Legendary music producer Phil Spector has died while still serving 19 years-to-life for murdering actress Lana Clarkson, prison officials announced Sunday.
The Bronx-born killer was 81.
California state prison officials said he died at 6:35 p.m. Saturday of natural causes after being taken to “an outside hospital.”
While the medical examiner has yet to release an official cause of death, sources told TMZ that he died of complications from COVID-19.
He was first hospitalized with a coronavirus infection four weeks ago, before returning to prison — but died Saturday after being rushed back to a hospital that day after struggling to breathe, the outlet said.
Spector’s “Wall of Sound” — merging vocal harmonies with lavish orchestral arrangements — revolutionized music production in the 1960s, and John Lennon called him “the greatest record producer ever.”
His work produced 20 top 40 hits between 1961 and 1965, including “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Be My Baby” and “He’s a Rebel,” as well as Righteous Brothers’ epic “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” the 1965 hit said to be the song most played on radio and television in the 20th century.
Despite his success, his dark side — which he pinned on “devils that fight inside me” — had long simmered in plain sight, with terrifying stories of gunplay, including threats against the likes of Lennon, Leonard Cohen, and the Ramones.
Blondie guitarist Chris Stein on Sunday recalled visiting Spector in the 1970s and being greeted with him “holding a bottle of diet Manischewitz wine in one hand and a presumably loaded 45 automatic in the other.”
“Long story. I thought he was nuts,” Stein tweeted.
Spector’s self-confessed “borderline insanity” came to a deadly conclusion on Feb. 3, 2003 — and left him spending his final chapter in prison from the age of 69.
B-movie actress Clarkson, 40, had gone back to Spector’s mock-castle home in Alhambra, California, after meeting at her hostess job at the Sunset Strip’s House of Blues in West Hollywood.
His chauffeur later testified that he heard a popping sound at about 5 a.m. — followed by the producer running out with blood on his hands, telling him, “I think I killed somebody.”
L.A. County sheriff’s deputies had to Taser Spector, who yelled, “Nobody’s taking my gun.” Clarkson’s body was then found in the foyer with a gunshot to the mouth.
Despite his apparent confession to his driver, Spector repeatedly maintained that Clarkson had killed herself, at one point saying she kissed the gun before her “accidental suicide,” his trial heard.
The jury was deadlocked at the end of his first trial — but he was convicted of second-degree murder in a retrial in May 2009, when he was 69.
After his conviction, he lashed out at the “actions of the Hitler-like DA and his stormtrooper henchmen,” calling them “reprehensible, unconscionable and despicable.”
During the trial, the producer — famed for his big hair and sunglasses — arrived in numerous theatrical outfits, usually featuring high-heeled boots, frock coats, and wildly styled wigs. He even arrived at one hearing in a chauffeur-driven stretch Hummer.
Once in prison, his carefully produced image was exposed — with his bald head and goatee looking like any aging inmate.
His murder also exposed a long history of violence toward women, with his second wife — Ronettes lead singer Ronnie Bennett — revealing in a memoir that he left a gold coffin in the basement and told her he would kill her if she tried to leave him.
“I can only say that when I left in the early ’70s, I knew that if I didn’t leave at that time, I was going to die there,” she wrote.
Born in the Bronx, Spector’s family moved to California after the death by suicide of his dad, Bernard Spector.
The death inspired his first hit song, “To Know Him is to Love Him” by his band the Teddy Bears — written when Spector was 17 and named after the inscription on his father’s tombstone.
The suicide is also said to have torn apart his troubled family, with his sister later spending time in mental institutions.
Spector described his famed “Wall of Sound” as “little symphonies for the kids.”
Not everyone was a fan, however. Although Lennon praised Spector’s work on the Beatles’ swansong album, “Let It Be,” Paul McCartney was enraged at all the strings and choirs — and later released a remastered “Let it Be,” removing Spector’s contributions.
Guitarist Steven Van Zandt of Springsteen’s E Street Band on Sunday remembered Spector as a “genius irredeemably conflicted.”
“He was the ultimate example of the Art always being better than the Artist, having made some of the greatest records in history based on the salvation of love while remaining incapable of giving or receiving love his whole life,” he tweeted.
With Post wires