The passing of Phil Spector got me thinking about the often rambling conversations that I had had with a friend, the late (but great) Robert Mumford. I have written about Robert before but to refresh, he was one given to obsessions with certain topics, the contents of which became quite esoteric in his hands. He had the ability to cover the same ground in many different ways, all to the same end. We had heard all of it before. Strangely enough, this was a part of the joy of knowing Robert.

So on hearing of Spector's sad demise, I could very easily construct the kind of conversation that Robert would have engaged in. Having a deep and abiding knowledge of The Beach Boys, I know that he would have given me a blow-by-blow of the relationship between Spector and Brian Wilson. How the latter had heard Be My Baby on his car radio and had been forced to pull over, overwhelmed by the sound. How Wilson had been influenced by Spector's production techniques on Pet Sounds. And on and on.

I was listening the other day to some Spector outtakes from sessions spent at Gold Star laying down the tracks for Walking in the Rain. A room full of musicians played the same thing over and over. The material was multi-tracked and given various treatments (echo chambers, reverb etc) until it was melded into a block of sound in which individual instruments no longer had a separate voice. Finally the vocalists (The Ronettes) were added, trapped in the wall but still emphatic. It was powerful and innovative technique for the time though it took a toll on the musicians, who were often likened to puppets in Spector's hands.

Robert would have said that Wilson was a more imaginative musician and producer than Spector. I think he would have been right too. Both were subject to their demons - for one this led to violence and murder, for the other, pained introspection. Musical history is likely to treat the Beach Boy more kindly, I suspect.