Shel Talmy, the American-born record producer who helped unleash the id of the British Invasion with a raw, grinding sound on proto-punk salvos like “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks and “My Generation” by the Who, died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87.
His death was announced in a post on his Facebook page, where he had been sharing detailed reminiscences about many of his past recordings with a long list of acts, which also included Manfred Mann, Chad & Jeremy, the Easybeats and a teenage David Bowie (who at the time was using his given surname, Jones).
Mr. Talmy’s climb to the top of the British music scene actually began in Los Angeles, where Mr. Talmy, who was born in Chicago, had lived since his teens. In 1962, he was working as a recording engineer at a studio in Hollywood when he headed for London for what he expected would be a five-week vacation, hoping he might scrape together enough work there to pay for the trip.
Before he left, his friend Nick Venet, who produced the Beach Boys for Capitol Records, offered him the acetates of some of his hit records to help Mr. Talmy drum up work. In a 2012 interview with Finding Zoso, a fan site devoted to the Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, whom Mr. Talmy used on many sessions, he recalled that Mr. Venet had told him: “Help yourself to my discs, whatever you want to use you can use. You can tell them it was yours.”
Once there, Mr. Talmy passed off hit records like “Surfin’ Safari” as his own in a meeting with Dick Rowe of Decca Records. “I thought, what the hell,” he said in an interview with the music writer Richie Unterberger, “I’m not going to be here long, I might as well be as brash as possible.” By the end of the meeting, he said, Mr. Rowe had told him, “You start next week.”
Mr. Talmy had already notched his first hit, “Charmaine,” a country-inflected number by the Irish vocal trio the Bachelors, when his ruse became obvious. But, by that point, he was on his way.
When Mr. Talmy arrived in England, even the Beatles were a sensation largely confined to their home island, and there was little hint that a wave of high-energy English rock was about to flood the United States and beyond.
That would soon change. In 1964, Mr. Talmy was hired to produce singles for a fledgling band called the Ravens, who later rechristened themselves the Kinks.
Mr. Talmy recalled on Facebook that he found Ray Davies, the band’s frontman and main songwriter, moody and difficult at times, but that he could see that his “potential for writing hits was up in the 95th percentile.” His faith was rewarded when one of the songs from those sessions, “You Really Got Me,” shot to No. 1 on the British charts.
With its chugging rhythms, garage-rock rawness and lyrics brimming with sexual tension, “You Really Got Me,” with Mr. Page sitting in on rhythm guitar, was eventually widely hailed as a precursor to punk rock and heavy metal. Mr. Talmy fattened the band’s sound by double-tracking the backing vocals and laying bare the filthy growl of the band’s lead guitarist, Dave Davies (Ray’s brother), who had slashed the speaker cone in his amplifier to produce a fuzzy distortion.
“I wanted a rock ’n’ roll band,” Mr. Talmy told Mr. Unterberger. “I grew up with rock ’n’ roll, R&B. What I felt I could do over there was give an American sound to a really good rock ’n’ roll band.”
The song had a major impact on Pete Townshend, the guitarist and primary songwriter for the Who, who sought out Mr. Talmy to produce his band. The Who “were playing in some church hall at the time as an audition place, and that’s where I heard them,” Mr. Talmy told Finding Zoso. “It took me I think maybe 30 seconds to decide that they were really good.”
He produced the band’s fiery first single, “I Can’t Explain,” in 1964, as well as the follow-up, “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere.” That song sounded so unvarnished that when Mr. Talmy sent it to executives at Decca in America, he said, they responded, “We think we got a bad tape, it seems to have feedback all over it.”
Working with Mr. Talmy and the celebrated recording engineer Glyn Johns, who collaborated with Talmy on many early tracks by them and the Kinks, the Who achieved a new level of fury that same year with their landmark single “My Generation,” an anthem of youthful rebellion marked by Mr. Townshend’s gut-punch guitar work and the lead singer Roger Daltrey’s stuttering, agitated vocals, said to be inspired by the heavy amphetamine use in the British Mod scene, from which the Who emerged.
Mr. Talmy employed a wide array of techniques to create a more monstrous sound. To capture the swirl of feedback and noise from Mr. Townshend’s guitar, Mr. Talmy placed one microphone a few inches from Mr. Townshend’s amplifier, another six feet away and a third on the other side of the room “so it would pick up the overtones bouncing around the walls,” he wrote on Facebook.
Sheldon Talmy was born on Aug. 11, 1937, in Chicago, one of two sons of Isaac Talmy, a dentist, and Esther (Gutes) Talmy. He was drawn to music from an early age, and after the family moved to Los Angeles, he attended Fairfax High School, where another future famous record producer, Phil Spector, was also a student.
After graduating in 1955, Mr. Talmy started his career as an engineer for ABC television before turning to music as a recording engineer at Conway Recording Studios, where he was working when he departed for Britain.
His work in the mid-1960s included records by two early bands featuring David Bowie, then known as Davy Jones: the Lower Third and the Manish Boys.
“I honestly didn’t think that what he was writing at the time had a snowball’s chance in hell of making it,” he told Mr. Unterberger, “but I thought, he’s so original and brash, let’s take a flier.”
The Manish Boys single “I Pity the Fool,” a cover of a Bobby Bland blues song, released in March 1965, when Mr. Bowie was 18. It went nowhere. As Mr. Talmy put it, “It wasn’t until seven or eight years later that a window of opportunity opened for his style of music.”
Despite his success with the Who, Mr. Talmy’s tenure with the band did not last long; it soured because of friction with Kit Lambert, one of the band’s managers. But he continued to work with the Kinks until 1967, producing many of the band’s signature songs, including “All Day and All of the Night,” “Tired of Waiting for You” and “Dedicated Follower of Fashion.”
Mr. Talmy also helped mint hits with several other acts in the 1960s, including Manfred Mann’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman,” “A Summer Song” by Chad & Jeremy and “Friday on My Mind” by the Easybeats.
He later worked with the Small Faces and the Damned before moving back to Los Angeles in the late 1970s. He produced records there for several bands, including the neo-glam group Nancy Boy, which included Donovan Leitch (Donovan’s son) and Jason Nesmith (the son of Mike Nesmith of the Monkees). He also ventured into tech as a founder of Superscan, a company that made digital scanners.
His survivors include his wife, Jan Talmy; a brother, Leonard; a daughter, Jonna Sargeant; and a granddaughter.
While he always considered himself a hands-on producer, sweating over the tiniest details in the studio, Mr. Talmy did leave room for random moments of magic.
“I always aimed at knowing 90% of what we’d do in the studio,” he wrote on Facebook, “with 10% reserved for a flash of spontaneous brilliance!”
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