Facing the music

Keith Morrison Correspondent • Profile

There was once a magic moment in America.

When the music was new, and Supermen rose to undreamt fame and power.

And no one, not a soul, was blessed -- or cursed -- with knowing the future.

(Music: The Ronettes)
"The night we met I knew I needed you so... Be my -- be my baby..."

(In court)
Alan Jackson (prosecutor): The evidence is going to paint a picture of a man who on February 3, 2003, put a loaded pistol in Lana Clarkson's mouth. Inside her mouth -- and shot her to death.

Bruce Cutler (defense attorney): Phillip did not shoot this woman. He did not force a gun in this woman's mouth. And he didn't do it.

It's slightly surreal, this murder trial of the silent little man, 67 years old. The blank stare. The quaking fingers.

And the wild reputation.

Diane tape: It was like he was demonic. It was scary ... scared the hell out of me.
Dorothy tape: I was sobbing and I said, "Why are you doing this, Phil? Why are you doing this?"
Melissa tape: "If you try to leave, I'm going to kill you…"
Stephanie tape: He had his gun with him and said that I wasn't going anywhere.

Hardly the sort of "This is Your Life" that Phil Spector must have dreamed about back in 50s, when he was a high school dweeb -- with a little band whose hopelessly innocent name was: the Teddy Bears.

A teenage Carol Connors was picked by a 18-year-old Phil Spector to sing that famous song "To Know Him is to Love Him."

Carol Connors: He knew that he was brilliant, even then. I mean and I think when you have your first thing out of the box and it's a number one record, boom-- and all of a sudden you are smarter than everyone. And you become invincible.

Invincible. Legendary. Huge.

His creations were so exciting back then. They changed everything.

Mick Brown: He loved Beethoven, he loved Tchaikovsky, he loved Sibelius.

Mick Brown has written about Phil Spector.

Mick Brown: He wanted to make rock and roll records that were as big as classical music.

It was called the wall of sound.

Mick Brown: Nine million radio plays. And as Spector himself told me with a great delight, "That's even more than Paul McCartney's "Yesterday." He took great delight in that.

But it wasn't easy getting there.

Mick Brown: A very unhappy life in many ways. His father was the-- was, you know, the figure on the top of the mountain. Had a very, very good relationship with his father.

Idolized the man, did that little boy.  And so the event that came next was, perhaps, the ultimate definition of the young Phil Spector.

Mick Brown: Ben Spector killed himself.

Carbon monoxide. In his car.

Mick Brown: Which of course, must have been devastating to the young Phillip, nine-year-old Phillip as he was then.

In 1953, four years later, the surviving Spectors -- overbearing mother Bertha, Phil and his sister -- left the Bronx for Los Angeles.

Mick Brown: He's the small child. He's the unprepossessing child. Short in stature, whiny voice, watery eyes-- borderline diabetic, asthmatic. He's out of water here.

And that's how Phil Spector became the high school outcast.

Rommie Davis remembers him. Though at the time, as one of the in-girls, she deliberately ignored awkward Phil.

Rommie Davis: But there was something just a little offbeat about him, and he somehow didn't move in the mainstream of what you might call the cool kids.
Keith Morrison: He wasn't in the in crowd.
Rommie Davis: He wasn't with the in crowd.

Until, suddenly, 1958, that song.

(Song plays)
"To know, know, know him…"

That's Phil on the right playing guitar.

The yearning little anthem of female teen-hood.

No matter that he wrote the song about his dead father-- now all of America wanted to know Phil Spector.

Rommie Davis: Because once the songs became popular and the kids liked what he was playing, then they wanted to have him around.

Mick Brown: I think at that point, he discovers that while he's somebody who doesn't fit in outside. Who doesn't have control of things outside. This is the area, the world where he finds he is in control.

There was never control in life. Married four times. Five kids -- three estranged now. One died very young. And he admitted to Mick Brown in an interview that his life had been horribly unhappy.

Mick Brown: And talking very honestly about the fact that his parents were first cousins, he said … and almost without any prompting from me. It was-- "I've not been well. I've been crippled inside."

Manic-depression which he'd only addressed late in life, not back when he was the hit-maker in the '60s and '70s ruling the music world -- letting his dark side run wild.

Carol Connors: Well, I had always heard about the guns. They were sort of legendary in the industry. You know-- I mean-- there was no way to continue to be in the industry and not know the antics of Phil Spector.

The stories? They start in the early '70s. He's said to have fired a gun in the studio while recording with John Lennon. In the studio with Leonard Cohen, he held a gun to Cohen's head. He held the Mama's and the Papa's Michelle Phillips at gun point.

Phil Spector was the inspiration for that character in 70s camp classic "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" holding the weapon in the woman's mouth, the fictional portrayal of a famous music producer with a penchant for guns.

But what was on the screen wasn't a movie anymore. Now the giant at the revolution of music had become the shrunken center of the very strange case of the People vs. Phil Spector.

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