Phil Spector

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Review: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector

Suitably weird
"If it weren't for us, there wouldn't be no Phil Spector." So spoke the Crystals' La La Brooks at Johnny D's last fall.
By BRET MILANO | January 19, 2011

Jail Weddings | Love Is Lawless

White Noise (2010)
Turns out there's more to music in Southern California than just bratty lo-fi surf pop, vanilla Laurel Canyon indie rock, and flashy 4 am electro.
By MICHAEL MAROTTA | November 16, 2010

Brian Wilson | Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin

Disney Pearl Series (2010)
George and Ira Gershwin's music may have been the pop music of its day, but — like much of the Great American Songbook — it was more sophisticated than most of the pop of the '50s and '60s.
By JONATHAN DONALDSON | August 18, 2010

Dee's so fine

The girl-group delights of the Deelinquents
Jenny Dee & the Deelinquents co-founders Jen D'Angora (the Dents, the Downbeat 5) and Ed Valauskas (Gravel Pit, the Gentlemen) won't come right out and say that they had ambitions of ever forming a '60s-style girl group — they won't even come out and say they're married.
By JONATHAN DONALDSON | March 02, 2010

Smack downer

Hip-Hop Misogyny: It Ain’t What It Used To Be
I haven’t come hereto academically justify West Coast credos about assimilating hoes into housewives. Instead I’ve come to mourn the commercialization of misogynistic rap lyrics.
By CHRIS FARAONE | July 23, 2009

By | January 01, 0001

Dance, Monkey!: Jess Sutich

On beachfront property in Ohio, idealistic pizza, and interspecies relations
Every week we put a comic in the hot seat. This week's victim is...
By SARA FAITH ALTERMAN | April 01, 2009

The Big Hurt: Hootie goes country, Roses stay in denial, Spector gets 'demonic'

Music news in brief
I’m still not used to the idea that Darius Rucker (“Hootie” to you and me) is a chart-topping country superstar now.
By DAVID THORPE | March 31, 2009

Interview: Greil Marcus

Rock's critic-in-chief talks rock and roll photography
Greil Marcus on rock-and-roll photography
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | January 21, 2009

Muck and the Mires

Dorren EP | Dirty Water
If Phil Spector could produce the Ramones, then Kim Fowley can produce Muck and the Mires, local faves whose sound has always been two parts Ramones to five parts British Invasion.
By BRETT MILANO | April 15, 2008

Unauthorized!

Axl Rose, Albert Goldman, and the renegade art of rock biography
I think it may have been sometime in the 1970s that the term “unauthorized” became sort of cool.
By JAMES PARKER | May 26, 2009

Ringo Starr

Liverpool 8 | Capitol
Ringo Starr has never made an album that’s less than entertaining, and there aren’t many Beatles you can say that about.
By BRETT MILANO | January 28, 2008

Cold remedies

Stephin Merritt warms up on Distortion
One suspects all colds are terrible in the world of Stephin Merritt.
By MATT ASHARE | January 07, 2008

Girl Group Redux

The Pipettes, Great Scott, November 15, 2007
I don’t imagine that the Pipettes are doing any more to curtail carbon monoxide emissions or save the rain forest than the Spice Girls.
By JIM SULLIVAN | December 09, 2007

Chairmen of the boards

Our critics pick the 14 producers with the fattest, meanest beats
Not unlike Swedish, Tagalog, and Esperanto, music is a language, with its own conjugations and (lewdly) dangling participles.
By PHOENIX MUSIC STAFF | October 18, 2007

Lucky 13

Our producers Hall of Fame
Our producers Hall of Fame
By MATT ASHARE | October 17, 2007

Britt pop

The spare magic of Spoon
It’s like the Anti–Wall of Sound.
By WILL SPITZ | October 09, 2007

Wall of shame

A definitive life of Phil Spector
In a moment of weakness, he licensed the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” for an ad for the erectile-dysfunction drug Cialis.
By BRETT MILANO | August 22, 2007

Post-punk pantheon

Daydream Nation tops our list of 10 landmark albums that made indie rock
They were, by definition, misfits.
By PHOENIX STAFF | July 16, 2007

Cool papa, hot mama

John Phillips’s solo album, Karen Dalton’s In My Own Time
Between Phil Spector’s becoming rock and roll’s first teen millionaire and the rock tycoons who emerged some decades later lies the rise of the hippie aristocrat.
By CHARLES TAYLOR | April 30, 2007

The 100 unsexiest men 2007: 30-21

These guys couldn't turn on a radio
These guys couldn't turn on a radio
By | April 12, 2007

Worst in breed: Music

The 100 Unsexiest men 2007
Who are the unsexiest music men of 2007?
By PHOENIX STAFF | April 12, 2007

Worst in breed: Newsmakers

The 100 Unsexiest men 2007
Who are the unsexiest newsmaking men of 2007?
By PHOENIX STAFF | April 12, 2007

Heart of the matter

Doc Pomus’s blues
Even among the oddballs of the music business, Doc Pomus was unusual.
By JEFF TAMARKIN | April 03, 2007

Stockholm calling

Peter Bjorn and John, El Perro del Mar, and Lo-Fi Fink lead the new Swedish invasion
In “Young Folks,” the hipster hit by the Stockholm-based indie-pop trio Peter Bjorn and John, Peter Morén boasts that “we don’t care about the young folks.”
By MIKAEL WOOD | March 03, 2007

Magic shows

The Charms become Wicked Cool
It’s a recent Sunday near midnight, and Charms leaders Ellie Vee and Joe Wizda have their ears to the radio. The Charms, "So Romantic" (mp3)
By BRETT MILANO | February 27, 2007

The new tastemakers

Does Pandora know you better than you do?
It’s a cliché by now, but the Internet allows you to be whomever you want to be.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | January 31, 2007

2007: Same as the old year

Relatives of Cicilline and Mollis continue the Vo Dilun tradition
And they are off and running, in the 2007 edition of “How Can We Embarrass Little Rhody Even More?”
By PHILLIPE & JORGE | January 11, 2007

Import only

The Pipettes bring on the pop
Whether or not the Pipettes ever make good on the flabbergasting confidence and effrontery of their debut, We Are the Pipettes (an import on Memphis Industries), they’ve already earned themselves a dissident footnote in the history of girl-group pop.
By CHARLES TAYLOR | November 28, 2006

Hanging ten or hanging on?

Brian Wilson: Dead on survival
This article originally appeared in the April 26, 1977 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
By GREIL MARCUS | November 14, 2006