What does it sound like, to be in love? I knew before I was old enough to have the feeling for myself: it sounded like swooping strings, it sounded like huge booming drums, it sounded like close harmonies, it sounded like a pure and pristine teenage girl’s voice catching at the edge of desperation, the innocent centre of a universe of wanting. It sounded, in fact, like producer Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. When I felt love for the first time, I was at least in some degree reciting from the songs I’d learned by heart, listening to the tapes my parents played in the car.
Spector — who died in prison at the weekend — was a king of rock ’n’ roll, beloved by all the men who mattered. He worked with the Beatles, on Let It Be, and on Lennon and Harrison’s solo projects; he worked with Leonard Cohen and the Ramones. A real-life Spector production was a badge of validation for any artist who bore his influence, and he influenced pop music more than most. Spector fitted the pattern of a genius. Eccentric. Erratic. A man, of course. He luxuriated in his myth: Tom Wolfe called him the “tycoon of teen”.
This masculine authority made it OK, even respectable, to applaud the music Spector made by and for girls. Throughout the sixties, Spector turned out a run of hits that defined teenagerdom, and the best of them were the ones by female acts — the Crystals, the Ronettes, Darlene Love. The triumphant girlishness of songs like “Baby I Love You” and “Then He Kissed Me” isn’t just a male fabrication, either. Spector’s songwriting team leaned heavily on women, Elaine Greenwich and Carole King especially.
Part of the reason these songs sounded so intensely teenage was that the writers actually listened to girls when they were writing them. Which is the story behind the darkest, most disturbing production in Spector’s catalogue (not the darkest, most disturbing bit of his life, but we’ll get to that). Carole King and her partner and co-writer Jerry Goffin hired teenage singer Little Eva (they had written “The Locomotion” for her) as their babysitter. One day, Eva showed up covered in bruises; when they asked what had happened, she explained that her boyfriend had beaten her because he loved her.
That explanation became a song for the Crystals, released in 1962: “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)”. If there was ever any irony in the lyric, it’s obliterated in Spector’s arrangement and production. There’s a martial determination in the song’s slow, stately build-up, as instruments accumulate around lead vocalist Barbara Alston. “He hit me,” she sings, precise, affectless, alone in all that noise, “and it felt like a kiss / He hit me, and I knew he loved me.”
The song allows no escape from this world of masochism. At the end, Alston declares: “And then he kissed me / He made me his.” The strings surge to a heavenly resolution, the backing singers chirrup angelically, and there is no doubt that all is right with a world where a girl takes a boy’s fists as proof of devotion. It is a grotesque piece of pop music, a hymn to domestic abuse.
The public was repulsed. Radio stations got complaints when they played it, and sales were poor. Spector pulled it after a few weeks. King later repudiated it. The Crystals described the recording as an unhappy one. “He Hit Me” was an embarrassment, something best forgotten. When a major boxset of Spector’s sixties work was released in 1991 — called Back to Mono, in recognition of its fidelity to his original recording intentions — I remember there was a bit of a thing in the music press about the inclusion of “He Hit Me”.
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