I first became aware of Phil Spector in a book of essays by Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. He sounded like a very sick puppy. The intervening years did nothing to change my opinion. In fact, the stories got a lot worse. He was a man with what I believe to be just modest musical talent of his own (okay, he wrote a few hit songs) but whose incredible ear let him hob-nob with the likes of Paul McCartney and The Ronettes. His proper social milieu should have been scrounging through garbage cans for scraps, muttering darkly to himself, and sleeping in cardboard boxes. Instead, he got to live in a 33-room castle in Alhambra.

Everyone who knew him (and I don’t think he had ANY friends, not the way I’d define the term) said he had a horrible temper, established new Olympic records in drug and alcohol abuse, was prone to behavior for which the word "erratic" was WAY too charitable, and was better armed than, say, Guatemala. Once while producing a song for John Lennon, he fired a bullet into the studio ceiling. They put a frame around the bullet hole, never filled it in, those wonderful scamps in the music biz, ha ha. Da do ron ron ron, da do ron ron.

I guess it’s a miracle he never killed anybody in all those years of excess. But a few days ago he did, fired at least one bullet into the face of a beautiful but aging starlet named Lana Clarkson. Lana was 40 and had a middle-of-the-road career, not a total flop like the majority of actors down there, but not a household name. She had a cult following for her B movies, did a lot of comics and collectors conventions, like Vampirella or whatever her name is. Now, she’s going to be much, much more famous, because she was murdered by a very famous piece of human garbage named Phil Spector.

(Innocent until proven guilty? I guess she could have been killed by the same Colombian hit men than shut up Nicole and Ron… but Spector was the only one THERE, unless the butler did it, or the guy who polishes the suits of armor in the castle hallways and feeds the crocodiles in the moat.)

It took a couple days for the name to register. Lana Clarkson? Damn, I knew a couple back in the ‘60s, Jim and DONNA Clarkson. Isn’t that odd? And, come to think about it, they had a girl child. What the heck was her name? She was about 6 when I met her … which would make her 40 today. Lana Clarkson was 40.

I have lost contact with them over the years, like I lost contact with most of the people I knew back in the dippy hippy ‘60s. I had heard that Jim Clarkson died some years back, from cancer. But it turns out that my stepsons have stayed in touch over the years, have at times been fairly close … and yes, it was THAT Lana Clarkson. Damn it.

The last time I saw her she would have been in her early teens. There is a picture of her at about that age on her website, sitting on her horse, not showing too many signs yet what a gorgeous, 6-foot knockout she would turn out to be. If you go to the site and click on PLAY PICS, and scroll down to the fourth and sixth pictures, you can see Donna, too, looking very good for her age in a low cut red dress.

This is all so disturbing. I can’t say I am grief-stricken by her passing, it’s been too long and, because of the age difference, I never knew her that well, anyway. She was more or less in the background of my life. But I knew her parents well. For a while I was pretty close to Jim. He somehow found us, me and my ex-wife Anet, and Stefan, in upstate New York shortly after we left the Woodstock Festival, and helped us nurse a '56 Buick all the way back to California with almost no money at all. I remember bartering for the last tank of gas at a station just west of Las Vegas, where they were used to deals like that with busted gamblers. We traded an old tape recorder and some albums.

You share a lot on a trip like that. Jim had been hit pretty hard by hippie madness, transforming himself from a middle-class businessman into … Kit Carson, Daniel Boone, something like that. He wore fringed buckskins and boots and hats, let his blonde hair grow long, and had a killer gunslinger mustache. He told me he spent almost an entire year living in a remote cabin in Northern California, hiding out from some people, living off the land. And I don’t mean milking goats and farming brown rice. He said he shot a bear, and ate it. He did a lot of acid and smoked a lot of grass, and got very, very happy when he did so. I tripped with him a few times, and remember laughing a lot. A whole lot. In fact I remember him as one of the most cheerful men I ever knew, high or not. It would have been awful to see him wither under cancer, and I’m almost glad I missed it … but I wish I could have been there to lend whatever poor support is possible.

Anet knew Donna better than I did. She was pretty wild then, up for just about anything. She bore a third child while I knew her, named her Fawn, in keeping with the times. They took a lot of pictures of the birth, may even have filmed it, I can’t remember for sure. I saw the pictures. I’m pretty sure Lana and her brother, Jeff, were present. Lots of people were doing that then. (I remember another friend, Maria, had a child in our apartment and seriously considered cooking and eating the … well, she didn’t, but some women did.)

But the worst of this is the boys, my stepsons. Lana was pretty much Mo’s first love, I guess. I tried to imagine what it would be like to hear my first love had been murdered. I think it would hit very hard, and I haven’t seen her in 38 years. Roger is pretty upset, too. And worst of all, of course, is thinking about Donna and the rest of her family having to go through this. Added to the horror of losing a child or a sister at ALL is the likelihood that this is all going to be a pretty nasty zoo of a trial.

The murdering fuck has hired Robert Shapiro, of course, and is free as a shitbird on one million dollars bail. And Phil Spector really ought to have his picture right there in the California Criminal Statutes, next to the paragraph labeled "Insanity defense." He has been obviously and flamboyantly nutty as an Almond Joy bar for almost fifty years. The entire American Bar Association gets an erection at the mere thought of a man like him being accused of murder. The lawyers are going to have fun with this one.

Of course, the insanity defense is tough, even if you ARE rich and crazy. Maybe they’ll go for self-defense instead, which means you have to cook up some bullshit story about what a crack-crazed whore Lana Clarkson was. Perhaps Shapiro should consider the Billy Flynn defense, from CHICAGO. He can choreograph it, and sing and dance:

Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes they both, oh yes they both, oh yes they both reached for,

the gun, the gun, the gun, the gun, oh yes, they both reached for the gun, for the gun!

(If you don’t know what I’m talking about you should go out now and see the movie version of CHICAGO.) Maybe Phil Spector could give the whole production his famous "wall of sound" treatment.

Nothing funny about it, I know. I just don’t know how else to deal with it.

I think about the things that link up our lives. I discovered there was yet another connection. Her website lists BRAINSTORM as one of her credits. It doesn’t show up in the Internet Movie Database, so it must have been a walk-on or extra work … but I was on the set of BRAINSTORM a couple of times, met Christopher Walken there. I could have run into Lana … but I didn’t.

Connections … A while back I wrote and sent out a short thing concerning the concept of "Six degrees of separation," the theory that any two humans can be connected by a chain of associations no more than six links long. I pointed out that all of you, my correspondents, are only three degrees away from Kevin Bacon, the Holy Grail of this whole silly idea. This time I almost feel I should apologize for the following chain:

You know me. That’s one.

I knew Lana Clarkson. That’s two. (I don’t see why the links need to be living.)

She knew Phil Spector. That’s three.

Spector knows Robert Shapiro. That’s four. Therefore …

All of you are five degrees from some of the scum of the planet: OJ Simpson. Johnny Cochran, he of the eagerly played race card. Ex-cop, now CNN consultant Mark "N-word" Fuhrman. The world’s most inept celebrity lawyer, F. Lee Bailey.

Before this trial is over, who knows WHAT slime you will be 6 degrees from.

Lucky you.