Robert Evans and Crazy Will dissect Phil Spector's volatile legacy, detailing his abusive confinement of Ronnie, who escaped barefoot in January 1972 after he brandished a handgun. The narrative covers his erratic Beatles sessions, where Paul McCartney demanded orchestration removal, and his chaotic Lennon collaborations involving axe-chasing and gun-waving. Spector's descent into paranoia culminated in the 2003 murder of Lana Clarkson, revealing a pattern of violence that transformed a music mogul into a convicted killer. Ultimately, the episode exposes how Spector's unchecked aggression destroyed lives while shaping rock history through fear. [Automatically generated summary]
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Welcome to Behind the Bastards00:03:55
Coolzone Media.
Hey, everybody, Robert here, and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences have announced that three different CoolZone media shows have been nominated for awards at the 30th Annual Webby Awards.
You can vote on these now if you just Google the name of the podcast and the category Behind the Bastards has been nominated in the Experimental and Innovation Podcasts category.
It could happen here is in the news and politics podcasts category.
And James Stout's mini-series, Migrating to America: A Dream Worth Dying For, has been nominated in the podcasts documentary category.
And you can find links to vote for each of these podcasts in the episode description and in the posts on social media for episodes of it could happen here and behind the bastards.
Thank you.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, everyone.
I'm Robert Evans.
This is a classy podcast about the worst people in all of history.
Always introduced by beautiful musical accompaniment, courtesy of our guest, Crazy Will.
Imagine there's no bastards, it isn't hard to do.
No cults or revolving.
Imagine all the podcasters.
What would they even do?
You imagine there's no robots and no Sophie to nothing to hear every Tuesday.
No pumps, no creams for you.
Imagine all the people.
Nothing else to do.
You may say I'm a dreamer.
But this part has made it clear.
The whole world is full of bastards.
And they somehow persevere.
Imagine there's no warlords or tech freaks from Netskies.
No poison gas dictators or libertarian dreams.
Imagine all the time, Robert would finally have free.
You may say I'm a dreamer.
But if the bastards were all through, then there'd be silence in the studio.
And there'd be nothing left to do.
That was beautiful, Will.
The Beatles and Phil Spector00:02:55
Thank you, thank you.
Yes, this was an entire composition by me.
I reproduced this all because today we are going to be talking a little bit about the Beatles and about John Lennon and Phil Specter and his relationship to all of them.
And so yesterday I decided I had so many things to do that I was like going to like lose my mind.
And I thought, what could be better than ignoring all your jobs, getting blackout drunk and making a tribute song for this week's second week here on Phil Spector episode three, which I thought this was going to be like one episode.
I can't believe we're getting two songs.
Yeah, I well, I had to.
It was like, it was, you know, it was like, I got to keep them, keep them, keep the fans interested.
I judge it.
Good.
So, yeah, so yesterday I got, you got your gavel.
Honorable.
It's official.
Yeah.
That was beautiful.
And I do wonder a lot, Will.
I wake up scared every night.
Like, are the did people finally figured out how to stop being evil?
Like, is this the day that my job loses all meaning?
And then I wake up and someone's committed a horrible crime against humanity.
I'm like, thanks.
Breathe.
Thanks.
Breathe and watch.
Like, even just opening your phone, you're like, oh, cool.
Still employee.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Still got work to do.
Thank God.
Thank God.
Oh, man.
Well, this has been a cold open, and it's a musical cold opening.
A very warm, cold open.
A very warm cold opening.
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
Sam Altman on AI Responsibility00:15:29
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're hearing more about Phil Spectre.
If anyone notices that my robe is covered in hay, it's because I just fed the animals.
It's a robe.
If you'd have not said anything, I'd assume that was a regular winter jacket, but no, you're wearing a robe.
No, it's a robe I got.
Well, it's a robe I got at Caesar's Palace.
They know now when you're here.
I remember buying this.
Well, that's my favorite part.
When we last left Phil, he and Ronnie had just been married and he went to visit his mother, Bertha, literally the day of, right?
He went to visit his mother, Bertha.
Abusive as ever.
Yes.
Truly terrible.
When he gets home, he's drunk as hell.
He starts screaming.
Sure.
Right.
And he's all mad at Ronnie and everything because he believes she's taken his money.
And Ronnie and her mother spend the night locked in her bathroom hiding from Phil, scared, you know, and they sleep in her bathtub, right?
Okay.
On her wedding night, that's how she spends her wedding night.
Cool.
That's romantic.
So the next day, Phil wakes up, realizes he's a bastard, and changes all his ways.
That's the end of the story.
Okay.
Great.
Wow.
You really put a lot of work into the song for a six-minute long episode, but I appreciate it, Will.
Not yet.
Well, so I was lying.
You're lying, Phil.
No, not you.
Not greasy, Will.
Phil Spectre went on to spend the rest of his life volunteering at a children's hospital.
Yeah.
Even something with children.
He's just kind of a shitty husband at this point, you know?
It's like, I guess it's behind the shitty husbands.
That's why I'm so far so far.
Well, and also, he's fucked over a lot of women.
He has.
He has been horrible.
He's in general.
He's a horrible person.
So his relationship with his mother is strained at best.
He doesn't let her come into the studio at all.
He doesn't like her being around at all.
Sometimes she does show up at the studio and she still calls him Harvey, which pisses him off, you know, because she like refuses to ever call him Phil.
Yeah.
And she'll like randomly show up in the studio with like matzah ball soup and shit and be like, Phil, you need to eat.
And he's like, no, I know, I would not either, but like, you know, whatever.
Anyways, he's also probably consuming his weight and cocaine every day, right?
So I'm imagining not much of an appetite.
He's not really a drug user as much.
He kind of looks down on drugs mostly.
He looks down on artists that do drugs.
Yeah.
When he does get into the vices, it's mostly alcohol.
You know, it's mostly that he's an alcoholic, but he's super Jekyll and Hyde with it all the time.
It's like he'll go and he'll go through like, this is his whole life.
He does this, like periods of sobriety and then periods where he's just getting lit all the time.
And he's one of those guys he's pissed by people like doing blow.
Smoking weed, taking acid.
Right.
Yeah, he doesn't seem to really like, it's not really mentioned about weed.
So I especially assume since like the Beatles and everything, he probably was fine with weed, but like definitely didn't like cocaine being around in the studio.
He's not the cool party guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
By the time he married Ronnie, right, he's barely seeing his mom.
But that's when his sister, right around the same time, his sister gets committed to a psychiatric facility.
And she will remain there for the rest of her life.
So Shirley is gone from the story now.
Phil will never talk about her ever.
He never discussed her.
And because of that, she just kind of just disappears to his.
I mean, obviously, she spends the rest of her life pretty much in and out of mental health care.
So she's gone.
Right.
Okay.
Phil, at the same time, this is when he starts transforming his home into a literal fortress.
He's got this huge mansion in Hollywood.
Oh, cool.
He's got gates all around it.
He's got dogs.
He's got multiple like guard dogs.
He's got a guy who's basically like his, his like personal bodyguards slash also.
He's like regularly, like he gets his like sandwiches and stuff.
Yeah.
You know, there's this dude, George Brent.
He's, he's around for most of this story.
And a lot of the stuff that happens, he's like involved in in some way, but he seems to be just a pretty, pretty decent guy.
But overall, like, like part of his job is to monitor Ronnie.
Part of his job is to monitor the visitors that come by.
If like, if somebody comes in and like a guest or whatever, he's not to leave the room while they're there and stuff like that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And like Ronnie.
I knew one son of a really famous and wealthy guy and who was otherwise normal, but would periodically get really paranoid while like out hanging out doing normal person things that they were going to get kidnapped.
Like that that was a constant, even when there was no, nothing happening, no indication of it.
And I guess that like, I think that just happens to some people when they start to hit that level of like wealth and fame where they just can't stop thinking about all of the people that, all the things that might go wrong, all the people who might want to take it from them.
I don't know.
Side story and a really correlating side one that is music industry.
I once worked for Balt Getty, who is the great grandson.
Oh, like those Gettys.
Those Gettys.
Yes.
His dad, his dad is the Getty that was kidnapped in Europe and had his ears sliced off and everything.
So it's like, it's understandable to carry a level of paranoia, you know, like I could, and like when he talked about it, like it was always just like, yeah, man, like, like he did not seem very trusting of people just showing up at his place, you know?
I mean, we were going to kidnap my friend, but we just never got around to it.
And he didn't have any money.
So he's just doing it for no reason.
It also, like, with the whole Patty Hearst thing became like a very popular.
Right.
That's such an interesting story.
Yeah.
All right.
So, so Ronnie is restricted inside the house.
