Shel Talmy: August 11, 1937 – November 14, 2024

By Harvey Kubernik

The legendary and influential record producer Shel Talmy passed away in mid-November from a stroke at age 87.

Talmy arranged and produced the Kinks recordings 1964-1967, “My Generation” by the Who, and hit singles by the Easybeats, Manfred Mann, Chad & Jeremy, and worked with the Creation and Pentangle. He produced early sessions for a young David Bowie.

Talmy was raised in Chicago, and a graduate of Fairfax High School in West Hollywood. He later attended Los Angeles City College, before relocating to London in early 1963, where his A&R skills and recording endeavors changed our world.

I knew Shel for half a century and interviewed him numerous times. Our last encounter was in 2022 for a recording studio documentary. In November he emailed me touting the skills of pianist and arranger Tom Parker’s work on the Laurie Styver’s album Gemini Girl: The Complete Hush Recordings issued on High Moon Records.

Below are some excerpts from interviews I conducted with him this century.

Shel Talmy: I went to Fairfax High School and Los Angeles City College before I went to England in the early sixties. In Los Angeles and Hollywood for my sessions I insisted on being there for the mastering on everything I did. I started as an engineer with Phil Yeend. I spend a lot of time trying to perfect the sounds we were getting at Conway Studios. We spent time isolating instruments and working on drum sounds. Working on guitar sounds. In terms of days and hours. Microphone placements we did were utilized with the Who and Kinks.

Nik Venet gave me his demos when I first came to England that is what I used to talk my way into a gig at Decca. What I learned from Nik, bless his heart, was how to handle artists. He allowed me to come to Capitol while he was going stuff. I went to one of his Lou Rawls’ sessions. Lou and Sam Cooke were fuckin’ brilliant. I would hear how he would talk to artists and the engineers. And I have done that forever.

I returned the favor and I wrote to Nick and said there’s a band called the Beatles you really got to take a listen too. I think they are gonna be enormous. Never heard another word. Thirty years later I ran into Nik at a studio and he told me when he got my letter he ran into Alan Livingston’s office, the head of Capitol and badgered them into signing the Beatles. Nik signed the Beach Boys in 1962.

I brought with me from Conway a way to using the equipment of making everything louder apparently louder than it actually was. I did that with bringing up a guitar through channel one, which was right at the beginning of distortion and the other one which was normal. So, I used to bring up the distorted one underneath the good one and the entire level went up. And I always tried to do everything I could without distorting. So, I was always near the red line of the meter. I brought that with me. I liked hearing records that I think it actually expands the vocal audio range of what you’re hearing. As far as echo, Conway had a damn good echo chamber that Phil worked on and it was in a little closet. I like echo where it applies and I don’t like echo where it doesn’t apply. There’s a lot of stuff I think that sounds a hell of a lot better dry then it does with echo. I loved working with Chad & Jeremy. They were more folky and orchestrally-arranged. I loved working with the Pentangle.

The UK technical people didn’t think I was weird. They thought I was different because I was pretty much the first American producer there. The first place I went to was IBC on Phil’s recommendation. That’s where Phil worked. And, they were way ahead of everybody else. In terms of gear, they had young engineers who were willing to experiment. Glyn Johns. And then Olympic. Initially it made my life easier. Glyn Johns and Eddie Kramer, who I used twice. Gus Dudgeon was my assistant at Olympic with Keith Grant.

I always felt the song was seventy-five per cent of the record.

1967 and the Summer of Love? By NME or Melody Maker, I was record producer of the year. I thought Sgt. Pepper was brilliant. Psychedelic or not it had form as far as I was concerned. Maybe they went a little overboard with the psychedelic stuff. The songs were great. What they did was a little too long for me. If there was a great song that went five minutes, that’s cool. Even six, maybe at a stretch. But I still subscribe to the fact that if you’re gonna hear a great song you’re gonna pretty much know it in the first eight bars. And then it continues to develop, three to four minutes is about the right amount of time for it.

