Phil Spector: 'I have not been well' (Duh!)

'I HAVE not been well," says Phil Spector, choosing his words carefully. "I was crippled inside. Emotionally. Insane is a hard word. I wasn't insane, but I wasn't well enough to function as a regular part of society, so I didn't. I chose not to." He pauses. "I have devils inside that fight me." The classical music that has been playing throughout our conversation ebbs and flows. Sibelius, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms.

Spector is responsible for producing some of the greatest pop music ever: Be My Baby by the Ronettes, You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' by the Righteous Brothers, River Deep - Mountain High by Ike and Tina Turner, Imagine by John Lennon, My Sweet Lord by George Harrison. But he no longer listens to those songs. The hi-fi equipment ranged in his music room - his own wall of sound - is silent; the antique jukebox loaded with his hits is never played. Instead, Spector subscribes to a satellite service that feeds classical music into his home on tap, 24 hours a day; balm for his troubled soul.

Twelve years ago, he locked the gates of the Beverly Hills mansion from where he masterminded his conquest of the pop charts in the 1960s and '70s and moved into a '30s replica of an 18th-century Pyrenean chateau, high on a hill above the Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra. Spector lives here alone, with only his small staff for company. He sits, hunched, a small figure on a large white sofa. His hands tremble slightly. He is drinking something red that might be wine, or cranberry juice, or who knows what else. He is wearing - the strangest thing - a wristwatch that on the hour makes a whirring noise, like a cuckoo clock, and speaks the time: "It's three o'clock."

"I am trying to get my life reasonable," he says. "I'm not going to ever be happy. Happiness isn't on. Because happiness is temporary. Unhappiness is temporary. Ecstasy is temporary. Orgasm is temporary. Everything is temporary. But being reasonable is an approach. And being reasonable with yourself. It's very difficult, very difficult to be reasonable."

He slowly shakes his head and falls back on the sofa. The music swirls around us. And you find yourself thinking, reasonable? When was Spector ever reasonable?

I HEARD my first Phil Spector record in 1963: Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah by Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans. There was, strictly speaking, no such group; they were simply session singers whom Spector had assembled for the occasion, their name a nod to the teenage sartorial craze of the time. The song was taken from the 1946 Walt Disney movie Song of the South. In its original form, it had been a slice of happy-go-lucky, not to say mindless, cornball optimism.

Spector turned it completely on its head to create something that sounded like music had never sounded before. The voices pleaded and preached, like a gospel choir getting happy in an echo chamber. The sound created by a melange of instruments was so dense, so clotted that, as Spector now recalls, there wasn't even room for a drum in the mix. The effect was dark, incantatory, disturbingly sexual. There was nothing reasonable about it.

Between 1961 and 1966 Spector's so-called wall of sound made him the most successful pop record producer in the world, with more than 20 top-40 hits. Writer Tom Wolfe says Spector was the "first tycoon of teen", a man who dared to come on not only as if he was Mozart but Salieri as well, part genius, part hustler, a precocious, brilliant and demented visionary who would change the face of pop music for ever.

When, in the late '60s, musical fashion overtook his Wall of Sound, Spector moved on to the biggest pop group in the world, the Beatles. In 1969 he produced their valedictory album Let It Be, and solo albums by John Lennon and George Harrison. Then began the long, slow retreat. In 1980 Spector produced his last album, for the Ramones. Then he vanished, seemingly abandoning his old life as pop music's most celebrated producer for a new one as its most enigmatic recluse.

But last year came the astonishing news that Spector had returned to the studio to produce two tracks for a forthcoming album by the British band Starsailor. There was talk of him working with the the Vines and with Coldplay.

The prospect that Spector would even consider being interviewed was remote; his agreement, when it came, was frankly incredible. It was almost to be expected, then, that the evening I arrived in LA there was a message waiting for me at my hotel. Our appointment for the following day had been cancelled. I was instructed to wait. For 24 hours I held my breath, then the telephone rang. A car was waiting for me downstairs, a white 1964 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, licence plate Phil 500. A chauffeur swung open the door. Encased in leather and walnut, hidden behind black curtains, we proceeded along the Hollywood Freeway, bound for Alhambra.

We turned off the freeway and the road wound upwards, and further upwards still, ending at last at a set of high wrought-iron gates. We drove through and pulled to a halt, the gates slowly closing behind us. "Mr Spector," said the chauffeur, opening my door, "likes visitors to walk up." A flight of broad granite steps led up through an avenue of towering pines. The summit seemed to be wreathed in mist, out of which the shape of the castle loomed, grey, turreted, imposing.

The front door opened into a cavernous hallway, red-carpeted and wood-panelled. Two suits of medieval armour stood sentinel. Spector was nowhere to be seen. His assistant, a vivacious woman in her early 40s, guided me through the ground-floor rooms: the music room, Lennon's old guitar resting on a stand; the bar lined with framed photographs of Spector with various music-business luminaries.

