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 the Special Agent Paul Ramon with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working case number double oh four DAP ten DASH seven four one nine,
case subject of Specter Philip Harvey. This information pertains to a period ending January nine. Interview subject is right Darlene a k A. Darlene Love. Interview number one Dash one two Dash two six three Dash six six six Recall number eight August twenty eight, two thousand eight. We'll all ego. Phil was twenty years old when he had his first two number one records. That will make anybody think they're bigger than they are. He was always a wheeler and
a dealer. People were actually afraid of him. I was probably one of the only people who wasn't afraid of him. It didn't bother him that I wasn't afraid of him. Look could he do if he could kill me? Is that all I just didn't have any fear towards him, because I knew he had a big mouth and he wasn't going to go through with any of his threats. People that threaten you often just have a big mouth. Plus Phil needed me at that time. He didn't have Ronnie,
he didn't have the Righteous Brothers. I was the only one who sang and gave him to number one records. So why are you going to kill somebody you love? Your bread and butter? Why are you gonna do anything that would leave so much mud on the tracks? Chapter eight, Phil Specter and Darlene Love. I thought my own story was over. I thought, maybe, just maybe I would gradually forget all the things I had done, the things I had been through, like they had been nothing more than
a dream of fantasy. The ups, the downs, the good the bad. It was a struggle. My own story had been a struggle. My career was a struggle, and I just didn't want to struggle anymore. I sang professionally for years, since I was a teenager, years in the church year
singing with the blossoms. Here's some Good Good, singing to the tune of Good Good Loving by the Good Good Blossoms, years singing behind Elvis, Sam Cook, Frank Sinatra, Chain Gang, Monster, Mash, That's Life, Shoot, Shoot say the name, and I probably stood at a mic in the studio behind them. And then all those years I've spent singing for Phil, or reeling from singing with Phil, or avoiding singing with Phil wasn't too Frank. I was in the right place at
the right time, but we never got it right. It was never made right. I ghosted on so many record so much that sometimes even I felt like the ghost. No one knew it was me singing on those records. Half the time, I was never given proper credit. And then later when I was given a proper shot with my own name on the record label, I was put through an emotional ringer. So I stuck myself at the back of the stage again, stood in the shadows, again towards singing back up for Tom Jones and Dion Warwick.
My marriage ended, I missed my kids. I was tired, frustrated, so I said, the hell with it? Who needs it? Who needs this story? This story that will never be right? And so I thought the story was over, But it wasn't over, far from it. The turning point happened in a bathroom, of all places, not even my own bathroom. I had put the singing behind me, took up odd jobs cleaning houses. The houses were nice, the money was steady, The money was instant, hundred dollars a day. The stress
level was low. No contract. The only expectation that either I or the person who hired me had was that the house would look better when I left than when I arrived. Simple, easy. I provided for my kids, put food on the table and close on their backs. The house I was in on this particular day was in the hills of l a somewhere. It was Christmas time. I was in the bathroom cleaning the sink. The whole
room smelled of disinfectant mint lemon. I had this lady's radio play and I was in the house alone, so I turned it up real loud, and the song came on. My song came on Christmas, Maybe Please Come Home. I stopped what I was doing, rubber gloves on my hands, one of them holding the toilet bowl brush. I pushed my hair back with the part of my forearm that wasn't covered in the soapy glove, and just stood there enjoyed.
