September 30, 2020 • 35 mins
Actress Lana Clarkson meets Phil Spector for the first and last time on a fateful and fatal night in February 2003. She doesn’t know who he is, but is gradually charmed by the stories he tells about The Beatles, The Righteous Brothers, Tina Turner, The Ramones, Elvis Presley, and more. When they end up at Spector’s Alhambra castle, a tipsy night of good fun quickly devolves into a deadly night of head games and murderous mischief.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Blood on the Tracks is the production of I Heart
Radio and Double Elvis. Phil Spector was a musical genius,
one of the most successful record producers of all time.
He's now sitting behind bars, serving a nineteen years to
life sentence for murder. This is his story told by
his so called friends. This is a Special Agent Paul
(00:28):
Ramon with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working case number
double oh four Dash ten DAS seven one nine, case
subject as Specter Philip Harvey. This information pertains to a
period ending February third, two thousand three. Interview subject as
Clarkson Lana Interview number three Dash four six STAPH two
oh five Dash seven six six Spirit Confessional Recall number
(00:50):
nine October one. I didn't even know him. I didn't
know him at all. I mean I got to know
him a little. I got to know what he wanted
me to know. I was on a need to know
(01:12):
basis with fell Specter. He was in control of his
own narrative. It was just the two of us, the
two of us in the middle of the night, in
his car, in his castle. We had just met for
the first time and the last time. Some would say
he told me too much Others would say he didn't
(01:35):
tell me enough. Some would say I shouldn't have gone
with him. Others would say I did the right thing.
But no one knows. Really, no one really knows what
went down that night besides me and Phil. The only
thing everyone else was pretty too was the blood. The
(01:55):
blood on the chair, the blood on the stairs, the
blood before before, and the trach Chapter nine, Phil Specter
(02:32):
and Lana Clarkson. I didn't know who he was at first.
I thought he was one of those guys who walks
(02:54):
into the place after midnight, some bimbo on his arm,
slip someone a fifty dollar bill, tries to get a table,
acts like he owns the place, but clearly doesn't own
the place. He's not even a member, just some schmo
trying to impress the gold digger by his side, bad hairpiece,
(03:15):
wearing dark sunglasses inside at one am, drunk like it's
the first time in his life he's been drunk, dumb
grin on his face, a JABRONI So I didn't let
him through. The Foundation room at the House of Blues
is strictly members only, and that's a annual feet right.
(03:39):
I didn't know this guy from Adam I've never seen him.
He wasn't getting past me. I had been the hostess
at the House of Blues on the Strip for a while,
longer than I would have liked to admit, to be honest,
so I knew all the regulars. I made the daily
commute from my place in Venice. Shifts usually ran from
(04:02):
six at night till two in the morning. It was
a gig to fill in the gaps, unnecessary evil, something
to earn some steady cash while I continued busting my
ass with casting calls and auditions and grabbing whatever roles
I could grab. I was forty. It's not like I
(04:24):
was all washed up, far from it. But I found
myself in a valley at the time, a valley in
the natural ebb and flow of an actor's professional life.
And when you find yourself in a valley, you scramble
and do what you gotta do to pull yourself back
out find that next mountain. Every actor needs to side
(04:45):
hustle every now and then. This particular side hustle was
a humbling experience and occasionally humiliating. I was waiting on
high rollers A level types, B level types, the kind
of Hollywood player who could afford to shell out an
(05:06):
annual feat just to walk into the joint. And so
other actors would show up to the foundation room, actors
who had beat me out for this role or that role,
and I had to seat them, show them to their table,
wait on them. I hated that moment, that moment when
(05:27):
the person I was about to see would put their
hand gently on my arm and patronizingly say, hey, aren't
you Lana Clarkson? And not because they had seen me
in Barbarian Queen either Verian queen. No man can touch
her naked steel. It wasn't the recognition that a fan
(05:51):
has when they meet a star. It was the recognition
that a winner has when they run into a loser.
So there, I was not wanting to get recognized by
all the wrong people, and it turns out I wasn't
recognizing the right people. I was ready to toss this
(06:14):
guy out on his ass, wipe the shit eating grin
right off his little Lord fauntleroy face. He asked to
speak to a manager. One of the waitresses happened to
be walking by at that moment and saw what was
going on. She pulled me aside. Don't you know who
(06:37):
that is, she whispered. I shook my head. Phil Specter
didn't ring a bowl. The record producer still nothing to do.
Run Run guy walks around his castle in Alhambra in
(06:58):
the dark, wearing up Batman on costume. I had heard
about that. It was in some Time magazine article or something.
Then the waitress started to hum the melody of that song,
and it clicked. I turned to face the man I
was about to send back into the street, menus in hand,
(07:20):
Mr Specter, I said, my apologies. I almost didn't recognize
you this way to your table. My face must have
been beat red. I wanted to go crawl back into
the kitchen, find a stainless steel table to hide under,
and just die. Oh the woman he was with, she
(07:47):
had that hospitality industry look like she had just worked
a grueling, demeaning shift already that night and now was
being taken out on the town by some guy who
barely knew her. I called him like, I saw, whether
you're an actress or a hostess, you get good at
that sort of thing in the thick of the Hollywood jungle.
(08:10):
She just gave me one of those half smiles, the
kind that simultaneously says thank you and fuck you. When
they sat down, I could tell there was trouble in
paradise already. They weren't really talking that much to each other.
His eyes would follow me every time I walked by,
(08:33):
and I didn't know if it was because he thought
I was an idiot for not recognizing him, or if
he was turned on by the fact that I didn't
recognize him. I'd find out soon enough. He ordered a
Bacardi and she had a glass of water that really
(08:53):
set him off. He was there to drink, to get
shitty and have a good time, and it pissed him
off that woman on his arm would rather be back
home in deep blissful sleep than tie one on with him.
He started to yell at her, loud enough that we
could all hear him. He was like, get a fucking drink,
(09:16):
and she just waved him off like he was a
fruit fly trying to land on the rim of her glass.
