Mixed up

Phil Spector's outlandish lifestyle was raising eyebrows in the rock world long before his arrest for the murder of a woman at his hilltop home outside Los Angeles. David Lister reports

It's ironic that on the night that Michael Jackson was confirmed as the strangest man in pop, the third or fourth item on the news mentioned that in Los Angeles, Phil Spector had been charged with murder. Long before young Michael had his first hit record, Spector had assumed pole position as a tormented and reclusive talent whose closest friends treated him with caution, if they could ever get hold of him.

John Lennon once appealed on national radio in the UK for Phil to answer his calls. Spector was, after all, meant to be producing his record. Ten years later, the punk-rock group The Ramones were more than happy never to hear from the legendary producer after a brief sojourn with him. He had been working on their record when they decided that enough was enough. The group told one startled interviewer that Spector had a habit of pulling a gun on them. "He was a good shot," said Dee Dee Ramone. "I saw him hit a fly at 50 yards."

All record producers have their own way of working. But Spector's is not one you should try at home. Certainly, Paul McCartney would agree with that. A few years ago I watched Sir Paul turn puce at a Q magazine awards luncheon, when Spector, in his absence, was given a lifetime achievement prize. McCartney stood up and walked out.

No guns involved there; more musical differences. Unknown to McCartney, Lennon had given The Beatles's last LP, Let It Be, to Spector to work his magic on. When McCartney heard it, particularly the lush, melancholic strings Spector had added to "The Long and Winding Road", he instantly added himself to Spector's list of enemies. Nearly 30 years later he could not bear to be in the same room when Spector was praised.

Phil Spector provokes strong reactions in people. At first, back in 1958, they were all positive ones. The whiny voiced, chronically asthmatic son of a steelworker father and seamstress mother, who were first cousins, he made his debut record, "To Know Him is to Love Him" in a group called The Teddy Bears at the age of 18. It topped the American charts.

At this stage, Spector was also working as a composer, co-writing Ben E King's classic "Spanish Harlem". But he was also beginning to try his hand as a producer, with a little-known group called The Top Notes, and a song that was to become rather better known, called "Twist and Shout". After The Teddy Bears, Spector had decided to produce and write rather than sing in a group. The experience of being in a group, he later said, had taught him about payola and the Mafia. Besides, he reasoned: "Beethoven was more important than whoever was playing his music." Significantly, Spector referred to his own pop productions as "little symphonies for the kids".

Spector formed a record company with the veteran music entrepreneur Lester Still but quickly bought him out, showing a streak of ruthlessness that was to get bigger and bigger. Tom Wolfe called him "the first tycoon of teen". But not many were that interested in Spector's personality back in the early Sixties. His fame rested on the string of hits he produced for The Crystals and The Ronettes, including "Then He Kissed Me", "Be My Baby" and "Baby, I Love You" – a girl-group genre in an era of boy guitar bands, with the music defined by Spector's distinctive Wall Of Sound effect. Relying on lavish orchestration, dense layers of percussion and swathes of echo, the Wall of Sound was to be Spector's lasting legacy to popular music.

Throughout the Sixties he continued to make his mark on some of the most memorable singles of the era, such as "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" by The Righteous Brothers and "River Deep – Mountain High" by Ike and Tina Turner. And when his work bombed – for example, a lavish album called A Christmas Gift For You, released just after President Kennedy's assassination – it was more bad luck than bad judgement. That and other works that failed continue to be re-evaluated and praised today. Indeed, it would shock many who rightly regard "River Deep – Mountain High" as a classic to learn that this top three hit in the UK barely dented the US top 100 on its release in 1966. Spector began to be disillusioned and depressed. He folded his record label, retreating into isolation for three years before emerging to annoy Paul McCartney.

He went on to produce key solo albums for John Lennon (Imagine) and George Harrison (All Things Must Pass), but his pop marriage to Ronnie of The Ronettes was breaking up, he was becoming more and more reclusive, and his increasingly odd behaviour caused John Lennon to end their once-close relationship during the recording of Lennon's 1974 Rock 'n' Roll. The obsessive nature of Spector's love for Ronnie was revealed in her autobiography when she recounted that when she was on tour he would call her each night and tell her to leave the receiver on her pillow so that he could hear the sound of her breathing all night. He also bought her a sports car with a custom-made mannequin of himself to ride in the front seat beside her.

Spector's name remained in currency for more than four decades of pop music, and he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. But pop historians have belatedly come to realise what the increasingly depressive and unpredictable Spector clearly realised many years before – that his greatest achievements were really encapsulated in a brief and frenetic four-year period from 1962 to 1966. I believe this to be a less than fair analysis. The influence of Spector is apparent on both Lennon's Imagine and Harrison's All Things Must Pass.

These were the finest post-Beatles achievements of both men, yet Spector has had precious little credit for his part in creating both albums. Rock 'n 'Roll was also given a hauntingly nostalgic feel by Spector, before Lennon had to complete it on his own. It's wrong to think of Spector as just the Wall of Sound man, though that is how rock history has rather too easily defined him.

That definition certainly played its part in Spector's self-imposed exile from the music industry, and his choice of a lifestyle that was largely shielded from the public gaze, but leaked out in rock gossip, myth and increasingly tall stories.

Much of this has been hinted at in the past, in the way that The Ramones in the Eighties revealed Spector's gun-toting habit. More became evident in a recent meeting between Spector and the journalist and leading rock writer Mick Brown. It was Spector's first major interview for 25 years, and it gave a clear picture of a disturbed eccentric.

