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Crime Story Episode 22: Mick Brown

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The following episode contains difficult subject matter, including references to suicide. Please take care.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I'm Kathleen Goldhar. This is Crime Story. Every week, a new crime with the storyteller who knows it best.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I came of age in the 1980s, and my days and my bedroom was filled with sounds from Duran Duran, The Police, the Smiths. I am not enough of a music head to tell you exactly how, but there is no doubt that any of these bands would have made it into my life without the innovations of a music producer named Phil Spector.

SOUNDCLIP

ANNOUNCER: Well, here he is, the man who produces all those records that your youngsters are singing and dancing to, Mr. Phil Spector.

[applause]

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: In the 1950s and 60s, Phil Spector, an eccentric rock genius, blew open the world of music.

SOUNDCLIP

PHIL SPECTOR: My role as a record producer will be important because I have a different approach to records, and there are a few people who still do.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: He worked with everyone from Tina Turner to the Beatles, helping them find their unique sound. But he was also known to be extremely volatile. He would have temper tantrums in the studio, yell at singers, most of them women singers, and at his worst, he was infamous for brandishing his gun in the studio. And as his mental health got worse and other musicians and producers started to forge ahead with newer sounds and ideas, Phil Spector retreated. He was rarely heard from until a night in the winter of 2003, when he shot and killed an actress named Lana Clarkson. In an almost stranger than fiction turn, Phil Spector had actually sat down to talk to a journalist just weeks before the murder. Mick Brown, a writer for The Daily Telegraph, wrote about it all in his book called Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Hi, Mick, and welcome to Crime Story.

MICK BROWN: Thank you very much. Very nice to meet you too. Thank you for inviting me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It's a pleasure. So let's start with the wall of sound. I'm not sure that people nowadays even know what that term means. So what is the wall of sound?

MICK BROWN: Well, the wall of sound was the name given to a particular sound of music that Spector created in the studios. In those days back in the 50s and 60s, the general sound that we heard in the early days of rock and roll, the early days of pop music, would be drums, bass guitar, maybe a saxophone, maybe a string section. Spector always dreamed of pop music as being something bigger than that, larger than that, more monumental than that. He talked about creating music that was art. And he wanted to recreate the sounds of symphony orchestras, but the technology didn't enable him to do that in those days. There were the multi tracking devices that are found in studios now. So rather than having one guitar player, he would have three or four guitar players. Rather than having one pianist, he would have two or three pianists. He'd have two drumkits. And so he built up this layer upon layer upon layer of sound. And then the final pièce de résistance was that he'd feed it into an echoed chamber. And like garlic in an Italian meal, you could never have too much echo on a Phil Spector record. And so what you got was this extraordinarily big sound, a bigger sound than anybody else in music was making at that moment. But the critical thing about Spector was that in a way, his name was bigger than the artists that he produced. And so he would have a succession of great acts. He had The Crystals, The Ronettes, The Righteous Brothers. But he wasn't making Crystals records and Righteous Brothers records in his mind. He was making Phil Spector records. And so these records bore the imprimatur of his name. And so his fame and reputation grew. And it was Tom Wolfe who famously described him as the first tycoon of teen.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It's kind of amazing the influence that he has. And where does that come from? Like you looked into who he was, where he grew up. Do you have a sense of where that musicality came from, where that first started?

MICK BROWN: So his family were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and he grew up in the Bronx in New York. He was this small, nerdy little kid, and he was the sort of kid that would be put upon in the school playground. And music, in a way, was to prove his salvation and his entry into the world. And what happened critically when he was nine was that his father committed suicide, and his mother, his sister and Phil moved from New York to Los Angeles to build a new life. And as I say, he was very much the outsider, but what he did have was this extraordinary gift for music. And he had an extraordinary good taste in music. And he would sit in his bedroom listening to R&B stations and jazz stations, and he got himself a guitar and he started playing the guitar, imitating his great heroes. And when he was about 16, 17, he got together a couple of school friends and went down to a local demo studio called Goldstar, and he cut this record called To Know Him Is to Love Him.

