot.

Ray Porter

Blackstone Publishing

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