It wasn't too long after he raised his voice that
his driver showed up at the hostess stand. He said
Mr Specter asked him to take his date home, but
Mr Specter was going to stay a little longer. After
(09:39):
his date was gladly chaperone outside. He tried to order
more drinks, but the guy was so drunk and it
was at least two, if not later, and we had
to wrap it up. He paid for the eight dollar
BICCARDI and the five dollar water and left a tip
that was like four hundred bucks, and then he asked
(10:00):
me to join him for a drink as I was
walking by his table again after he had already been
told the bar was closed. At first, I thought he
was just working in an angle to get another drink,
that maybe if he could convince one of the staff
members to join him, the taps would flow for him
once more. So I sat down with him for a moment.
(10:25):
He asked me to accompany him back to his place
in Alhambra, his castle, as he put it, I politely declined,
a guy who walks around in the dark with a
batman costume wants me to come over, and what do
I play? Catwoman or maybe poison ivy? No, thank you.
I hardly knew the guy. I wasn't about to get
(10:47):
myself too deep, but he was persistent. He kept asking,
I kept declining, and then he compromised. He asked if
he could drive me to my car. Well, actually, if
his driver could drive me to my car, you know.
Once he was back from dropping off the date at
(11:09):
her place, we got in the elevator together. He turned
his head slightly towards me and said, I bet you
won't forget me again. He was buying time. He was
going to try to butter me up in his car,
get me to change my mind about going to his place.
I said to myself, Laana, get in his car and
(11:33):
see how you feel in a few minutes. Maybe turn
this humdrum night sating aless clientele on the strip on
its ear. Maybe maybe not. It was close to two
thirty am when I clocked out of the House of
Blues and followed Phil into the cool evening air. My
mind was not made up yet. I was always in
(12:27):
the background, a face in the crowd, always walking on
screen just to walk off. Sometimes the roles were minor.
Fast times at Ridgemond High was like that. I had
a line at least High that was the line. There
were no lines in scarface. Scarface was minor, minor. I'm
(12:50):
there for a second or two, helping to fill the
frame as part of the ensemble, and then I'm gone.
The bigger rules were always the lower profile pictures, the
Roger Corman stuff, the ones where I was a buxom
warrior and a fur leotard doing the female cone in
the Barbarian thing, I'll be No Man's Slave and no
(13:12):
Man's horror zena Lucy Lawless. They were all inspired by
that one. I like to think I paved the way
in a cult classic kind of way. I never got
used to the nudity. I always felt it was beneath me.
But it was a boy's town and a boy's game,
(13:33):
and I did what I had to do to move forward.
But I never took any ship from anyone. These nude
publicity shots of me wound up in some paper in
San Francisco, and I lost it. I went right to
Roger Corman himself and demanded to know what the hell
(13:53):
was the big idea. He took me to the publicity
department so that I could bear witness to his verbal
eat down. See. I admired a classier Hollywood than the
Hollywood of the nineteen eighties. I'm talking Marilyn Monroe, Jane Mansfield.
I met Lana Turner, once the epitome of Hollywood class.
(14:18):
Of course, she's the actress I'm named after. We both
had the same hairdresser, so we were introduced sometime in
the early eighties before I had landed much of anything.
That Lana hadn't acted in years, but she still carried
herself like a star, the glow, the ploise, the class.
(14:41):
I like to think I inherited more than a name,
that I took on the whole aura of a golden age,
a bygone era. Maybe that's what Phil saw in me
that night. Maybe I was an echo to Phil, something
that called out to him from Afar, something that brought
him back to a place that he never wanted to leave.
(15:05):
The more he talked to me in the car on
the ride back to his place in Alhambra, the more
I learned that he was a soul that was stuck
in time. His head was in the sixties. Time kept
pushing ahead, but Phil didn't go along for that ride.
He was a mono man living in a quadraphonic world.
(15:28):
Hang on, I should explain. You're probably thinking, wait, she
told him she wasn't going home with him. I changed
my mind. I did accept the invitation to go back
to his castle. After all, he was relentless. What can
I say he made me an offer I couldn't refuse.
(15:53):
When we left the House of Blues, Phil was walking
like a slow motion pinball, banging around a machine. He
was feeling no pain, I'll put it that way. I
helped him into the Mercedes and his driver Adriana, this
real nice kid. He helped him get inside the back seat.
(16:13):
Inside the car, he invited me. He begged me to
come home with him a few more times. The third
time he asked me, right as we were pulling up
to my parked car, is the moment I changed my mind?
What's the worst that could happen? Right? Because at first
his stick was a little endearing. He seemed to really
(16:35):
want my company. I couldn't really tell if it was
a romantic thing or not. I think he just didn't
want to be alone. I knew I was the third
woman he'd been with that night. He told me that
he'd been all over l A, spent hours haunting this
(16:57):
place in that place. Dinner during X he told me
what they'd eaten and how nothing was really going the
way he wanted. The other women weren't good company, but
he could tell I was good company. That was the
kind of minimal flattery he offered up during the thirty
minute ride from Hollywood to Alhambra. We took the one
(17:24):
oh one to the ten. It was so late the
traffic wasn't a complete nuisance. The talk quickly turned to
Phil just talking about Phil. It was either because he
was extremely intoxicated, or he was nervous, or perhaps he'd
just liked to talk about himself. He was intrigued that
(17:44):
I didn't know much about him, and he wanted to
give me a Phil Specter crash course right there in
the car. Huh, Phil Specter one oh one. On the
one oh one. He told me about the Righteous Brothers,
about the Beatles, and John and George, about Agantina, about
the Romans. But he didn't talk about them as if
(18:07):
they were his friends. I don't even know that he
looked back on his time with any of them fondly.
He talked about them, to talk about them, to name drop.
He told me he recorded Elvis and that the Beach
Boys wouldn't have been the Beach Boys without him, that
(18:27):
modern pop music as we know it would have ceased
to exist. The more he talked, the more the initial
appeal of his personality started to wear thin. I wondered
if I had made a mistake after all. And then
he told me about his castle. He didn't call it
a house or even a mansion. It was his castle.
