Music legend and murder suspect, Phil Spector, isn't trying to make friends or curry favor with old pals while he waits for a second trial. The thin and frightful-looking music producer turned up at reviled R&B legend Ike Turner's Los Angeles funeral on Friday and gave an impromptu speech that laid into both Tina Turner and Oprah Winfrey. And for someone who 'wasn't prepared to say anything,' he sure did say a lot. "Nobody had told me that I was going to speak. This is a very sad occasion for me," said Spector.
Below are several detailed excerpts taken from his impromptu semi-eulogy about his Grammy Award-winning brother from another mother:"First of all, the things that were said about Ike, that were in that piece-of-trash movie they made about him were ... (applause), it was a piece-of-trash movie. I haven't seen the movie but it was told to me, and [Barney] Kessel was the world's greatest guitar player in the world and the only reason that Ike didn't play on 'River Deep, Mountain High' was because Ike was the second greatest guitar player in the world. I treasured him and everybody knew it except Ike. That's how good he was.
"Ike made Tina the jewel she was. When I went to see Ike play at the Cinegrill in the '90s after his absurd reason for being sent to prison for no reason other than being a black man in America, there were at least, and I counted them, five Tina Turners on the stage performing that night, any one of them could have been Tina Turner."
"And sell-out, whom you really love and respect but I have an ambivalence towards Oprah Winfrey. She made Tina Turner's book into a bestseller, which demonized and vilified Ike. The book wouldn't have sold 10 books. It was badly written. It was a piece of trash and because Oprah idolized Tina, she didn't feel it wrong to vilify a 'brother.'"
READ MORE EXCERPTS FROM PHIL SPECTOR'S EULOGY TO THE LATE IKE TURNER AFTER THE JUMP!
"Other black sisters did the same thing to Ike and there was a very famous story about Whoopi Goldberg, who had a television show for about five minutes, interviewed Ike. Ike had called me and said, 'Shall I do the show?'
"I said, 'You can't get hurt.' And he said, 'OK, I'm going to do it.' And we figured it would be good because it's Whoopi and Whoopi asked him, 'I understand before you were married when you were living together, you beat the hell out of her and she tried to commit suicide because she was so terrified of you and she tried to jump out of a window,' and Ike said, 'Yeah, but it's hard to jump out of a window from a basement floor.'"
"It was only one Ike. I learned more from Ike than any professors I've been around. He never, ever bothered me. He never interfered with me. He never got in my way."
"When we did 'River Deep Mountain High,' people said you can't put Ike and Tina Turner's name on that record. It won't sell because they are rhythm and blues and it's a pop record. I said I signed Ike and Tina Turner, it won't even say featuring Tina Turner; it's Ike and Tina Turner."
Spector said part of the reason he became disillusioned with the record business was because he could not make Ike and Tina as big of an act as he wanted.
"I wanted them to be the biggest revue in America. They were the first act that I recorded that ever could play big-time and break it in Vegas and America."
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