People Features

Phil Spector: An eccentric and troubled genius

By Andy Goldberg Sep 27, 2007, 10:15 GMT

Los Angeles - Phil Spector, whose prosecution on murder charges was declared a mistrial on Wednesday, was well known in recent years as an eccentric, gun-loving recluse. Music producer Phil Spector looks at the jurors as Judge Larry Paul Fidler (unseen) polls each juror after the jury announced it was deadlocked during Spector's murder trial at the Los Angeles Superior Court in Los Angeles, California, USA, 26 September 2007. EPA/AL SEIB/POOL

Music producer Phil Spector looks at the jurors as Judge Larry Paul Fidler (unseen) polls each juror after the jury announced it was deadlocked during Spector's murder trial at the Los Angeles Superior Court in Los Angeles, California, USA, 26 September 2007. EPA/AL SEIB/POOLBut his early career marked him as a musical genius who pioneered modern recording techniques and created a dense multi-layered soundscape that redefined rock music. Spector was born in the Bronx in 1940, and his father committed suicide when he was 8. The family moved to California, where Spector took up the guitar as a teenager and recorded the hit song To Know Him Is to Love Him in 1958 - named after the epitaph on his father's gravestone. Spector himself became known as 'the tycoon of teen,' famous as a producer and musician for his Wall of Sound recording style that created hit after hit for 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 shooting 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. He later wrote in an email that it was an 'accidental suicide' and told Esquire Magazine that 'she kissed the gun. I have no idea why.' Spector went through three legal teams during the trial and did not testify on the stand. © 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur