Phil Spector to star in media circus trial

By Andy Goldberg Mar 15, 2007, 4:48 GMT

Music producer Phil Spector (R) leaves a Los Angeles courthouse after jury selection began in his murder trial, in Los Angeles March 19, 2007. The murder trial of pioneering rock producer Spector finally begins on Monday, more than four years after a B-movie actress was found shot to death at his castle-like mansion outside Los Angeles. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

Los Angeles - Michael Jackson's molestation trial is history. Courtney Love is out of rehab and Anna Nicole Smith is six feet under at last.

But if you're wondering where your next celebrity courtroom drama will come from, worry no longer. The murder trial of legendary record producer Phil Spector, 66, is set to begin on Monday, with a cast of characters that is sure to dominate the talk shows, news programmes and gossip columns wherever you look. Best of all, the judge will allow TV cameras inside the courtroom, so you can look forward to non-stop coverage on the news.

Call it escapism, an addiction to celebrity wrongdoing, or just a modern version of the old village need to gossip about someone we all know. But rest assured, by the end of the trial we'll all know more than we want to about Spector and his frizzy hair-do, his sparrow- like and apparently-face-lifted features, and the epic tale of his rise and fall.

The basic facts are simple enough. Spector was born in the Bronx in 1940, and his father committed suicide when he was 8. The family moved to California, where he took up the guitar as a teenager and recorded the hit song To Know Him Is to Love Him - named after the epitaph on his father's gravestone.

Spector became famous as a producer and musician, especially for his Wall of Sound recording style that created a dense multi-layered soundscape. Hit followed hit as he worked with the top acts of the music world throughout the revolutionary years of the 1960's and early 70's - The Ronettes, Ike and Tina Turner, Sonny and Cher, the Beatles.

Rolling Stone magazine said his work 'may be the most personal and stylistically unified series of multi-artist recordings in pop history.' Spector himself said it was 'a Wagnerian approach to rock and roll: little symphonies for the kids.'

By the mid 70's he was becoming more reclusive - and tales of his eccentricities were already rife. His first wife - Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes - left him in 1972. She said he threatened to kill her and that he had a gold coffin for her in the basement. Musicians said he pointed loaded guns at them in the studio. He is said to have fired a shot while working with John Lennon.

He did little work from the 1980's on - but his problems with guns never passed. In February 2003 he was arrested for the murder of B-movie actress Lana Clarkson, whom he had met late one night in the House of Blues nightclub where she worked as a hostess. He persuaded her to come back with her to his hilltop castle in Alhambra, a suburb in the north-east of Los Angeles.

While Spector's driver waited outside, Clarkson, 40, was shot in the mouth as she sat in an ornate chair in the grand foyer. Spector has since claimed it was suicide, but just after the murder he told both his driver and an officer at the scene that he had killed her by accident.

'I didn't mean to shoot her. It was an accident. I have an explanation,' he was quoted as saying in the police report. The comments could decide the fate of the trial and Spector, who is already on his third legal team, failed in a pre-trial effort to bar them. Other evidence will be equally hard to explain and the odds seem stacked against him - the gun was wiped after the shooting, Spector's jacket was sprayed with blood.

The prosecution will allege that Spector flew into a homicidal rage after the beautiful Clarkson rejected his sexual advances. The state's attorney has lined up four other women who claimed to have been in similar situations with him. Spector's legal team is likely to argue that it was suicide.

The outcome could be determined by moments of high drama, complicated legal strategy or spectacular miscalculation, such as the infamous OJ Simpson glove blunder.

That's not the only potential similarity between the two cases. Whatever the outcome, the Spector trial will be a long and sensational media circus.