epub or
mobi, with thanks to the original sharer
“This
is a primitive country,” says Phil Spector. “I was at Shepheard’s, the
discotheque, and these guys start saying these things. It’s unbelievable. These
people are animals.” “What kind of things, Phil?” “I don’t know. They look at,
you know, my hair—my wife and I are dancing, and, I mean, it’s unbelievable, I
feel somebody yanking on my hair in the back. I turn around, and here’s this
guy, a grown man, and he is saying these, unbelievable things to me. So I tell
him, like this, ‘I’m going to tell you this one time, that’s all—don’t ever try
that again.’ And the guy—it’s unbelievable—he shoves me with the heel of his
hand and I go sprawling back into a table—” —Spector pauses— “—I mean, I’ve
studied karate for years. I could literally kill
a guy like that. You know? Size means nothing. A couple of these—” he cocks his
elbow in the gloom and brings up the flat of his forearm—“but what am I going
to do, start a fight every time I go out? Why should I even have to listen to
anything from these animals? I find this country very condemning. I don’t have
this kind of trouble in Europe. The people of America are just not born with
culture.”
“I
had just come from Sacramento, and I wasn’t supposed to know anything. My car was wilder than anything around. One night this
kid comes up with a roadster with no door handles. It looked real sharp, but he
had to kick the door from the inside to open it. You should have seen the look
on his face when he saw mine—I had the same thing, only with electric buttons.”
The real action was the drag racing, which was quite, but quite,
illegal. “We’d all be at the Piccadilly and guys would start
challenging each other. A guy goes up to another guy’s car and looks
it up and down like it has gangrene or something, and he says: ‘You wanna go?’ Or, if it was a real grudge match
for some reason, he’d say, ‘You wanna go for pink slips?’ “Well,
as soon as a few guys had challenged each other, everybody would ride out onto Sepulveda Boulevard and
the guys would start dragging, one car on one side of the center line, the
other car on the other. Go a quarter of a mile. It was wild. Some nights there’d
be a thousand kids lining the road to watch, boys and girls, all sitting on the
sides of their cars with the lights shining across the highway. After a while the cops would come. Then
you really saw something. Everybody
jumped in their cars and took off, in every direction. Some guys would head
right across a field. Of course, all our cars were so hopped up, the cops could
never catch anybody.”
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