I can listen to six hours of Phil Spector recording sessions, some of which amount to take after take of Spector instructing the lead singer of The Crystals on how to sing the opening lines of ‘Uptown;’ I’ve listened to 28 consecutive takes of the instrumental track of a minor Spector production, ‘Why Don’t They Let Us Fall In Love,’ and about 17 vocal takes of Tina Turner getting louder and raspier as she tackles ‘River Deep Mountain High.’ Say what you will, he has made some incredible records.

Watching the documentary ‘The Agony and The Ecstasy of Phil Spector’ by Vikram Jayanti, you will get the idea that Spector whipped up those incredible records in his own kitchen, unburdened by anyone else’s participation. You will wait in vain for the names Gerry Goffin & Carole King, Jeff Barry & Ellie Greenwich or Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil to come up as Spector explains how he wrote all those songs, but as far as he’s concerned, the songwriting credit is “I.” I know his name is on a lot of them as a co-writer, but those songwriters wrote a slew of classic songs without the name ‘Spector’ tacked on to the credit. Spector without any of them? Not so many. Draw your own conclusion. For him to even imply sole credit for writing ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling’ and ‘River Deep Mountain High’ and ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ is laughable. The movie comes complete with subtitles (by Mick Brown) explaining to us how the songs reflect Spector’s creative and personal state of mind, but it strikes me that ‘He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)’ (Goffin & King) and ‘Crippled Inside’ (John Lennon, with no co-writer credit that I can see) don’t tell us all that much about Phil.

Who also fails to mention that the early records were arranged by Jack Nitzsche (and in the case of ‘Lovin’ Feeling,’ Gene Page), and that the musicians were ridiculously talented. And here is a Phil Spector documentary in which the name ‘Ronnie Spector’ is never mentioned, even while Phil goes on and on about how he labored over ‘Be My Baby,’ and that its (allegedly unauthorized) use in ‘Mean Streets’ was responsible for the careers of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. Most people would agree, I believe, that Ronnie’s vocal has something to do with the record’s wonderfulness. Spector’s version of ‘Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah,’ another record he crows about, is also sung by singers (Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans).

The omissions are Spector’s fault, of course, but they’re also Jayanti’s (and Brown’s). Javanti also focuses heavily on the first Spector murder trial (I assume you’ve heard about it? One of those loaded guns he used to intimidate people finally went off), flipping back and forth between forensic evidence and vintage performance footage in a random way. We don’t get to see or hear anything about Spector’s career after he ‘saved’ ‘Let It Be’ and went on to work with Lennon and Harrison. Nothing about his projects with The Ramones, or Dion, or Leonard Cohen, all of whom found his working methods pretty unbearable (all three albums are hit-and-miss, to be kind).

I don’t expect I’ll ever get tired of playing Spector’s records. One thing the movie does do is play a whole lot of them in their entirety, including a demo of ‘Spanish Harlem’ that I never heard before (the movie does not point out, however, that Spector didn’t produce the Ben E. King record), and the Shindig performance of ‘Lovin’ Feeling’ by The Righteous Brothers is a gas, but listening to Spector kvetch about being under-appreciated while ignoring all his very significant collaborators is simply agony.