There was no more pathetic sight than the prison shots of Phil Spector, wrinkled and bald, his dignity in ruins, his vanity undone, his arrogance tamed; the great record producer – some say the greatest ever – reduced to little more than a husk. Most of the interviewees in Spector, the Sky documentary film aired this week, believe he got his just deserts and it’s hard to argue with them, though his daughter Nicole does her best and a handful of figures from his past, musicians and studio hands who’d worked with him long ago, draw more attention to his accomplishments than to the way it all ended.
The story unfolds over four hour-long episodes: how Lana Clarkson was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, working on the door at the Los Angeles House of Blues when Spector, whom she failed to recognise, turned up very late and very drunk. Two ‘dates’ had already abandoned him that night but he was still on the prowl for female company, so he coerced Clarkson into accompanying him back to his palatial home where he shot her in the mouth, the penalty for declining to accompany him to the bedroom, as was alleged in court at two separate trials, the second of which saw Spector found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to 19 years in prison, where he died in 2021.
On the previous day, The Sunday Telegraph Magazine had published an interview Spector gave to the writer Mick Brown a few weeks before. It was the first interview the famously reclusive Spector had given in 25 years, and when news of Clarkson’s murder reached the Telegraph’s offices in London Brown’s colleagues were concerned that something he had written might have triggered events. Brown, who went on to write the book Tearing Down The Walls Of Sound: The Rise & Fall of Phil Spector, is the most prominent, and lucid, of all the interviewees in the documentary because he straddles both camps, acclaiming Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’ production style, as do many in the film’s first hour, yet siding with the prosecution as Clarkson’s fate and its consequences dominate the film’s later episodes. He’s also eloquent on Spector’s madness, or eccentricity, or genius, or whatever you want to call it.
The producers go to great lengths to avoid the errors of judgement that clouded those Spector obituaries that devoted the lion’s share of space to his music while mentioning Clarkson merely as a footnote. Over the four hours we learn as much about the life and career of Lana Clarkson as we do about the life and career of Phil Spector, his far greater celebrity of less weight than the need to present an evenly-balanced portrayal, with comments by Spector acolytes repeatedly countered by those who knew and admired Clarkson, among them her mother. The oft-used, pejorative, description of her as a ‘B-movie actress’ is soundly disparaged by her friends, as are suggestions by Spector’s defence team that she was ‘washed up’ and might have had reason to deliberately kill herself.
I would have been 11 years old when Phil Spector first arrived in my consciousness. ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’ was playing on the jukebox in the coffee bar just across Mill Bridge in Skipton, where I often listened to records in those days. The melody was very simple, trite even, but there was something about the way it was recorded, a haunting quality that accentuated the love-struck singer’s palpable sincerity, that appealed to me, and I liked the way the middle-eight ramped up the emotion, that soaring high note, and how it resolved into the final verse via a tidy descending run. Within a month I had badgered my parents into buying it for me, a 7-inch single on the invariably dependable black and silver London American label, same as Jerry Lee, Eddie Cochran and the Everly Brothers. I have loved the records that Spector made ever since, including those by Beatles John and George.
In a December 24 post about the virtues of Spector’s A Christmas Gift For You, I recalled that around 44 years after first hearing ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’, on February 3, 2003, I was having lunch with Richard Williams, an old Melody Maker colleague, at the precise moment – 5am in California, 1pm in London – when Clarkson was shot. The purpose of our lunch was to discuss Omnibus Press, of which I was editor, republishing Phil Spector: Out Of His Head, Richard’s critical study of Spector’s work, first published in 1972 and long out of print. While unbeknownst to us Spector was being taken into custody, Richard and I were concluding an agreement that saw Out Of His Head, with a new introduction and revised conclusion, appear in the shops later that year. Cynics no doubt thought its reappearance was motivated purely by the events of that day in LA but this was not the case – it really was an astonishing coincidence – though I can’t deny the circumstances didn’t strengthen my resolve to get the new edition out promptly. Today, almost twenty years later, it’s still in print.
Nevertheless, the timing of our lunch was still a bit weird, but weirdness clung to Spector like a limpet, as this documentary makes clear, and maybe this happenstance was simply another manifestation of Spector-related weirdness. This is a repeated theme in the film and it connects with Spector’s credo that timing, good and bad, is what really matters in life; not just Hal Blaine’s immaculate sense of timing as his snare launches the chorus of a fabulous Ronette’s record, or how A Christmas Gift For You was stymied through being released on the same day that JFK was shot, or even how Mick Brown’s interview appeared the day before Clarkson lost her life, but how the timing and sequence of unforeseen events really does govern our lives. This gripping documentary hinges on that exact same premise – a tragedy of timing for everyone involved.