[Song: “To Know Him Is to Love Him” by The Teddy Bears]

MICK BROWN: And he got a fellow schoolmate called Carol Connors, who recorded the vocals. And this song became an enormous hit against all the odds because it soared to the top of the American charts, and Spector had written that and produced it in the studio. And of course, what people didn't know at that time was that this beautiful love song which appeared to be a love song from a lovely teenage girl singing in a lovely voice was actually taken from the inscription on Phil Spector's father's tombstone, to know him was to love him.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But right from the beginning, while we knew there was a genius there and that he was changing music even right from that first To Know Him, to Love Him song, we also heard about violence in the studio from Phil. Like specifically, there's a story that Carol talks about when they are about to go on a TV show and in practice, her voice cracks. And how does Phil respond to that?

MICK BROWN: Well, he tends to strip off. I mean, he could be a very volatile individual. And I think it's only many, many years later, really, that we begin to have a diagnosis for that. I mean, it's clear that he was bipolar. And if we look back at the family history, there were mental troubles in the family. His father, as I said, had taken his own life. His sister ended up in a mental institution. And the family life after the death of his father was characterized by these ferocious, intense rounds between Phil, his mother and sister. Somebody described it to me as being like three birds on a telephone wire just yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah at each other the whole time. And he was driven mad by his domestic surroundings. He was very insecure because he was small, he being put upon. Music gave him a license to grow in stature and almost sort of grow in confidence in a way. And he became somebody who was very commanding, paradoxically, for somebody his size, I mean, somebody who could intimidate. But he was always afflicted by these mental difficulties and mental troubles. I mean, it was a while before guns came into the picture. You know, as a teenager, he obviously wasn’t carrying a gun. But then as his fame grew, as his wealth grew, so paranoia came into the picture. He wouldn't go anywhere without being accompanied by bodyguards. He took karate lessons in case he was ever put upon.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I found it interesting. One of the stories that I found most interesting, the friendship between John Lennon and Phil Spector. They had a real close friendship that lasted until the end of John Lennon's life. I mean, can you talk to me about just what connected those two so much?

MICK BROWN: Well, interestingly, To Know Him Is to Love Him was one of the songs that the Beatles included in their repertoire long before they were famous, when they were the Silver Beatles performing in Hamburg. So there was, you know, an early connection made there. But the friendship was really cemented at the end of the Beatles’ career when they recorded Let It Be, and the recording of that was not really to everybody's satisfaction. And so Allen Klein, who by then had become the Beatles’ manager, suggested that Phil Spector should come to London and sort of work his magic, so to speak, on the album. And he and Lennon became very, very close. And he produced a couple of John Lennon’s solo albums after that, and then the rock and roll album later on. I think there were similarities, really, because, you know, Lennon himself had had a very unhappy upbringing. You know, his father had been absent from the home. And so Lennon, of course, had been brought up by his Aunt Mamie. Spector's father had taken his own life. You know, I think they were very, very much sort of birds of a feather. And Spector described Lennon as the closest friend he'd ever had. He described him as being, you know, the brother he never had. And uncharacteristically, whereas Spector had always been incredibly domineering in the studio, as you said earlier, particularly with the young female singers, with Lennon, he was absolutely respectful. And in fact, he dialed down on the Wall of Sound to a great extent. I mean, if you listen to probably John Lennon's most famous song which Phil Spector produced, Imagine, that is not a Wall of Sound record. It's a very sensitive, very, very sparse recording, as were, you know, a number of songs that John Lennon was recording at that time. And so when Lennon was killed in New York, Spector was absolutely devastated by that. I mean, he was destroyed by that. So there were two great tragedies in, three great tragedies, I should say, in Phil Spector's life. One was the death of his own father. The second was the death of John Lennon, and the third was the death of Spector's son, Philip Jr., who died at the age of 10 from leukemia. And that, I think it's not too much of an exaggeration to say that destroyed Spector. That was a terrible blow to his heart that he never, never recovered from.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Because at the time that he had Philip, and who's a twin, I know that his daughter is still alive, he was trying to sort of calm his life down. Am I correct in that sort of evaluation?

MICK BROWN: Yeah. Well, he’d certainly withdrawn from the music business because by then, his star had begun to fade. You know, I mean, he was a major figure in the 1960s, a slightly dwindling figure, it had to be said, in the 1970s. He still continued to make albums with Leonard Cohen, with Cher. You know, his last hurrah really was with the Ramones and a rerecorded Baby I Love You with Johnny Ramone singing. And that was just sort of a moderate hit.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, Rock ‘N’ Roll High School, he did too, right, which was quite a big hit.

