Word: phils
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...Finally there are two masterpieces, songs as good as "Be My Baby" or "River Deep Mountain High." The first is a Veronica number called "Why Don't They Let Us Fall In Love." Phil opens with a seismic riff - a sax line of tectonic dimension, especially on crankin? speakers - but the song's just starting, and the second time through he adds the backup vocals: "Bop bop bop, bop bop ba-dah-dah dah-dah..." I'm sitting on that couch in the dark, my next-door neighbor is pounding on the wall...
...this kind of setting, is what finally convinces me that - like Brian Wilson - "I just wasn't made for these times". I mean, I'm in tears, I'm a grown man and moved to tears by this teeny-bop concoction, this early '60s equivalent of Britney Spears. (Phil called them "little symphonies for the kids.") But it's not Britney Spears - it's better. It gets to me. It defeats the cynic within, dismantles the censoring mechanism, and bypasses the cool-meter. I achieve the actual, never-articulated goal of the obsessionist: the ecstatic experience...
...with a hipster buyer who controlled the records section, which in those days were all LPs and 45s. I walk over to the Oldies section, or the Girl Groups section, or maybe just S in the alphabetical listing. I flip through the LPs and suddenly I'm holding "The Phil Spector Wall of Sound Vol. 6 - Rare Masters...
...record up to that time (I've paid more since). It was an anti-climax, of course - all the really great tunes were on the first one. Maybe I'd changed in the meantime, and was no longer open to the intensity I'd experienced with the original. Somehow Phil Spector had lost the ability to get me there, to put me in the flow, to peak me out. Who knows why? But for 20 years I had an obsession, a comforting, distracting, and consuming passion. The object of the hunt had not been the point, anyway - the hunt...
...Rebel: The Truth About Phil Spector - Rock and Roll's Legendary Madman," by Mark Ribowsky, E. P. Dutton...