She, she can't really do much.
Like she, she's not allowed to leave ever.
The doors are always locked.
Phil always locks the doors.
He's big on that.
So as she's, her isolation intensifies, she began drinking heavily.
Phil actually gave her the first alcohol she ever had.
She did not drink until she was well into like her relationship with Phil.
And Phil gave her the first the first sip of alcohol she ever had.
But now it's becoming like one of the few emotional outlets available to her.
Right.
It wasn't recreational at all.
It was absolutely a coping mechanism inside an environment she could not safely leave.
Like Phil's behavior becomes increasingly unpredictable, alternating between affection, surveillance, and intimidation.
He gets more and more controlling.
He would tell her to stop focusing on her music, you know, and like be a good wife.
And that's what she should do.
And that's her job.
And he no longer even pretends that, like, to be interested in taking her into the studio anymore.
Like, she very, she has no career anymore.
Being her, like, the Ronettes are still doing things, like touring and stuff like that.
She's just not a part of it, right?
Right.
The group that's literally her namesake, the Ronettes don't have Ronnie anymore.
Yeah, they're still touring.
And because, like, you know, again, like, it's very, like, bands back then are very amorphous.
You don't really know what a lot of them look like because you've never seen a picture of them, you know?
Sure.
So no one else knows or whatever.
But because she's drinking heavily, she would, she would sneak downstairs.
They had a bar, right?
Because Phil's in the entertainment industry.
People come over.
Have a bar, but he would lock it up, and she would just come down and jimmy it open and drink all the liquor that's inside.
And then, you know, and Phil obviously sees this or whatever.
Sure.
Even though she's stressed and isolated and going through this whole thing, they still are trying to have a baby, you know, but they weren't able to ever conceive.
And the blame was always passed to her despite, you know, Phil being half of that situation as well, you know?
Yeah.
Sensing that she was getting frustrated with life as a shut-in in 1968 for her birthday, Phil bought Ronnie a Camaro.
But even in the gift came the air of control.
He had the car monogrammed with VS for Veronica Specter, so everyone would know that she's his possession, right?
It's like because she's on a livestock here or something.
Yes.
And she's like, you know, musically, she's known as Ronnie, right?
So for her to, he starts calling her Veronica all the time, specifically as a measure of control.
Like, you are not Ronnie anymore.
You are Veronica Specter.
You are Phil's wife, right?
Wow.
Whatever, Harvey, was that his real name?
Harvey.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
Just the emphasis on really forcing her to like that in front of her face is interesting.
Yeah.
And speaks to some desperation on his part, too.
It's about to get even better.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
So this is a quote from Ronnie from Be My Baby.
Quote: It might seem far-fetched that anyone would put that much energy into controlling someone else's life, but that was Phil.
You've got to remember that the man was a genius and he had nothing better to do with his life after he retired from rock and roll.
So turning me into the perfect wife became his major project, just as making me into a number one singer had been his goal five years earlier.
So, you know, this is what he spends his time doing instead of music now is just being maybe there's other things he could have done with his life.
Yeah.
With his vast fortune and access to the halls of power and entertainment.
Maybe other things.
Okay.
This next part is easily my favorite Phil Specter story.
Like we're going to get into all right.
So there's going to be some very troubling things and also some extremely hilarious things that you will you just all right.
I'm going to tell you it.
All right.
So so understand that when we're laughing, we're also crying.
You know, I want to make sure everybody knows that this is funny in retrospect, but in at the time, I'm sure it was horrific and trigger warnings and all that shit.
These are just the things you have to laugh about afterwards because how else do you handle it?
Crazy.
Crazy.
So when showing her the brand new Camaro, he goes to the trunk and he pulls out an inflatable mannequin dressed exactly like himself.
Ronnie is completely baffled about it.
Yes.
And he tells her, this is for when you're driving alone, so no one will ever fuck with you.
She realizes that Phil has this dummy just to watch over her when she's not, when he's not with her.
Yeah.
He's called a dummy.
And like she talks about it extensively.
Like it had like his face basically like on it, you know, like he's.
Did you say it's a blow-up dummy?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's an inflatable dummy.
And he's got it dressed exactly like him.
Like he's got it.
And he puts it in the seat and she's like, he's got one clothes for the dummy.
Yeah.
Hey, why does the dummy have a gun, Phil?
It's so funny.
Inflatable dummy with a gun.
Keeps popping himself every time.
I feel like he's trying to send a message, but I just can't figure out what it is.
Phil, the dummy, you shot himself in the head.
I've never seen anything like it.
So, just 10 days later, and only four months after their wedding, Ronnie hired a lawyer to file for divorce.
But almost immediately, she rescinds and says, Okay, I'm just, I'm being silly.
Like, I need to chill out.
I'm not, this doesn't have to be this way.
Like, it definitely, you know, probably, I mean, a bit of early marriage jitters because this guy's a giant asshole.
Like, maybe I can fix him, you know?
I'm sure.
Yeah.
I'm sure many of my ex-wives thought exactly the same thing.
No comment.
Well, look, I can't stand me.
I think you're perfect the way you are.
All right.
So, Ronnie says that Phil was never physically violent.
It just, it wasn't his style, but his emotional and mental abuse was legendary.
Yeah.
When she falls and suffers a minor sprain and he has to leave town, he hires a nurse to look over her while he's gone.
Sounds, that sounds nice, right?
He hires her a nurse while he's out of town.
No, the nurse is there to forbid her from doing anything.
She's forced to sit in a wheelchair and use a wheelchair while he's gone so that she can't get around or whatever.
All right.
And then he's not just like controlling her with the nurse.
He's also, I mean, he is controlling, but he's also having the nurse give her heavy-duty tranquilizers.
Oh, shit.
Oh, cool.
So that she just has no like willpower to do anything while he's gone.
She has, yeah, she just put her on pause.
He's putting his partner on pause as he leaves for the weekend or whatever.
Yeah.
She's like a TiVo.
Kids don't know what TiVo is.
Like a Vijimagay.
So yeah, so he's literally like, she has some friends come over and her friends are like, why are you, what are these pills you're taking?
And she's like, the nurse just makes me take them.
I don't know what they are.
And they're like, dead inside.
Are you okay?
Nightmare.
So Phil eventually lets her get back into the studio and writes a song for her, but it bombs horribly.
And he uses it as justification for her to no longer pursue her music career.
Years later, she realizes that Phil likely gave her a bad song for that exact reason.
And she finally resigns to just be the housewife that Phil wants her to be.
So he like, he gives her a purposely bad song and is like, see, it failed.
You should just be a wife.
You know, he's trying.
Gaslighting and Forcing Rehab00:08:29
Great.
That's like gaslighting.
You really have to.
That's on the national level.
Yeah.
It's like on the national stage.
Literally, like, I'll fuck up my career just to fuck up your career.
It's the opposite of what I want to do to like right-wingers who fail out of Hollywood or whatever and try to go into politics is just like make fake fans in the fake industry like, oh, yeah, you can fill fake Madison Square Garden Ben Shapiro.
People love to hear your speeches.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
So, um, so yeah, so she finally resigns to just be the housewife and they adopt a baby boy named Dante.
Okay.
Um, but Phil doesn't want anyone to know that this baby is adopted.
So he sends out fake birth announcements being like, We welcome Dante to our family.
And like when people ask, he tells her, like, just tell her, just tell everybody.
Cause like, obviously she was not pregnant and then she has a baby, right?
And he's like, just tell everybody that that it was, it was a premature birth and that's why, you know, we you didn't see me pregnant at all because I was barely ever pregnant, you know?
That's not how that works.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's 1967 or eight or some shit.
You know, it's like, probably, you know, it's like, It's not like FaceTime exists or whatever, you know.
Like, you could go a good time without really seeing somebody and then be like, you might mess up entirely.
Yeah.
Yes.
So she gets the baby and everything, but she's not allowed to be a mother to the baby at all.
So they get like a nanny and the nanny does all the work.
And Phil's like, that's why we hired a nanny.
What are you doing work for?
So why are you doing nanny stuff?
Yeah.
So she's like, you tell me to be the perfect wife and the perfect mother.
And then you yell at me whenever I'm trying to be a mother.
She completely gives up on having a career.
All right.
And then this is from Ronnie's book.
Quote, besides, he pointed out, who's going to take care of the baby while we're in the studio?
Phil knew he had me.
I wasn't going to argue against anything that might get my career back.
So I accepted it.
And then she goes on to say that anytime she would bring up getting back into the studio, he would either be like, you got to take care of the baby.
What are you doing?
Or he would like, or he'd flip out on her and be like, I've got other things to do.
I've got a call to make.
I can't be doing this shit right now.
