On the first Monday in February, Phil Spector was arrested on suspicion of shooting B-movie actress Lana Clarkson in the face in the marble foyer of his hilltop suburban LA mansion. Not long after, the rains came. Streets flooded, hillsides oozed onto freeway overpasses, restaurants and gyms emptied. It rains in LA every year between January and April, and when it does, the city stops being itself. LA runs on the myth of its sunshine, and people live in LA to live myth, not reality. That’s why they have Hollywood and cell-phone towers built into plastic palm trees and newspaper ads for " vaginal rejuvenation " and a new outdoor mall that over the last winter holiday dropped fake snow on Banana Republic.

Spector first came to LA from NYC because of death. His father — the first cousin of his mother — asphyxiated himself with carbon monoxide when Spector was nine. His mother moved the family out West in 1958, and when he turned 13, Spector got a guitar for his bar mitzvah. By the time he was a 17-year-old student at Fairfax High, he and his singing group the Teddy Bears had already turned death into pop success, writing and recording " To Know Him Is To Love Him, " a radio hit based on his father’s gravestone epitaph. As Timothy White told it in A Near Faraway Place, his book on the Beach Boys, this was the song that first made a young Brian Wilson believe in the California Dream. If Spector could do it, maybe he could too.

As Spector rose to pop prominence in the ’60s, Wilson would go on to love Spector’s production on " He’s a Rebel " as well, and to this day he calls " Be My Baby " his favorite song. But the relationship became as much about respect as about rivalry. In 1965, Wilson paid tribute to Spector by one-upping him: he wrote " Then I Kissed Her " for the Beach Boys, a rearrangement of Spector’s Crystals hit " Then He Kissed Me. " Spector said he made his legendary girl-group records to be " teen symphonies. " A few years later, Wilson went farther: he said he wanted Pet Sounds to be " A teenage symphony to God. "

They were ’60s LA’s most driven illusionists, troubled audio savants determined to harness the power of God and control realities they didn’t actually live. From " Be My Baby " in 1963 to " Let It Be " in 1970, Spector-produced songs were defined by their production. He made sure that when you heard the Ronettes or the Beatles, you were also hearing him. He was the producer as Ahab, the perfect pop song his always elusive white whale. Stories about what would happen when he felt his control slipping away are legendary: guns, insults, tantrums, and, after the US flop of Ike & Tina Turner’s masterpiece " River Deep, Mountain High, " self-inflected social isolation.

Wilson had his well-documented periods of withdrawal too, but he was most like Spector in his fear of the California he helped promote. " The one thing I never understood about Phil, " ex-Ronette Ronnie Spector once said of the man she famously claimed kept her a prisoner in their home, " is how a man who loved California as much as he did could be so afraid of the sun. " The last time the two worked together, on " I Wish I Never Knew the Sunshine, " Ronnie sang these words: " I wish I never knew the sunshine/’Cause if I never knew the sunshine, baby/Maybe I wouldn’t mind the rain. "

Likewise, the man whose name is synonymous with California surf culture, with the " Fun, Fun, Fun " of waves and beaches, was terrified of the water. The Beach Boys’ 1971 Surf’s Up — political, psychedelic, and full of environmental dread — was their greatest lie of a surf album. It included Wilson’s melancholic collaboration with Van Dyke Parks, "  ’Til I Die, " where the ocean wasn’t freedom but existential solitude. " I’m a cork on the ocean, " it began, " floating over the raging sea/How deep is the ocean?/I lost my way. "

Recently, Wilson was at the Staples Center as the LA Lakers defeated the LA Clippers. He sat — his face a ghostly pale — three rows up from the floor, almost directly behind the spot where Spector used to sit before his arrest, right alongside the center of the court, one of the best seats in the house.

Lakers games were one of the few times Spector was known to emerge from the 1926 replica of a French castle he called home. Unlike the other courtside celebs, he rarely socialized, rarely got excited about a Kobe dunk, and always looked the way he was supposed to look — the sad, mad genius, the pop hermit gone crazy. At that Lakers-Clippers game, the night Wilson was in the house, someone else was in Spector’s seat. Free on a million-dollar bail, Spector was back in seclusion, a casualty of his own drive for pop paradise. " Baby, do you know what you did today?/Baby, do you know what you took away? " , Ronnie sang on " Sunshine. " " You took the blue out of the sky. "