MICK BROWN: Yeah.

[Song: “Rock ‘N’ Roll High School” by Ramones]

MICK BROWN: But then after that, he withdrew from the business. The music scene, it's fair to say, had left him behind. And so he had two children, twins, as you say, moved out to Pasadena, a big family home, and I think was trying to rebuild his life and to find some sort of domestic content, which he never managed to find throughout his life. And then when Phillip Jr. died, I mean, he was just completely devastated by that. And that was the end of that relationship effectively, and the house in Pasadena was sold. After that, he spent a long period sort of rocketing around like a pinball in a machine, really. I mean, living in New York, drinking a lot, misbehaving himself. And he eventually settled in Alhambra, which was this working class community just outside Los Angeles. He bought this extraordinary old castle. It's called the Pyrenees Castle. It had been built by a Spanish farmer in the 1920s, when Alhambra was all fields. In fact, when Lana Clarkson's body was found in the castle and it came out about the murder, there were people in Los Angeles who said, you know, the most astonishing thing about the whole thing was that Phil Spector was living in Alhambra.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

MICK BROWN: People were shocked to hear he’d murdered somebody, but there were some who said they weren't surprised. I think Phil's life was always on some sort of trajectory towards tragedy. And he was a man, really, who sort of magnetized darkness in so many ways. And that fateful night in 2003 was the culmination of that magnetizing of darkness. It was as if he was almost drawing this unfortunate woman, Lana Clarkson, towards him, as if fate was drawing them together. And so this terrible tragedy occurred.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Speaking of fate drawing them together, let's talk about you and him, because you do sit down with him only weeks before this murder. Tell me about the Phil Spector that you sat down with.

MICK BROWN: Oh, well, it was extraordinary. I mean, it's one of the most extraordinary interviews I've ever done in my life. As you say, he'd been leading a reclusive life. Actually, not quite as reclusive as I'd somehow imagined when I met him. It subsequently came out that he had been going out and about, but still, by his standards, a very reclusive life. And I managed to secure an interview. So I drove to, I flew to Los Angeles, I should say, and was collected from my hotel by a driver in a splendid white 1965 Rolls-Royce. The same driver, it turned out, who had driven Phil Spector around Los Angeles on the night that Lana Clarkson died, and had taken Spector and Lana Clarkson back to the Pyrenees castle where she died. And I had this extraordinary interview with Spector where almost the first thing he said to me when I sat down in his lounge was I have not been well. And he started to talk about how he'd been assailed by demons, his parents were first cousins. That might have had something to do with his mental state. I take medication for schizophrenia, but I'm not schizophrenic. So at that point, he was certainly on a wide range of prescription tablets to stabilize his sort of mental state. And so we spoke for about three or four hours. But what was most extraordinary, one of the most extraordinary things about it was that throughout the conversation, he kept saying, and I'm trying to be a reasonable man. Now I’m being a reasonable man. And those were the words that were echoing in my mind as I was driven back to my hotel in this magnificent white Rolls-Royce. Nobody had ever described Phil Spector as a reasonable man, but he was trying to be that. And so it was a great surprise to me. And I had a great shock when, shortly after I’d done the interview, the piece appeared in the Telegraph Magazine. And the picture of Phil on the front cover, found Rock's lost genius. And that was on the Saturday. And on the Monday morning, I was sitting in the office and somebody came down from the newsroom and said, what did you write to upset Phil Spector? And I said, what do you mean? Turn on the television. So we turned on the TV and there was a news clip of the Castle where I'd been sitting with Phil Spector. Now, lots of yellow crime tape around it, detectives in boxer suits getting in and out of prowl cars.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: That's just so nuts. How did you feel?

MICK BROWN: At that point, Lana Clarkson hadn't been identified as the victim. And my colleague, Casper, who I’d worked on the story with, the editor of the story, we looked at each other and we said, My God, he's read the story and he shot his PA, because it was his PA who we'd been negotiating with before I later went to meet Spector. And so I felt… I felt… I mean, I felt shock, but I also felt strangely sort of implicated in this. And then an hour or two later, it was revealed that it was Lana Clarkson, whom I had not heard of before.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Who was Lana Clarkson?