Ray Davies of the Kinks. How we used to work it, and at that point in time, was the most prolific songwriter I’ve ever known. He’d go home and bring you back a dozen songs the next day. What we used to do was sit down, in a studio, and he actually played piano, not guitar, and he’d play me the stuff. I heard four bars of “Sunny Afternoon” and I said, “That’s gonna make number one.” He ‘d play me songs. “That’s good … That’s not quite there yet. Let’s put that aside.” He went along with that. We never did demos. Sitting down and playing the stuff live.

“See My Friends.” Jon Mark was already influenced by Indian stuff, and I played a recording he did to Ray. And Ray came back the next day with “See My Friends.” We had to tune down the regular guitar and double-tracked it for a kind of sitar sound. It broke a lot of ground. We were so far, as you know of the market that it was the lowest chart record I ever had with the Kinks.

I have been saying for years that Dave Davies is probably the most underrated guitarist in rock ‘n’ roll. A damn good guitarist. He’s also a very good songwriter. He’s not as good as Ray, but then again, very few people are. Ray was in a class by himself. As was Pete Townshend. Lennon and McCartney. Dave was one small step beneath that in terms of how good he was. But he wrote some damn good stuff.

Contrasting Pete and Ray. The easy way in broad strokes… Is that Ray was the major social commentator of what was going on in England at that time. Pete was much more into early blues and what he could so with his guitar and loved sound. Of course, I encouraged all the power chords and all that kind of stuff and that’s what attracted me when I first heard them. I thought they were the first rock ‘n’ roll band I heard since I came to England. When I first arrived, I thought everything was incredibly polite. Pete and Ray, the only thing they really have in common is that both of them are really brilliant songwriters. I think it’s fair to say that Ray could not write a song that the Who would do and Pete could not write a song that the Kinks could do.

As a producer I knew they had global appeal.

Nicky Hopkins… With the Who and the Kinks. I found him real early. Nicky was one of my favorite people. A really nice guy. Easy to work with. A heavy-duty talented musician. I had him playing live with all these people, by the way. I didn’t bring him in for overdubs. I don’t know how to describe him. When you hear something that’s undefinable but you know it is brilliant. That’s what I saw with Nicky Hopkins. All the bands loved him that I introduced him too.

Pye Number 2 studio in the basement of ATV House, was the band studio and am guessing the dimensions about 20 X 30 to 40. Pye Number 1 was the orchestral studio and a lot bigger, never worked in it. Entering the studio, the control room was on the left, again guessing dimensions 10 X 15. We had Ampex tape machines, three-track and mono, and a little later, two-track. They had a good selection of mikes, Neumann, Telefunken, Shure, AKG etc, and I made use of a lot of them as I was miking drums with a dozen mikes. There was also a good B3 organ with Leslies that John Lord played for the first LP, and a good piano, I think a baby grand that Nicky Hopkins played on. The drum corner was near the control room and I had guitar and bass amps against the walls with baffles around them. This studio had really good acoustics and one of the reasons it was in constant use.

The MC5: A Eulogy

By Doug Sheppard

And then there were none. Five equals zero. The morning of May 9, 2024, the last surviving member of the MC5, drummer Dennis Thompson, died while recovering from a heart attack—just months after the passings of guitarist Wayne Kramer on February 2 and one-time MC5 manager John Sinclair on April 2.

Thompson left this world in a much quieter setting—the serenity of the MediLodge recovery facility in Taylor, Michigan—than where he made his name some 17 miles away, the legendary Grande Ballroom in Detroit. You couldn’t think of one without the other: The Grande was where the MC5 were the house band, and the MC5 put the venue on the map in the late ’60s with electrified performances pushing the bounds of music, volume, culture and even politics; plus they recorded their first album, Kick Out the Jams, there in 1968.

You also couldn’t think about many musical developments since that pivotal debut without thinking of the MC5—not just their often-mentioned influence on punk rock, but on strains of hard rock and heavy metal, not to mention myriad Michigan contemporaries. Without the MC5, there probably wouldn’t have been a Stooges and definitely wouldn’t have been the Up, Third Power might not have evolved from psych into Detroit-infused hard rock, and Brownsville Station might not have cranked the amps to 11 in their quest to bring a ’50s rock ’n’ roll sensibility to the ’70s. Think about the impact of one of those bands, the Stooges, then try to imagine a world without them. Or maybe, as vocalist Rob Tyner proposed in the inner gatefold of 1971’s High Time swan song, “Think of a world where art is the only motivation.”

