Shel Talmy, record producer who oversaw hits by the Kinks and the Who, dies at 87
Shel Talmy, the American record producer who helped foment the British Invasion by capturing the scabrous guitar riff in the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” and Roger Daltrey’s stuttering vocal line in the Who’s “My Generation,” died Wednesday. He was 87.
His death was announced in a post on his Facebook page, which said he “passed away peacefully at home” in Los Angeles “after suffering a stroke over the weekend.” The post included a message from Talmy in which he wrote that “if you’re reading this now, this is my final vignette, as I am no longer residing on this plane of existence, and have ‘moved on,’ to wherever that may be.”
“I’d like to think that I’m thoroughly enjoying my new ‘residence,’ and that the countless rumors that there is a big working ‘studio in the sky’ are true,” the note continued.
Though he was born in Chicago, Talmy was an architect of the catchy if rough-hewn sound that propelled many a British band to pop stardom in the mid-1960s; in addition to the Kinks and the Who, he oversaw hits by Manfred Mann and Chad & Jeremy and worked with a young David Bowie (back when he was performing under his real name, Davy Jones).
Talmy’s live-wire production style — as immortalized in a catalog of classic tunes that also includes the Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night” and “Tired of Waiting for You,” the Who’s “I Can’t Explain” and the Easybeats’ “Friday on My Mind” — emphasized fuzzy guitars and bashing drums that created a sense of a band fighting against the establishment to be heard.
Yet one of his best-regarded productions was the Kinks’ 1967 “Waterloo Sunset,” a gently psychedelic pop song about a guy watching two lovers cross a bridge over the River Thames. In an interview with The Times last year, the Kinks’ Ray Davies remembered “Waterloo Sunset” — which Davies said he produced, though Talmy insisted otherwise — as a favorite of his mother’s, adding that the song “says a lot about people of her postwar generation living in austerity in London.
“I was a strange kid, not very sociable, but I think with this song she finally understood me a bit.”
Davies leads a guided tour through his band’s catalogue of classic hits, near-hits and the songs that makes him think about his mum and dad.
Sheldon Talmy was born in 1937 and moved to L.A. from Chicago as a teenager. He graduated from Fairfax High School in 1955 and started working as an engineer at an early version of the studio that became Conway Recording Studios on Melrose Avenue. Talmy went to England in 1962 and quickly fell in with a scene he described as “energy-filled” in a 1990 interview with Mix magazine. “Nobody got a lot of sleep, but nobody gave a damn,” he said. “We all worked long into the night, and then we’d go out to parties.”
Talmy later collaborated with Pentangle, the Small Faces and the Damned. In the late ’70s, he moved back to L.A., where he continued to work in music as well as in computers, including for a company he co-founded called Superscan that charged other firms between 95 cents and $10 a page to feed documents into a “photocopy-like machine,” as a 1987 Times article put it. “Using a small camera, the scanning machine takes pictures of the text and does electronically what a typist working a word processor does at a keyboard.”
According to Variety, Talmy’s survivors include his wife, Jan Talmy; a brother; a daughter and a granddaughter.
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