MICK BROWN: She'd been an actress. And at that point, still was an actress, but not so much of an actress. She made a name in sort of sword and sorcery films. You know, it's the kind of… it's the Amazonian princess brandishing a sword and sort of seeing off the vandals. Had a lot of fans, had a big following of fan conventions and things like that. But her career as an actress certainly was on the wane. And she was reinventing herself as a comedienne, and she was appearing in comedy clubs in Los Angeles. She'd had this terrible accident where she was dancing at a family party and slipped and broke both her wrists. So that had put her out of action for a while in terms of being able to work, and she was in the process of recovering from that. And in order to sort of tie herself over, I guess, she took a job as the celebrity, the VIP greeter at the House of Blues, which was this very fashionable nightclub on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Owned by another Canadian.

MICK BROWN: Dan Aykroyd.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Dan Aykroyd.

MICK BROWN: Yeah. That's right. Oh, in fact, I didn't know he was Canadian.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Oh yeah.

MICK BROWN: Shame on me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So what was Spector doing at the House of Blues?

MICK BROWN: On that evening, he'd been drinking a lot. And critically, at the time that I met him, he wasn't drinking. But something had happened in the few weeks between my meeting with him and that night in February 2003. And what had happened was that he was on the way to see a friend. His driver wasn't working that night, so Spector was driving himself. He was not a good driver. He'd hit a fire hydrant on the way up driving through Beverly Hills and walked to the friend's house. And I’m told the first thing he said was, give me a drink. So you've got this man who is back drinking again and who is also taking a mood altering medication. And so on that night that he was out driving around Los Angeles, wining and dining and then ending up at the House of the Blues, I think he was like a volcano about to erupt, really. So he walked into the House of the Blues, and he was dressed as he was when I met him in this rather extraordinary way, with this sort of Louis Kearns wig and a long white jacket. And Lana Clarkson greeted him at the door, and she had no idea who he was. And he got very angry at this, and somebody quickly materialized at her side and said, This is Phil Spector, the famous producer. He's a friend of Dan’s. Treat him like gold.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: In fact, she thought he was a woman, right?

MICK BROWN: She did think he was a woman. Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

MICK BROWN: She was very confused by his appearance, and I can well understand that. And as the club was closing, it was Lana Clarkson's job and duty to treat him like gold and to ensure that he was comfortable and that he was able to get back to his car. So she accompanied him back to his car, and that's when he started to press her to come back to the castle. You know, come back to the castle. Now, we don't know why she agreed eventually to go back to the castle, but eventually, she did get in the car, and she leaned forward to the driver, Adrian D’Souza, and said, this will be quick, just one drink. And Spector turned to her and said, you don't talk to the driver. So they drove back to the castle in Alhambra. And on the way, Spector had had a little sort of portable DVD player with him, and he slotted in a film. And the film was that famous Jimmy Cagney film from the 1950s, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. And I think that could hardly be more prophetic.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Exactly. And what did happen when they got to the house?

MICK BROWN: The chauffeur had been by the car, and he'd been there for something like two hours. And he suddenly heard this faint popping sound, got out of the car to look around. And it was shortly after that the figure of Spector emerged from the back door, according to D'Souza, with a gun in his hand, saying I think I killed somebody. Spector then turned and walked back into the house. D’Souza, frightened as you would be, got back into the car, drove down to the bottom of the… down the winding road down to the front gate, where he phoned the police and was told to wait at the bottom of the gate until the police arrived. And it was about 30 or 40 minutes before the police arrived and had actually checking out, checking out the grounds and so forth. Then got to the back door and Spector came out, and Spector was sort of pushed back into the house. And there in the hall was the body of Lana Clarkson sitting in a chair, single gunshot wound in her mouth, and she was pronounced dead.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What did Phil Spector say happened?

