Little Symphonies for the Kids
I’ve always had friends who were really into records. Sometimes they suggested we go record shopping. I always went along with it but in my head, thought, “RECORD SHOPPING?!?!?! I HATE RECORD SHOPPING.” I thought record shopping was the most boring thing on the face of the planet, save watching my friends play Super Smash Brothers, the official most boring thing I could bear witness to. Sure, I have my collection of hardcore 7” from high school that I haven’t listened to since and I have a bunch of records that were my parents’, but I never really “got” records. I get it now. Man, oh, man do I get it. Thanks to a few friends who are big into that sort of thing, not only do I go out multiple times a week to scour the records at Amoeba and such, but I get excited about certain releases and certain labels and mono and things like that - things about which I’m still learning but I’m sure will only obsess me more as my knowledge and understanding grow. In the spirit of “getting” record shopping and searching for the ever-elusive Ronettes record that I’ll probably never have, I’m going to blog about Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound.
- In the autumn of 1961, Spector co-founded Philles Records with Lester Sill, which boasted The Crystals, The Ronettes and Darlene Love, among others.
- During this period, the early to mid-60s, Spector pioneered a production technique called Wall of Sound, which is well-suited to being played over AM radio or jukeboxes.
- Most, if not all, of these recordings were done at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles.
- Wall of Sound recordings are “dense and layered,” a sound Spector achieved by assembling a mass of musicians playing all sorts of orchestral instruments and musical arrangements with musicians playing acoustic and electric guitars parts in unison.
- Microphones recorded the singers and musicians in the recording studio and then sent the signal to an echo chamber in the basement, where the sound was brought in through the speakers then bounced (reverberated) off the walls of this room, was captured by the microphones and then was transmitted to another room where it was recorded onto tape.
- Spector referred to this technique as “a Wagnerian approach to rock & roll: little symphonies for the kids.”
- He often used the same musicians as part of his group - Glen Campbell, Carol Kaye, Hal Blaine, etc. They became known as The Wrecking Crew and, later, Wreckx-n-Effect. (JK but I did dance to a Wreckx-n-Effect song in my 3rd grade talent show)
- Sonny Bono and Jack Nitzsche helped Spector with these performances, and he worked with popular song-writing teams of the time.
- Spector preferred singles to LPs, calling the latter “two hits and ten pieces of junk,” and mono to stereo, insisting that stereo recordings took control of the sound away from the producer and put it in the listener’s hands.
- Basically, the main vocalist is not necessarily the focus of Wall of Sound recordings; it doesn’t sound like the vocalist in the foreground and the instruments somewhere behind that - everything comes at you from relatively the same point in space.
- Here’s a good quote: “…he buried the lead and he cannot stop himself from doing that…if you listen to his records in sequence, the lead goes further and further in and to me what he is saying is, ‘It is not the song…just listen to those strings. I want more musicians, it’s me.”– Jeff Barry, quoted in Williams 1974, p.91
- Phil Spector tried to resurrect his “Wall of” idea during his trial 2 years back with the debut of his “Wall of Hair.”
- He didn’t think it went over well, so he switched to a more toned down approach.
- Surprise! The verdict came in and the jury LOVED it. So much so, that there’s going to be another trial, just to see what else he’s got up his sleeve.
Listen to the song above as an example of one such recording.
