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Flashback Lunch: Phil Spector Finally Found Guilty Of Murder

phil spector

After two trials, three sets of attorneys and more than six years, record producer Phil Spector was found guilty of second degree murder for the shooting death of actress Lana Clarkson on Monday. The jury took more than two weeks to reach a guilty verdict (his first trial ended in a deadlock).

While revered for his pioneering “wall of sound” production techniques (used on everyone from Ike & Tina Turner and John Lennon to The Ramones), his guilty verdict caps decades of reclusive eccentricity and violent outbursts—not to mention some outlandish haircuts.

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As a record producer, pint-sized Phil Spector created the sound of the 1960s, using a multitude of instruments to re-create the feeling of a first kiss and the fracture of a broken heart. Through the 1970s and ’80s, the reclusive Spector earned a reputation as a borderline psycho and gun-nut. He has waved pistols at John Lennon and Leonard Cohen.

Bad craziness undid Spector when, in 2003, a dead B-movie starlet was found in his home. Lana Clarkson had died of a gunshot wound that Spector blamed on “accidental suicide.” In an interview given a week earlier, he had described himself as “relatively insane.” Phil didn’t help his sanity’s cause when he appeared at his second-degree murder trial in a variety of wigs that made him look like everything from a blond pageboy to a collision between TV’s Screech and a bottle of Rogaine.

In 2007, a deadlocked jury resulted in a mistrial. In public, the jury is still out on Phil Spector. Phil is just out to lunch. — Charles Bottomley

Watch Tina and Ike Turner perform Spector’s “River Deep, Mountain High” below.