The teen tycoon’s falling star

We slid four quarters into the old diner jukebox, and pressed the buttons for Phil Spector's Ronettes singing Be My Baby.

The waitress brought eggs over-easy as the Wall of Sound wafted over the seating booths, the tinny speakers accelerating the rush back to all those innocent adolescent dreams of America.

Spector - the 'mad genius' of pop before the Beatles came along - waits in California for his jury's verdict, facing old age in jail for second-degree murder after five months of trial.

His life and all it once meant is in ruins, whatever their verdict. Lana Clarkson, the B-movie blonde and sometime party girl, died slumped in his kitschy castle with his bullet in her mouth. The songs he called 'symphonies for the kids' belong forever to the