The MC5 thought big, and even hit #30 with the debut album in 1969, but it was their art that endured, not fame or record sales. Musical or otherwise, the Five’s radical art laid the groundwork for much that followed—providing listeners with a guidepost to escape the confines of societal conformity. While they weren’t peace-and-love hippies playing to oil-projected light shows, the MC5 were very much in line with the counterculture, even—as part of their involvement in the White Panther Party’s “total assault on the culture”—aligning with the Black Panthers’ 10-point program and a musical parallel to civil rights, free jazz.

As history has liberated wheat from chaff, many forget what the ’60s were really like and how much the MC5 stood out. The enduring images of the ’60s are of long hair, beads, flower power, Vietnam protests, Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock. But for a microcosm of what the dominant culture really was, look at any given 1960s high school yearbook and you’ll see boys with ultra-short hair donning formal wear in almost every picture, girls decked out in frilly dresses and noticeably absent from the sports pages in those dire pre-Title IX days, and every student looking much older and virtually indistinguishable from most teachers and administrators as a result of the sartorial requirements.

Fashions had changed by the ’80s, but not social norms. If you came of age in the suburbs, you probably lived comfortably, but your life was boring—filled with fast food, cable TV, chainstore malls, concrete embankments, manicured lawns, boxy station wagons and idiotic neighbors competing over who had the latest gizmo or gadget. Inspiration also couldn’t be found on the radio, which was infested with noxious AOR, new wave and some of the wimpiest pop ever conceived. Basically, the ’80s was a repudiation of the ’60s: antiwar sensibilities replaced by Rambo-like “war is fun” nonsense on the silver screen, musical creativity harnessed and stifled by corporate commercialism, and a pushback on civil rights and women’s rights that (sadly) carries on to this day thanks to right-wing apparatchiks trying to undermine both. And did I mention that the ’80s were really boring?

For some, the escape hatch was punk rock, a genre that owed a lot to the MC5; for others, it was heavy metal. Or maybe if you were getting bored with both like me, it was the MC5. With two of their three albums long out of print and the first uncommon in spite of an early ’80s Elektra reissue, they were inaccessible, buried and forgotten—which made them even more of a revelation when you finally heard them. Kick Out the Jams was raw and incendiary, Back in the USA was streamlined and terse, and High Time was a poetic monolith that should have been a breakthrough, but they were all great in their own way—evoking concepts, imagery and worlds alien to ’80s conformity. The same thing that spoke to musicians spoke to me as well, even if by that point all five members were living in relative obscurity.

Two of the MC5, Tyner and guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, died in 1991 and 1994, respectively—right on the cusp of the band going from cult underground phenomenon to elder statesman. CD reissues of all three albums proper in 1991 and 1992 hastened that higher profile, as did several albums worth of previously unreleased material that same decade, and by the 2000s survivors Kramer, Thompson and bassist Michael Davis were able to parlay that newfound (if minor) recognition into the DKT-MC5 with various side men—a project that ended with Davis’ death in 2012.

The legacy won’t end now that all five are gone. Heck, even the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame finally recognized them in its musical excellence category this year. As long as there are musicians with a rebellious streak or people who simply want to hear high-energy rock ’n’ roll, the MC5 will live on. Neither will be in short supply anytime soon—if ever.

Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg

By Harvey Kubernik

Catching Fire – The Story of Anita Pallenberg, debuts in New York as a sneak preview at 7:30 pm at IFC Center on Thursday, May 3, 2024 and may open at more theaters at a later date, and on VOD.

This fascinating documentary comes from Magnolia Pictures. It’s directed by Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill, with the words of Anita Pallenberg read by Scarlett Johansson from Pallenberg’s unpublished memoir. It was an Official Selection 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

Catching Fire is about a woman who was at many points in her life a newspaper headline: Anita Pallenberg was a “rock n’ roll goddess,” a “voodoo priestess,” and an “evil seductress.” She was accused of trying to break up the Rolling Stones, among other things. But those who loved her considered her an exciting cultural force, and a loving mother – and innocent of the accusations. Never-seen-before home movies and family photographs explore life with the Rolling Stones and tell a bittersweet tale of both triumph and heartbreak. From Barbarella to the Swiss Alps, and the Lower East Side to London, Anita Pallenberg was a creative force ahead of her time.