So he's like, so he's like gaslighting her back and forth on everything that's going on in her life.
You know, it's like, you know, you can't go into the studio because you got to be a mom, but you can't be a mom because we hired a nanny.
Why would you be a mom?
Like, you know, it's like, she just has this profound sense of being basically nothing anymore.
From going from a mega superstar on the world stage, touring Europe and everything to like, you can't even take care of your kid.
You don't even have an audience with your own child, you know, type shit.
God, that's.
I mean, and that's also got to be getting him off just the exercise of that much power.
Like, I can take you from this to this.
I don't know how like directies talking about that, but it feels like that's got to be part of it, right?
Yes.
And it does seem to be like a common situation in his life, that power and like having that power.
And Sophie, to bring up something that you mentioned before, it's like with his first wife, the reason it's, it's like he has to have control and he has to be in charge until being in charge no longer means anything to him, right?
And then that's why with his first wife, he wasn't possessive in control.
And once he had her, he was like, oh, I don't care.
I've proved everything I need to prove here.
But now with like Ronnie, he continually needs to prove how in charge of her life he is and to himself, to everyone else.
And he takes joy from that, you know?
Interesting.
Okay.
But Ronnie's memoir is full of the most hilarious stories you've ever heard.
Like, so, so, Ronnie is mixed race.
She's black and white and Cherokee, I believe.
And Phil is obviously white, Jewish.
And Dante is a mixed race baby.
So this makes sense for everything.
But shortly after they adopt Dante, Ronnie's mom comes to stay with him.
And Phil sends her out to Watts to buy him an Afro wig.
Oh, God.
No.
No, he doesn't.
Oh, he doesn't.
No, he doesn't.
No, that's not real.
No.
That's not real.
Watts, huh?
That's not real.
You're in like late 60s, early 70s.
He's like, go over to Watts.
Watts was if you don't know what's going on.
That's where you would buy an Afro wig for sure.
It is where you get an Afro wig.
And listeners, Watts was calmly the famously the calmest place in Los Angeles in this part of the 60s.
Nothing happened in Watts during this part of the 60s.
No, no, no.
Okay.
So she has to go all over Watts looking for one.
She finally finds it and she brings it back for Phil and he loves it and he starts wearing it all the time, dude.
Including.
Oh, awesome.
Awesome.
Including to a black church in Watts that he forces them to go to.
He's like, we're going to go to this black church in Watts.
He's part of his own Watts riots.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Okay, hold on.
Hold on.
I misinterpreted what you were saying.
And now it's even funnier because I thought you were saying he forced her to get that for the kid to wear.
No.
But no.
He forced her to get that for Phil to wear it.
Phil to wear it.
Is there a picture?
Yeah, Afro.
Is there a picture?
So Ronnie says she's like kind of bored, but Phil is loving it.
He's, you know, like, hallelujah.
He's dancing around.
And he's got, and he's wearing a gun at the time.
Oh, my God.
And everybody can see he's wearing a gun and being the only white person in like a very black church in Watts, dancing around and clapping and singing hallelujah and doing all this shit.
Jeffro wig with a piece.
Oh my God.
I mean, can you, can you even imagine this happening?
Like he survived through like the grace of people just being like, oh, that guy's crazy as fuck.
There's something wrong with him.
Yeah.
It's so funny, man.
So, um, so Ronnie, of course, continues to abuse alcohol because who wouldn't in this situation?
Right.
I don't even call that abusing.
I would just call that self-medicating.
Yeah, you're just self-medicating.
So she blacks out while driving her car and she wrecks her Camaro.
And she doesn't get in any trouble.
But Phil's then like, all right, well, you got to see a psychiatrist, which she does right up until the psychiatrist says, also, hey, Phil, you should come in because clearly there's some other things going on that are, you know, that are causing this stuff.
There might be more to, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And, and he's like, and he's like, no, I ain't doing that.
He's like, and you ain't either.
You ain't going to a psychiatrist.
And so, and he tells her specifically, you're the one with the problems.
Why would I go?
Wow.
Wow.
What a perfectly shitty response, though.
That is beautiful, Phil.
Well crafted.
Yeah.
He tries locking the liquor cabinet, but she just pries it open.
Eventually, he forces her into rehab, which she actually loves.
I'm sure she does.
She's like, rehab is the shit.
They tried to make her go to rehab, and it was great.
It helped her a lot.
And she, and she, because it's like, oh, I get to be away from Phil.
I don't have to be around him anymore.
So now, any time she starts this cycle, right?
Where anytime she just gets sick of Phil, she just drinks a shitload and gets put into rehab.
And then she's like, cool, two-week vacation from Phil, right?
And then pops right back.
Okay, fine.
I'll come back.
I can deal with him again, you know?
So she doesn't have an alcohol problem as much as she has a Phil Specter problem.
Yes, completely.
Just a Phil Spector problem.
Gotcha.
Gotcha.
Speaking of things that will make you go to rehab.
They tried to make me go.
I have to go to rehab every time we do an advertisement because I'm addicted to our advertisements.
I should probably go to rehab, but rehab is for quitters, says the t-shirt I saw at the state fair when I was 11.
Just a Phil Spector Problem00:03:35
Yeah, exactly.
That state fair taught you a lot.
Thank you, Carney parents.
Come back and we'll learn some things you can't learn at a state fair.
Unless it's the Texas one.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shariach stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
A Control Freak in Truest Terms00:15:15
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
All right, so she's drinking.
She's a drunk.
She's going to rehab.
She's a specter.
She's addicted to Phil Specter.
Yeah, and she's going to rehab.
One night, Phil takes Ronnie down to the basement of their house.
Don't like this.
Don't like this way.
This is starting.
I don't love that.
I don't love that.
He takes it down to their basement and he shows her a golden glass casket.
And he says, this is where you will be if you ever leave me.
Oh.
Oh.
The level of commitment to this intimidation.
I cannot begin to stress.
He had a custom-made casket, right?
He had them bring it into his house.
Like he presumably left it there for years.
Yeah.
Only waiting?
Yeah, waiting until he knew he needed the big guns to pull out.
Like this is, this is high-level mental abuse.
Yeah.
This is like what an unlimited budget.
Like, this is why I would never date a millionaire, right?
Or a billionaire.
Oh, right.
Because they can do crazy shit to you.
Yeah.
Like, they're going to be able to pay somebody to just follow you around for an entire year when you leave them, you know?
Yeah.
It's dark.
It's super dark.
Protecting that casket.
Like, he's not pissed and she wants to go downstairs.
And he's like, wait, no, no, no.
I got to take care of that.
You can't go down there.
You can't go down there.
I don't want you to see a Christmas gift.
Yeah.
Something like that.
She's like, I'm just going to go get a jar of spaghetti.
He's like, no, no, no, no.
Not in the basement.
Not in the basement.
Make George get it.
All right.
So she would claim that the doors of the house were always locked and she was only allowed to leave during their anniversary.
Phil kept her shoes so she could never leave the house without his approval.
For her 26th birthday, she's 26 years old.
For her 26th birthday, Phil takes her to Las Vegas to see Elvis Presley.
And presumably so they could do karate in the fucking back room together.
I would imagine they're doing karate, maybe showing off the guns they always carry.
Yeah.
So she's stoked because, you know, she always wanted to meet Elvis and they're a big time couple or whatever.
And basically Phil like abandons her in the crowd and it's like, I'm going to hang out with Elvis.
Go to the hotel room.
Such a menace.
I'll see you later.
He's such a master.
Have a good night.
That didn't make it into the new Elvis movie.
That's tragic.
Him and Phil Specter just in the back just, yeah.
Karate.
Go crazy.
In 1969, in the midst of the Beatles' well-documented decline, side bastard Alan Klein asked Phil to come to London to help assemble the disaster of the Let It Be recordings.
So for people who are the dumbest human beings alive and don't know everything about the Beatles.
Sure.
Okay, fair enough.
The Let It Be album was actually recorded before Abby Road, right?
It was recorded.
They didn't know that.
I'm not sure.
Yeah, it was recorded before Abbey Road, but it was a mess, right?
They were fighting.
John is on heroin hardcore.
By the way, of course.
Side story.
Do you know who got who I heard got John addicted to heroin?
Was it?
James Taylor.
Oh, okay.
I can see that.
Yeah.
James Taylor of Fire and Rain is the guy who got him addicted to heroin.
Well, because if James Taylor offered me a heroin, I would do it later.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, for sure.
I can see that.
Literally, if like my brother offered me heroin, I'd probably do it.
So they're quite there, but certainly James Taylor.
Yeah.
But yeah, so they're a mess, right?
They're falling apart.
And Phil is brought in to save these recordings, right?
