Guns and wine in a walled mansion: Blondie’s dangerous dinner party with Phil Spector
Separating the art from the artist is always a hot debate. In some cases, the prevailing belief is that in order to protest musical history, perhaps we have to cleanse its icons of a few sins. But Phil Spector commits way more than a few.
In the entire debate, Spector perhaps stands as one of the strangest examples, or at least one of the clearest ones, of how talent, or even genius, can allow a person to basically get away with anything.
I say ‘person’, but what I really mean is ‘man’. When looking back over the history of disgraced, violent or criminal artists who have been allowed to return to the public sphere, or keep their legacy, basically all of them are men. In the world of acting, Woody Allen won an Oscar in 2011 despite being accused of serious child sexual assault in the 1990s. In 2020, female nominees walked out of the César awards as Roman Polanski won ‘Best Director’ despite having been on the run since the 1970s, with a warrant out for his arrest in the US after being arrested and charged for drugging and assaulting a 13-year-old.
It’s a similar story in music. Figures like Marilyn Manson and Chris Brown still perform and work despite serious allegations against them, but in Phil Spector’s case, it wasn’t just allegations.
In 2003, Spector shot actor Lana Clarkson. He tried to claim in an interview with Esquire that it was an ‘accidental suicide’ and that she “kissed the gun”. He tried to put it on having bipolar disorder. He tried to even blame his fans in a way, talking about the effects of his powerful career, stating, “I’ve been called a genius, and I think a genius is not there all the time and has borderline insanity.” But in 2009, he was found guilty and sentenced to 19 years.
But despite that, Spector remains revered. It’s tough to know what to do with a legacy like that, given the sheer amount of impact his production and songwriting had on the music world of the 1960s and ‘70s, especially. But let me raise you this counterpoint to brushing his evil under the carpet – his evil was right there all alone, waving a gun at Debbie Harry.
In 1977, Spector appeared backstage at Blondie’s Whisky A Go Go show. No one in the band could figure out if he was there to rage at them for their last record, In The Flesh, sounding like his signature style, or whether he was trying to work with them. “He practically locked us in the dressing room and sort of lectured us at length,” Clem Burke said, adding, “I guess it was already common knowledge that he was kind of out of his mind.”
But given his looming reputation and how it was already brushing incidents under the rug, the band accepted an invite to go to his mansion and talk more. They instantly regretted it, though, when he opened the door with a gun in hand.
“He was fucking nuts,” Chris Stein said, recalling, “He answered the door to his house with a [Colt] .45 in one hand and a bottle of Manischewitz wine in the other hand.”
Instantly tense and terrified as the famed producer was nothing but a madman that night, at one point, he pointed the gun direct at Debbie Harry’s boots and yelled “Bang, bang!” Trying to get out of there as fast as possible, Stein prophetically said, “We’re really lucky we avoided Phil, is all I can say.”
