ABSTRACT
While the negotiations and compromises worked out between Greenwich and Barry and King and Goffin took place on an interpersonal sphere that was inaudible to listeners, the blurring of individual contributions to a song in order to present a pleasing homogeneous product is sonically characteristic of the girl group records associated with Phil Spector. Identifying him as the first auteur among record producers, Evan Eisenberg asserts in his landmark study of recorded music that “in its urgent solipsism, its perfectionism, its mad bricollage [sic], Spector’s work was perhaps the first fully self-conscious phonography in the popular field.” 1 Spector’s studio techniques involved reducing (for example) four separately recorded instrumental tracks to one track, then adding that to three other tracks that had been similarly mixed down, then mixing the four new tracks down to one, and then layering that with vocal tracks that had been through the same process to build his trademark Wall of Sound.
