Phil Spector: The Man Behind the Music Who Terrorised Everyone Around Him
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- 11 min read
He gave the world the Wall of Sound, one of the most recognisable and influential production techniques in the history of recorded music. He shaped the sound of the 1960s, produced some of the most beloved songs ever committed to vinyl, and left a fingerprint on records by everyone from The Beatles to Leonard Cohen. By pretty much any measure of musical achievement, Phil Spector was a genius.
He was also, by the accounts of dozens of people who came into contact with him over five decades, a violent, controlling, deeply frightening man who wielded guns the way most producers wield a mixing desk. Long before a jury convicted him of murder in 2009, the stories were out there. Friends, lovers, colleagues, rock stars and assistants had all seen the same Phil Spector: the one who showed up to sessions dressed as a surgeon with a pistol on his hip, the one who hid firearms inside sandwiches, the one who kept his wife locked in a mansion surrounded by barbed wire and attack dogs.
This is that story.
A Trauma That Never Healed
To understand Phil Spector, you have to go back to the Bronx in 1949, when he was nine years old. His father, Benjamin Spector, had died by suicide, and the family eventually relocated to Los Angeles. By Spector's own account, his childhood was fractured and frightening, and he spent much of his adolescence feeling small, awkward and vulnerable.
The first documented sign of what was coming happened in 1958, when the 18-year-old Spector was on tour with his first act, The Teddy Bears. He was cornered in a public restroom by four older men who humiliated him by beating him and urinating on him. The incident, by multiple accounts, shattered something in him. From that day forward, he had a bodyguard. He also started carrying a gun.
It's tempting to treat that moment as an explanation for everything that followed. But plenty of people survive humiliation and trauma without pointing firearms at the people who make them records, or threatening their wives with glass coffins. Phil Spector had a background that could generate sympathy, and a character that makes sympathy very difficult.
The Studio as a Hostage Situation
By the early 1970s, Spector had earned his reputation as a musical visionary. He'd also earned a reputation among musicians as someone who could make a recording session feel like a hostage situation.
When John Lennon hired him in 1973 to produce a covers album called Rock 'n' Roll, things deteriorated fast. Spector routinely arrived late to the studio, high on amyl nitrate, wearing elaborate costumes, one night dressed as a surgeon, the next as a karate expert, with an ever-present pistol tucked in a hip holster. One night he pulled the gun out and fired it into the ceiling of the control room, inches from the former Beatle's ear. Lennon's response, delivered with the weary composure of a man who'd genuinely had enough, was:
"Phil, if you're going to kill me, kill me. But don't fuck with my ears. I need 'em."
It didn't stop there. On another occasion, Spector pulled his gun and chased Lennon through the hallways of the studio, screaming threats. When Spector later disappeared with the master tapes, Lennon's label Capitol Records had to buy them back for $90,000. The album, which Lennon called "jinxed," didn't come out until 1975.
In 1976, Leonard Cohen made the mistake of agreeing to collaborate with Spector on what became Death of a Ladies' Man. After working through a long night, all Cohen wanted to do was leave the studio and go home. Spector had other ideas. Cohen later recalled Spector waving a loaded gun in the studio, even wrapping an arm around him while declaring "I love you, Leonard," still holding the weapon. Cohen slowly pushed the barrel away, replying, "I hope you do, Phil." Cohen also recalled the sessions became “armed to the teeth ... you were slipping over bullets and biting into revolvers in your hamburger.” Spector then ran off with Cohen's session tapes, mixed the album without him, and buried Cohen's voice under so much orchestral bombast that Cohen publicly called the result "grotesque."
Then came the Ramones. When New York punks the Ramones recorded End of the Century with Spector in 1979, stories circulated that he'd locked them in his mansion and pointed a gun at band members while obsessing over endless, meticulous overdubs. When an exhausted Dee Dee Ramone said he was going home one night, Spector reached for his revolver. "You're not going anywhere," he said. Dee Dee's reply was characteristically punk: "What are you going to do, shoot me? Go ahead. I'm leaving. Goodbye." The band soldiered on. The budget ballooned past $700,000.
Debbie Harry had her own encounter. In the late 1970s, when Spector was hoping to make a comeback, he invited Harry to his mansion to discuss a studio collaboration. The meeting went south fast. “He pulled a gun,” Harry recalled. “That notorious thing he does. He stuck it in my boot and went, ‘Bang.’ I thought, ‘Get me outta here. I just wanna go home.’ Why would anyone be carrying a .45 automatic in their home?”
Ronnie: Seven Years in a Gilded Cage
If there's one relationship that defines the full horror of what Phil Spector was capable of, it's his marriage to Ronnie Bennett, the lead singer of the Ronettes and one of the great voices of the 1960s. They married in 1968. He was 28. She was 25. She spent the next six years wishing she hadn't.
Their marriage signalled the end of Ronnie's career and life as she knew it. Phil yanked her out of the spotlight and imprisoned her in his lavish mansion. He forbade her from performing entirely and refused to let her leave the house at all.
