US music producer Phil Spector has been convicted of murdering actress Lana Clarkson, after a five-month retrial.
The 68-year-old, famous for the "Wall of Sound" recording technique, faces between 18 years and life in prison. He had pleaded not guilty to the second degree murder of 40-year-old Ms Clarkson, who was shot in the mouth at Spector's home in Los Angeles. Spector was remanded in custody until sentencing on 29 May. His lawyer has said he intends to appeal.
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My most bizarre experience with a producer was with Phil Spector, with whom I worked in 1977 or 78, and we produced that grotesque album called Death of a Ladies' Man.
...And when he got into the studio it was clear that he was an eccentric, but I didn't know that he was mad. He's not mad any longer, I've spoken to him on the phone recently, he's really quite reasonable and calm, but we were, you know, I was flipped out at the time and he certainly was flipped out, my flipped out was, you know, the expression was withdrawal and melancholy, and his was megalomania and insanity, and the kind of devotion to armaments, to weapons, that was really intolerable. With Phil, especially in the state that 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, was guns. The music was subsidiary an enterprise, you know people were armed to the teeth, all his friends, his bodyguards, and everybody was drunk, or intoxicated on other items, so you were slipping over bullets, and you were biting into revolvers in your hamburger. There were guns everywhere. Phil was beyond control, I remember the violin player, the fiddle player in the song Fingerprints, Phil didn't like the way he was playing, walked out into the studio and pulled a gun on the guy. Now this was, he was a country boy, and he knew a lot about guns, he just put his fiddle in his case and walked out. That was the last we'd seen of him. And at a certain point Phil approached me with a bottle of Manishewitz kosher red wine in one hand and a 45 in the other, put his arm around my shoulder and shoved a revolver into my neck and said, "Leonard, I love you". I said, "I hope you do, Phil".
Leonard Cohen
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