USA Today:

Rock lore abounds with tales of Spector's eccentricities and volatility. Musicians have recounted that he often wore a gun on his hip and brandished it in the studio, where he was known to be an obsessive tyrant. Lennon claimed that Spector pulled a gun on him.

The Ramones made no secret of Spector's aggressive style while producing 1980's End of the Century. They said he locked them in his house for hours and pointed a gun at Dee Dee Ramone.

''A lot of these things were overblown and a lot of these things were alcohol-induced,'' Marky Ramone said.

While recording 1978's Death of a Ladies' Man, singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen dealt with Spector's ''megalomania and insanity and the kind of devotion to armaments, to weapons, that was really intolerable,'' according to a BBC radio show transcript.

''At a certain point Phil approached me with a bottle of Manischevitz kosher red wine in one hand and a 45 in the other, put his arm around my shoulder and shoved a revolver into my neck and said, 'Leonard, I love you.' I said, 'I hope you do, Phil.' ''

Rodney on Phil:

Another friend, the longtime Los Angeles radio host Rodney Bingenheimer, said Mr. Spector had been in good spirits in recent years, and had been spending time with Nancy Sinatra, attending Los Angeles Lakers games with her.

Mr. Spector has also been giving parties at the Montrose Bowling Alley, in a nearby suburb, inviting close friends and former colleagues. "He even started doing something he's never done before, posing for photos and signing autographs for fans," Mr. Bingenheimer said.

Mr. Spector has been embroiled in several lawsuits concerning royalties he may have owed to artists who performed some of his biggest hits in the early 1960's, but even adversaries said today that they had seen no sign in recent years of the combustible figure of lore. [NY Times]