In the drawing room a Picasso drawing hung on the wall beside an original Lennon sketch. A uniformed maid brought iced water. The classical music swirled around us. After 30 minutes the assistant's mobile phone rang. Philip, she said, would be with us shortly.

He appeared at the top of the stairs, to the strains of Handel. A small, slight figure, he was wearing a shoulder-length, curled toupee, blue-tinted glasses, a black silk pyjama suit with the monogram PS picked out in silver thread, and three-inch Cuban-heel boots. He looked bizarre, yet at the same time curiously magnificent.

Spector says he doesn't like to talk about the past, yet this can't be right because here, seated on the sofa, talking about the past, he flames into life; names, dates and song titles come spilling out. Old friends are saluted, old enemies trashed.

When I ask him about You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' he appears to enter a reverie. Written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, two of his best writers, and recorded in 1964, the record was Spector's most Wagnerian production yet - a funeral march to departed love.

Eschewing the Righteous Brothers' usual practice of sharing the lead, Spector gave almost the whole song to Bill Medley, leaving his partner, Bobby Hatfield, to sing only a minor part. When a peeved Hatfield asked what he was supposed to do while Medley was singing, Spector allegedly snapped back, "You can take the money to the bank."

"That's true," he says. "It's also true that they didn't want to do Lovin' Feelin'. They wanted to do rock'n'roll, ooh-bop-a-doo stuff." He shakes his head, as if to say, "Idiots". Spector says You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' is now the most played and programmed song in the history of music, beating Always by Irving Berlin and the Beatles' Yesterday. "I'm just saying this because McCartney and I have a little thing going with each other." He gives a snickering laugh. "I'm just giving it a little boom-boom-boom." Spector's wristwatch speaks. "It's four o'clock." "Timing," he says, "is the key to everything."

In 1969, in the midst of breaking up, the Beatles approached him to salvage the tapes of Let It Be. Paul McCartney was reportedly incensed when Spector applied his grandiloquent techniques to the title song, dressing it in strings and choirs. (There are rumours that McCartney now plans to issue a remastered version of the recording with Spector's flourishes excised.) But the album was a critical triumph and sold millions. Revitalised, Spector went on to produce George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, and four albums with Lennon, including Imagine.

Spector's countenance becomes mournful when he talks of Lennon. He loved him and misses him, he says, as he loved and misses his father and Lenny Bruce. Lennon was "the brother I never had. I just loved him. And we just loved each other. He loved the way I worked. He loved the way I thought. Perfect marriage. Just perfect."

The last album they made together was Rock'n'Roll, recorded in 1974. Lennon had been thrown out of the matrimonial home by Yoko Ono, and had moved to LA. He was drinking heavily, and so was Spector. "It got a little out of hand," he remembers, "because it was the first vacation either of us had taken since we'd started our careers. We partied and invited too many people to the party, everybody from Warren Beatty to Elton John. It wasn't healthy and it wasn't good."

The sessions ended in disarray. "I didn't want to work any more and neither did John." Lennon started recording again, but without Spector. Spector continued to work fitfully. He recorded albums with the veteran rocker Dion and with Leonard Cohen, albums that were events simply by virtue of Spector's presence at the controls. But he had lost interest. His eccentricities had by now become a thing of legend. The electric fence around the mansion, the bodyguards, the scenes in restaurants.

Spector's second wife was Veronica Bennett, the stunningly beautiful lead singer of the Ronettes. She would later write in her autobiography, Be My Baby, of how Spector kept her a virtual prisoner in his mansion. When she toured with the Ronettes, she recalled, he would call each night and tell her to leave the receiver on her pillow so he could hear the sound of her breathing until morning. He bought her a sports car and a custom-made mannequin of himself to ride in the front beside her.

Cohen described Spector, the control freak, as "out of control". Dee Dee Ramone recalled that when the Ramones first met Spector to discuss working together on the album End of the Century, his first words were, "My bodyguards want to fight your bodyguards." Spector had taken to wearing a pistol - a different one, it was said, according to his wardrobe, and stories multiplied about him brandishing it in the studio. "He was a good shot," said Dee Dee. "I saw him hit a fly at 50 yards." It didn't matter if these stories were true. The myths swirled and eddied about him, and in the end they closed over his head like a shroud. By 1980 he had done it all. He had shaped the defining sound of a generation, he had worked with the greatest rock group of them all. Finally, there was nowhere left for him to go. On December 8, 1980, Lennon was shot dead. Phil Spector turned away from the world, and closed the door behind him.

"I'm not addicted to applause," Spector says, "because I live a life of reclusiveness." He pauses. "My friend Doc Pomus [who wrote hits for Elvis and the Drifters], when people used to say, I hear Phil Spector's a recluse, he would say, 'Not recluse, reckless, baby! Reckless!"' Spector smiles to himself. His wristwatch whirs into action. "It's five o'clock."

