Strange things happen when celebrities go bad. Has Michael ‘Kramer’ Richards racist outburst at a heckler last year changed the way we watch Seinfeld? Can we still see him bursting through Jerry’s door without thinking of him shouting “n-gger n-gger n-gger” at a punter?
Has the Naked Gun series ever recovered from the fact OJ Simpson has such a prominent role in them as a lovable goof?
Eventually these things fade, but the confusion of role and star in the current world of celebrity can cast a shade over a work of art for years to come. And there is no greater example of that than the case of “Wall of Sound” producer Phil Spector, whose murder trial appears to have ended in a jury deadlock.
So technically he is innocent – but no-one denies that an AMW (actress/model/whatever) Spector picked up at a nightclub died of a gunshot to the head at his creepy LA mansion – nor that Spector has a history of pulling guns on people to express mild disagreement. (“Do you love me Leonard?” he once said to Mr Cohen, sticking a revolver in his face during the recording of that much underrated classic “Death of a Ladies Man”. “I hope you love me Phil”, Cohen replied).
Spector’s defence was that the woman in question had been talking suicidally and was playing with the gun when it went off. His defence dug up a history of mental instability – in LA Z-movie land not something that required a hell of a lot of spade-work, one would imagine.
And the real tragedy is that someone is dead. But the knock-on is that Spector’s great work – and some of the great music of the century, classics such as “To Know Him Is To Love Him”, “Walking In The Rain”, “Baby, It’s You” etc – got much of their power from a delicious innocence, pre-The Who, pre-68, pre-Altamont. Now the shadow has fallen on them.
The question is whether that has finished them off – or given them a new lease of life.
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