Whats Love Got To Do With Phil Spector?
Like Ike Turner and Suge Knight, Phil Spector knew that great American pop is best produced under threat of violence. Kicking off a bad week for creepy pop geniuses, Spector’s arrest for murdering a former actress seems to confirm his longstanding reputation as a dangerous eccentric. Spector wrote some of the biggest hits of the newly integrated post-Elvis era (including the Ronnettes’ “Be My Baby” and the Righteous Brothers’s “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”) and pioneered the girl group concept that has brought black women fame from here to Destiny’s Child, but he was also known to have explosive relationships with his artists. His marriage to Ronnette lead singer Ronnie lasted only five years, and punk rocker Dee Dee Ramone alleged that Spector once pulled a gun on him during a recording session argument. What’s even wilder than the charges and the fact that he hired OJ’s other attorney, Robert Shapiro, to defend him, is the revelation that Spector admitted to suffering from schizo