That moment took it all in. It's a beautiful song means so many things that so many people communicates so much about the holidays and distance and longing, about love lost and found so much and under three minutes in that moment, it brought me back. I closed my eyes and I was standing there and gold Star in Hollywood. It was nineteen sixty three, it was August. Los Angeles
was in the middle of a heat wave. It was a hundred and three outside, but inside gold Star it was a meat lock or Phil always kept it cold. The song was a triumph, one of my triumphs, and the feeling the song gave me in that moment, the feeling it always gave me trumped any of the bad memories I was holding onto. The song gave me strength. It reminded me that no matter how low things got,
how low I got, I never felt weak. I found strengthen my songs, my voice, And no matter how many times Phil tried to suppress me, to silence my name or my voice, he never made me feel less than because I wouldn't let him. That song reminded me that I had that power. Standing in the bathroom, I opened my eyes and looked at my face in the mirror as the song faded out. Trust me, the irony of listened to one of my greatest moments play on the radio in the house I had been hired to clean
was not lost on me in that moment. In that moment, I knew what I had to do. I finished the job, clean the house. At the end of the shift, I told the woman who hired me that I wouldn't be coming back the next week. She didn't even know who I was. To her, I was merely someone who had answered an ad and dusted her house. She'd find someone else. I walked out that door and started looking for the
next microphone. Years later, my performance of Christmas Baby, Please Come Home became an annual holiday tradition on David Letterman Show. Ladies and Gentlemen but one and only Darlene Lowe. Then everyone knew who I was. I knew my name, even that woman in the Hills of l A with the bathroom so clean you could eat off it. Phil started to call the Letterman Show and tell them he was going to sue. He was going to sue for repeated
use of that song. His song. You see, because every session was a Phil Specter session, and every song was a Phil Spectra production. The TV studio knew they were in the clear, but Phil thought he could just scare them. That's what he did. He thought he could scare everybody, bend them to his will. He tried to make people think a lot of things, think that they were nothing before him, and they'd be nothing without him. But me, I was working well before I ever looked him in
his eyes, and I'm still working. Phil Specter didn't scare me at all. If you had asked me back in three if Phil Specter would one day be behind bars for murder, I need to think about that for a moment. You try to really really evaluate another human being, and it's really difficult because I had my own premonitions about all these people I worked with. I remember telling Sam Cook, for instance. I told Sam, you'd better keep an eye
out all these women you keep running around with. One of them is going to be the wrong woman, and then you're going to be in trouble. I just had a feeling with Sam that things wouldn't end well, not that I thought they would end that soon. With Phil, he seemed to be tempting fate. His obsession with guns was constant. He he even brought them to the studio. He take one from his pockets, swinging on his finger
like he was an outlaw in a John Ford film. Now, remember I was the only person who would stand up to Phil on the regular. I had a husband, I had kids at home, I had a mortgage to pay. This was a job to me. This was life. This wasn't no game. So I was the one who would leave, walk out the room. If that gun goes off, it's not gonna shoot me. Guns don't shoot people shoot. Gold Star was crammed with people, musicians, singers, guests. If that gun fell out of his hand and hit the floor,
guess what. The odds are pretty good that someone's gonna take a bullet. My prophecy on Phil was because the way he acted with guns. He always had guns in the studio, and he was always put them in his pocket and taking them out and flipping them around and all those things. I was the only one that would leave the session because I would say, listen, if he's gonna shoot somebody, it ain't gonna be me. Guns don't shoot people shoot. I just think it was stupid and
dangerous to be in a recording studio. We had like fifteen to twenty musicians in the studio while he was doing this. If the gun were dropped and went off, guess what I stood my ground. If Phil bought a gun into the studio, I'd make and put it in his car. It was the gun or me. The studio wasn't big enough for both of us. So yeah, part of me wouldn't have been surprised if you told me back in sixty three that one day Phil's gun would go off and that there would be an innocent person
on the other end of it. We the jury and the bad titled action find the defendant, Philip Spector, guilty of the crime of second degree murder a lot of culture. When I first met him, he didn't seem like that kind of a person, a crazy gun person. It was Jack Nietzsche that introduced me to Phil, recommended me. Jack knew everybody I was singing in the Blossoms. We did our own thing, but we did a lot of background singing. I joined the group when I was still in high school.
