On 23 May 2005 Phil Spector entered a courtroom in Los Angeles to hear evidence to be admitted to his trial for the murder of Lana Clarkson. He arrived wearing a permed ash-blond afro, the top of which stood nine inches from his head. He was nattily dressed in a blue shirt with large gold buttons and a black jacket with silk handkerchief and silver broach. This image immediately flashed around the world. That night the comedian Jay Leno joked on his TV show that Spector "looks like he's already got the electric chair". For long-time friends of Spector the photograph would not have seemed so strange, nor would his wish to appear like this in court. Wigs and flamboyant, attention-seeking clothes have been a part of Spector's wardrobe since the early '60s. The petulant look on his face they would have known too, masking keen intelligence and the fact that he was not in control of the circumstances around him. And finally, they would have known that after all the years of him waving guns around, someone had to get shot.

Phil Spector is a record producer. Actually, you could say he was the first record producer. Jerry Wexler from Atlantic Records, who knew and worked with Spector early in his career, deftly places him in rock history. First there were the producers whom Wexler calls the "documentarians", people like Leonard Chess who in the '50s recorded blues singers such as Muddy Waters live in the studio. Then there was the more sophisticated pop approach of the "servant of the project", which is where Wexler puts himself, "whose job was to enhance; to find the right song, the right arrangement, the right band and the right studio ... to bring out the best in the artist". And then came Phil Spector, who co-wrote some of his artists' songs and worked with the same musicians in the same studio to create a signature sound that varied little from record to record. This is the "producer as star, as artist" category, and Spector is the starting point.

His main acts were The Ronettes, The Crystals, The Righteous Brothers and Darlene Love. The songs are ‘Be My Baby', ‘Da Doo Ron Ron', ‘You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'', ‘He's a Rebel' and so on. It's a very hefty body of work, and it has a royal place in pop history. This is the sound of 1962-63: a massive wash of instrumentation and arrangement with a lead vocal wailing over the top, usually about a boy whom the singer has just met and wants to marry. It's pre-Beatles and pre-Dylan, the last big gasp of innocence before the '60s rush it all away. It's candyfloss hair, the Kennedy administration, big voices and simple choices: He walked up to me / And asked me if I wanted to dance. And it's magnificent.

Spector was born in the Bronx, New York in 1939, and most of his recorded work was done in Los Angeles. The tug between the coasts, his travels and loyalties to both places, drive his life and the narrative of Mick Brown's book (Bloomsbury, 512pp; $32.95). Spector's father committed suicide when he was nine. His one sister was schizophrenic, his mother was domineering and his parents, both from immigrant Jewish-Ukrainian families, were related (perhaps first cousins) before marriage. As a family knot it's wildly overheated, and the manic, sensitive, preening, precocious boy who projects himself into the LA music scene of the late '50s was the result of it. His first hit, and still the best song he wrote on his own, is ‘To Know Him is to Love Him' - a gorgeous love song, but the chill is in knowing that the epitaph on his father's gravestone read, ‘To Know Him Was To Love Him'.