MICK BROWN: Well, he originally seemed to confessed to the crime. He said, I didn't mean to do it, words to that effect. But that wasn't admissible in evidence because it hadn't been taped. This was according to one of the police officers. By the time Spector was down at the police station, I mean, I guess you could say that he managed to get some kind of story together in his mind, but he was very drunk. He was raging. He was angry. He was shouting insults and abuse. A lot of what he was saying was nonsense. But the upshot of it was, who does this woman think she is coming into my house and blowing her head off? His argument was that it was suicide. Another phrase that subsequently popped up was she kissed the gun. And this became the central strategy of the defence, that Lana Clarkson was this poor loser, once a film star, now a loser, who in despair, terrified of the future, fearful for her own career, had been so disconsolate and sad that she pulled out a gun in the house of somebody she'd never met before, and quite arbitrarily decided to kill herself. That was basically the defence argument.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: They really did drag this woman through the mud. I mean, they took a lot of who she was and sort of contorted it, I feel like, to fit the idea that she wanted to end her life.

MICK BROWN: That's right. I mean, basically, if listening to the defence, it wasn't Phil Spector who was on trial. It was Lana Clarkson who was on trial. And she was on trial for the worst possible crime that you could commit in Hollywood, being a failure. And she was spoken of in the most demeaning, demeaning and horrible way. She was a washed up actress, somebody who had no future. They tried to infer that she had drink and drug problems. You know, she was 40 years old. I mean, one of the defence witnesses basically said, well, what do you expect? An actress 40 years old in Hollywood. You know, as if to say every 40 year old actress in Hollywood would be a candidate for taking out a gun in a stranger's home and killing themselves.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

MICK BROWN: So she was dragged through the mud in the most disgraceful, disgraceful way. And that very sadly became, not exactly in the defence's words, but that became the template for all of the reporting that was subsequently done about this story.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And not that we have to say she wasn't, but I mean, Lana Clarkson was a really spectacular person.

MICK BROWN: She was. Yeah, she was a spectacular person. I remember talking to the family lawyer about Lana. And there were 300 people came to her funeral. And he said it was as if almost every one of them said, described Lana Clarkson as being my best friend. You know, she was somebody who had this extraordinary gift for friendship, somebody who was extraordinarily kind, somebody who would always have a nice word to say about somebody, who would help, help somebody. And maybe she wasn't the greatest actress in the world. That's not the point. I mean, she was a working actress.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And she was spectacularly good at reinventing herself. Like in this story, you know, she did break her wrist. She was getting, in the eyes of Hollywood, older, especially in that time. But she would constantly be trying to find a new way to show her talents and to keep herself positive. I mean, that's what I got from understanding her.

MICK BROWN: That's absolutely true. That's absolutely true. She wasn't somebody in despair as the defence tried to depict. I mean, they described her as a woman with no skills, no prospects. That was an outrageous lie. I mean, she was doing this comedy. She devised a comedy sketch, comedy routine, which she was playing in clubs. You know, was very successful. And what derailed that basically was this accident. She was due to do a commercial in the week after her death. She was not the washed up has been that the defence tried to present her as.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And even if she had been, how many people commit suicide in some stranger's house?

MICK BROWN: Well, I mean, it's ludicrous. The whole thing was ludicrous.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

MICK BROWN: I mean, one of the things they said about her, because she was tall, she was tall and she was beautiful. And so the defence would turn this against her. She was described as a big, strong woman, a big, strapping girl. And in comparison, it was suggested Spector was this tiny old enfeebled man, you know, who had been put upon by this kind of ravaging Amazon, you know, who then sort of killed herself. I mean, the whole thing was a ludicrous farce, basically. And…

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But sorry, it does work in a way, because the first trial ends up as a mistrial. So some of the jury must have believed that that was true.

MICK BROWN: I mean, I was in the courtroom when that verdict came through, and there was a sense of just disbelief among people in the courtroom. Spector had been this, I mean, this extraordinary spectacle throughout, throughout the trial. I'm sure everybody would have seen pictures of him at one of the preliminary hearings where he turned up in this extraordinary sort of big Afro wig, completely outsized Afro wig. As one comedian put it, it looked as if he'd been in the electric chair already. And for the trial itself, he had another wig, a sort of blonde pudding bowl that made him look uncannily like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. And he would turn up, he would turn up in the courtroom with this sort of entourage, These two enormous great bouncers and his young 26-year-old then wife, wearing these kind of pastel coloured shirts and suits that look more suited to a Disco Inferno than a murder trial. But throughout the trial, he would sit there staring ahead of him sort of trembling. I got the sense that he was probably quite heavily medicated for that. I mean, he certainly looked very, very disengaged by it.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: When I saw videos of him, I thought, oh, that's a man on medication for sure.

