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Blogging SpectorOur revels now are ended.

By Timothy NoahUpdated Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2007, at 6:17 PM ET

(Continued from page 8)

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[Update, May 11: On Court TV's Spector blog, Harriet Ryan counts two Navy grogs at Trader Vic's, not one. Okaoka! I must've been so plastered from hearing about the first one that I missed the second.]

Does This Sound Familiar?
May 9, 6 p.m. ET

Melissa Grosvenor, a waitress in New York, met Spector in May 1991. They dated, platonically, for about a year and a half. "He's very charming, a quick wit," she testifies. He invited her to visit him in California, flew her out (at first he offered only a one-way ticket); she arrived, they listened to some music, danced a little, and around 2 a.m., "I said I'm tired, I want to go." Charming Phil became Angry Phil ("His whole demeanor had changed"). Angry Phil disappeared from the room, Grosvenor gathered up her purse and sat in a chair waiting to leave. (By her description, it sounds as though this was not the foyer but perhaps the living room; at any rate, the locale was not Spector's Alhambra mansion, but his earlier dwelling in Pasadena.)

Spector returned with a gun and holster. "He walked right up to me and held the gun right to my face, just inches from my eyes, and said, 'If you try to leave I'm going to kill you.' " Spector's signature refrain, destined perhaps to become more famous than "And when he walked me home/ Da doo ron ron, da doo ron ron."

The Etiquette of Dating
May 9, 2007, 2 p.m. ET

All right, ladies. If a gentleman asks you out on a date and then threatens you with a gun after you spurn his advances or express a desire to leave, do you—assuming you're lucky enough to get away—

a.) Press criminal charges and refrain from future contact with that gentleman, except perhaps in a legal proceeding;
b.) Call it even when the cops have retrieved your purse and subsequently send that gentleman a joke via e-mail;
c.) Continue to see the gentleman because he "needed help" and "I cared about him" and because most of the time he's a peaceable fellow (though subsequently he will chase you with an Uzi as you drive away);
d.) Attend a subsequent party in New York thrown by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as that gentleman's guest because "as a photographer in the news industry, that's the type of event I needed to be at."

If you answered a.), then give yourself a gold star. If you answered b.), c.), or d.), then you are qualified to be a witness for the prosecution in the Phil Spector murder trial. According to testimony in the trial, Dorothy Melvin chose b.); Diane Ogden-Halder—who testified two days ago ("He said he was going to blow my brains out. That wasn't romantic to me")—chose c.); and as I watch today I learn that Stephanie Jennings chose d.). These choices were unsound. Granted, Spector was an intimidating person, both with his firearms and with his legal team. But if these witnesses had chosen otherwise, Lana Clarkson might still be alive.

"I Had Some Trouble With My Nipple Ring"
May 9, 2007, 1:50 p.m. ET

I promised this would be tawdry. On May 7 the Spector jury, back in court after a week off while defense attorney Bruce Cutler fine-tuned the dosage on his diabetes meds, listened to six voice mails that Spector left Dorothy Melvin, the first of four witnesses whose adventures in Spector's foyer (and comparable locales) bear striking resemblances to Lana Clarkson's. Melvin, you'll recall, said that in 1993 Spector threatened and struck her with a gun when she tried to leave his house—Pasadena patrolman Chris Russ disputed that she bore marks from pistol-whipping but otherwise corroborated Melvin's account—and that Spector became so suspicious of her purse and its contents that he wouldn't allow Melvin to take it with her. ("What is this?" he demanded, holding up her lipstick.)

According to the Court TV Web log (I was otherwise engaged on Monday and Tuesday), after the incident Spector created on Melvin's answering machine her own personal Wall of Sound in the form of five messages that range from contrite ("If you want to harbor ill will against me, it is OK") to menacing ("You are fucked and I am going to get you for what you did"). This last threat refers to legal action, but the most chilling Spector message was a threat against Melvin's life, and Court TV has the audio:

Sorry I'm late calling, chief, but I had some trouble with my nipple ring. Um, don't worry about the competition. Let the competition worry about you. All right, I cannot be replaced by a machine, unless it learns to uh, drink, fuck, [inaudible], right. Okay, keep smiling Dorothy, uh, but not so much that you begin to wonder if you're mentally fucking unbalanced. And I expect a return call, but be very careful of what you say to me, because nothing you say to me is worth your life. Goodbye, Dorothy!

The Los Angeles Times story buried this at the bottom and left the nipple ring out. It didn't even include that choice noir detail in an item for its Spector log about the voice mail! The L.A. Times is the only major newspaper in America giving this trial the coverage it deserves, and this is no time to go all high-minded on us. Save it for your global-warming coverage!

[Update, 4:05 p.m.:A reader informs me that "Sorry I'm late, chief—I had some trouble with my nipple ring" is the caption to a cartoon about office life that Robert Mankoff published in The New Yorker in January 1994, which was not long before Spector left this phone message. In the cartoon, the speaker is carrying a briefcase and his boss is looking at his wristwatch. Spector's nipple-ring reference was therefore a private joke referring to that cartoon (though, given Spector's often-incoherent style of communication, it wasn't necessarily a joke he'd let Melvin in on).]

Spatter Wars
May 2, 2007, 2:30 p.m. ET

The Phil Spector trial is on hold this week. On Monday, the proceedings were canceled because Spector's lead attorney, Bruce Cutler, was experiencing some sort of problem with his diabetes medication. On Tuesday, the judge gave everybody the day off in anticipation of a traffic snarl caused by a pro-immigration May Day march near the courthouse in downtown L.A. (Turnout was expected to be 100,000, but in the end it was closer to 25,000, according to the Los Angeles Times.) Today there will be a hearing about the prosecution's claim that the defense withheld evidence. This may concern the potential velocity of blood spatter from a gunshot wound. Yuck! Or it may be something else. In any event, I'm going to play hookey.

"Blood spatter is shaping up as the issue in the trial," explains Harriet Ryan on Court TV's Spector blog. The defense wants to argue that blood spatter can travel very far, because that helps its case that Spector was not standing close to Lana Clarkson when the gun went off. If he wasn't standing close, then he couldn't have put the gun barrel in her mouth. The prosecution wants to argue that blood spatter can't travel very far, because that helps its case that Spector was standing very close to Clarkson when the gun went off—close enough to put the gun barrel in Clarkson's mouth. Both sides will surely overstate the precision with which forensic science can address (let alone settle) this matter. Anyway, today's hearing concerns only procedural issues, not the evidence itself. The jury isn't even there. The trial resumes Monday, assuming Cutler has his blood sugar under better control by then.

In the meantime, the LA. Times Spector blog has unearthed, for your viewing pleasure, a YouTube clip of Phil Spector's short-lived band the Teddy Bears singing their Top 10 hit, "To Know Him Is To Love Him," recorded in 1958. The rest is rock 'n' roll history.

Well, Which Is It?
April 27, 5:15 p.m. ET

I've been reviewing video snippets from the defense's opening statement on the Court TV Web site. Spector's attorneys say they're going to argue that Clarkson killed herself. To support that theory, they will argue two seemingly contradictory points: