studio musicians

Who’s That Studio Cat?

Oct 262012

Click this photo to enlarge and better identify these legendary producers from the 1960s and 1970s.

If you come here on a regular basis I bet you, like me, have spent an inordinate amount of time looking through album credits. You probably retain the full names of producers better than you do those of old flames, and that’s pretty sad considering how few old flames a typical Townsperson has to his or her name.

What occurred to me, recently, was how few of these producers I can tell by sight. I’ve collected photos of 13 legendary rock ‘n roll producers from the 1960s and 1970s. Without use of photo-identifying apps and with us limiting ourselves to one guess per post (so someone who’s met half of these guys, like professional studio cat cherguevara, doesn’t bogart the thread), how many of these producers can we identify?

To get a better look at each producer, click on the image in this post for a larger version to appear in a separate window.

Good luck!

Instant Offense

Posted by Mr. Moderator

Nov 302010

Sydney "The Macrowave" Greenstreet?

The Detroit Pistons used to have a guy named Vinnie “The Microwave” Johnson, nicknamed for his ability to come off the bench and provide “instant offense.” I love the concept of instant offense, and I’ve taken to using it to refer to a quality in certain character actors, whose mere presence onscreen instantly raises the energy in a film. Sydney Greenstreet, who would have needed to be nicknamed “The Macrowave,” is just such a character actor in my book. Even the classic Casablanca manages to get better when he shows up in a scene. (That film, by the way, is loaded with instant offense types, including Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, S.Z. Sakall. It’s a wonder director Michael Curtiz had enough “rock” to go around.)

Rock ‘n roll musicians typically don’t move around as frequently as Hollywood character actors or NBA role players, but I’m wondering what journeyman or studio musicians you feel provide “instant offense” to whatever session they touch. The first who comes to mind for me is studio drummer extraordinaire Hal Blaine, who made not only the great hits he drove but the fade-outs of the most pedestrian MOR fodder worth turning up. Following, Hal even makes Peggy Lipton worth giving a try.