Had to get my parents permission, so we got a reputation. Jack told Phil that we were exactly what he was looking for. Phil wasn't a bind. It was a bind of his own, but a bind. Nonetheless, he was planning for the Crystals to record this song. He's a rebel. But he got wind that Vicky Carr was about to record her own version of the song for Liberty Records. Phil wanted his version to hit the radio waves and the store shelves first. He wasn't gonna be one up
by another label. The problem was, the Crystals were torn on the East Coast. Phil was in l A. He needed to cut that record now, So that's how we were brought in. I knew all thelong that we the Blossoms, were singing on a record that was going to be credited to someone else. I knew that from the jump. Now, maybe the Crystals weren't aware of that fact. Maybe they heard the song on the radio and maybe their jaws dropped to the floor and they realized it wasn't their
voices on the track. I've been uncredited for so long at that point, it wasn't something that shocked me, to be honest, I wasn't even crazy about the song. Phil paid me three grand flat to cut that tune, so I was good. Phil was beside himself when our version went to number one, but he was even more pleased when Vicky Carr's version didn't even break the top one hundred. Now, one of the next songs we've recorded, He's the boy I love. That was supposed to be credited to me.
That was supposed to have my name on it, my stage name, Darlene Love. Phil gave me that name, and I figured where he went through the motions to give me a catchy stage name. He would put it on the record label, DJs would say my name on air, kids would look at my name, maybe my picture on the sleeve while the forty five spun. But when he released it on his Phillies label, once again, it was credited to the Crystals. Remember to him, it was always
a Phil Specter production. It didn't matter who sang on it or who played on it. It was his record, his show. He didn't care how anonymous any of us were. The tower my heart sunk. I was hurt. I was angry. It hurt that people were here in my record and didn't know it was me. It hurt that I had been lied to used. It hurt like hell. But I made sure that it didn't bring me down. I was determined to never give Phil Specter the satisfaction of knowing that he broke me. We'll be right back after this
word word word. I may have had my own premonitions about Sam Cooke and Phil Specter, but none of us could have seen what was coming in late nine. That day in November hit all of us like a brick. We had been busy making other plans. As they said, we had wrapped recording the Christmas album that summer. A Christmas gift for you from Phil Specter, That's what he called it again, putting his name out in front of
everyone else. We had recorded through a sweltering summer, put our all into it, an army of musicians Hal Blaine, Barney kessel Sonny Bono, Leon Russell, Tommy Tedesco. There was no room to move in gold Star. Heel loved Christmas music despite his Jewish background. He loved how big the music was, how emotional and sentimental it was. It was the Wagner lover inside of him. He also got a big kick out of the fact that Irvin Berlin, a
fellow jew, was the one who wrote White Christmas. The atmosphere was very playful and very joyous, and I think that joy comes through on the record. It was one of the few times I enjoyed being in a studio with Phil. The record was packaged and set for release and an honest Friday, November twenty second, nineteen and then the bottom dropped out further details on an assassination attempt against President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. President Kennedy was shot
as he drove from Dallas Airport to downtown Dallas. Governor Connelly of Texas in the car with him was also shot. It is reported that three bullets rang out. A secret serviceman was heard to shout from the car, He's dead. President Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas. The record was pulled from Shells shortly after. Phil blame poor sales on
the assassination. Phil was years old, his first t number one records, Oh Make Anybody Think They Are And then in early nineteen sixty four, the Beatles played Ed Sullivan. The landscape of America changed Draft Stickley in so many ways, and just a matter of months, that kind of change was difficult for Phil to navigate. The whole thing began a new pattern, a pattern of blame. We always had to have something or someone to blame for his failures.
