In this extract from MOJO’s exclusive interview with Blondie, the band recall the time they ventured into Phil Spector’s Beverly Hills mansion…
WEST HOLLYWOOD 1977. Backstage at the Whisky A Go Go on Sunset Strip, there was a knock on Blondie’s dressing room door. Outside stood two bodyguards flanking a long-haired and bearded Phil Spector. The fabled producer was dressed in black, wearing Gradient Aviator shades and a cape, a crucifix dangling from his neck, and two badges pinned to the lapel of his suit jacket. One bore his sonic motto, “Back To Mono”. The other, “In The Flesh”, the title of the New York band’s distinctly Spector-esque second single, released the previous year.
“He practically locked us in the dressing room and sort of lectured us at length,” remembers Blondie’s then-bassist Gary Lachman (AKA Valentine).
“I guess it was already common knowledge that he was kind of out of his mind,” notes drummer Clem Burke.
“He was fucking nuts,” flatly states guitarist Chris Stein, who recalls that after Spector tried to entice his partner, the group’s luminous singer Debbie Harry, into his limousine, the band warily accepted the unhinged producer’s invitation to follow him up to his walled-off Beverly Hills mansion.
“He answered the door to his house with a [Colt] .45 in one hand and a bottle of Manischewitz wine in the other hand,” Stein remembers. “The whole time he spoke in a WC Fields voice.”
Inside, Spector blasted out rough mixes from the album he was working on, Leonard Cohen’s Death Of A Ladies’ Man, before coaxing Harry to sit alongside him at the piano and sing Be My Baby and other Ronettes hits. At one point, he pointed his gun into her thigh-length leather boot and exclaimed “Bang, bang!”
“It was a little intimidating being there,” says Harry, with no little understatement. There was talk that night of Spector perhaps producing the next Blondie album. But these weird scenes rightly set off alarm bells.
“We’re really lucky we avoided Phil, is all I can say,” concludes Stein, drily.
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