Back to Mono

A mono master is one channel, one version, and no way back. That is the thesis, not a technical note. The Wall of Sound was never a sound. It was a procedure with a governing principle: make an object out of many people from which no individual can be recovered. At Gold Star Studios on July 29, 1963, Phil Spector spent four hours rehearsing a song before the tape rolled, then recorded it across near forty complete takes. Twenty-odd musicians played at once in a room twenty-three feet by thirty-five, through cement echo chambers, down onto a single track. The singer was not in the building. Veronica Bennett arrived the next day to overdub the lead, and she was the only Ronette on the record. In 1962 Darlene Wright sang "He's a Rebel" for five thousand dollars flat, the record went out under the Crystals' name, and the Crystals heard their own number one on the radio. In a Beverly Hills house with the curtains shut, a wife's shoes were taken away so she could not leave the building.

Lana Clarkson enters at Chapter 13, at the center, alive: two credits in Roger Corman's economy, a comedy reel nobody would look at, and a job on the door at the House of Blues four weeks before the end. The last four chapters hold a position the book will not soften. He almost certainly killed her, and the forensic apparatus that established it was not sound. Judge Larry Paul Fidler found in May 2007 that Dr. Henry Lee had removed or concealed something from the entrance hall of the Alhambra house; Lee denied it. In 2019 the Connecticut Supreme Court found Lee had testified to a blood result he never tested; in 2023 a federal court found he had fabricated evidence in the same case. Every existing biography of Spector predates those findings. Four things stay unknown: why Lana Clarkson went to that house, what happened in the ninety seconds before the shot, what was in Spector's head that night, and what the Philles accounts actually said.