(18:50):
He said, you gotta see it, you know, just wait
to see. He was trying to explain the architecture and
a staircase in something about suits of armor. That's the
part when I wondered if he had drifted off into
loopy land talking about suits of armor, like who the
fox has suits of armor at their house. The more
(19:12):
he described his place, the more I thought I was
walking into a droopy dog cartoon. We drove through the
suburbia of Alhambra, you know, the strip malls, the bungalows.
It was a sleepy place, a sleepy place, especially so
late at night. But there was really nothing to write
(19:33):
home about there. I actually caught myself wondering what it
was about the place he liked so much. We got
to these huge iron gates, so big that Adriano had
to get out of the car and push them open
with his bare hands. We drove up further through the trees,
(19:57):
like we were headed into a jungle. There was a
gradual incline and then it cleared, and there was this
amazing water fountain, and there it was Phills home, the castle.
It was incredible. In the darkness, I could only wonder
(20:20):
what it looked like. In the light, you could see
everything from up there, the whole damn town. You could
probably see even right down into l A if you
looked hard enough. But I didn't want to look around
at the floor and fauna at three o'clock in the morning.
I wanted to see if his castle was everything Phil
(20:42):
had made it out to be. We'll be right back
after this word word word. I didn't know there was
(21:04):
a gun until we got inside. There were many guns inside, actually,
But you know that, don't you. You would think that
a guy who had so many guns and is so
in love with guns would have actually said something about
it on that thirty minute drive. You've got to think
that the subject of guns was somewhere in his mind
(21:26):
at the time, that it was always on his mind.
He didn't utter one word about his collection of firearms
as we rode to his place. Looking back, that was
a red flag. God, I was so naive about the
whole thing. However, I'll admit I was more than a
(21:49):
bit star struck in the moment star struck in a
little drunk the tequila and vikd in combo offered some
smooth sailing on the stranger danger front. It's not like
I hadn't been in the presence of top shelf celebrity before.
I'd hung out with Jack Nicholson, Warrened Batty don Henley.
(22:09):
But this this was different. This was a whole other
level of spectacle, the pageantry of it, the bravado. It
was this giant French chet To style manifestation of Phil's ego.
I don't think I had missed Betty go from the
moment he walked up to the hostess stand at the
(22:30):
House of Blues to the moment he asked me to
come home with him to all the cliff notes war stories.
He told me in the car, let's just say, if
his house had been any smaller, I would have been disappointed.
But this thing didn't disappoint. Turrets spires. There was an
outdoor terrace on top of the thing. As we stepped
(22:54):
out of the car, Phil took a cue from my
gasps and comments and told me he had bought it
from one point one million, just like five years ago.
He threw that number out there in a way. He
threw out references to the Beatles and Elvis Presley. He
wanted to make sure you were still paying attention, you know,
(23:14):
paying attention to the biggest fucking deal in the room,
fucking Bill Specter. He told me they called it the
Pyrenees Castle. Some guy from France built it in the twenties.
His voice was slurred as he told me all of this.
(23:37):
I had to help him walk, especially up the dramatic
stairs that led to the front door. I told Adriano
I had it under control. I had made that co dependent,
drunken walk up a flight of stairs many a time,
Thank you very much. And so he drove the car
around back where Phil liked it. Phil pushed open the
(23:59):
wide front doors, and it was like we were stepping
back in time. The place certainly hadn't been updated to
reflect any sort of two thousand three aesthetic. There was
a marble foyer, crystal chandeliers, a bunch of outdated red
carpet that ran up the staircase. There was a Picasso
sketch next to a John Lennon sketch. There wasn't one
(24:23):
suit of armor. There were two suits of armor, just
propped up on either side of a doorway. I have
expected the things to come to life and chase me
around the place. He told me there were nine bedrooms,
ten bathrooms, but it was just him living there, just
him adrift in all this space. Don't you get lonely
(24:48):
here all by yourself? I asked him. I probably asked
him three or four more times. Every time I asked him,
I saw him wins a little, like the idea of
loneliness hurt him, but it was obviously his reality. Damn.
(25:09):
He shook off the questions by just rattling off more
details about the place. Did I know there was a
wet bar there and a hair salon? Not one but
two kitchens. We drank some more, fumbled around some more.
Phil didn't stop talking, and then at some point he said,
(25:30):
take a look at this. He had opened the drawer
of a dresser in the foyer. There was a gun
in it. He asked me if I liked guns, asked
me if I ever shot a gun. He pulled the
gun out of the drawer and started to play around
with it. It was small, a revolver. He spun it
(25:53):
around and flipped it over like it was hot to
the touch didn't really look like he knew what he
was going. I had no idea at the time, no
idea that he had pulled a gun on Debbie Harry,
that he pulled a gun on the Ramans, he shot
a gun at John Lennon, that he locked his wife
(26:17):
in a closet, that he held Leonard Cohen and many
others hostage in his own house. I didn't know any
of those things. I was fully out of that loop.
I had no idea. I was yet another in a
long line of unsuspecting visitors to Phil's house or studio
(26:39):
who got a pistol shoved in their face. I don't
think that either of us knew that I would be
the last. The last time I saw Phil Specter, he
was holding a little revolver up to my face. He
(26:59):
had to reach to up there. I was so tall
and he was so short. He was holding a little
revolver up to my face and daring me to kiss it.
(27:35):
February three, two thousand three, Grand View Avenue, Alhambra, California.
It was around five in the morning when Adriana to
Susa heard the pot. He was sitting in the driver's
seat of a black Mercedes Limo parked around the back
of the Pyrenees Castle, eight thousand, seven hundred square foot
Alhambra home that offered a bird's eye view of the
(27:57):
San Gabriel Valley from the top its isolated no Both
the Mercedes and the castle belonged to Adriana's boss, Phil Specter.
