A stunning biography of "pure self-interest and cruelty, tempered only slightly by the great musical achievements of Mr. Spector's golden age in the early 1960s" ( The New York Times ). He had a number one hit at eighteen. He was a millionaire with his own record label at twenty-two. He was, according to Tom Wolfe, “the first tycoon of teen.” Phil Spector owned pop music. From the Crystals, the Ronettes (whose lead singer, Ronnie, would become his second wife), and the Righteous Brothers to the Beatles (together and singly) and finally the seventies punk icons The Ramones, Spector produced hit after hit. But then he became pop music's most famous recluse. Until one day in the spring of 2007, when his name hit the tabloids, connected to a horrible crime.  In this “bruising portrait of legendary music producer Phil Spector” ( Entertainment Weekly ) ,  the last journalist to interview him before his arrest tells the full story of the troubled genius. “Bloodcurdling biography. . . . A portrait of pure self-interest and cruelty, tempered only slightly by the great musical achievements of Mr. Spector's golden age in the early 1960s.” — The New York Times “Gripping. . . . Brown succeeds in providing a well-rounded portrait of someone the public never understood. And it comes at just the right time, too-when they're asking more questions about him than ever.” — The Washington Post “Fascinating, detailed. . . . A great portrait of where genius and madness meet.” — Rocky Mountain News “A bruising portrait of legendary music producer Phil Spector.” — Entertainment Weekly Mick Brown was born in London in 1950 and has interviewed Salvador Dali, the Rolling Stones, James Brown, Don DeLillo, Richard Ford, Ravi Shankar, and the Dalai Lama, and has written several books as well on Richard Branson, the movie Performance , and a guide to America through pop songs. His interview with Spector--the first in twenty-five years--was published in The Telegraph in England only days before Lana Clarkson was found dead in his "castle" in Los Angeles. Chapter 1: “Mr. Spector Likes People to Walk Up” On an unseasonably warm day in December 2002 I found myself sitting in a room at the Hyatt Hotel on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, waiting for Phil Spector to call.It had been thirty-six hours since I’d arrived in Los Angeles, to find a message telling me that my meeting with Spector, which had taken some three months to arrange, and was scheduled to take place the following day, had been “postponed.” It was as if all my worst fears had come to pass.Between 1961 and 1966, Spector’s so-called Wall of Sound made him the most successful pop-record producer in the world, with more than twenty Top 40 hits by such artists as the Crystals, the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers. In the words of the writer Tom Wolfe, Spector was the “first tycoon of teen”—a mercurial and combustible mixture of genius and hustler, a precocious, brilliant and off-the-wall visionary who would change the face of pop music forever.In a period when most people, even those who made it, regarded pop as disposable ephemera, Phil Spector alone dared to believe it could be art. Marshaling armies of guitars and keyboards and brass and drums, celestial sleighbells, and voices keening like angels, he made records of a hitherto unconceived-of grandeur and majesty, elevating the themes of teenage love and heartache to the epic proportions of Wagnerian opera—“little symphonies for the kids,” as he put it. Spector crammed emotion into a bottle and uncorked it—the clamorous, joyous noise of a small tyrant unleashing his vision, his revenge, on the world. When, in the late ’60s, musical fashion overtook his Wall of Sound, Spector moved on to the biggest pop group in the world, the Beatles. He rescued their valedictory album, Let It Be . He produced Imagine for John Lennon, and “My Sweet Lord” for George Harrison. Then began the long, slow retreat. In 1979 Spector produced his last album, for the punk rock group the Ramones. And then he was gone. The architect of the Wall of Sound vanished behind another wall—of barbed-wire fences, guard dogs and Keep Out: Armed Response signs, of stories about guns and craziness, rumor, half-truth and legend—much of it, it seemed, of Spector’s own creation. The “tycoon of teen” became rock and roll’s most enigmatic recluse.When in the autumn of 2002 I first contacted Spector, he had not given a major interview in some twenty-five years, and to arrange a meeting involved delicate and protracted negotiations. Letters were dispatched back and forth. Michelle Blaine, Spector’s personal assistant, and the daughter of Hal Blaine, the drummer who had played on all of Spector’s greatest hits through the ’60s, happened to be passing through London, and we met for tea at a Mayfair hotel. She was fiercely protective of her employer. What exactly would be the thrust of the interview? Was I familiar with Mr. Spector’s records? How familiar? What had