Pop legend turned killer Phil Spector dies in jail of Covid-19
Murderer was Wall of Sound pioneer
RECORD producer Phil Spector masterminded some of the 1960s’ biggest hits – but behind his genius was a warped control freak whose unhinged behaviour eventually erupted into murder.
Spector, who had Covid-19, died in hospital aged 81 in California on Saturday morning, four weeks after being diagnosed with the virus.
He was serving a life sentence for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson, who he shot in the mouth at his mansion in 2003.
In the 1960s, Spector pioneered the “Wall of Sound” method of recording – layering instruments and arrangements to create a dense, echoing sound – and had more than 25 US Top 40 hits between 1960 and 1965.
He went on to work with some of the biggest names in music, including The Beatles, Cher, Ike and Tina Turner, Leonard Cohen and The Righteous Brothers.
But Spector was a grotesque character, violent, abusive and obsessed with guns. John Lennon once said of him: “I’m fond of his work, a lot. His personality I’m not crazy about.”
Those sentiments were echoed in “tributes” after Spector’s death was
announced yesterday. Blondie guitarist Chris Stein, 71, said he remembered going to Spector’s California home in the 1970s.
He tweeted: “He came to the door holding a bottle of diet Manischewitz wine in one hand and a presumably loaded 45 automatic in the other. Long story. I thought he was nuts.”
Spector, who took to wearing outlandish wigs to hide scars from a head injury after a car crash in 1974, got a minimum of 19 years for murdering Lana, 40. He claimed her death was an “accidental suicide”.
In 1990, Spector’s second wife Veronica “Ronnie” Bennett, a member of the Ronettes, accused him of holding her captive in his mansion and subjecting her to years of psychological torment after they wed in 1968.
In her memoir, Be My Baby, Ronnie told how she escaped from the mansion, barefoot, with the help of her mother in 1972.
In their 1974 divorce settlement, she forfeited all future record earnings and surrendered custody of their three adopted children. She later said this was because Spector had threatened to hire a hit man to kill her.
Their sons Gary and Donté both claimed their father kept them captive as children, and made them simulate sex acts with his girlfriend.
Spector was born in 1939 in the
I’m fond of his work, a lot.. his personality I’m not crazy about
MOUNTAIN HIGH With Ike and Tina Turner in 1966
Bronx, New York, to immigrants from Ukraine. His father took his own life a decade later, and Spector’s mother moved the family to Los Angeles in 1953.
In high school, Spector played guitar and piano and began writing songs with a classmate. With schoolfriends he formed The Teddy Bears, who had a No1 with To Know Him Is To Love Him in 1958. The title was inspired by the inscription on the gravestone of Spector’s dad Benjamin.
By the time he was 21, Spector was a millionaire.
In the early 1960s,
he worked with Ben E King, Gene Pitney and the Paris Sisters. He produced Then He Kissed Me by The Crystals and Be My Baby by the Ronettes, hits in 1963.
When Ike and Tina Turner’s River Deep, Mountain High was a commercial failure in 1966, Spector closed down his Philles Records label.
After a period out of the public eye,
he produced The Beatles’ final album Let it Be, released in 1970. He also worked with John Lennon on Imagine and produced George Harrison’s album, All Things Must Pass. The Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, co-written by Spector, is listed as the song which had the most US airplay in the 20th century.
Spector was inducted into the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. In 2003, he worked with UK band Starsailor, but was fired over artistic differences.
In 2006, he married Rachelle Short, a 26-year-old former Playboy model. He filed for divorce in 2016.
Spector is rumoured to have pulled a gun on a string of stars, including John Lennon and Debbie Harry. Steven Van Zandt, 70, from Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, tweeted: “He was the ultimate example of the Art always being better than the Artist, having made some of the greatest records in history based on the salvation of love while remaining incapable of giving or receiving love his whole life.”
JOHN LENNON ON WORKING WITH SPECTOR