Long before he was convicted of second-degree murder in a Los Angeles courtroom this afternoon, Phil Spector led the kind of rich-and-famous life that almost no one wanted to emulate.
Including Phil Spector.
“It hasn’t been a very pleasant life,” Spector told writer Mick Brown in a rare 2002 interview. “I’ve been a very tortured soul. I have not been at peace with myself.”
Or with everyone else, either. During his two trials for the shooting of actress Lana Clarkson, a parade of women testified that he enjoyed waving guns at them, often to keep them from leaving his company.
Friends said when he was younger, he would change outfits up to four times a day, with a different matching gun to accessorize each.
He fired a gun into the ceiling during a John Lennon recording session and the Ramones said that when Spector produced one of their albums, he would hold them in the studio at gunpoint.
His ex-wife Ronnie said she often felt like a hostage in their home. She also said Spector set up a glass-topped coffin in the basement and told Ronnie’s mother that if Ronnie ever left him, he would kill her and keep her there like Snow White.
No, Spector’s behavior has for years gone way beyond the lovably zany excess associated with, say, Keith Richards or Jack Nicholson.
His adopted sons, Gary and Donte Spector, said in 2003 that they were sexually abused as children. “We were caged animals to be let out for Dad’s amusement,” Donte told The Mail.
Gary and Donte have both had demons of their own. But tales of unpleasant encounters and poisoned relationships permeate every Spector biography.
Forgiveness, he has acknowledged, is not his strong suit. When his 1966 production of Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High” did not become the towering success he felt it deserved to be, he took his ears and went home, in effect telling the music business and the public it didn’t deserve him.
Before his January 1989 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Spector got so drunk his speech turned into a seemingly endless ramble to nowhere.
“Finally two of his bodyguards physically picked him up, one at each arm, and carried him off the stage,” recalls WPLJ program director Scott Shannon. “As they took him off, his legs were moving as if he were walking, even though they weren’t touching the floor. It was like a cartoon — one of the strangest things you’ve ever seen.”
Spector’s lawyer, Allen Klein, said the problem that night is that Spector is essentially very shy, and the idea of speaking in front of all his peers literally drove him to drink, which he does not handle well.
(source)
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