Well, and they're, I believe they're already done with Abby Road having recorded Abby Road.
And Let It Be definitely comes after, you know, like it was, but it was assembled by Phil, essentially.
He flies in literally just for this job.
They're like, here's a bunch of tapes.
Just do something with it.
And it's why that album is generally like kind of, it's kind of wild, right?
There's like these huge orchestrations, but also like these like slapdash little like weird interlude sections and talking and jokes and all that.
Because they just needed to fill out space and it was part of the creativity of the whole thing, right?
Right.
Phil hates flying, which I read a story somewhere and I wish I tried to find it so hard, but I read a story one time about Phil freaking out on a private plane that they had to turn around and come back like almost immediately after taking off because he's terrified of flying all the time.
But he has to fly back and forth.
I mean, do you think any of his fear is related to, I mean, like the day the music died, right?
The famous plane crash that killed Buddy Holly and the big Bobby.
Big Bob and Richie.
Yeah, Very likely.
I mean, like, I think there was a lot of musicians that died around this time in plane crashes.
Otis Redding dies in a plane crash right around this time, you know, like, and Phil feels every one of those deaths into me.
I think it's also a bit of like a control thing.
I think Phil is a control freak in the truest term of a control freak.
That makes total sense.
So I definitely think that that was a bit of what was going on.
But I think also, too, he just has a natural fear of flying.
So he arrives in London and he immediately starts specterizing the Beatles recording.
He added strings to it, dense production to McCartney's Long and Winding Road, which if you know now, like McCartney hates that.
McCartney released his own version of Let It Be that was like despectorized, basically.
Like he took all of his production out and released that individual project as like his own thing because he hated what Phil Specter did to it.
In fact, he was so enraged, he sent a letter to side bastard Alan Klein demanding that the arrangement be minimized.
Sophie, can you show the letter?
This is probably the angriest letter that Paul McCartney has ever written.
He says, dear sir, this is to Alan Klein, dear sir, in the future, no one will be allowed to add or subtract from recording of any of my songs without my permission.
I had considered orchestrating the long and winding road, but I decided against it.
Therefore, I want it altered to these specifications.
He gives a list of some stuff.
One is strings and horns, voices, all noises to be reduced, vocal and beetle instrumentation to be brought up in volume.
Three is harp to be removed completely at the end of the song.
And four is don't ever do it again.
Signed, Paul McCartney.
Don't do it again.
And this has to be like an unstoppable force and movable object thing because like Paul McCartney, very rarely would anyone, I imagine at this time, it's pretty rare for people to tell Paul McCartney other than other Beatles, other than other Beatles, what to do.
And this has to be true of Spectre.
It does speak very highly of who Phil Specter is, that he managed to get away with all of this.
Yeah.
That he could do this to the Beatles, arguably the biggest band.
It's 1969.
They're the biggest band in the world.
Yeah.
This is their last album to be released collectively.
And Paul would never work with Phil again, but both Lennon and Harrison loved him.
Lennon and Harrison both loved him.
Good.
Thought he did a wonderful job.
There you go.
Yeah.
Makes sense.
He's mad.
Paul is so mad, but and a lot of people claim that he ruined the Beatles, right?
But Let It Be sold 1.2 million in the first two days as a single.
And it was the Beatles' final number one in America, earning them a Grammy.
So You know, there's certainly, I honestly, I listened to Paul's version of The Long and Winding Road versus Phil's.
Maybe it's nostalgia that I just always feel that way, but Phil's just feels more correct for what's going on.
It feels still very George Martin-y.
It doesn't feel like they stripped the soul of the original or the mid-decade Beatles albums, like the 66, 67 stuff.
It feels real, right?
Right.
So, so I get what Phil was on, and I can respect that.
I think it was still a really great album.
Uh, there's some really cool stuff about it.
Um, so they finish work on Let It Be, and Spectre set to work on another Beatles project, this time the solo effort of George Harrison.
This is when Phil starts actually drinking again.
Uh, normally he's the perfectionist in the studio, but George matched his perfectionist attitude.
And he, you know, he's scared he's not going to be able to compete with the other Beatles, right?
Like, Paul will release a record of John and it will overshadow him.
So, he makes his first record the record.
Like, he's imagine he wasn't worried about Ringo, but yeah.
Yeah, yeah, no one.
I mentioned John and I mentioned Paul.
That's what I said.
You very clearly mentioned just John and Paul.
Nobody's worried about old octopus under the sea bullshit.
Look, everyone, I figured out how to make a dimmer switch.
I don't know why that's my Ringo.
So, so this starts a Jekyll and Hyde personality with him.
He would endlessly abuse studio personnel for his own humor.
One night he gets so drunk, he falls off his chair and hurts his arm, and then he can't go to sessions for like a few days.
Also, who hasn't, right?
Who hasn't?
Who hasn't had to miss work for a day or two because he got drunk and fell?
I've gotten suddenly ill and had to delay podcast recordings with Sophie, of course.
For sure, absolutely.
Because we're adults, and that's what it's worth.
That's right.
Eventually, he returns to America.
He leaves George to finish the album.
He kind of is like, and George complains that he's being inattentive.
And he doesn't like that Phil is doing this, but he does, regardless, finished his record.
And All Things Must Pass was released and spent seven weeks at number one.
And he's the first Beatle to chart post-breakup, right?
Good for him.
He is, I mean, All Things Must Pass is a banger of a record.
It is, it is top to bottom.
It's a no-skip album.
It's amazing.
And it's nothing like the Beatles, which is the most interesting thing about it.
It's like the fact that he put out a record that was not reminiscent of any of his work really with the Beatles in any way.
He was very Ravi Shankar-influenced at this point in his life.
He's into spiritual.
He's literally doing Hare Krishna songs and stuff, you know.
Yeah.
So for that to be seven weeks at number one, pretty impressive.
You know, it's a great album.
In September of the same year, John Lennon returned from America.
He was staying in America.
He returns from America and he brought Phil into Abbey Road studios to record what would become the Plastic Ono Band album.
In contrast to Phil's previous work, he listened to John's direction and made a record of sparse arrangements.
It perfectly matched John's words and the tone of the lyrics and everything.
So in John, Phil found a kindred spirit and the same for John, right?
John had this belief that tortured geniuses, right, are always the tortured part of that, right?
They have, there's something that makes a person a genius and it's usually incredible tragedy.
And of course, John had his own mother die.
John was a victim of tragedy himself oftentimes in the Beatles.
Yeah, he sure.
You know, he had a hard life as well.
And so he kind of thought both sides of this, him and Phil, kind of kindred spirits, right?
Right.
You know?
Right.
Yeah.
We're both kind of giant assholes to the women in our lives.
This probably helps us bond.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I get you, bro.
Yeah.
I too am a piece of shit sometimes.
So Klaus Voorman played bass on the George Harrison record and the John Lennon record.
And he said there's a stark contrast of tone between Phil for George Harrison and Phil for John Lennon, you know?
Interesting.
And also, Mick Brown, who wrote the book Breaking Down the Wall of Sound that I referenced for a lot of this, he mentions that Phil got along with Yoko Ono really well as well.
And he relates this a lot to the same thing as the way Ike Turner gave Phil his space to work when he was working with Tina.
You know, it was like he was so respected that even the controlling member of their lives was like, yeah, yeah, let Phil do his thing.
You know?
Yeah, yeah.
That does say a lot.
That says a lot, a lot.
You know, like that's, that's, those people are famously controlling of the others' careers, you know?
So in the meantime, Ronnie is in New York.
She thinks her career is over.
And Phil flies her out to London and says, hey, actually, George wrote a song for you.
He wants you to sing it.
And so she flies out there and she gets into it.
And unfortunately, it flops again.
And she's like, all right, yeah, yeah, I'm done.
I'm done.
I'm done.
Right.
Yeah.
John Lennon's album did not flop, but only managed to reach number six in America and number 11 in the UK, which is a pale comparison to George's success.
And with John seeing what he perceived as the weaker writer's success over his over his, right?
He pulled back on releasing music and starts supporting Yoko's career more at the time.
They reunite to work on Imagine, which we listened to an exact copy of today.
And despite it being a legendary piece of work, it wasn't really well received.
And Phil retreated again into semi-retirement and did not record any music for over a year.
John Lennon's Pale Comparison00:05:35
On Christmas 1971, Phil surprised Ronnie with a set of five-year-old twin boys who he had adopted without her knowledge.
Jesus Christ.
He went through awesome.
Awesome.
Surprise adoption.
It's better than surprise knocking someone up and having two surprise kids.
Yeah.
I don't know.
There you go.
Or is it worse?
Sort of.
