As the Boomers aged into parenthood, one musical standby of their own youth became permanently enshrined in the Christmas canon. Every December, the generations young enough to have been reared on pop will put on A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector, a compilation album featuring 60s girl groups like the Ronettes and the Crystals singing the Yuletide standards. On the final track, however, mega-producer and impresario Spector delivers a direct address to the listener over the gentle strains of Silent Night, explicating his vision for the project and thanking the public for allowing him into their homes. There’s a creepy intimacy to the spoken-word song, Spector’s reedy voice gentle yet insincere, his speech sentimental yet egotistical. Even without knowledge of his turbulent backstory, a child trimming the tree can pick up on something unsettling.
Spector, a four-part documentary airing this week on Showtime, catalogues the contradictions making up an essential, contemptible figure without attempting to untangle them. “Like a lot of people my age who grew up listening to music from the 60s with their parents, I knew the work of Phil Spector before I knew who he was,” says Don Argott, co-director of the upcoming miniseries with Sheena M Joyce. “I knew the eccentric stories, him pulling guns, the trial, his Afro hair, but this knowledge wasn’t really fully formed.” This is the man in broad strokes, a living dissonance between the creative output that gave exquisite voice to teenybopper innocence and the violent, erratic behavior behind the scenes. But if his story is a tragedy of hubris ending in homicide, that means he’s only one of two main characters.