MICK BROWN: Yeah. Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You know, though, the hair thing, I mean, I know we all talk about it and it's become memes and quite funny, but a lot of people found it extremely disrespectful. I mean, we did laugh about it, but I think there was a sense that this was a murder trial and a woman did lose her life. And the way that he seemed to be sort of trying maybe to laugh at it was offending to a lot of people.

MICK BROWN: I think that's right. I think it was. It was Phil Spector. You know, it was sort of symptomatic of his character. I don't know whether it would have occurred to him, actually, that people would have seen it as being disrespectful to the victim or disrespectful to the court, because his whole default position was, what am I doing here? This is a stitch up. You know, he saw himself as being a martyr. He didn't see himself as being a murderer. And he never moved away from that position. I mean, I looked at emails that he'd been sending to friends throughout the trial, and they were full of bile and indignation. I mean, not a single word of sort of regrettable sympathy for Lana Clarkson or sympathy for the family.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But he does eventually… we know he ended up in prison. So there was a second trial. And what did the prosecution do differently that brought a guilty verdict?

MICK BROWN: No, basically, it was pretty much a word for word, letter for letter replay of the earlier trial. What was different was that for the first trial, he'd had a battalion of lawyers at his disposal. I think there were three, four, maybe five at various times, lawyers who would come forth to argue different facets of the case. Something which I also found extraordinary, and I don't know whether this is true of the Canadian legal system, is that he had brought forward another battalion of expert witnesses, so-called expert witnesses who were forensics experts, and these were all paid. I mean, among these expert witnesses, there was a man named Michael Barden, who was a forensic scientist. He, believe it or not, was the husband of Linda Kenney Barden, who was the lead defence counsel.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Oh my goodness.

MICK BROWN: And he was paid $110,000 for his services. Others of them were paid, you know, $40,000, $50,000, and this was before they’d even taken the stand. So going back to the point about the differences between the trials, there were certainly expert witnesses, but he didn't have all those lawyers. He just had the one lawyer. I think by that point as well, Spector was running low on money. He'd spent so much on the first trial on this battalion of lawyers, on these expert witnesses. And, you know, his records certainly weren't selling in the volumes that they had been through the 60s and 70s, although there were still royalties coming in. But I was told that he was experiencing, you know, money troubles. And so it was very much, from his perspective, it was very much a scaled down court hearing.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: In both trials, the prosecution worked very hard to show a pattern of violence, especially against women. Can you tell us what we saw during the trial that showed that?

MICK BROWN: Yes. There were a number of women who came forward to say that Spector had pulled guns on them in the past, and in two or three cases, in circumstances that seemed to uncannily foreshadow what happened with Lana Clarkson. Spector had a, this was long before the trial, Spector had, it's not too exaggerated to call it a fear of abandonment. And I should pretend I was a psychologist, which I'm not, we’d probably say, well, that goes back to his father having killed himself when he was young. He didn't like to be left alone. And in the course of my researches for the book, I was told story after story by people who had gone to visit Spector at his home, and the hours would tick by, and it gets to sort of 1:00, 2:00 in the morning. And they say, well, I really must be going now, Phil. And he’ll say, you know, no, you're not going anywhere. I don't want you to go. You're not going anywhere. The door's locked. But if you try and leave, George, that was his bodyguard, George is going to stop you. So people then have to sort of basically tough it out until Spector was ready to go to bed. He didn't like to be left alone, and that was a pattern with women. He didn't want them to walk away from him, so he had pulled guns on people in the past. I spoke to one of these women personally. It was an English girl who'd been working for Spector as his personal assistant. I mean, she wasn't a stranger and she wasn't a date. But one evening, she'd wanted to go, and he’d pulled a gun and pointed it at her head and said, you know, you're not going anywhere. So there was certainly this pattern. And I think it's very interesting because in the trial, the forensic evidence from both sides was pretty much 50-50. You know, there was so much evidence about blood spatter where he might have been standing, how this could have happened, how the complete opposite of that happened. All these phrases that came up. Impact spatter, satellite spatter, bouncing blood. And I think by the end, the jury was so confused by all of this that it was sort of 50-50. You know, well, it might prove it, but then again, it might not. But the weight of circumstantial evidence was so overwhelming and so powerful about the kind of man he was, about prior acts, the things that he’d done, and also just the sheer evidence improbability of Lana Clarkson having taken her own life and the circumstances that had led up to, you know, on that very evening, the circumstances that led up to her death, because the defence never actually presented a precise picture of the minutes leading up to her death. It was all left very much in the realm of speculation, in the realm of the imagination.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: He does the second time, like you said, found guilty. He was sent to prison, and he died just a couple of years ago.