It takes a lot more thought to adopt secrets.
You got to find so much paperwork to adopt it.
It might be, you're right.
It might be worse.
It might be worse.
She's coming back.
She thinks they're adorable, but she doesn't really want anything to do with them because, you know, his behavior is becoming increasingly erratic.
He's worse and worse all the time.
She's just, she, like, her whole life is just story after story of horrible things.
Like, I could do an entire episode just on Ronnie Specter and the horrible things that happened to her.
Yeah.
Cool.
Phil's behavior.
In January of 1972, he's arrested at the Daisy Club in Beverly Hills after a woman called the police to report that a small man in a karate jacket pointed a gun at her.
That sounds like our Phil.
That's the description.
A small man in a karate jacket?
That's like the most insulting thing I can possibly imagine being called.
I love it.
I love it.
Police arrived promptly and found Beverly Hills, you know.
They arrive promptly, find Specter with a handgun in his waistband, and he was charged with the misdemeanor and received a $200 fine.
Wow.
All the good old days of brandishing a weapon and getting a simple misdemeanor fine.
Yeah.
If only.
Just a few months later, in the middle of the night, Ronnie escaped with the help of her mother.
She was forced to escape barefoot because Phil didn't let her have shoes, and she had to leave behind her kids and all of her possessions.
Wow.
But, Robert, do you know who won't force you to have been in your home in the middle of the night barefoot with nothing to your name?
Well, hopefully not the sponsors of this podcast because they're trying to get it.
They could giveth and take it away, I suppose.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
Quitting When It Stops Being Fun00:15:58
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Maranchini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
I'm taking control of this whole situation.
All right.
I love it.
So when we last left our hero, his wife Ronnie had escaped into the night with no shoes in fear for her life.
She filed for divorce, and surprisingly, Phil walked away completely amicably and gave her everything that she asked for.
Okay.
Weird.
Psych!
Psych!
Okay, okay, hit me for a second.
You did.
No, he's a weird enough guy.
I don't know.
No, he wasn't.
He was an absolute asshole about every single aspect of their divorce.
Just days after she fled during a telephone call, Phil informed her that all her clothes were in a trash can on La Cienega Boulevard.
Been there.
She files for custody of Dante, but not the twins for obvious reasons and cited the dangerous nature of the mansion and Phil's collection of guns and temper for the reason.
At the time, Phil kept numerous guns around the house and had up to five guard dogs, as I mentioned.
The mansion was surrounded by tall fence, barbed wire, signs everywhere.
He's super paranoid, obviously.
Yeah.
So Phil retaliated by claiming that Ronnie was unstable.
And what did he use as evidence of her instability?
Why those frequent trips to rehab that she took?
Oh my God.
And she barely is even covered in guns all the time.
So she's clearly not thinking about those kids' safety.
I've got three on me right now and I handed one to the kids.
So the court orders Phil to pay for Ronnie's temporary lodging and provide her with support.
He wrote a check for the first month, but the second month, he had three armed guards deliver $1,250 payments in nickels to her lawyer's office.
What?
You had to be a dick, just to be a dick.
Sure.
Yeah, the record.
$25,000.
That's $25,000 nickels, $25,000 nickels, and it weighed 275.6 pounds.
I did the math.
He sucks.
Three petty armed guards, two of them with shotguns to deliver $1,250 in nickels.
Now, look, have I been petty before?
Have I, for example, been treated badly at a private gym that I went to and mailed them a box that exploded into glitter?
Sure.
Sure.
Have I mailed anime shit when I had a bad experience at a small business that I specifically hated the owner?
Perhaps.
Allegedly.
Would I do this?
Well, maybe.
Maybe.
Yeah, I might actually do this.
Again, you know, it's like, oh, this sounds pretty funny.
Yeah, I do.
I just hope I never owe anyone that much money.
Yeah.
But here's the fun.
To me, this is the funniest thing, right?
Because like, I mean, I didn't do the math on what the quarters or pennies situation was, but he chose nickels, right?
He could have chosen diamonds.
He could have chosen pennies.
Pennies would have been way more.
I assume that he was like, okay, well, that's a lot of pennies.
And he was like, maybe too much.
And they were like, well, actually, if you do that, we're going to have to have four armed guards.
And he was like, that's a waste of money.
Yeah.
At the beginning of August, at the behest of her lawyers, Ronnie checked herself into psychiatric care and spent several weeks there.
Then on September 14th, her lawyers were called to the Beverly Crest Hotel to deal with her in an intoxicated condition, heavily with the finger quotes here, right?
Intoxicated condition.
She was lit.
She said she drank a lot and she was just screaming in the lobby, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
A few days later, they're called again when Ronnie nearly killed herself after passing out with a lit cigarette and setting the bed on fire.
Oh my God.
She drank a full fifth of vodka by herself.
Oh, honey.
And then said she was getting a little nap.
Yeah.
Nap with a cigarette.
She was unharmed, fortunately, you know, for the most part, but she did have to go to the hospital and everything.
That's good.
That did kill a lot of people back then.
Yeah.
You know, but obviously she's going through this is this is taking its toll on her for sure.
Side note, that's part of why they made they changed how they made both beds and like couches.
There's new fabrics they use on all of those because of how many people burnt to death smoking in bed and on the couch.
What do you mean, Robert?
You mean that all those spontaneous combustions that just stopped recently might have been a manufacturer's issue?
The eternal mystery.
What caused the human combustion?
Was it a life smoker?
Was it a life smoking?
Was it smoking next to cocktails that were just pure liquor?
I don't know.
Yeah.
Weird crazy how that happens.
Yeah.
So right after this, she tries to fire her lawyers, right?
And end her divorce proceedings, right?
But in one of the rarest moments of lawyers being amazing people, they refuse to be fired.
They say, we don't think that you are making sound decisions.
This is not what you want.
Our conversations with you have said that this is not what you want.
You are under mental distress right now, and we want to make sure that you continue with this divorce proceeding because this person is bad for you.
And she does.
And she rehires them or whatever the hell, but they move on.
Okay.
She reversed course again, continues with the dwarves.
It takes another 18 months to finalize the divorce.
She received a $25,000 payment in addition to $2,500 a month under the condition that she never disparaged Phil in public.
She also would, Phil would receive control over her master recordings and most of the publishing leverage and the ability to limit Ronnie's access to her own hits.
That's fucked.
That's fucked up.
That's fucked.
Yeah.
I mean, it has been great before, but that's really bad.
He takes away her ability to make money, making her dependent on his money.
Yeah.
Right.
And then also, she has no control, so he can do whatever he wants.
And it kind of robs her, too, like, not just of her money, but of like the things probably.
Well, just and also just like probably some of the stuff she's proudest of.
Like this stuff that she made that was hugely successful and influential.
She has no control.
Like that also has, as a creative, that's like a knife, another knife.
She's got a lot of knives in her.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So he has to send her a check every single month.
And every single month, oh, she doesn't get custody of the children.
And he has to send her a check every month.
And every single month he sends her a check and he writes, fuck off on the back.
So she has to write her name underneath.
So it says fuck off Ronnie Bennett every single time she catches a check.
This man, this man.
She could give credit.
Yeah, like fucking smallest man in the world.
I have never, ever heard of this level of pettiness in a relationship.
Super petty.
Yeah.
Super petty.
But Ronnie's free, you know, and she looks back on this.
You know, it's like she says she escaped their divorce and she was happy to escape it with her life.
Like she was happy to be done.
Yeah.
So shortly after the divorce, Spectre was brought in again to work with John Lennon.
Things had been extremely rough for John Lennon in the years following the Beatles breakup.
He's fighting the government for his right to stay in America.
He's fighting his bandmates.
He's fighting his wife for money.
Like there's everybody is fighting for his money, right?
Yeah.
In one of the strangest situations ever, Yoko sensed that John was working towards cheating on her.
And rather than lose him completely, she opted to pawn him off on one of her friends.
May Cole.
Is her name to know any of this?
Yes.
So it's basically a sanctioned affair, right?
It's like, you're going to do this anyways.
Let's just, May, will you just like be his little fling for a while or whatever?
He's living outside of his means, but he convinced the label to give him $10,000 to record an album of standards, and he enlists Phil to produce.
Okay.
So when he worked with John previously, he's on their turf and he's and he's got to do their things, right?
But now they're in Los Angeles and he's doing his thing, right?
So he brings in his favorite musicians, including the sons of his idol, Barney Kessel.
Remember Barney Kessel, who his mom embarrassed him in front of?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He brings in his kids, right?
They come in and play on this record.
We're going to talk about them in a minute.
He developed a joy for amyl nitrates.
Robert, you're a big fan of nail amyl nitrates?
