Phil Spector Found Guilty

Legendary music producer Phil Spector was convicted this afternoon of second-degree murder for the killing of actress Lana Clarkson. Schocking as the story might be, it shouldn’t be that surprising that Spector’s story would end like this. As MTV music writer Kurt Loder wrote in 2003, shortly after Spector’s arrest:

The Ronettes had started out as go-go dancers at a New York discotheque called the Peppermint Lounge (one of the Beatles’ first stops on their first visit to the U.S. in 1964). Spector eventually married Veronica (Ronnie) Bennett, the group’s leader. Much later, in a 1983 documentary by filmmaker Binia Tymieniecka that aired on England’s Channel Four (from which I will liberally quote hereafter), she said of her ex-husband: “I think Phil was a very normal person at the beginning of his career. But as time went on, they started writing about him being a genius. And he said, ‘Yeah, I am a genius.’ And then they would say, ‘He’s the mad genius.’ And so he became the mad genius.”

And he just went downhill from there. For more background, read Loder’s entire article here.