Our
chief pop critic's Phil Spector top ten I Comment:
Phil Spector's Wall of Sound I Watch
The Ronette's perform Be My Baby
During the 11 months that he spent on trial for murder, Phil Spector said
nothing. Not a word. Not a peep. Not a single da-doo-ron-ron,
da-doo-ron-ron. His wigs, however, told you pretty much everything you
needed to know: at times they were so implausibly massive that the man's
head appeared to be encircled by its very own weather system. And then, of
course, there was the cake-icing foundation that he chose to shovel atop
those ghoulish, sunken features, not to mention the long-tailed pinstripe
suits, bespoke to fit his 5'ft 5in frame.
“Relatively insane,” was how the 69-year-old music producer and inventor of
the “Wall of Sound” recording technique once described himself. Few would
argue - except, perhaps, with the use of the word “relatively”. This is a
man, after all, who reportedly used to rattle around his mock-castle in
complete darkness, wearing only a Batman suit; a man who out-drank and
scared John Lennon when the two worked together on Imagine; a man who once
promised to bury his then-wife alive in a glass coffin if she slept with a
member of the Rolling Stones.
In the end, of course, insanity might have been a better defense for Spector -
or at least a more believable one - than the claim that Lana Clarkson, a
40-year-old cocktail hostess, accepted a late-night invitation to his vast
hilltop residence in the early hours of Monday, February 3, 2003, only to
steal Spector's snub-nosed .38 Colt pistol and ram it into her own mouth
before pulling the trigger.
The image of Clarkson's slumped body, taken hours later by a forensic
photographer, shows her sitting on a chair, her stockinged legs buckled and
twisted, the spent gun lying next to them. A bag is slung over her shoulder,
as though she's been waiting impatiently to go home. By the time that
detectives arrived at the scene, someone - presumably Spector - had tried to
wipe up the blood with an old-fashioned cloth nappy. But much of it had
already soaked deep into the dark crimson carpet.
Spector's only comment on the incident to date remains the quote that he gave
to Esquire magazine: “She kissed the gun.” The sado-erotic wording brings to
mind the lyric of the producer's little-known 1962 single He Hit Me (It Felt
Like A Kiss), which, unsurprisingly, failed to catch on with the American
public. A year later, he would try agai, more successfully, with Be My Baby,
with its subtlety threatening opening line: “The night we met I knew I
needed you so/And if I had the chance I'd never let you go.” Spector's
lawyers, meanwhile, preferred a more conventional explanation for Clarkson's
death: “accidental suicide” they called it.
It is a testament to the power of money in the American judicial system that
it took three years of preparation and another three years of court
proceedings, including two trials, the first of which lasted for six months
and ended with a hung jury leaning 10-2 in favour of a conviction (unanimity
is required in California), to put Spector in prison for the murder of
Clarkson, whom he had met for the first time on the night of her death at
the House of Blues nightclub where she worked. After leaving Clarkson a $450
tip on a $13 drink, she let him take her home - by most accounts, she was
desperate for any shot at money or fame. Only a few hours later the one-time
extra in Knight Rider and star of 1985's pulp classic, Barbarian Queen,
would be dead.
After his arrest and release on $1 million bail, Spector set about hiring an
11-strong criminal defence team, at least one of whom was paid $1 million a
year. On top of that he bankrolled four private detectives, five paralegals,
a jury consultant, and several expert witnesses who charged him an estimated
$500,000. Spector threw so much money at the case, he practically created a
shadow Justice Department.
Yet those who knew him - or knew of him - could not have been surprised when
news of Clarkson's death by gunshot wound emerged six years ago. Rock'n'roll
legend had it that Spector was accosted and urinated on by a gang of thugs
in a public lavatory in the 1950s, a trauma that had resulted in the musical
savant's lifelong obsession with bodyguards and firearms. He often pulled
those firearms on the women he was dating, as some of his ex-girlfriends
testified at his trial. His jealousy was so intense that his first wife,
Veronica “Ronnie” Bennett, former lead singer of The Ronettes, a girl group
managed and produced by Spector from 1963 to 1974, complained of being
kidnapped within her own home.
