Phil Spector got his terrifying reputation the old fashioned way; he earned it.
This is a man, after all, who died in prison serving out a 19 year to life sentence for murder.
But even before he murdered Lana Clarkson in 2003, Spector was dangerously unstable and violent. Mixing alcohol and drugs, untreated mental illness, unchecked paranoia, near zero empathy and an obsession with firearms in equal measure is never a good thing, after all.
And add to this the fact that he routinely carried and handled loaded firearms while massively intoxicated and you can imagine just how bad it could get.
It’s practically a miracle he didn’t kill anyone before 2003.
The stories about him are endless.
He was known to routinely threaten musicians, including The Ramones, John Lennon and Leonard Cohen, with his loaded gun in a drunken rage during recording sessions. Joey Ramone, in fact, dared Spector to shoot him during one such incident.
He held his second wife, Ronnie Bennet, captive for years, essentially a prisoner in her own home. When she finally escaped in 1972, barefoot, broke and with the help of her mother, he threatened to hire a hitman to kill her during the ensuing divorce, forcing her to surrender custody of their children and all future royalties for her own musical work.
At least one of his children, Donte, claimed his father treated him and his brother in much the same way as Ronnie Bennet. Worse yet he claims Spector forced them to perform sexual acts on Spector’s adult girlfriends as “a learning experience” while they were kids.
And then there’s the time he narrowly missed shooting John Lennon in the head.
During the recording of Rock & Roll in the mid ‘70s, Spector was up to all his old tricks, and in this instance got a little trigger happy while drunk. While reportedly aiming at the thermostat or the ceiling (God knows if either of those things is true, but oh well), he fired his gun in the studio during recording.
The bullet reportedly either grazed Lennon’s ear or came so close to his head Lennon heard the crack of it passing. In either event, Lennon’s response was legendary, telling Spector if he planned to kill him, just to do it, but not to screw with his hearing, because, as a musician he needed that.