Like coppers?
Yeah.
Coppers.
Who doesn't love a good amyl nitrate every now and again and again and again?
May Pang remembers that he just smelled like old socks all the time.
Is it because he's huffing them out of socks?
No, I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
But she just says he smells like old socks.
Or VCR cleaner, I guess.
I don't know.
Anyway, he'd show up wearing a holster, right, with a gun in it.
He'd show up and he'd dance around with his guns all flicked.
He's 35 at this point, right?
It's like he's a grown-ass man.
He's a grown man.
Yeah.
John would drink vodka straight from the bottle because he's depressed.
And Phil would drink this wine called Manischewitz, which is basically like, it's like a Jewish ceremony wine.
Right.
You can get it in most grocery stores.
I don't recommend it.
It doesn't taste good.
Nobody says that it tastes good.
I've never had it.
And I was going to just get a bottle of it for the episode.
But you know what?
I'll just drink whiskey instead.
We'll play everybody's favorite game.
It's that expensive, but it's not good.
It's grape.
It tastes like grape juice with alcohol in it, but also the grape juice is bad.
Right, right.
Yeah, yeah.
So really shitty wine.
They'd explode into arguments about the direction of the music and things were often hectic.
One night, Elton John comes by and he's hanging out for like a little bit and he's like, I got to go.
And he leaves and he tells the guy that brought him, he's like, what the fuck was going on?
They're like, yeah, they're just like that.
They're just, and he's like, I'm so glad we left.
Like, this sucks.
Yeah.
Phil would, because they're arguing all the time, Phil started dressing in ridiculous outfits.
He'd show up dressed like a captain or dress like a, you know, like a pirate or like crazy, like just random outfits all the time.
He'd show up dressed like a waiter or something, you know, just look ridiculous.
But then eventually they'd get drunk and then they'd fight.
One night, Chuck Berry comes by Phil's house to meet with John.
And John's a big fan of Chuck Berry.
Like a lot of the Beatles' music came because of Chuck Berry.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, obviously.
He helped.
Phil is just in the other room playing music so loudly that no one can hear anything.
And so Chuck just gets mad and leaves.
Yeah.
Which, by the way, presumably so that he could go watch PP tapes or traffic an underage girl across state lines because he's a side bastard.
Yeah.
If you don't know Chuck Berry is he's he was a founder of Rock and Roll other than Big Mama Thornton and Sister Rosetta.
He hoped to found Rock and Roll and found a lot of the bad things rock and roll musicians did.
He is one of the reasons why the man act was so successful was because he actually was trafficking a 14 year old girl across state lines for purposes of sex.
And he got convicted, which is crazy.
Yes.
He's sentenced to three years in prison for said crime.
He was a black man, so he got convicted as opposed to being a president.
Yes, yeah, absolutely.
As things go.
As things tend to go.
So Phil would always play games with John's, you know, fragile mental state and everything.
He'd, he'd call him John would call him when he was supposed to be at the studio and he'd be like, yeah, I'm on my way.
And then he just wouldn't show up, you know, and John's like wasting money on this studio shit, which, by the way, we find out later that Phil has been kind of grifting the whole thing.
He's paying for the sessions himself so that he can maintain control of things and so that he can build John's label.
It's a whole thing.
We'll get to it in a second.
But so one night, John gets blasted, right?
He gets shit faced.
And him and another guy, his bodyguard, take him to Lou Adler's house where John was staying.
And they tied him to the bed.
And John thinks they're going to rape him.
He thinks they're going to sexually assault him.
And he freaks out.
Like he loses.
Phil gets a black eye.
Like it's, they fight.
They physically fight.
Like, I don't know.
John was obviously very, very drunk.
Like, they don't, it's not, it's not insinuated that that was actually, that a sexual assault was actually going to happen.
But for whatever reason, John thinks that that's what's going to happen.
And he freaks out.
And they, they, they tie him to the bed.
And probably not a good way to make him not think that's happening.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then he eventually like gets out or whatever, but they leave and uh and Phil has to wear makeup on his bruised eye for a couple days and stuff.
Jesus.
The sessions are so crazy that AM Studios evicts them from the studio.
They're like, Phil's waving a gun around during sessions.
This is too, too much shit.
Right.
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
Something is going on.
We don't think our insurance covers whatever you're doing.
Yes.
Right.
And so they kick him out and they head over to record plant, which is especially hilarious.
If you know the so record plan is this famous Hollywood studio.
There's a lot of record plants around the world, but the record plant in Hollywood is kind of a famous Hollywood studio, especially currently.
It just shut down like a year ago, but prior to that, it was like the party studio.
It was the Arizona State University of Studios.
So the fact that they got kicked out of AM, which is now owned by John Mayer and called Chaplin Studios or something like that, which is a very professional, fancy studio to go to record plant that's basically like, yeah, we let people party.
This is where at record plant, Phil fires his gun into the ceiling of the studio.
So record plant's like, yeah, we'll have you.
And like, first night, he's like, what is the context?
Is he trying to emphasize a point?
Is it using it like a punctuation mark?
Is it just an accident?
So he gets into an argument of some type with Mal Evans, who is a famous like kind of fifth Beetle situation.
He's he's like their roadie.
He's their Sphixer.
The Atmosphere Was One of Guns00:14:59
He does everything.
He's hanging out with John Lennon and he is very trusted by the group, right?
Gotcha.
And he gets into an argument with Phil, presumably about like, hey, man, you got to stop doing some dumb shit or whatever.
Hey, man, did you try to molest John Lennon?
Something like that.
Phil, as like a measure of anger, pulls his gun out and he says, accidentally fires his gun into the studio, which says something, right?
Yeah.
John turns to him like, and he's like, Phil, if you're going to shoot me, shoot me, but don't fuck with me ears.
He's like, I need them to listen with.
Oh, my God.
What a great response.
Honestly, that's a pretty good thing.
He's like, if you're going to shoot me, shoot me, but like, I need my ears, bro.
Don't shoot guns beside my head, Dick.
That's pretty cool.
I got to give it to him.
That's pretty cool.
Everybody thinks Phil is just shooting blanks in these guns, right?
Nope.
But the next day, Mal Evans shows up to John Lennon's house with the bullet from the ceiling.
He's like, here's the bullet from last night.
And John's like, what bullet?
And he's like, the bullet that he fired into the ceiling.
He's like, he's got bullets in that thing.
That's a real gun?
Yes, it's a real gun.
Right.
So shortly after that incident, John returns to New York City.
And one night he receives a phone call from Phil claiming that the studio had burnt down and they lost everything.
So John's like, whoa, what?
What was going on?
He calls the studio and they're like, there ain't no fire.
What are you talking about, man?
There's no fire here.
And then, so he's like, what the fuck is going on?
And then a week later, Phil calls again, this time ranting about helicopters surrounding the house.
Right.
He's like, there's helicopters surrounding the house.
Right.
And he says, but don't worry, I got the tapes.
I got the tapes.
Right.
And so John eventually discovers basically Phyllis paid for the entire session, which means in the recording world, if you pay for it, you own the tapes.
The tapes are released to the person who pays for them, right?
Okay.
You own all of John Lennon's work if you own those tapes, right?
And so they get a bill from Phil's label for $90,000, right?
Oh, God.
And they're like, what the fuck?
Apparently he's like, he's, he's paying for all the sessions.
And then he's doing the old classic rebill at like 170% of the cost of whatever it is type thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That Hollywood shit.
Yeah.
So when Bob Mercer of EMI Capital went to Phil's sunset office to retrieve the tapes, Phil chased him down a flight of stairs with an axe.
Yeah!
He's a big brilliance.
The album wasn't released until 1975 with only five tracks produced by Spectre and another eight that John recorded without him.
So obviously a mess.
So I mentioned before Barney Kessel's two sons, Dan and David, they start hanging out with Phil during the Lennon sessions.
And this is the first time that they come to his house.
And the first time they come to his house, he greeted them wearing a 38.
And he asked them if they like guns.
Of course.
Yes.
Absolutely.
They said yes, of course, because, you know, who doesn't?
And he takes them into the backyard in Hollywood, remember?
And they spend a few hours shooting at old records.
They, they idolize him.
They love this dude.
Like, they think he is the epitome of the rock star mentality, right?
And to be fair, you know, he's like in his 30s.
He's shooting guns.
He's partying with John Lennon.
Like, he is kind of a rock star.
He's getting away with all sorts of crimes.
Sure.
He's kind of a rock star, right?
Definitely.
Yeah.
He starts treating them like his kids, right?
Which is fucked because he has kids and he is currently locking them in their rooms and they're under the they're under the supervision of a governess who doesn't let them do shit.
Right.
