“There is a fine line between genius and insanity” is a very common phrase indicating that the difference between the two is perhaps similar to that of Canada and United States. This very sentence was also stated by an American pianist Oscar Levant and he added, “I have erased this line.” By hearing the lecture up to this point, I wonder who else fits into such quote better than Phil Spector. Indeed, he was both a gifted pioneer who established the concept of a producer in a previously singer-oriented music scene and an unstable man with strange behaviors that showed signs of mental illnesses.
Phil Spector proved himself as a prodigy at the age of seventeen. He scored his first hit record with the group called the Teddy Bears in 1958. Spector wrote and produced the hit song, “To Know Him is to Love Him,” and this song initially made me envision a girl madly in love with a guy who does not love her back yet. I
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He was hot-tempered, sexist, perfectionist, schizophrenic, obsessive and yet a genius. I wonder if all of the traits mentioned are aftermath pieces from series of traumatic incidents. His father 's suicide, divorce from Ronnie and deaths of dear friends Lenny Bruce and John Lennon, youthful fall from the pinnacle of professional success—were they too destructive for him to ever recover? Perhaps, though I am reluctant and sad to point out, that must have been the case. He never recovered. Maybe even without all those incidents, especially his father’s death, he could have been the same person he turned out to be. I will never be able to know that for sure as I do not know him in person and is not a prophet. However, regarding the aforementioned musical aspects of his life, Phil Spector is worthy of respect as a music producer. Indeed, even though I cannot like him as a person for the murder and his other wrongdoings due to his instabilities, I respect him for his musical accomplishments and