In 2014, Ronnie told The Telegraph that she was only allowed to leave once a month "to go get my feminine stuff if you catch my drift," and if she was gone for 20 minutes, he'd send a bodyguard. He also reportedly screamed at her so violently that she became mute at one point. "The last year of my marriage I didn't talk at all," she said. "Because if I said anything he'd yell at me, so why say anything? I was a scared little girl from Spanish Harlem living in this mansion with five servants, not knowing what to do with any of it. I cried every night I was married."
In 1991, Ronnie told Inside Edition that Phil had brought home adopted twin boys and placed them in front of the fountain at the mansion, telling her "Happy Christmas." It was a tactic, she said, meant to keep her tethered to him. He'd adopted the children without consulting her. "We were in the car and all of a sudden we pull up to the mansion and there's a fountain and there are these twins running around.
When she tried to leave, he deployed weapons of a different kind. He had a glass coffin installed in the basement of the mansion, modelled on the one from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and showed it to Ronnie's mother, making clear that this was where Ronnie would end up if she ever tried to go. He reportedly kept her shoeless so she couldn't simply walk out. He forced her, when she was permitted outside, to have an inflatable dummy placed in the passenger seat of her car, so that anyone watching would think she was accompanied. He patrolled the grounds at night in a Batman costume.
In 1972, Ronnie managed to escape through a window and run barefoot to a getaway car with her mother at the wheel. She left with almost nothing. She lost any money she would ever make from the Ronettes and custody of her three children, who would remain in the Spector mansion.
Years later, Ronnie testified in court that Phil had threatened her multiple times. "He told me, 'I'll kill you' and 'I'll have a hitman kill you.'" When Spector was eventually convicted of murder in 2009, Ronnie was asked whether she was shocked. Her answer was three words long. "I was just glad it wasn't me."
The children he'd adopted without her consent, Gary and Louis, later gave their own accounts to the Daily Mail. They described their lives in the mansion as similarly imprisoned: "Go to school, come back from school, get locked up back in our room again until dinner, come back down, eat dinner, no talking, go back upstairs and lock up." Gary and his brother also made serious allegations of abuse by their adoptive father, allegations that received little media attention at the time.
A Pattern of Guns and Rejected Women
What emerged at Spector's two murder trials was a picture of behaviour that had been going on for decades and had been, somehow, tolerated by an industry that valued his talent above the safety of the people around him.
Prosecutors detailed how, in each case involving prior incidents with women, Spector had been drinking alcohol and was romantically interested in the woman. In each instance, he then grew angry after the woman turned him down and allegedly pointed a gun at her to prevent her from leaving. The incidents allegedly occurred in 1988, 1991, 1993 and 1995.
Devra Robitaille, who'd worked at Warner Spector Records from 1974 to 1977, told investigators that one night Spector placed a shotgun or rifle against her forehead when she tried to leave his home after a party. "Spector, who was drunk, made some sort of joke and then said, 'Just so you know, I'll blow your fucking head off,'" according to court documents. She says a similar incident occurred a decade later, when Spector again put a gun to her head in the foyer of his home after a night of drinking.
Veteran music talent coordinator Dianne Ogden testified about a 1989 incident in which the famed record producer seemed to undergo a personality change as she tried to leave his mansion after a party. "He was screaming at me, the F-word," she said. "He wasn't my Phil, not the man I loved. He was demonic. It scared the hell out of me." Ogden testified that Spector tried to have sex with her, but did not.
Dorothy Tiano Melvin, then Joan Rivers' manager, stated that at his home after the July 4th weekend in 1993, Spector had pointed a gun at her and demanded she undress. She refused, and he struck her, accusing her of "searching" the house. He then allegedly aimed a shotgun at her as she ran for the front gates.
A photographer named Stephanie Elizabeth Jennings stated that Spector had invited her to his room at New York's Carlyle Hotel after she'd accompanied him to the 1995 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction after-party. When she declined, he allegedly stood blocking the door to her hotel room with a gun before finally leaving.
Then there was the Christmas party at Joan Rivers' home, around 1995 or 1996, where a retired New York police officer who'd been working security reported that Spector had drunkenly ranted that women "deserve to die. They all deserve a bullet in their head."
The prosecution argued that Spector had a "common plan" of using guns "to intimidate women into staying with him," an ongoing course of conduct that "happens again and again and again." The judge agreed that the pattern was clear enough to be admitted as evidence. He also noted, with some understatement, that allowing it was "a dangerous path to go down" legally, but that the incidents illustrated the state's theory too precisely to exclude.
Separately, Spector had two firearms-related convictions from the early 1970s, one at a now-defunct Rodeo Drive club and another outside the Beverly Hills Hotel, for which he received probation.
The Night Everything Caught Up With Him
On the night of February 3, 2003, Phil Spector went to the House of Blues in Los Angeles. He was 63, he'd been in virtual reclusion for years, and he was already something of a ghost. He'd tried to work with Céline Dion in 1996 and had been fired. He'd been brought in to produce Starsailor's Silence Is Easy in 2003 and was fired from that too. The music industry's long tolerance of dangerous men, something explored in our piece on Charles Manson and Dennis Wilson, had its limits after all.
