PROFILE/Phil Spector: In a strange Sunset Boulevard twist, the man responsible for some of the world's best-known pop songs found himself facing a murder charge this week. Brian Boyd looks back at the troubled life and times of Phil Spector
Pistol shots ring out on a still Californian night. In the grounds of a gothic mansion, inhabited by an ageing genius from yesteryear, lies a dead body. In a grisly echo of the Hollywood noir classic, Sunset Boulevard, the legendary and reclusive music producer Phil Spector now finds himself living out the cinematic role of Norma Desmond. Spector is now getting ready for his court-room close-up - he has been charged with first-degree murder - and the supporting cast features his lawyer, Robert Shapiro, who previously appeared in a starring role as a member of O.J. Simpson's defence team.
Fame, fortune, guns and a pretty blonde actress - it should keep Vanity Fair in front covers until the end of the year.
As the salacious details of the case are drip-fed out, the tabloids have bumped up the story from one-paragraph-on-page-seven status to "B-Movie Blonde Death Shocker" bold print. The murdered woman, Lana Clarkson (41) a jobbing actress, had met Phil Spector only a few hours before she was murdered. Los Angeles police say Clarkson, "a six-foot blonde beauty" and Spector, "crazed music man" are believed to be the only people in the 10-bedroom house at the time of the shooting. Given the locality of the murder and the nature of the Hollywood acting profession, Clarkson's friends say she would have found it grimly humorous that the first investigators at the scene couldn't identify her (not A-list enough) and later said in a statement saying the victim was "in her early to mid 20s".
Released on $1 million bail pending the court case, Spector - who has well-documented mental health "issues" - has always had problematic relationships with women. In the 1960s he was married to the lead singer of one of the groups he made famous - Ronnie Bennett of the Ronettes. When the marriage broke-up, she spoke about his erratic and bizarre behaviour, and how she was "held as a virtual prisoner" in their home. On the rare occasions she was allowed out, Spector insisted that a blow-up effigy of himself had to sit beside her in the car passenger seat.
His most recent relationship was with Nancy Sinatra, daughter of Frank, perhaps not the most sensible pairing of all time. Observers referred to the relationship as "Two flying over the cuckoo's nest".
His relationship with guns would be of the "dysfunctional" type. While others in the music industry get their kicks from champagne/cocaine/questionable relationships with teenagers, Spector gets off on his guns. Believed to have a different gun for every day of the week, the weapons are co-ordinated with his "individual" dress-sense - a favourite outfit is the Batman costume.
It has always been a slightly irksome, but grudgingly accepted fact that if you worked with Spector, he would pull a gun on you in the recording studio. John Lennon talked about the time he saw Spector putting a gun to Stevie Wonder's head - "it seemed an awkward way to threaten to kill a blind man" Lennon noted. Spector also pulled a gun on The Ramones - "whenever we had rows he would point it at us" said Dee Dee Ramone. Leonard Cohen also got the gun treatment. "Phil approached me with a bottle of red wine in one hand and a .45 in the other, put his arm around my shoulder, shoved the revolver into my neck and said 'Leonard, I love you'."
There was never that much made of Spector's "thing" about guns - this, after all, is an area of employment where people eat the heads off bats, marry their 13-year-old cousins and wear Spandex trousers to work. Despite, what was known as the "gun thing", the biggest and best artists in the world queued up to work with Spector, genuflecting as they went. Put simply, the man is a bona fide genius and one of the most important and influential musical figures of the 20th century. And there are some musicians out there who would regard that as an understatement.
Spector, now 62, entered the music business as a songwriter, but while still in his teens set up his own record label, where he invented the concept of the "girl group" with acts such as the Crystals and the Ronettes. Spector wrote and produced his bands, creating masterpieces such as Be My Baby - still one of the most dizzyingly beautiful singles released. He described his work as "the creation of teenage symphonies"; his arrival on the musical scene coinciding with the birth of the teenager and the explosion in popularity of popular music.
Although ostensibly pop, Spector forever changed how music was made. There was an artistic vision in his work that far outstripped the talent of the performers he was working with. He created the famed "Wall Of Sound" - pumping his records full of multi-layered orchestral sounds and using instruments that had previously never featured in popular music. You'll get some sense of his sound if you listen again to one of his career highlights - You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling by the blue-eyed soul act, the Righteous Brothers.
Dubbed the "Beethoven of Pop" and presciently "a deranged genius", he was "eccentric" in his working methods to a degree only matched by the semi-insane talents of his musical peers - Brian Wilson and Arthur Lee. The Beach Boys were heavily influenced by his work - to this day Brian Wilson is haunted by his belief that he has never written a song as good as Be My Baby, and The Beatles responded to Spector's giant leaps by writing the Sgt Pepper's album. The Rolling Stones producer, Andrew Loog Oldham, frequently "borrowed" from the Spector box of tricks.
After the failure of Ike and Tina Turner's 1966 single, River Deep, Mountain High - which he still considers his best moment - Spector, bitterly disgruntled, retired from the music industry (the song went to number one in the UK but barely troubled the US charts).
Living as a recluse in his Los Angeles mansion, he was persuaded back into the studio by The Beatles who implored him to work on their Let It Be album. To this day, Paul McCartney won't speak to Spector because of the string arrangement he put over McCartney's song The Long and Winding Road - and when Let It Be is re-released later this year, word has it that McCartney has gone back to the master tapes to excise Spector's strings. John Lennon and George Harrison idolised him, however, and Spector went on to produce Lennon's Imagine and Harrison's All Things Must Pass album, which contained My Sweet Lord.
Since then, he's only been tempted out of his lair to work with The Ramones, Leonard Cohen and Dion. His behaviour was believed to have become more eccentric, even by his high standards, but he seemed to relish his contemporary Norma Desmond status. He always worried if his mental state was the result of his parents being first cousins, and has had Woody Allen levels of psychotherapy over the years.
After years of silence, there was a flurry of activity in the last 12 months. Spector shocked the music world by announcing he was going back to the studio to work with a new British band called Starsailor (a good but unremarkable band). He also expressed an interest in working with Coldplay. He was seen out at shows in Los Angeles of late, including Starsailor and Bruce Springsteen. And just this week the Daily Telegraph newspaper ran his first full interview in 25 years, speaking at length about his "deeply troubled state of mind over the years". If found guilty, he could soon be exchanging one prison for another.