It was the singer's fault, or the label's fault, or the audience has fault, or it was the fault of an American president struck down in Dallas by God knows who. I never heard him except the blame for anything, even the Righteous Brothers. He hit gold with the Righteous Brothers in You've Lost That Love and feeling was his everest. It was his peak, that was his mountain high. It was almost double the length of a single at that time,
and it's still dominated the charts. It got played on radio and TV more than any other song in the twentieth century. The twentieth century, that song was the twentieth century understand. As crazy as they went for that in
the United States, they crazier in the UK. Andrew law Gold him, the Rolling Stones manager, took out a full page ad in the paper simply to sing the praises of the song and to phil He called it the last word and Tomorrow's sound today, and said that it was responsible for exposing the overall mediocrity in the music industry and even that level of fame, that level of
success wasn't good enough for him. He weaseled his name under the songwriting credit of There As a Woman, the B side of the single that Bill Medley and Bob Hatfield had written on their own. They were irritated because it took a third of the tracks royalty money and funneled it directly to Fill even though he didn't write
the thing. More drama followed. Of course, Bill and Bobby were fighting with each other and fighting with Phil, and then Phil released an album of the Righteous Brothers material that the duo didn't approve. The next thing, you know, they jumped ship and go to MGM. Phil is suing them, and then a few years later he's talking about them in Rolling Stone magazine, calling them untalented and saying they were really non intellectual and unable to comprehend success. They
couldn't comprehend success. They were intalented. Man, leave it to Phil. Only Phil would have a hit that huge and then so easily mess it all up. I think those sorts of experiences led him to be even more controlling, controlling people like me, and that's why after I had finally cut myself free from Phil and signed a contract with Philadelphia International, with gamble and huff. He found a way to get me back without me even knowing. It was a power move, no doubt. I was in Philly for
a few months. They'll have the same lawyer. They sold the contract back to him. I had a turning point that day in the studio in the early seventies recording Lord, if You're a woman. Not the turning point I had cleaning that woman's bathroom that would be years later. This was an opposite kind of turning point, the moment when I said to hell with it all, put my headphones on the mica sand and walked out of phil studio forever.
I didn't see him again for twenty years. At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, they were given him a damn Award when he took him another twenty two years after his to give me mine, And despite the fact that he never gave me proper credit, that he bought back my contract just to get under my skin, that I had to sue him for royalties ode despite all of that, when I was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in two thousand and eleven,
I thanked him. I called him a genius. At that point he was in jail, but I knew a word would get around to him. He'd hear my speech, and I wanted him to know that, no matter what he did to me, I was going to go out on top January, New York City, the Waldorf Astoria. Phil Specter never mentioned Darlene loved during his speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. He could see Darlene in the audience from his eagle eye position at
the podium on stage. His three inch Cuban heels helped with the elevated advantage point. She applauded with the crowd, smiled at Phil from where she sat at her table. But Phil made sure that he kept the moment to himself. Just like the songs he recorded at gold Star, his moment on stage was a Phil Specter production. It had been a while years even since Phil made a public appearance like this. He had spent most of the nineteen eighties living the life of a reclusive midas who had
lost his golden touch. In nine eighty six, he left the Hollywood mansion where he held court and where he held people hostage for two decades. He moved into another mansion, in Pasadena, this one previously owned by Robert Reid of the Brady Bunch. He said he was downsizing, but instinctively went in the opposite direction. He went big bulgarian, three stories, two acres or waterfall and a jacuzzi. The Mediterranean style mansion offered him ample room to never be seen by
anyone else for as long as he wanted. Everything he did in the eighties was done in secret. He got married again, this time to his assistant turned girlfriend, Janezavola, and the couple had twins in nine two. He kept the marriage hidden from many. He really sold that image out of touch, hermetic, paranoid, cartoonish part Howard Hughes and part Howard the Duck with the three armed bodyguards that flanked him as he made his way to the stage
at the Waldorf Historia that night. He didn't know it as he walked, wobbling from side to side from one too many Roman Cokes. But in less than two years he would find himself hold up in the presidential suite of the Waldorf Historia for a year as he mourned the death of his nine year old son, Philip Jr. From leukemia. Be my baby boomed over the house p A, but Phil didn't want to talk about be my baby.