That night, Lana Clarkson was working as a hostess. She was 40, a B-movie actress who'd had small roles in Scarface and Fast Times at Ridgemont High and was trying to rebuild her career. When Spector first arrived, she didn't know who he was, and given his small stature and elaborate wig, she initially addressed him as "Miss Spector." When she was quietly informed that he was a famous producer and should be treated "like gold," she apologised and let him in.
Spector had a habit of keeping people in his home by removing the locking mechanism off his front door's deadbolt so that they couldn't open it from the inside. Around 5am, his chauffeur Adriano De Souza heard a gunshot. Spector then walked out of the back of the house holding a gun. He was quoted as saying, "I think I just shot her."
Inside, Lana Clarkson was dead in his foyer. She'd been shot through the mouth. Her teeth had been scattered across the crime scene. The gun, a Colt Cobra .38 calibre revolver, was found nearby. Spector's clothing had her blood and gunshot residue on it.
His initial account to police was that it was an accident. Then he said she'd killed herself. Later he described it to Esquire as "an accidental suicide" and claimed she'd "kissed the gun."
His first trial in 2007 ended in a hung jury. His second trial, in 2009, returned a guilty verdict. He was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 19 years to life. He died in California State Prison in January 2021 at the age of 81, from COVID-19 complications.
What the Music Industry Let Happen
It's worth sitting with that timeline for a moment. The gun incidents, at least the documented ones, started in the 1970s. Spector received probation. He went on to work with John Lennon, Leonard Cohen, and the Ramones, brandishing firearms throughout. He went on threatening women with guns for another two decades after that. An industry that knew, or should have known, kept hiring him.
Much of it comes back to talent. The Wall of Sound, that orchestral, reverb-drenched production style that defined so many classic records, was genuinely revolutionary. Spector understood music in a way very few people ever have, and the industry was willing to overlook almost anything in exchange for that understanding. It's a dynamic that showed up elsewhere in the music world too, as anyone familiar with Brian Wilson's relationship with Dr. Eugene Landy will recognise. His producers and managers negotiated contracts. His lawyers extracted him from trouble. His bodyguards and assistants kept their mouths shut.
His treatment of the Ronettes alone, stripping them of their royalties and earnings through the small print of a contract he'd written himself, cost the group millions. Ronnie Spector eventually sued and was awarded over a million dollars after a long legal battle. The Ronettes themselves received almost nothing for decades.
There's a line that connects the terrified teenager in a Los Angeles bathroom in 1958, the controlling husband with a glass coffin in his basement, the producer pointing a gun at Dee Dee Ramone's head, and the man walking out of his castle at 5am holding a revolver. It's the same line, the same man. The music never stopped being great. The man never stopped being dangerous. And for too long, the industry decided those two facts could coexist.
They couldn't. Lana Clarkson paid for that decision with her life.
Sources
1. Rolling Stone: "Phil Spector Files Made Public" https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/phil-spector-files-made-public-116081/
2. Mental Floss: "5 Artists Reportedly Held at Gunpoint by Phil Spector" https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/28392/5-artists-reportedly-held-gunpoint-phil-spector
3. Today.com: "4 Women Who Say Spector Threatened Them May Testify" https://www.today.com/today/amp/wbna7958045
4. Today.com: "Woman Says Demonic Spector Threatened Her" https://www.today.com/popculture/woman-says-demonic-spector-threatened-her-1c9423117
5. CBS News: "Prosecutors: Spector Threatened Ex-Lover" https://www.cbsnews.com/news/prosecutors-spector-threatened-ex-lover/
6. LA Times / Interalia blog: "Prosecutors Submit New Evidence in Spector Case" https://interaliainc.blogspot.com/2007/04/prosecutors-submit-new-evidence-in.html
7. Far Out Magazine: "The Moment Phil Spector Held a Gun to Leonard Cohen's Head" https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/phil-spector-held-gun-to-leonard-cohen-head/
8. Please Kill Me: "Leonard Cohen, Phil Spector: Death of Ladies' Men" https://pleasekillme.com/leonard-cohen-phil-spector/
9. Classical Music: "Fear, Control, Violence: The Darkness Behind Phil Spector's Wall of Sound" https://www.classical-music.com/articles/phil-spector
10. Fox News: "Ronnie Spector Once Detailed Her Abusive Marriage to Phil Spector" https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/ronnie-spector-phil-spector-marriage-abuse
11. Inside Edition: "A Look Back at Ronnie Spector's 1991 Interview" https://www.insideedition.com/a-look-back-at-be-my-baby-singer-ronnie-spectors-1991-inside-edition-interview-72528
12. Rolling Stone: "Ronnie Spector Gets Raw on Phil Spector in Unearthed Audio" https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/ronnie-spector-phil-spector-death-autobiography-podcast-1287112/
13. Oxygen: "Why Did Phil Spector Kill Lana Clarkson?" https://www.oxygen.com/crime-time/music-legend-phil-spector-fatally-shot-actress-lana-clarkson