The sound made Adriana nervous. It was loud and came
out of nowhere to disrupt the idyllic pre don com.
It was too loud to be a plate hitting the
kitchen floor, too intense to be a slam door. Adriana
(28:17):
was equally nervous because he wasn't Phil's regular driver. He
was the filling guy. Dylan was the regular driver, but
it was Dylan's night off. Adriana was in the US
on a student visa from Brazil and picked up the
part time gig for some easy cash. For the most part,
it was a cush gig. Sometimes it even seemed too easy.
(28:38):
Adriana spent a small percentage of every pinch, hit shift anxious, Anxious.
It's something off, something bad would happen on his night,
on his watch. It would be just as luck and
the evening had been exceptionally busy. Adriana had driven Phil
all over l a first of Beverly Hills with Ronnie Davis,
someone Phil new from high school. They aided a place
(28:59):
called Grill on the Alley. That was around seven pm.
After dinner, Phil had Adriano driving Roni home and returned
to the Grill, where Phil asked the waitress Cathy Sullivan,
to hit the town with him. Adriano drove them to
Trader Vix and then to Dan Tanna's. Phil had drinks
at each stopped, and by the time they got to
their third location, the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip,
(29:21):
Phil was slurring his words. It was around three am
when Adriana returned to the alha Ro Castle with Phil's
new acquaintance, Lana Clarkson in tone. After Lana helped Phil
wobble up the steps and into the house, Adriano parked
the Mercedes out back and debated, allowing himself to catch
a few winks before he was needed again. The sound
from inside the house said five am, snapped Adriana to attention.
(29:44):
There was no way he was catching even a few winks.
After that sound, it popped. It was loud. Something was wrong,
Something was off. Adriana opened the door of the Mercedes
and stepped outside. It was cold, out, cold for Alaha
run in February, at least above forty degrees. Adriana could
see the breath escape from his mouth. He rubbed his
(30:06):
hands together to maintain the warm feeling of the limo's
climate controlled interior, and for a moment he heard nothing more.
Nothing followed the dramatic sound, just the hush sounds of
the world slowly coming to life for another day. Maybe
he had imagined the whole thing. And then the back
door of the castle flung open. Some birds in a
nearby tree were startled and flapped away. Phil Specter tumbled
(30:30):
out of the castle. His eyes were wide, his face
frozen in shock and confusion. He was still dressed in
the same clothes from the night before, and Adriana wondered
if he was still drunk. As Phil got closer, Adriana
saw the revolver and fills right hand. He saw the blood.
Adriana looked past Phil through the open door and saw
the woman who just hours before had been in the limo.
(30:52):
Lana Clarkson, slumped on top of a chair in the foyer,
Her blonde hair hung in the air. Her long legs
were sharp and us Phil got closer to Adriano, who
stood still halfway between the Mercedes and the castle. Phil
looked at him dead in the eye. At first he
said nothing, just the thousand yard dead eyes stare, and
(31:13):
then he made a confession, I think I killed somebody.
Adriano stood and shocked. He wasn't sure that he had
heard what he thought he had heard. Had he heard
a gunshot? Did Phil Specter just confessed to murder? What happened?
Sir Adriano asked filled an answer. He didn't make a sound.
All he did was calmly shrug his shoulders, and then
(31:36):
he turned around to direct the thousand yard dead eye
stare back into the house and at Lana Clarkson's body.
Detective Mark Lillian Fields, half of David, the one he
filed with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, gave a vivid
account of the scene the first responders found inside the
ostentatious home. The victim, Lana Clarkson, was slumped in a
(31:56):
chair in the foyer. She was dressed in black. Her
leopard print herst dangled from her limbs shoulder she had
a single gunshot to her mouth. Broken teeth were strewn
on the floor of the foyer and even made their
way onto the stairway. Nearby. Under Lana's leg was a
thirty eight caliber Colt Revolver blue steel. Of the six
possible shots in the weapon, five of them still had
(32:16):
live AMMO locked and loaded, but the sixth was spent.
All signs pointed to one conclusion. The police investigation, the
coroner's report, the testimony of Adriana to Susan and others,
and then throwing a quick examination of the host character,
his love of gunplay, the wild ways in which he
carried himself, his history of physical and emotional abuse. All
(32:39):
signs pointed to Phil Specta, that famed record producer and
infamous recluse whose life was now spattered with blood. Everyone
was privy to it. The blood on his chair, the
blood on his stairs, the blood on the floor of
his foyer, and the blood on the tracks. This episode
(33:10):
of Blood on the Tracks is brought to you by
seven Club, a podcast that I host on musicians who
died at the age of seven. Season two, featuring Jim Morrison,
is now available, as is season one, with twelve episodes
featuring Jimmy Hendrix, Subscribe to The Seven Club on Apple podcast,
I Heart Radio app, or wherever you get your podcasts,
and of course, this episode was also brought to you
(33:32):
by Disgrace Land, the award winning music and true crime
podcast also hosted by Years Truly. Episodes on The Rolling Stones,
Jerry Lewis, Cardi b, The Grateful Dead, j Z Prince,
and many many more are all waiting for you right now.
Just search Disgrace Land on Apple podcast, the I Heart
Radio app, or wherever you get your podcast all right.
(33:53):
This episode of Blood on the Tracks was written by
Zeth Lundi and scored in mixed by Matt Boden, Hosted
by me Jake Brennan. Additional music and score elements by
Ryan's Breaker and Henry Juneta. This episode featured Ruby Rose
fox Is Lama Clark's Blood on the Tracks is produced
by myself for Double Elvis and partnership with I Heart Radio.
Sources for this episode are available at Double Elvis dot
(34:16):
com on the Blood on the Tracks series page. If
you like it, you hear, please be sure to subscribe
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Radio app, wherever you get your podcasts and if you'd
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(34:37):
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Go ahead and give that a follow, all right. As always,
you can find me blabbing about other crazy rock stars
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talk to me per usual on Instagram and Twitter at
Disgrace lad rockabill mm hmm, diet crazy overdened
Blood on the Tracks is the production of I Heart
Radio and Double Elvis. Phil Spector was a musical genius,
one of the most successful record producers of all time.