Media materials provided include the Director’s Statement which further describes this captivating movie.

“Catching Fire is a truly hand-made film by two directors motivated by the desire to create something lasting, and personal. It’s a film about family, made by family: Alexis and Svetlana were brought the idea in 2020 by Marlon Richards, the son of Anita Pallenberg and Keith Richards, who wanted his mother’s story to be told in all its complexity. The directors have worked closely with Anita’s inner circle over the course of three years, and the result is a private view of a life that was often lived in public. The Super 8mm home movies woven throughout the documentary are the purest expression of this intimacy.

“Catching Fire is very much an expression of the honesty and love in Anita’s family, but it’s no hagiography. Anita was famous for her biting sense of humor and her contempt of false praise. This film bucks the trend of “branded content” and “celebrity bios” by embracing both the bitter and the sweet, the heartbreak as well as the triumph. Anita Pallenberg is a true anti-hero, an antidote to corporate messaging. The directors approached the film as an act of historical reclamation: putting the female perspective back in the official narrative of rock ‘n’ roll, making Anita visible again.

“For Alexis and Svetlana, Catching Fire was a deliberate recalibrating of history, and a celebration of an unapologetic leader. Anita was doubtless a muse to many, and she continues to be an inspiration to the directors. In the words of one of Anita’s grandchildren: ‘Anita was the original gangster; she was ‘girl power’ to the end.’ Alexis and Svetlana developed the film with the conviction that something this personal can become universal. Anita struggled to balance her own professional life with the needs of her partner, motherhood with a desire for freedom – her themes are absolutely contemporary. The directors hope that Anita’s humor – and theirs – shine through a story that’s unsparing at times. Anita took risks, and so did e directors: this is an immersive documentary with a style and rhythm all of its own.”

The documentary is enhanced by a deep archive of rare, unseen photos and home videos. This film truly reveals Pallenberg’s many facets and assets.

It’s very obvious Keith Richards still harbors tender feelings for Pallenberg, and in one reflection summarizes her, “She was a unique piece of work.”

In Catching Fire, Anita finally has a forum to define herself. As she says in her memoir, “Writing this has helped me emerge in my own eyes.”

The cast includes Prince Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, Kate Moss, Angela Richards, Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull, and Marlon Richards.

In April, I saw an advance screening of Catching Fire with photographer and music journalist Heather Harris. She reinforced to me again that Pallenberg surpassed her gorgeous European fashion model classification “by seeming to be, to all who encountered her, one of the most reckless extroverts to ever stride the planet.”

Heather emailed me about Catching Fire.

“Her great-grandfather painted one of the most famous, genuine Goth paintings of all time, ‘Isle of the Dead,’ 1880, oil on canvas by Arnold Bocklin, a work of immeasurable dread as a coffin-laden hearse-barge is rowed, lapping on a lake in the dark of night, towards its ominous namesake.

“But Anita Pallenberg attained notoriety for a far different fate, first as the major non-audio influencer of the nascent Rolling Stones, then as an almost worst-case scenario victim of, then survivor of that band’s most notorious excesses. Younger music fans of Classic Rock are said to lack context in which to fathom the import of what they’re hearing. Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg is a newly released documentary that treads a long ways to rectify that.

“Make no mistake, Pallenberg’s absence in the band history would have begat a far different Rolling Stones. No matter how superior the music is in and of itself, do not underestimate the importance of strong visuals in modern popular music. We have five senses, and they all work together. And she plugged her own volcanic life force directly into the Stones at just the right minute of the 1960s, which indeed helped codify The World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band.

“She insured they looked different from their frenemies and fellow tastemakers/leaders of all pop culture the Beatles during the style turbulence of the ’60s.