Phil was drunk on the moment, drunk on the attention, and drunk on whatever the mind eraser of choice was that day. He rambled on about George Bush, about the presidential inauguration that was only two days away. The audience shot each other confused, if not mildly entertained glances, and when he got around to talking about music, he skipped over all the people who helped get him to the place.
He found himself that day, standing at the podium addressing a room full of industry giants, he didn't ring out the names of the singers and the musicians who had layered the bricks in the wall of sound. Instead, he pointed fingers. He pointed a finger at Bruce Springsteen, and then another at Eric Carmen, and yet another at Abba. Accused them of ripping him off. They all ripped him off. He played the stereotype to a t. His bodyguards had to cut him short and peel him away from the podium.
Phil went home and got lost in his Pasadena mansion again. Down the road from Pasadena, twenty six year old actress Lana Clarkson wasn't paying any attention to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony that night. The name phil Specter meant nothing to her. Instead, she looked at a poster mock up for her latest movie, Wizards of the Lost Kingdom Too. There was a castle in the distance. It lay at the end of a craggy cliff that was shaped like a lightning bolb. Two foreboding heads hung
in the clouds. The dramatic tagline at the top of the poster read, Across the Sea of Dreams, behind the curtain of time lies the land of ultimate fantasy. Lana got lost for a moment looking at the image, got lost in the other worldliness of it. It was a place she had never seen before, the kind of place she would probably never see beyond the make believe of a Hollywood sound stage, a castle, a mansion, high in the clouds, at the end of a long and winding road.
It really was a fantasy. She'd been eating out the actress thing for years now. She was tall, blonde, classically beautiful. Her parents had named her after Hollywood legend Lana Turner, and like Laana Turner, Lana Clarkson was the embodiment of tinseltown elegance. She brought a level of halcyon class to
every minor role she could snagged. She had walked on On Three's Company in The Jefferson's On Night Writer, and Who's the Boss on the A Team in The Love Boat, but her movie career wasn't progressing beyond the B list or even the C list. Wizards of the Lost Kingdom Too was set for release in March, and she was worried how many theaters in town would even show it. At the poster would get hung up, she prepared herself for another straight to video co classic the right people
would never see. Laana wasn't paying any attention to what was happening at the Waldorf Historia that night. She stared at the poster wondered if this would be the role that was different, the one that got her one step closer to something she never thought was attainable, the fabled mansion in the Clouds. It will be fourteen years later, almost to the day that Lana Clarkson approached that unattainable fantasy.
She walked the craggy cliff walk to the door of a hilltop castle in Alhambra, Her host was Phil Specter. Even fourteen years later, she still knew nothing about it. The invitation was sudden, unexpected, and the castle was magical but also eerie. Something about it all didn't feel quite right. She was driven up the quarter mile driveway, but then she thought, what was he gonna do? What was he going to do to his bread and butter? Why would he do anything? It would leave so much blood on
the tracks. This episode of Blood on the Tracks is brought to you by twenty 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 the
season one with twelve episodes featuring Jimmy Hendrix. Subscribed 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 by disgrace Land, the award winning music and true crime podcast also hosted by Yours 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, I Heeart radio app or wherever you get your podcast all right. This episode of Blood on the Tracks was written by Zeth Lundi and scored in mixed by Matt Boden, Posted by me Jake Brennan. Additional music and score elements by Ryan's Breaker and Henry Juneta. This episode featured Lindsay cox Is Darlene Love. 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 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 Nike Gonzalez and leave a review for Blood on the Tracks on Apple Podcast, you can hashtag blood on the Tracks on social media
you leave your review there. We'll pick two winners each week and announced them on the Double Elvis Instagram page that's at Double Elvis. Go ahead and get that a fall, all right. As always, you can find me blabbing about other crazy rock stars on Disgrace Land and Club and you can talk to me per Usual on Instagram and Twitter at Disgrace, lad Rock Alozy Dad