He's now sitting behind bars, serving a nineteen years to
life sentence for murder. This is his story told by
his so called friends. This is a Special Agent Paul
(00:28):
Ramon with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working case number
double oh four Dash ten DAS seven one nine, case
subject as Specter Philip Harvey. This information pertains to a
period ending February third, two thousand three. Interview subject as
Clarkson Lana Interview number three Dash four six STAPH two
oh five Dash seven six six Spirit Confessional Recall number
(00:50):
nine October one. I didn't even know him. I didn't
know him at all. I mean I got to know
him a little. I got to know what he wanted
me to know. I was on a need to know
(01:12):
basis with fell Specter. He was in control of his
own narrative. It was just the two of us, the
two of us in the middle of the night, in
his car, in his castle. We had just met for
the first time and the last time. Some would say
he told me too much Others would say he didn't
(01:35):
tell me enough. Some would say I shouldn't have gone
with him. Others would say I did the right thing.
But no one knows. Really, no one really knows what
went down that night besides me and Phil. The only
thing everyone else was pretty too was the blood. The
(01:55):
blood on the chair, the blood on the stairs, the
blood before before, and the trach Chapter nine, Phil Specter
(02:32):
and Lana Clarkson. I didn't know who he was at first.
I thought he was one of those guys who walks
(02:54):
into the place after midnight, some bimbo on his arm,
slip someone a fifty dollar bill, tries to get a table,
acts like he owns the place, but clearly doesn't own
the place. He's not even a member, just some schmo
trying to impress the gold digger by his side, bad hairpiece,
(03:15):
wearing dark sunglasses inside at one am, drunk like it's
the first time in his life he's been drunk, dumb
grin on his face, a JABRONI So I didn't let
him through. The Foundation room at the House of Blues
is strictly members only, and that's a annual feet right.
(03:39):
I didn't know this guy from Adam I've never seen him.
He wasn't getting past me. I had been the hostess
at the House of Blues on the Strip for a while,
longer than I would have liked to admit, to be honest,
so I knew all the regulars. I made the daily
commute from my place in Venice. Shifts usually ran from
(04:02):
six at night till two in the morning. It was
a gig to fill in the gaps, unnecessary evil, something
to earn some steady cash while I continued busting my
ass with casting calls and auditions and grabbing whatever roles
I could grab. I was forty. It's not like I
(04:24):
was all washed up, far from it. But I found
myself in a valley at the time, a valley in
the natural ebb and flow of an actor's professional life.
And when you find yourself in a valley, you scramble
and do what you gotta do to pull yourself back
out find that next mountain. Every actor needs to side
(04:45):
hustle every now and then. This particular side hustle was
a humbling experience and occasionally humiliating. I was waiting on
high rollers A level types, B level types, the kind
of Hollywood player who could afford to shell out an
(05:06):
annual feat just to walk into the joint. And so
other actors would show up to the foundation room, actors
who had beat me out for this role or that role,
and I had to seat them, show them to their table,
wait on them. I hated that moment, that moment when
(05:27):
the person I was about to see would put their
hand gently on my arm and patronizingly say, hey, aren't
you Lana Clarkson? And not because they had seen me
in Barbarian Queen either Verian queen. No man can touch
her naked steel. It wasn't the recognition that a fan
(05:51):
has when they meet a star. It was the recognition
that a winner has when they run into a loser.
So there, I was not wanting to get recognized by
all the wrong people, and it turns out I wasn't
recognizing the right people. I was ready to toss this
(06:14):
guy out on his ass, wipe the shit eating grin
right off his little Lord fauntleroy face. He asked to
speak to a manager. One of the waitresses happened to
be walking by at that moment and saw what was
going on. She pulled me aside. Don't you know who
(06:37):
that is, she whispered. I shook my head. Phil Specter
didn't ring a bowl. The record producer still nothing to do.
Run Run guy walks around his castle in Alhambra in
(06:58):
the dark, wearing up Batman on costume. I had heard
about that. It was in some Time magazine article or something.
Then the waitress started to hum the melody of that song,
and it clicked. I turned to face the man I
was about to send back into the street, menus in hand,
(07:20):
Mr Specter, I said, my apologies. I almost didn't recognize
you this way to your table. My face must have
been beat red. I wanted to go crawl back into
the kitchen, find a stainless steel table to hide under,
and just die. Oh the woman he was with, she
(07:47):
had that hospitality industry look like she had just worked
a grueling, demeaning shift already that night and now was
being taken out on the town by some guy who
barely knew her. I called him like, I saw, whether
you're an actress or a hostess, you get good at
that sort of thing in the thick of the Hollywood jungle.
(08:10):
She just gave me one of those half smiles, the
kind that simultaneously says thank you and fuck you. When
they sat down, I could tell there was trouble in
paradise already. They weren't really talking that much to each other.
His eyes would follow me every time I walked by,
(08:33):
and I didn't know if it was because he thought
I was an idiot for not recognizing him, or if
he was turned on by the fact that I didn't
recognize him. I'd find out soon enough. He ordered a
Bacardi and she had a glass of water that really
(08:53):
set him off. He was there to drink, to get
shitty and have a good time, and it pissed him
off that woman on his arm would rather be back
home in deep blissful sleep than tie one on with him.
He started to yell at her, loud enough that we
could all hear him. He was like, get a fucking drink,
(09:16):
and she just waved him off like he was a
fruit fly trying to land on the rim of her glass.
It wasn't too long after he raised his voice that
his driver showed up at the hostess stand. He said
Mr Specter asked him to take his date home, but
Mr Specter was going to stay a little longer. After
(09:39):
his date was gladly chaperone outside. He tried to order
more drinks, but the guy was so drunk and it
was at least two, if not later, and we had
to wrap it up. He paid for the eight dollar
BICCARDI and the five dollar water and left a tip
that was like four hundred bucks, and then he asked
(10:00):
me to join him for a drink as I was
walking by his table again after he had already been
told the bar was closed. At first, I thought he
was just working in an angle to get another drink,
that maybe if he could convince one of the staff
members to join him, the taps would flow for him
once more. So I sat down with him for a moment.