“As rock and roll couturier Evita Corby noted (not in the film) ‘Brian Jones, Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg constantly looked like they all wore one another’s clothes,’ which indeed they did, ‘And that they just threw their favorite garments together daily, with zero regard to a matched, put together look’ unlike everyone else in the music biz, fashion biz or even the avant-garde. The resultant mode was Unisex in exotic textiles reflecting worldwide travels alongside cherry-picked exemplars from Granny Takes A Trip appropriated idiosyncratically to their own custom tailors via Pallenberg’s personal, outsider taste.

“The doc traces her complexity far beyond her libertine persona familiar to music fans from her years with Keith Richards (and Brian Jones.) Her maternal side is well presented by the movie’s producer, her erudite son Marlon Richards, and one of the two Weber brothers who lived when youngsters with Keith and Anita in their Nellcote villa in the south of France, invited to do so when their mother committed suicide and their father had understandable trouble coping.

“Directors Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill chose the classical music also used in the film Barry Lyndon to subtly underscore the tragedies in her later life, some of, some not of her own decision-making, often clouded by the extreme distraction of taking narcotics. The fabled sexiness speaks for itself in clips of her leading roles in the films Performance, Barbarella and A Degree of Murder.

“People who encountered her briefly invariably called this beautiful woman ‘scary.’ Folks who knew her better called her ‘intelligent, and a tough cookie.’ The slow, deliberate narration by her friends avoids any tempting cliche of having jumpy-cut style or cinematography to match the ‘wildness’ of the ’60s, thankfully. But there is the puzzling choice of having my fellow American Scarlett Johansson voicing Pallenberg’s own written words. Pallenberg’s own vocals were a mashup of Marlene Dietrich’s smoky sophistication and Joan Greenwood’s seductive purr. (Greenwood in fact was her dubbed voice as the Great Tyrant in Barbarella. Same tone and timbre, but just by the then entertainment world’s sexiest plummy voice.) It is jarring, but doesn’t inhibit enjoyment of the film. And the home movies footage throughout the documentary is nothing short of incredible.”

In 1965 it was my brother, Kenneth Kubernik, an author and musician, who showed me a photo of Anita Pallenberg in a magazine.

During 2024 he viewed a screener of Catching Fire and emailed me his response to this stunning cinematic portrait of Anita.

“Those twilight feline eyes; a mouth set to snarl, not purr; legs built to stalk, ever conscious of a prey drive that bordered on ravenous. Anita Pallenberg was built from exotic animal parts, as rarefied as a snow leopard and just as agile, just as willful. She didn’t arrive on the scene so much as blow up the entire toxic patriarchy that defined the British rock aristocracy of the deathless ’60s. Brian, Keith, Mick and all of their pimply devotees became bewitched by her palpable allure. At that time London was choc-a-bloc with Dolly birds sashaying along Kings Road in their Mary Quant minis and their white Courrèges boots. Along comes Anita, resplendent in Berber batik, a splash of Bosch and the hauteur of a Barbary coast buccaneer. It wasn’t Keith who Depp was copping in those silly films; it was Anita who cast that piratical spell. Her life was a series of escapades and escapes, a survivor of the vicious misogyny that drove the music culture of her time like a runaway train. Wild horses couldn’t drag her away.

“The hotly-anticipated documentary of her tempestuous life exceeds all expectations. The discovery of an unpublished memoir provides a vital narrative backbone (her words read by Scarlett Johansson in her distinctive single malt voice) that delivers just enough self-reflection to suggest we’re finally getting close to this mythic creature who never stopped tantalizing both men and women with her singular style. The footage is gob-smacking; Stones fans will lap up every bit of heretofore unseen Super 8 footage that only confirms what our febrile imaginations have been concocting all these years. All the touchstones are checked: Anita’s youthful caprice in NYC, meeting Brian in Munich, Courtfield Road, red carpet at Cannes, the madness in Morocco, VilleFranche, the Swiss Alps and on and on. How she persevered through the insanity of those times reminds all of us that even our most fervid projections on our heroes and heroines come at an often ruinous cost to them.

“Three ABKCO era Stones tracks were licensed for the soundtrack, the rest a pastiche of bluesy British punch-ins. That’s enough – we’re all better off with just a taste.

“Marianne Faithfull, a unicorn in her own right, said tellingly about her: “I often used to think that if one spent the evening with Anita, one could very easily get killed.” There are worse ways to exit this mortal coil.”