John Lennon + Phil Spector 

John Lennon + Phil Spector 

“Phil wanted control,” May [Pang] remembers, “That’s basically what it came down to. And he kept holding John at bay—like, It’s my show, not yours. It was an ego trip. Fucking with John’s head. It was unbearable, because I could see the pain in John from this.” One night, Spector arranged to meet at Gold Star to do some vocal overdubs. Lennon arrived, only to pass the evening with Gold Star’s boss Stan Ross, waiting in vain for Spector to turn up. “We kept phoning saying, ‘Where are you?’” Ross remembers. “And Phil’d say, ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’ And an hour later it’d be the same thing—‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’ At the end of the evening I said to John, ‘It’s been a pleasure and I’m sorry we couldn’t do anything.’ He said, ‘He’s a prick.’ Next day I called Phil and asked him, ‘What happened?’ He said, ‘Oh, I had problems and couldn’t leave.’

At one stage in the evening, Lennon had a heated telephone exchange with Yoko back in New York and smashed the receiver against the mixing board, causing some minor damage. Spector later offered to pay Ross for the repair, but Ross decided to keep the desk in its damaged state, “as a souvenir.”

On another night, Lennon became so drunk that Spector was obliged to abandon the session altogether. With George Brand’s help, he bundled Lennon into a car to take him back to Lou Adler’s house.

“They got John upstairs into the bedroom, John was going, ‘Come on, Phil, I love you’—in a drunken, melancholy way. And George was sitting on top of him. In John’s mind, I think he thought he was getting into some kind of three-way sex situation. He couldn’t tell what was happening. So he freaked out. They brought me upstairs and I was in shock to see that they’d tied John up. He was screaming at me. ‘This is it!’ I said. ‘What did you guys do?’ They said, ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be okay, just let him sleep it off.’

Phil and George left, with John upstairs screaming every awful thing you could imagine. Everything he wanted to say about Yoko was just coming out. It was just anger at everybody, Phil, Yoko, everybody.”

In desperation, May summoned Tony King to help. By the time King arrived, Lennon had broken free of his ties and was standing at the front door, bellowing, King remembers, “like a mad bull. I got him in the house and he was a mess, sobbing, saying, ‘Why did they do it, how could they do that?’ Then all of a sudden he started fighting me. We were rolling around on the floor. Finally I got him where I was laying on top of him with his arms pushed out to the side, my face six inches away from his, and he was in some kind of blackout. He looked up and saw my face, and he said, ‘I didn’t know you were that strong, dear…’ We both ended up laughing. And that broke it. The house was just a wreck; windows broken, Carole King’s gold records were all over the floor, bent out of shape; Lou’s collection of silver-handled walking sticks were scattered everywhere. The next day we went off to breakfast, and John just kind of laughed it off. He said, ‘Well, that was a funny night, wasn’t it.’ I thought, All right for you to say—I’ve got to repair the bloody house.”

~ Mick Brown, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector. 

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“When he did work, John had a great work ethic. He liked to be on time and work, work, and work. Phil Spector was different. At times he would come into a session two or three hours late, dressed in some costume. One night he was a doctor, the next night a karate expert. He drank heavily. He drank a bottle of Vodka every night and held everybody at bay by screaming at them. I hated when he popped those nitrates. They smelled like dirty socks and he would pop them under everyone’s noses.

The worst scene happened one night when Phil was playing his ‘I am God’ routine. He took away John’s glasses, so John had no idea where he was. He literally was frothing at the mouth. John was screaming and he thought that he was being put into this sexual gay thing because Phil’s bodyguard George was trying to tie him up. He thought he was going to do something. He was kicking and screaming. Nothing happened, but it was terrifying to John.” 

~ May Pang in Lennon Revealed by Larry Kane.

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“Phil, if you’re going to kill me, kill me. But don’t fuck with me ears. I need them.“ 

~ John Lennon (Spector had shot one of his many pistols into the ceiling of a studio bathroom after having tied John up, drunken and raving.)

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“I was at the A&M studios with my brothers (The Hudson Brothers) and everyone knew that Lennon was in the big studio with Phil Spector, and through the walls you could hear Spector just going off on John. One time, Spector pulled out a large gun and started chasing John through the hallways. John was trying to laugh it off, but it was horrible. I mean Spector’s reputation had preceded him. I was scared to death.” 

~ Mark Hudson in Lennon Revealed by Larry Kane.