(10:25):
He asked me to accompany him back to his place
in Alhambra, his castle, as he put it, I politely declined,
a guy who walks around in the dark with a
batman costume wants me to come over, and what do
I play? Catwoman or maybe poison ivy? No, thank you.
I hardly knew the guy. I wasn't about to get
(10:47):
myself too deep, but he was persistent. He kept asking,
I kept declining, and then he compromised. He asked if
he could drive me to my car. Well, actually, if
his driver could drive me to my car, you know.
Once he was back from dropping off the date at
(11:09):
her place, we got in the elevator together. He turned
his head slightly towards me and said, I bet you
won't forget me again. He was buying time. He was
going to try to butter me up in his car,
get me to change my mind about going to his place.
I said to myself, Laana, get in his car and
(11:33):
see how you feel in a few minutes. Maybe turn
this humdrum night sating aless clientele on the strip on
its ear. Maybe maybe not. It was close to two
thirty am when I clocked out of the House of
Blues and followed Phil into the cool evening air. My
mind was not made up yet. I was always in
(12:27):
the background, a face in the crowd, always walking on
screen just to walk off. Sometimes the roles were minor.
Fast times at Ridgemond High was like that. I had
a line at least High that was the line. There
were no lines in scarface. Scarface was minor, minor. I'm
(12:50):
there for a second or two, helping to fill the
frame as part of the ensemble, and then I'm gone.
The bigger rules were always the lower profile pictures, the
Roger Corman stuff, the ones where I was a buxom
warrior and a fur leotard doing the female cone in
the Barbarian thing, I'll be No Man's Slave and no
(13:12):
Man's horror zena Lucy Lawless. They were all inspired by
that one. I like to think I paved the way
in a cult classic kind of way. I never got
used to the nudity. I always felt it was beneath me.
But it was a boy's town and a boy's game,
(13:33):
and I did what I had to do to move forward.
But I never took any ship from anyone. These nude
publicity shots of me wound up in some paper in
San Francisco, and I lost it. I went right to
Roger Corman himself and demanded to know what the hell
(13:53):
was the big idea. He took me to the publicity
department so that I could bear witness to his verbal
eat down. See. I admired a classier Hollywood than the
Hollywood of the nineteen eighties. I'm talking Marilyn Monroe, Jane Mansfield.
I met Lana Turner, once the epitome of Hollywood class.
(14:18):
Of course, she's the actress I'm named after. We both
had the same hairdresser, so we were introduced sometime in
the early eighties before I had landed much of anything.
That Lana hadn't acted in years, but she still carried
herself like a star, the glow, the ploise, the class.
(14:41):
I like to think I inherited more than a name,
that I took on the whole aura of a golden age,
a bygone era. Maybe that's what Phil saw in me
that night. Maybe I was an echo to Phil, something
that called out to him from Afar, something that brought
him back to a place that he never wanted to leave.
(15:05):
The more he talked to me in the car on
the ride back to his place in Alhambra, the more
I learned that he was a soul that was stuck
in time. His head was in the sixties. Time kept
pushing ahead, but Phil didn't go along for that ride.
He was a mono man living in a quadraphonic world.
(15:28):
Hang on, I should explain. You're probably thinking, wait, she
told him she wasn't going home with him. I changed
my mind. I did accept the invitation to go back
to his castle. After all, he was relentless. What can
I say he made me an offer I couldn't refuse.
(15:53):
When we left the House of Blues, Phil was walking
like a slow motion pinball, banging around a machine. He
was feeling no pain, I'll put it that way. I
helped him into the Mercedes and his driver Adriana, this
real nice kid. He helped him get inside the back seat.
(16:13):
Inside the car, he invited me. He begged me to
come home with him a few more times. The third
time he asked me, right as we were pulling up
to my parked car, is the moment I changed my mind?
What's the worst that could happen? Right? Because at first
his stick was a little endearing. He seemed to really
(16:35):
want my company. I couldn't really tell if it was
a romantic thing or not. I think he just didn't
want to be alone. I knew I was the third
woman he'd been with that night. He told me that
he'd been all over l A, spent hours haunting this
(16:57):
place in that place. Dinner during X he told me
what they'd eaten and how nothing was really going the
way he wanted. The other women weren't good company, but
he could tell I was good company. That was the
kind of minimal flattery he offered up during the thirty
minute ride from Hollywood to Alhambra. We took the one
(17:24):
oh one to the ten. It was so late the
traffic wasn't a complete nuisance. The talk quickly turned to
Phil just talking about Phil. It was either because he
was extremely intoxicated, or he was nervous, or perhaps he'd
just liked to talk about himself. He was intrigued that
(17:44):
I didn't know much about him, and he wanted to
give me a Phil Specter crash course right there in
the car. Huh, Phil Specter one oh one. On the
one oh one. He told me about the Righteous Brothers,
about the Beatles, and John and George, about Agantina, about
the Romans. But he didn't talk about them as if
(18:07):
they were his friends. I don't even know that he
looked back on his time with any of them fondly.
He talked about them, to talk about them, to name drop.
He told me he recorded Elvis and that the Beach
Boys wouldn't have been the Beach Boys without him, that
(18:27):
modern pop music as we know it would have ceased
to exist. The more he talked, the more the initial
appeal of his personality started to wear thin. I wondered
if I had made a mistake after all. And then
he told me about his castle. He didn't call it
a house or even a mansion. It was his castle.
(18:50):
He said, you gotta see it, you know, just wait
to see. He was trying to explain the architecture and
a staircase in something about suits of armor. That's the
part when I wondered if he had drifted off into
loopy land talking about suits of armor, like who the
fox has suits of armor at their house. The more
(19:12):
he described his place, the more I thought I was
walking into a droopy dog cartoon. We drove through the
suburbia of Alhambra, you know, the strip malls, the bungalows.