Meanwhile, he'd take the Kessels to Muhammad Ali fights and even took them to Vegas to see Elvis and brought them backstage after the show to hang out, which is super fucked because he just didn't take Ronnie backstage.
Right, right.
Not his wife, of course.
In their eyes, Phil can do no wrong.
They love him, dude.
To this day, they always like, hey, Phil was the best, right?
You know, I mean, he's a legend at this point, you know?
He's a legitimate legend.
So.
He's veering out of control with his drinking and his relationships.
At one point, this writer, Roy Carr, is brought to LA from London with the task of writing a book about him.
One night, in between telling fantastical stories like Bruce Lee was my bodyguard once and how he had worked as an undercover agent in Paris.
Sure.
Spectre announced that he needed to pee and he gets up and walks out only to come back wearing no shirt and a revolver in his waistband and playing the accordion.
One thing we've learned about him is that no matter what he is or isn't wearing, he will have a gun.
He's always got a gun on him.
Always got a gun on him.
Always got a gun on him and he's always doing something wild.
He's like Frank from Always Sunny.
Yes, yes, very much.
Picture him as Skinny Frank, a very little man with a gun.
He's a little man with always.
So I started blasting him.
Yeah.
Just ready to shoot.
So Carr says he couldn't tell what was fact or fiction when it came to Phil, but he does know that like without a doubt, Phil has intense loneliness issues.
Like he would get anytime Carr would prepare to leave.
Like he'd be working all day taking notes and they'd be like, okay, all right, well, time to go.
And he would go, no, no, no, stay for a little bit longer.
Stay, don't leave.
Don't leave.
So he believes that Phil is even following him around town.
One night, Phil's assistant was sent to pick him up, and they get in the car and she looks in the rearview mirror and she sees Phil and the Kessel brothers in a Cadillac with shotguns.
And they just chase them all over Hollywood until they escape, right?
And then they just, there's no explanation given for why they did this.
Like the next day, they're like, Phil, why did you guys chase us around with shotguns last night?
And he's just like, what are you talking about?
What do you mean?
I didn't do that.
I didn't do that.
I always have a little gun.
Another time, Phil picks up Carr and the Kessel boys with some mysterious people in the car and they fill the car with pumped shotguns and rifles.
And then they go to this Cantonese restaurant where they ate dinner by themselves all roped off in this little section.
And then after dinner, they just go back to Phil's house and Phil shot at a tree with a pistol for like an hour, right?
Yeah, yeah, okay, sure.
So he's just sounds like Phil.
He's just living La Vita Loka, bro.
He's got a lot of bullets with him to shoot for an hour, dude.
Yes, he absolutely did.
When Carr returns to England, Phil tries to give him a pistol, and he's like, I can't take a pistol through customs.
Every country doesn't just let you take guns there, Phil.
So funny.
In 1974, Phil is brought in to produce for Cher.
You know, Cher is in his life.
But Cher is no longer with Sonny Bono now.
She's with David Geffen.
And David Geffen had become her manager as well as like her label head, as well as her boyfriend, as well as like every, he's everything, right?
Does he like even have any connection to the music industry or no?
David Geffen?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, but here's the, so here's the thing.
Phil hates him because he's like, he's a kind of a nepo baby in the situation.
Like he doesn't know music.
He doesn't, he's not a musician.
He didn't come up that way.
He came up through like the business side of the industry and he gets lucky.
He's just to see starts dating Cher basically, becomes her manager, becomes a label head, starts getting all these positions of like authority and shit.
And Phil hates him.
Phil despises him, right?
Interesting.
And one night, David Geffen tells Phil, hey, man, maybe you should try this with Cher's song.
And Phil punched him in the face and told him to get out of here, you fucking F-slur.
Great.
Okay.
Cher is like, Phil, what are you doing?
Chill the fuck out.
And Phil does, right?
And they just go back to work, right?
And that's like the type of way Phil is.
He'll just haul off and punch somebody in the face in the studio.
Call him a slur and then get right back to work.
You know, all in a day's work.
You know?
Yeah, all in a day's work.
Look, he puts his gun on one gun at a time, the same that you do.
Yeah, same as all of us.
Phil dated after Ronnie left.
One of those women is a woman named Deborah Robotai.
She starts as his assistant, then becomes his lover, right?
She was married when she starts working with him, but Phil's crazy hours and like constantly having to like answer ruins her marriage.
And then one night after their kind of flirting office flirtation or whatever, Phil walks into her car, gives her a kiss, and now, you know, now they're dating her.
But he's always mistreating her.
He'd be super sweet and loving, and then all of a sudden begins screaming and calling her name.
One night during an argument at dinner, he dumps a bowl of noodles on her head.
So they go through this cycle where it's like, yeah, he's just a shit, dude.
Noodles.
They're at dinner and he's just like, she's being a huge ass.
He takes noodles.
Yeah.
And so she.
He noodled her noodle.
Sorry.
So he'd get mad.
Boo, that dad joke sucked.
So she'd get mad and quit.
And then he'd send her like a dozen roses and she'd, you know, forgive him and come back.
And it just keeps kind of doing this, right?
It's this like constant like revolving door of Phil Specter where he does something shitty and then he gets super mad and they have a big argument and then he apologizes the next day or makes no mention of it whatsoever.
Like sometimes she'd like, he'd do horrible things and then just the next day he'd be like, what are you talking about?
I didn't do that.
I don't know.
That doesn't sound like me.
Yeah.
Ladies, don't take back shitty little men.
Yeah.
One night, Tempers flared and he grabbed a shotgun and put it to her temple, telling her he would kill her if she left.
She calmed him by telling him he's being silly and that he should open the door and let her leave.
But as soon as he does calm down, she bolts out of there, right?
But she does say she never thought Phil would actually kill her, but she did think he might by accident.
Spoiler.
Okay.
Yeah.
Not much better.
Yeah.
In November of 1975, a parking attendant claimed that Phil pulled a gun on him and told him to get the fuck away from me before driving away.
He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor brandishing a firearm and two years of probation, provided he not owned any more firearms.
Robert, can you guess who kept owning firearms?
I'm going to guess it's Phil Spector.
And I want to remind everybody, we talk about him carrying a gun everywhere.
At this period of time, there weren't really concealed carry laws in most places.
Like there were some ways, if you were like a bodyguard, there were ways people could legally carry concealed guns in cities and stuff, but it wasn't like it is today.
My point is that Phil was committing a felony basically every time he walked out the door.
Yes.
From this day on, he is absolutely committing a felony because he's not supposed to be carrying any more guns.
He's not supposed to have any of them.
He's not supposed to have any guns.
Yeah.
So Phil Specter, then in the mid-1970s, he starts working with Leonard Cohen, right?
And this is crazy for everybody in the world, right?
This is like, this is like, what's the, what's the, what, Jesse Wells, the little folk kid that sings in the field?
This is like him working with Max Martin, right?
Like, it's like, it's, you know, it's like, what, why would he be with like a pop producer?
This doesn't make any sense.
Yeah.
So everybody's like already thinks it's kind of strange, right?
But Spectre thinks like, hey, maybe this will be like a really crazy inspired thing.
So they make the 1977 album Death of a Ladies Man.
The sessions quickly deteriorated into chaos, fueled by Spectre's alcohol abuse, erratic behavior, and obsession with dominance inside the studio.
Cohen later described Spectre as volatile and deeply intimidating, recounting an incident in which Spectre allegedly pressed a loaded gun against Cohen's head during a recording session and declared, Leonard, I love you.
Cohen responded, I hope you do.
All these rock stars have the coolest responses to Phil Specter putting a gun to their head.
Really funny.
Yeah.
And honestly, of all the rock stars I expected to be cool with a pistol pointed at their fucking soul, Leonard Cohen's got to be top of the list.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In another incident, Spectre pulled a gun on the violin player, Bobby Bruce, which, by the way, the violin player, like, yeah, I pulled a gun on the guy.
Yeah, I was pulling a gun on a daycare teacher, man.
Like, you're like the most innocent person you can find.
It's like, there's extra bad that you're, this guy went to school, man.
It's like a gang enhancement thing on your sentencing where Leno, you pulled a gun on a violinist.
That's an extra five years.
Yes.
Yes, absolutely.
So Spectre took control of the final mixes and didn't even allow Leonard Cohen to hear them.
He didn't allow him to be present.
He layers all of his sounds into it and over Cohen's stripped down songwriting, which is what he is known for.
And they made a record that Cohen doesn't even stand on himself.
He doesn't think that it's very good.
But Cohen said of this, of his time with Phil, quote, in that state, he found himself, which was post-Wagnerian.
I would say Hitlerian.
The atmosphere was one of guns.