Spector married again, a year before his trial, to the 28-year-old
singer/actress Rachelle Spector, whose topless portrait once appeared in
Playboy magazine. One biographer has described her as a “trial wife”,
designed to make him look slightly more sane to impressionable jurors.
Spector's first trial was a full-on celebrity justice spectacle, followed in
every intricate detail by the press, with the music producer's defence led
by Bruce Cutler, notorious for securing three acquittals in the 1980s for
the renowned mobster, John Gotti. He offered vague theories and dark
suggestions about Clarkson's death, but nothing that ever came close to an
official explanation.
Clarkson was a drunk and a failed actress, he said; she was depressed; she had
written about killing herself in her diary; she was taking prescription
drugs; she had been told where Spector's gun was kept. The jury was shoved
towards the conclusion that she had chosen Spector's home, nicknamed
Pyrenees Castle, as the venue for her inevitable suicide. It was
Goodfellas-style logic, like the accidental plunge into the concrete
foundations; or the tragic mishap with the unchained Doberman and the vat of
sulphuric acid.
The death of Clarkson was presented by the defence as a kind of mystery, a
whydidshedoit, as opposed to a whodunnit. In the end, two jurors bought it,
which was all they needed to kill the trial.
The prosecution immediately pushed ahead with a retrial, in spite of having
struggled on two fronts: first, none of Spector's DNA was on the gun (the
quantity of Clarkson's blood possibly made it undetectable even to a crime
lab) and the gunshot residue was all over the victim, not the alleged
perpetrator.
Second, the credibility of Specter's driver, who allegedly heard his boss
“confess”, fell apart during cross-examination. When the Brazilian called
911, for example, the operator couldn't understand why a man with an
impenetrable foreign accent was wailing hysterically about a “seal
inspector”. He was actually trying to say Phil Spector. Given this
confusion, asked the defence, how anyone could be sure the driver had heard
Spector declare “I think I killed someone”, as he wrote in his official
statement to police?
Throughout the initial proceedings, Spector had looked both sad and
ridiculous. And also contemptuous: as if he knew something but wouldn't say.
In 2003 there had been some expectation in the press that his trial might at
least produce some dark, Michael Jackson-style humour. But the laughs never
came. In the end, there was no irony, no rock‘n'rock swagger. Only death and
madness, and a tragic starlet, her shoes black and shiny and studded with
rhinestones, which glittered in the flash of the forensic photographer.
As time went on, however, his wigs kept getting crazier and crazier: on one
memorable occasional, he looked as though he had plugged himself into the
grid: his hair seemed to be trying to escape from his face, trying to get
far away as possible from its owner and his lifestyle of castles and guns
and Sunday nights spent cruising the Sunset Strip and picking up cocktail
hostesses with $450 tips.
After the first trial collapsed a theory emerged that even Spector himself
couldn't remember what had happened on the night Clarkson died. Perhaps,
after so many years of drinking and prescription drugs, he had become as
much of a stranger to himself as he was to his adopted sons from his first
marriage, whom he allegedly isolated and abused when they were children. One
of them, Louis, turned up at court at one point. He hadn't seen his father
for seven years.
When Spector was finally put back in the dock, both the public and the press
had largely forgotten about him. News of the recession and the Obama
Administration had rendered his trial obsolete. And yet the verdict still
came as a shock, more because common sense had prevailed above anything
else. And yet, even though Spector now faces 15 years to life in prison for
second-degree murder, he could still win on appeal. No one saw him pull the
trigger and the scientific evidence was inconclusive enough to convince two
jurors in his first trial of his innocence.
Whatever happens, however, Spector will almost certainly be held accountable
for Clarkson's death in civil court, where he will face wrongful-death
damages that might very well wipe out a fortune amassed by owning or
part-owning publishing rights to 200 songs, including the track that
received the most air-play of the 20th century, the Righteous Brothers'
You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling.
As for those who followed the case over its six-year lifespan, perhaps the
most haunting moment remains the series of six terrifying answering machine
messages left by Spector in 1993 for an ex-girlfriend whom he had just
chased down his driveway with a pistol. The tape was played in court. “I
expect a return call, but careful what you say to me,” hecould be heard
growling into the telephone receiver. “Nothing you say to me is worth your
life.”