It was a sleepy place, a sleepy place, especially so
late at night. But there was really nothing to write
(19:33):
home about there. I actually caught myself wondering what it
was about the place he liked so much. We got
to these huge iron gates, so big that Adriano had
to get out of the car and push them open
with his bare hands. We drove up further through the trees,
(19:57):
like we were headed into a jungle. There was a
gradual incline and then it cleared, and there was this
amazing water fountain, and there it was Phills home, the castle.
It was incredible. In the darkness, I could only wonder
(20:20):
what it looked like. In the light, you could see
everything from up there, the whole damn town. You could
probably see even right down into l A if you
looked hard enough. But I didn't want to look around
at the floor and fauna at three o'clock in the morning.
I wanted to see if his castle was everything Phil
(20:42):
had made it out to be. We'll be right back
after this word word word. I didn't know there was
(21:04):
a gun until we got inside. There were many guns inside, actually,
But you know that, don't you. You would think that
a guy who had so many guns and is so
in love with guns would have actually said something about
it on that thirty minute drive. You've got to think
that the subject of guns was somewhere in his mind
(21:26):
at the time, that it was always on his mind.
He didn't utter one word about his collection of firearms
as we rode to his place. Looking back, that was
a red flag. God, I was so naive about the
whole thing. However, I'll admit I was more than a
(21:49):
bit star struck in the moment star struck in a
little drunk the tequila and vikd in combo offered some
smooth sailing on the stranger danger front. It's not like
I hadn't been in the presence of top shelf celebrity before.
I'd hung out with Jack Nicholson, Warrened Batty don Henley.
(22:09):
But this this was different. This was a whole other
level of spectacle, the pageantry of it, the bravado. It
was this giant French chet To style manifestation of Phil's ego.
I don't think I had missed Betty go from the
moment he walked up to the hostess stand at the
(22:30):
House of Blues to the moment he asked me to
come home with him to all the cliff notes war stories.
He told me in the car, let's just say, if
his house had been any smaller, I would have been disappointed.
But this thing didn't disappoint. Turrets spires. There was an
outdoor terrace on top of the thing. As we stepped
(22:54):
out of the car, Phil took a cue from my
gasps and comments and told me he had bought it
from one point one million, just like five years ago.
He threw that number out there in a way. He
threw out references to the Beatles and Elvis Presley. He
wanted to make sure you were still paying attention, you know,
(23:14):
paying attention to the biggest fucking deal in the room,
fucking Bill Specter. He told me they called it the
Pyrenees Castle. Some guy from France built it in the twenties.
His voice was slurred as he told me all of this.
(23:37):
I had to help him walk, especially up the dramatic
stairs that led to the front door. I told Adriano
I had it under control. I had made that co dependent,
drunken walk up a flight of stairs many a time,
Thank you very much. And so he drove the car
around back where Phil liked it. Phil pushed open the
(23:59):
wide front doors, and it was like we were stepping
back in time. The place certainly hadn't been updated to
reflect any sort of two thousand three aesthetic. There was
a marble foyer, crystal chandeliers, a bunch of outdated red
carpet that ran up the staircase. There was a Picasso
sketch next to a John Lennon sketch. There wasn't one
(24:23):
suit of armor. There were two suits of armor, just
propped up on either side of a doorway. I have
expected the things to come to life and chase me
around the place. He told me there were nine bedrooms,
ten bathrooms, but it was just him living there, just
him adrift in all this space. Don't you get lonely
(24:48):
here all by yourself? I asked him. I probably asked
him three or four more times. Every time I asked him,
I saw him wins a little, like the idea of
loneliness hurt him, but it was obviously his reality. Damn.
(25:09):
He shook off the questions by just rattling off more
details about the place. Did I know there was a
wet bar there and a hair salon? Not one but
two kitchens. We drank some more, fumbled around some more.
Phil didn't stop talking, and then at some point he said,
(25:30):
take a look at this. He had opened the drawer
of a dresser in the foyer. There was a gun
in it. He asked me if I liked guns, asked
me if I ever shot a gun. He pulled the
gun out of the drawer and started to play around
with it. It was small, a revolver. He spun it
(25:53):
around and flipped it over like it was hot to
the touch didn't really look like he knew what he
was going. I had no idea at the time, no
idea that he had pulled a gun on Debbie Harry,
that he pulled a gun on the Ramans, he shot
a gun at John Lennon, that he locked his wife
(26:17):
in a closet, that he held Leonard Cohen and many
others hostage in his own house. I didn't know any
of those things. I was fully out of that loop.
I had no idea. I was yet another in a
long line of unsuspecting visitors to Phil's house or studio
(26:39):
who got a pistol shoved in their face. I don't
think that either of us knew that I would be
the last. The last time I saw Phil Specter, he
was holding a little revolver up to my face. He
(26:59):
had to reach to up there. I was so tall
and he was so short. He was holding a little
revolver up to my face and daring me to kiss it.
(27:35):
February three, two thousand three, Grand View Avenue, Alhambra, California.
It was around five in the morning when Adriana to
Susa heard the pot. He was sitting in the driver's
seat of a black Mercedes Limo parked around the back
of the Pyrenees Castle, eight thousand, seven hundred square foot
Alhambra home that offered a bird's eye view of the
(27:57):
San Gabriel Valley from the top its isolated no Both
the Mercedes and the castle belonged to Adriana's boss, Phil Specter.
The sound made Adriana nervous. It was loud and came
out of nowhere to disrupt the idyllic pre don com.
It was too loud to be a plate hitting the
kitchen floor, too intense to be a slam door. Adriana
(28:17):
was equally nervous because he wasn't Phil's regular driver. He
was the filling guy. Dylan was the regular driver, but
it was Dylan's night off. Adriana was in the US
on a student visa from Brazil and picked up the
part time gig for some easy cash. For the most part,
it was a cush gig. Sometimes it even seemed too easy.