MICK BROWN: Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Where do you think that leaves Phil Spector's legacy? Is it the music or the murderer?

MICK BROWN: I think it's both. You know, maybe I may sort of take a slightly dissenting view on this, but I know that there were people who said that, you know, this joke isn’t right. I'm never going to play a Phil Spector record again. And, you know, people have said, well, that's it. You know, that's his reputation. You know, he's now once and forever Phil Spector the murderer. I think you can be both a murderer and a genius. But if I hear a Phil Spector record on the radio now, I'll stop and think what a great record. And I won't stop and think, ah, it's the man that killed Lana Clarkson. Which is not to say that that's not a terrible thing. Of course, it's a terrible thing. It's the worst imaginable thing. But I do think it's possible to hold both of those thoughts in one's head at the same time. I mean, the tragedy was, to me, the tragedy. The very sad thing was that in the immediate aftermath of the death of Phil Spector, acres of newsprint were devoted to the life of Phil Spector, the musical Phil Spector. And for a long time, Lana Clarkson was the forgotten person. There was a very, very touching moment in the trial, I think to me, the most affecting moment in the trial, where the defence, in order to demonstrate how washed up and terrible Lana Clarkson was, had actually played what was called a sizzle reel, which is the real she’d done of clips of her comedy act, to demonstrate that she was never going to make it as a comedian. That was her intention. This, of course, completely misfired because in seeing that, the jury were put in mind, reminded of the fact that she was there, she was alive on the screen in the courtroom, that she was a human being, that she wasn't the washed up, hopeless, faded actress that the defence tried to suggest. The other thing was that at the end of the trial, the prosecution then sort of turned that on its head, and they showed parts of the clip, and they also showed home movies of Lana the person, photographs of this beautiful, radiant, smiling woman. You could never do this in an English courtroom. I was astonished to see this. Maybe you can do that in a Canadian court. I don't know. But they showed this video on a big screen up in the courtroom. And there was a soundtrack, and the soundtrack was a song called Peg by Steely Dan. And we were told that this was Lana’s favourite song. And I swear, there was only one dry eye in the courtroom when that was shown. I don't need to tell you who the dry eye belonged to, but I can't hear that song now without thinking about Lana Clarkson. I don't know what that means. I don't know what, you know, it's true. I can't hear that song without thinking about Lana Clarkson. But I can't hear You've Lost That Loving Feeling without thinking about Lana Clarkson. And so, you know, music and murder, they go together.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: They go together.

MICK BROWN: They're not mutually exclusive, I should say.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And it's worthy of her that she influences his legacy.

MICK BROWN: I think. I think that's absolutely right. Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, Mick, thank you. This has been such a lovely, lovely is the wrong word, but informative. And it was really nice to speak to you and hear about the work that you've done on this story.

MICK BROWN: Thank you, Kathleen. And it's been a real pleasure to do this. Thank you so much.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You've been listening to Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. We drop a new episode every Monday. You can get our next episode a week early on CBC Podcasts’ YouTube channel or by subscribing to the CBC Podcasts’ true crime channel on Apple Podcasts. In addition to Early Access, subscribers to our true crime channel also listen ad free. Crime Story is written and hosted by me. Our producers are Alexis Green and Sarah Claydon. Sound design by Graham MacDonald. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner. Our video producer is Evan Aagaard. Our YouTube producer is Jon Lee. Executive producers are Cesil Fernandes and Chris Oke. Tanya Springer is CBC Podcasts’ senior manager, and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

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Transcript: Crime Story, Episode 22

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