Bruce Springsteen Presents Darlene Love With Platinum Award for Phil Spector Christmas Album and ‘Baby Please Come Home’
variety.comJem Aswad Executive Editor, Music While it includes some of the most iconic Christmas songs of the past 60 years — most notably Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) — if there was ever an album with a problematic history, it’s “A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector.” Spector was the hottest producer in the world at the time of the album’s release, but it dropped on Nov.
22, 1963 — yes, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Needless to say, the country was not really in the mood for Spector’s glorious Wall of Sound holiday masterpiece, and the album largely languished for the next several years (although the Beatles re-released it on their Apple label in the early 1970s).
Spector himself was just as problematic. A notoriously vindictive control freak and gun fanatic, he largely suppressed the career of Love — arguably the greatest singer he worked with during the era bar Tina Turner — by hiding her behind group names like the Blossoms (her original group), the Crystals (a totally different group whose name Spector sometimes credited Love-sung songs to), Bob B.
Soxx & the Blue Jeans and others. While his star fell in the early 1970s, he continued to work sporadically until the early 2000s, when he was convicted of murdering actress Lana Clarkson in 2003 and spent the remainder of his life in prison.
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