(28:38):
Adriana spent a small percentage of every pinch, hit shift anxious, Anxious.
It's something off, something bad would happen on his night,
on his watch. It would be just as luck and
the evening had been exceptionally busy. Adriana had driven Phil
all over l a first of Beverly Hills with Ronnie Davis,
someone Phil new from high school. They aided a place
(28:59):
called Grill on the Alley. That was around seven pm.
After dinner, Phil had Adriano driving Roni home and returned
to the Grill, where Phil asked the waitress Cathy Sullivan,
to hit the town with him. Adriano drove them to
Trader Vix and then to Dan Tanna's. Phil had drinks
at each stopped, and by the time they got to
their third location, the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip,
(29:21):
Phil was slurring his words. It was around three am
when Adriana returned to the alha Ro Castle with Phil's
new acquaintance, Lana Clarkson in tone. After Lana helped Phil
wobble up the steps and into the house, Adriano parked
the Mercedes out back and debated, allowing himself to catch
a few winks before he was needed again. The sound
from inside the house said five am, snapped Adriana to attention.
(29:44):
There was no way he was catching even a few winks.
After that sound, it popped. It was loud. Something was wrong,
Something was off. Adriana opened the door of the Mercedes
and stepped outside. It was cold, out, cold for Alaha
run in February, at least above forty degrees. Adriana could
see the breath escape from his mouth. He rubbed his
(30:06):
hands together to maintain the warm feeling of the limo's
climate controlled interior, and for a moment he heard nothing more.
Nothing followed the dramatic sound, just the hush sounds of
the world slowly coming to life for another day. Maybe
he had imagined the whole thing. And then the back
door of the castle flung open. Some birds in a
nearby tree were startled and flapped away. Phil Specter tumbled
(30:30):
out of the castle. His eyes were wide, his face
frozen in shock and confusion. He was still dressed in
the same clothes from the night before, and Adriana wondered
if he was still drunk. As Phil got closer, Adriana
saw the revolver and fills right hand. He saw the blood.
Adriana looked past Phil through the open door and saw
the woman who just hours before had been in the limo.
(30:52):
Lana Clarkson, slumped on top of a chair in the foyer,
Her blonde hair hung in the air. Her long legs
were sharp and us Phil got closer to Adriano, who
stood still halfway between the Mercedes and the castle. Phil
looked at him dead in the eye. At first he
said nothing, just the thousand yard dead eyes stare, and
(31:13):
then he made a confession, I think I killed somebody.
Adriano stood and shocked. He wasn't sure that he had
heard what he thought he had heard. Had he heard
a gunshot? Did Phil Specter just confessed to murder? What happened?
Sir Adriano asked filled an answer. He didn't make a sound.
All he did was calmly shrug his shoulders, and then
(31:36):
he turned around to direct the thousand yard dead eye
stare back into the house and at Lana Clarkson's body.
Detective Mark Lillian Fields, half of David, the one he
filed with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, gave a vivid
account of the scene the first responders found inside the
ostentatious home. The victim, Lana Clarkson, was slumped in a
(31:56):
chair in the foyer. She was dressed in black. Her
leopard print herst dangled from her limbs shoulder she had
a single gunshot to her mouth. Broken teeth were strewn
on the floor of the foyer and even made their
way onto the stairway. Nearby. Under Lana's leg was a
thirty eight caliber Colt Revolver blue steel. Of the six
possible shots in the weapon, five of them still had
(32:16):
live AMMO locked and loaded, but the sixth was spent.
All signs pointed to one conclusion. The police investigation, the
coroner's report, the testimony of Adriana to Susan and others,
and then throwing a quick examination of the host character,
his love of gunplay, the wild ways in which he
carried himself, his history of physical and emotional abuse. All
(32:39):
signs pointed to Phil Specta, that famed record producer and
infamous recluse whose life was now spattered with blood. Everyone
was privy to it. The blood on his chair, the
blood on his stairs, the blood on the floor of
his foyer, and the blood on the tracks. This episode
(33:10):
of Blood on the Tracks is brought to you by
seven Club, a podcast that I host on musicians who
died at the age of seven. Season two, featuring Jim Morrison,
is now available, as is season one, with twelve episodes
featuring Jimmy Hendrix, Subscribe to The Seven Club on Apple podcast,
I Heart Radio app, or wherever you get your podcasts,
and of course, this episode was also brought to you
(33:32):
by Disgrace Land, the award winning music and true crime
podcast also hosted by Years Truly. Episodes on The Rolling Stones,
Jerry Lewis, Cardi b, The Grateful Dead, j Z Prince,
and many many more are all waiting for you right now.
Just search Disgrace Land on Apple podcast, the I Heart
Radio app, or wherever you get your podcast all right.
(33:53):
This episode of Blood on the Tracks was written by
Zeth Lundi and scored in mixed by Matt Boden, Hosted
by me Jake Brennan. Additional music and score elements by
Ryan's Breaker and Henry Juneta. This episode featured Ruby Rose
fox Is Lama Clark's Blood on the Tracks is produced
by myself for Double Elvis and partnership with I Heart Radio.
Sources for this episode are available at Double Elvis dot
(34:16):
com on the Blood on the Tracks series page. If
you like it, you hear, please be sure to subscribe
the Blood on the Tracks on Apple podcast, I Heart
Radio app, wherever you get your podcasts and if you'd
like to win a free Blood on the Tracks poster
designed by Nate Gonzalez, and leave a review for Blood
on the Tracks on Apple podcast. You can hashtag Blood
on the Tracks on social media. Leave your review there
(34:37):
and we'll pick two winners each week and announced them
on the Double Elvis Instagram page. That's at Double Elvis.
Go ahead and give that a follow, all right. As always,
you can find me blabbing about other crazy rock stars
on Disgrace Land and twenty seven Club, and you can
talk to me per usual on Instagram and Twitter at
Disgrace lad rockabill mm hmm, diet crazy overdened
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