Here was a troubled man, living alone, with unusually high self-knowledge. "I have not been well," Spector said. "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. I have devils that fight inside me."

The interview painted a picture of a pained man cocooned in his home, never playing the antique jukebox that featured his own hits, easing his mind instead by constantly listening to piped classical music. (The house is a Thirties replica of an 18th-century Pyrenean chateau, on a hill above the Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra. Spector refers to it as his castle; the castle where the body of Lana Clarkson, a youngish, second-string actress, was found this week. She had been shot.

When Spector speaks in the interview, it is like a therapy session with very little need for the therapist. "I'm not ever going to be happy," he told Brown. "Happiness isn't on. Because happiness is temporary. Ecstasy is temporary. Orgasm is temporary. Everything is temporary."

What apocalyptic conclusions would Martin Bashir have drawn from Spector's musing? "I don't like to talk, and I can't stand to be talked about. I can't stand to be looked at. I can't stand to be photographed. I can't stand the attention." Spector also says that he is taking medication for schizophrenia.

Brown recalls how he was met at the airport by Spector's white 1964 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, but was dropped off by the chauffeur a short distance from the house because "Mr Spector likes visitors to walk up". Perhaps it is so that they can be suitably awed by the two suits of medieval armour at the threshold, the Picasso drawing and John Lennon's old guitar; all designed to offset the theatrical entrance of Harvey Philip Spector himself, who appears to the strains of Handel, sporting shoulder-length curled toupee, blue-tinted glasses, three-inch Cuban boots and a black silk pyjama suit with a PS monogram.

Spector emerges as a deeply introspective man, but also bitter and prone to sudden outbursts. When Brown mentioned his ex-wife, Spector burst out with a phrase memorable enough for a dictionary of quotations. "Wife and marriage isn't a word, it's a sentence." He has little to say about his past relationships, or the children they produced, preferring to wax sentimental about the best friends he really misses – Lenny Bruce and John Lennon.

But his daughter Nicole has been guiding him in recent times, helping to bring him back on to the music scene and into the studio, where he has been working with the British band Starsailor (though with Spector now charged with murder and on $1m bail, the band may have a very long wait before the album is completed).

Meanwhile, fans of both Spector and the murdered Clarkson have been posting their thoughts on the web. The following message from one fan contains an analysis that we are likely to hear repeated many times, be it in a courtroom or at a thousand fortysomething dinner parties.

"To the Spector fans out there: I happen to be one myself, and I know him well enough to know that he has always been a troubled man, and that, though he is a genius, he is still unbalanced. There was once 'method to his madness', but he did go mad. It did seem that he was finally returning to reality, but that doesn't mean he was 'cured'. He made some truly great, world-changing, music, but remember that he was also a shit to women. If he was a hero of yours, you've got to understand that all heroes have their flaws – we're all human – and some 'heroes' are truly damaged."

Phil Spector: The 10 Best...

The Teddy Bears: To Know Him is to Love Him (1958)

Teen Phil forms his own vocal group in high school, evincing early interest in things cuddly yet macabre. The song's title was a version of the epitaph on his suicide father's grave.

Ben E King: Spanish Harlem (1960)

Spector joined forces with Jerry Leiber to compose the very model of tuxedoed uptown sophisti-pop: a sort of trans-racial call to redemption-thru-romance with Spanish guitars and the glistening black baritone of Ben E himself.

The Ronettes: Be My Baby (1963)

Unless you have leant in to the body of someone you fancy to distraction at the moment "Baby" begins to billow from a set of straining school disco speakers, YOU HAVE NOT LIVED. This remains the single most potent manifestation of the Wall of Sound, a compressed thunderhead of massed instruments, "bounced down" over and over again on to a couple of tracks of tape so often that they lose their voices in the roar.

The Crystals: Da Doo Ron Ron (1963)

See "Be My Baby", then speed it up. The last word in barrelling girl-pop.

A Christmas Gift For You from Phil Spector (1963)

Spector's greatest long-form achievement. No household should be without this 13-track tribute to the American Christmas spirit, which glistens as it tinkles as it crushes you into the biggest, softest snowdrift you ever did see.

The Righteous Brothers: You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin (1965)

The most performed song in recording history. But be assured that no sappy cover version in the club style will ever match for sheer histrionic oomph the vocal dogfight that is the (unrelated) Brothers' glory moment. If blokes really went off like this every time their babies opened their eyes when snogging, the world would be an even more dangerous place.

Ike & Tina Turner: River Deep – Mountain High (1966)

Probably the "biggest" pop record ever made, with the Wall of Sound transformed by improving studio technology into a Continent of Sound. Tina Turner plays the tidal wave.

The Beatles: Let It Be (1970)

The Fabs' break-up was made all the more excruciating by Lennon sending off the tapes of Let it Be for Li'l Phil to tart up. Oh dear.

John Lennon: Plastic Ono Band (1970)

One of Lennon's finest moments as a solo artist, resoundingly produced by Spector to maximise the welly of a four-piece rock band performing live-ish in the studio.

The Ramones: ...nd of the Century (1980)

Da bruvvers' hammering version of the Ronettes' "Baby, I Love You" went top 10. But in the end the conversation between speedfreak fuzz guitar and intercontinental mega-echo was not a felicitous one.

Nick Coleman