For years he did nothing. He was incapable of action. Paralysed. Projects came and went, unfulfilled. What could possibly interest him? Disco? "Terrible." Michael Jackson? "The most depressing, heinous thing. I mean, starting out life as a black man and ending up as a white woman, what's that all about?" Rap music? "Like the c got left off at the printers." Spector falls back on the sofa. "It's all been done! It's all been done!" How did he pass the time - the weeks, the months, the years? "I studied languages." The sentence peters out into silence. "I don't remember. I don't think it was a particularly good time."

HE WAS mostly alone. Spector had no gift for relationships. "Those records, when I was making them, they were the greatest love of my life. I lived for those records. That's why I never had relationships with anybody that could last." He pauses, bewilderment flickering in his face. "That's why I can't figure out why they have so little significance for me today."

Spector talks of his psychological problems with remarkable candour, struggling, it seems, to find some
explanation for all the phobias, the irrational behaviour, the need for control, for approbation. He first started seeing a psychiatrist in 1960, he says, to get out of the military draft. He never stopped, but therapy was never enough. "There's something I'd either not accepted, or I'm not prepared to accept or live with in my life, that I don't know about perhaps, that I'm facing now."

His mother and father were first cousins, he says. "I don't know, genetically, whether or not that had something to do with what I am or who I became. I would say I'm probably relatively insane, to an extent." He pauses to think on this. "To an extent. I take medication for schizophrenia, but I wouldn't say I'm schizophrenic. But I have a bipolar personality, which is strange. I'm my own worst enemy."

He talks about wanting to change things, as he changed them in the '60s; to shake up the business, to make a difference. But this is all vague. You sense that what his rumoured comeback is really about is self-esteem and survival. Damn the myth, Spector wants to go back in the studio because the studio is where he always belonged. "It's where I feel comfortable, where I feel reasonable." He stops for a moment. "Really, I'm not even sure what I want to do. I just know that what I do is better than what anybody else does."

Outside, the night is closing in. His wristwatch speaks. "It's six o'clock." "I don't know what to say any more," he says. He is tired of talking about himself, the past. It is time to wipe the slate clean. "Listen." He leans forward.

"People tell me they idolise me, want to be like me, but I tell them, trust me, you don't want my life. Because it hasn't been a very pleasant life. I've been a very tortured soul. I have not been at peace with myself. I have not been happy."

But then what is happiness? It's not a good woman, says Spector, or a good man. It's not money. It's not hit records. "Happiness is when you feel pretty f---ing good and you've no bad shit on your mind." He pauses. "Good health, bad memory, that's about happy."

Slain actress hoped for new career

February 6 2003

She was a statuesque blonde siren who idolised Marilyn Monroe. Like her idol, she had a devoted cult following. Like her idol, she met a tragic end.

Lana Clarkson, the actress who was shot to death early on Monday at the mock castle mansion of the music producer Phil Spector, was a B-movie bombshell who starred in the sword and sorcery epic The Barbarian Queen - said to be the model for the television series Xena: Warrior Princess - and the sci-fi spoof Amazon Women on the Moon, not to mention Vice Girls. She was discovered by the B-movie king Roger Corman.

There were 17 films altogether and she had just started working as a hostess at the House of Blues nightclub on Sunset Strip while a new agent tried to conjure up a fresh screen image for the now 40-year-old blonde - that of character actor and comic.

The agent, Ray Cavaleri, said he took the 1.8-metre-tall Clarkson as a client four months ago, hoping to place her in a TV pilot this northern spring.

"She had been one of the starlets some years ago, more of a sexy, femme fatale kind of actress and now was making the transition to more comedy and character roles," Mr Cavaleri said. "We were looking forward to a nice pilot season."

Clarkson's lawyer, Roderick Lindblom, issued a statement on Tuesday from her family thanking "Lana's extended family, friends and fans for the outpouring of love and support that they have shown during this extremely difficult time".

Sources said the actress left the House of Blues with Spector on Sunday night following a heavy metal concert. She was found shot to death in the foyer of Spector's mansion a few hours later.

Spector was charged with murder but was released on $US1million ($1.7million) bail.

Mr Cavaleri said he was unaware of any relationship between Clarkson and Spector.

"I was hoping it was somebody else," he said of the murder. "She was very sweet to me."

Agencies

"Spending the rest of your life in jail, won't be temporary..."

. ah...that would be for me and you....you have to remember he is a RICH guy who socializes with the other RICH guys ....

he is already out on bail...

I expect he will check himself into a drug/alcohol unit anyday now...

and I expect him to start claiming his father abused him...

all in all, he will probably never see the inside of a prison...

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