Record producer Shel Talmy died last week at age 87, and if the name is unfamiliar to you, the music he crafted isn’t. The earliest hits by the Kinks and the Who owe their tough, aggressive attitude to Talmy’s techniques and eye for talent, which he lent to scores of acts in the early days of the British Invasion.
Talmy made his name in London, but he was born in Chicago and trained in sound studios in Los Angeles. He visited England in 1962 and bluffed his way into a job.
I was fortunate enough to get Nick Venet, who was head of A+R at Capitol records, to say help yourself to some of the demos that he’d been working on. When I got to London, I had some names of people to look up, and the first one I went to see was Dick Rowe at Decca Records. I walked into his office and told him that I was, arguably, the greatest thing since oxygen was invented, in terms of producers, and played two demos that I had taken from Nick Venet. One was from the Beach Boys and the other from Lou Rawls… [B]y the time they found out it was all bullshit, I already had a major hit with the Bachelors! The British, being as gentlemanly as they are, never mentioned that they knew that I knew that they knew.
The Bachelors were Irish folk trio that Talmy gave a country-pop gloss on “Charmaine,” a No. 6 UK hit in 1963. The next year someone hooked him up with a band called the Ravens, soon to be the Kinks. With Talmy’s guidance and Dave Davies’ idea to slice the speaker cone on his amp to get that fuzz effect on his power chords, they came up with a sound that charted the course for countless bands to follow. (Talmy also emphatically denied the persistent rumor that Jimmy Page, who Talmy often used as a session guitarist, played the solo on the single).
Talmy’s signature sound owed a lot to some tricks he learned in Los Angeles.
I spent a lot of time in the studio working out how to isolate instruments, how to mike drums, how to do all kinds of stuff. When I arrived in London, I started recording drums using twelve mikes, which I had worked out how to do. Everybody in London, at the time, was only using four. They said I couldn’t do that because it would phase. I said, “Just listen to it, see if it does.
When Pete Townsend heard “You Really Got Me,” he wanted Talmy to produce his band, recently renamed The Who, so he wrote a song to get Talmy’s attention. It worked. “I Can’t Explain” was the result.
Talmy stayed busy through the ’60s, producing records by David Bowie (when he was still David Jones) and several by the British folk band Pentagle, but after the early ’70s and a return to Los Angeles he devoted more attention to books, as both an author and publisher. He was a terrific storyteller, and he told a lot of them on his Facebook page until a week ago. His final posthumous message was posted Friday.