I mean, that's really what was going on.
Guns.
The music was a subsidiary, an enterprise.
People were armed to the teeth and everybody was drunk or intoxicated on other items.
So you were slipping over bullets and biting into revolvers in your hamburger.
There were guns everywhere.
Why did he even lose the rice?
That's one of those things where I have to assume that's like a joke for flavor, but also maybe someone hit a revolver.
Yeah, a hamburger.
Somebody was like, hey, Leonard, I got revolvers and some big hamburgers.
Hey, hey, Leonard, I got you a hamburger.
Oh, cool.
Thanks, man.
What?
What is going on here?
When it was released in 1978, it was critically panned.
Everybody hated it.
Specter claimed, this is one thing I love about Phil Specter: anytime you shit talk Phil Spector, he will shit talk back and say, like, yeah, I got hate mail from all eight of your fans.
It's just so, so disrespectful.
Leonard Cohen and Revolvers00:07:25
Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah.
You guys really love it, all eight of them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So while he's cultivating this brilliant and eccentric producer, his family home is horrible.
He treats his kids horrible.
He, oh, real quick, when I was mentioning the Barney Kessel kids, Dan and Dan and David, how old did you get the sense that they were?
You know, they're hanging out.
They're driving around shooting shotguns out of Cadillac.
16 or 20, maybe?
Yeah, late teens, early 20s.
11 and 13.
Oh, no.
Why is he hating out of my children?
When I was reading this, I was like, this is wild, man.
Like, this is crazy.
Like, he's hanging out with these like teenagers.
I got them like same thing, like 17, 18, something like that.
Maybe even early 20s.
The way they're referencing the things that they're doing, driving around shooting guns, they're going, they're hanging out together, right?
Yeah.
No, I looked it up, and his kids were born in like, in like the late 60s, they were like 11 and 12 years old.
Let's go crazy.
Meanwhile, he's treating his own kids horribly.
They have the governess is always on them.
They're not allowed to do anything.
And he's very rarely involved in any actual parenting, except for when he is forcing them to simulate sexual acts on women so that they learn how to be men.
Yikes.
One of those kinds, huh?
Yikes.
He's doing the classic, like, no, get over there and do it, brings a girl home from the strip or whatever, and it's like, lay down and like takes control of the whole thing and like is making them simulate.
They all report having gone through this.
It is that, I wonder, is that more out of like a power, him wanting power, him getting off on it, or just him being such a narcissist that, like, if my kids are bad at sex, it reflects badly on me.
So I'm going to make goddamn sure they know what they're doing.
You know, very fairly, his kids kind of stayed out of the limelight and they don't talk about a lot of this stuff.
And I did see a few interviews with them.
Like they resurface in later years, and one of them tries to write like a book, I think, but it never gets off the ground.
But it basically, whenever like the dirt comes out, it's it he's horrible to them.
He treats them the same way as he treated Ronnie.
He's threatening them all the time.
He's making them do crazy stuff.
Yeah.
They all develop lifelong issues with trust, identity, and emotional stability.
Like, it's just, it's not, there's no guidance.
It's all, it's all performance and it's all possession, right?
Right.
When John Lennon was murdered in cold blood in front of the Dakota building in New York City on December 8th, 1980, Phil was once again thrown into a world of depression.
But this time he took it as a sign.
He always said that John moved too, too easy.
John was too careless with how he acted and it would be his downfall one day.
And this just reaffirms it for him.
Like he's going to get killed if he doesn't travel with bodyguards and guns and all that stuff.
So by the 1980s, he starts withdrawing from public life.
He moves out of his Hollywood mansion and bought a house in the suburb of Alhambra.
He dubbed the Pyrenees Castle.
Okay.
It's a huge French-style mansion.
It's enormous.
Like it's out in Alhambra.
You know, it's out of the city of Los Angeles.
He, he, you know, as was his style, he surrounds himself with guard dogs and armed guards and fills the house with guns.
Guns that he's not allowed to have.
Yeah, illegal guns.
Sure.
So for a brief period, Spectre attempted sobriety and acquaintance describe him as calmer and more reflective.
The stability, though, is temporary.
Every time he relapsed, he gets crazy again.
And I think a large part of the stability was due to his relationship with Janice Zavala.
Phil first met her in the 60s when she was a teenager and eventually hired her to work for his label.
After his split with Ronnie, he would date her on and off again for the next like 15, 20 years.
And eventually he would give birth.
She would give birth to two twins, Nicole and Philip Jr.
And contrary to his relationships with his other kids, who are now adults at this point, Phil treated him wonderfully.
His daughter Nicole says that, you know, he was a doting father.
He loved spending time with him.
That he was always around for his kids.
But in 1991, this is now well removed from his music career in the late 50s, early 60s, and into the 70s.
Philip Jr. dies from leukemia and Phil goes back into deep depression and insanity.
Yeah, well, of course.
Nicole remains devoted to her father throughout the rest of her life, always claiming that he was her hero.
He never raised her voice to her.
She says he was amazing.
Yeah.
Phil rarely grants any interviews.
He remains a recluse, rarely leaving the house and never without a bodyguard.
He hired Hal Blaine, who's the drummer from the wrecking crew that he had employed.
He hired his daughter to be his day-to-day manager or whatever.
And was generally pretty kind to her.
And everything's set for Phil to just ride off into the sunset and be forgotten as a nobody's, right?
Until Mick Brown shows up in his life.
Mick Brown is the author of the book that I was describing that I got the primary source from all of this.
Mick Brown's book is one of the most authoritative biographies on Phil Specter.
It is brilliant.
It has everything.
It's a very good book.
I highly recommend.
He's the primary source of my research.
And he's probably one of the, besides me, probably one of the most knowledgeable people on Phil Spector in the world.
And he managed to get an interview with Specter in December of 2002.
He recorded the entire interview on tapes and they painted a picture of a deeply troubled and eccentric man who was likely suffering from mental illness.
His article was titled, The Mad Genius of Phil Specter, and questioned whether the madness was part of the genius or just something that had gone unchecked because of his genius.
It was a deeply intelligent and honest look at Phil's life, which angered Phil.
He broke what many said was a decade of sobriety and began drinking and acting erratically again.
On February 2nd, 2003, just two weeks after the article came out, Phil Spector began his evening at Dantana's, a long-standing Hollywood restaurant and bar known for attracting entertainment industry regulars.
He took a high school friend out for dinner and began drinking heavily before taking her home and then returning to Dantana's and starting to drink with his waitress from the night.
Oh boy.
He was heavily intoxicated by the time he left for the House of Blues in Hollywood.
Yeah, when you leave with your friend and then come back to keep drinking with the waitress, that implies a level of drunk that is, yeah.
But if you're going to do it, it's at Dantana's.
It's at Danta's.
Hit the troubadour for a little bit.
Yeah, it was a good night.
So it was then that he would begin his fateful interaction with the hostess of the foundation room in the house of blues, Lana Clarkson.
Lana Clarkson and Fateful Night00:05:06
And this is the end of this episode.
We are about to get into one of the most storied and important nights in musical history.
But for now, we are going to plug our pluggables, which I have a podcast.
It's about music stuff.
It's the most poorly produced podcast in the entire world.
We need a Sophie so bad.
Like we would crush with a Sophie, but we are incapable of doing things ourselves.
So we just forget to do it.
But I do have a podcast.
It's called That Sounds About Right.
I have a recording course that teaches you the principal's recording.
And I have a label.
And by the time this song comes out, our very first artist on the label will release her single.
So please check that shit out.
Her name is Violet Lux.
The link will be in my bio Greasy Will on Instagram.
It'll be all over the place.
But I am a rebel of the music industry and I need your support.
So love him.
Support him.
And care for me.
And also, you are on all sorts of the internets as I write okay.
And you also sell merch at places.
Some places, probably.
Presumably.
Both, we're both Googleable.
Just be an adult and use Google, man.
Do you know what I think is interesting?
Everybody keeps discussing about how ChatGPT uses like a tablespoon or a teaspoon of water every time you search.
Nobody is mentioning that Google is automatically using AI to search your answers.
And Googling now is also using that same amount of water.
Let's be mad about everything.
Type in minus AI with your Google searches and it'll cut that part of it out.
I don't know if it actually reduces the energy usage, but at least you don't have to see the summary.
It's still logging all your information and keeping logging.
Yeah.
And it knows everything you're doing.
So that's why I stay off the real internet.
That's right.
I still use Netscape Navigator.
It does not work well.
That's what I'm relying on: my technology being too outdated to spy on me.
That's right.
That's the secret.
Old Mozilla fireworks.
This is the end of the episode, guys.
We're done.
Bye.
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