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.

Erkin Koray R.I.P.

By Jay Dobis

Erkin Koray, aka Erkin Baba, the father of Turkish Rock ‘n Roll (he put together the first Turkish rock band (Erkin Koray ve Ritmcileri) in 1957 when he was a high school student in Istanbul, died at the age of 82 on Monday, August 7. He had been living in Toronto, Canada for a while and had been hospitalized due to lung problems.

After a mandatory stint in the army, Erkin started playing out and became a popular live attraction. In 1962, he released his first single: “Bir Eylül Akşamı”/”It’s So Long.” In 1967, he had his first hit record: “Kızları da Alın Askere” (Let Girls Join the Army), which quickly sold 800,000 copies in a country of only 30 million people (70% lived in rural areas). His next release, “Meçhul/Çiçek Daği” (also in 1968) came after his band finished fourth in Hürriyet newspaper’s Altın Mıkrofon contest… In 1969, Erkin Koray & Yeraltı Dörtlüsü (Underground Quartet), released “Sana Bir Şeyler Olmuş,” the greatest version of the Cannibal & the Headhunters song “Land of a Thousand Dances.” And I mustn’t forget his magnificent, crunching track from 1972, “Hor Görme Garibi” (by Erkin Koray ve Ter, which included guitarist Aydın Cakuş (formerly of Grup Bunalim) on sizzling guitar).

Against his objections, in 1973 his label Istanbul Plak, released an album called Erkin Koray, which collected his singles… In 1974, Doğan Plak released Elektronik Türküler, which Erkin considered his first album. It is his masterpiece and is one of the greatest psychedelic albums ever recorded. The core group (Erkin on guitar and bağlama, Ahmet Güvenç on bass, Sedat Avcı on drums) were augmented by Haci Ahmet Tekbilek (who would soon move to Scandinavia to play in Okay Temiz’s great Turkish jazz bands of the 1970s on zurna and gaida), Omer Faruk Tekbilek (a future world music star) (bağlama), Eyüp Duran (bongos), and Ayzer Danga (drums) from Moğollar and Mavi Işiklar. The album fully integrates rock with traditional Turkish folk music: great originals; a cover of a traditional folk tune; and a cover of Ürgüplü Refik Başaran’s “Cemalin.” My two favorite songs on the album are the original “Inat,” with searing psychedelic guitar, and “Türkü,” a cover of a Nazim Hikmet poem that had originally been set to music by saz player Rui Su. This album cemented Erkin’s reputation as an Anadolu Rock legend, blending Turkish classical music, folk tunes, and various Middle Eastern sounds into his psych driven songs. Erkin also claimed to be the inventor of the elektro-saz; he was certainly one of the first and popularized the instrument.

His next album, Erkin Koray 2, released in 1976, was almost as good, putting even more emphasis on Arabic influences, particularly on my favorite song by Erkin, “Şaşkın.” Other greats on this album are “Fesuphanallah,” “Estarabim,” “Arap Sacı,” and “Timbıllı.” His last excellent album (though he continued to have more great singles) came in 1983: İlla Ki, which shows the influence of the American band The Devil’s Anvil. (Knowing that his life was nearing its end, Erkin wrote a letter to music writer Kanat Atkaya, claiming that there was no such influence calling The Devil’s Anvil an ‘amateur’ band, and that he had never heard their album, that he is ERKIN KORAY, and that those who think otherwise should look to ASCAP for clarification. He also discussed his meeting with John Lennon and Yoko Ono at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.)

In the early and mid ‘70s, in concert Erkin would typically do two sets. The first would consist of covers of songs by bands such as Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, and Atomic Rooster. In the second set, he would play his own superior songs… At some point in the early ‘70s, he planned to record an album of what he described as ‘space rock,’ but unfortunately his label refused to pay for studio time.

Throughout his career he was known to be a ‘different kind of guy,’ most probably due to the ill treatment he received from record label owners whom he frequently quarreled with and sued in court. He was even bootlegged in his own country. Over the years I heard many stories about his ‘crazy’ actions. However, for about 12 years, I was in occasional contact with Erkin: hanging out with him, talking about music, talking on the telephone, having dinner, inviting him to see the band I was managing (ZeN), etc. And he always was very nice and normal.

Even in the US, he had bad luck with record labels. In 1996, an American label was set to release a 3-CD set called Erkin Koray: Turkish Psych Monster. The label had Erkin’s permission, and he would have been paid. Extensive liner notes were written and numerous photos were to be included. However, these CDs were never released due to threatened lawsuits by another label that was releasing an Erkin album without his permission. So in America, now you have to settle for the competent but lacking collection on Sublime Frequencies, which doesn’t match the quality and number of rarities that would’ve been available on the Turkish Psych Monster set.

A few years later, a different American label was to release Erkin Koray: Live in Nazilli, which is my all-time favorite live album. On an Aegean tour with his Süper Grup, a power trio with Nihat Örerel on drums (a former member of Grup Bunalim, Nihat also cowrote some of Erkin’s greatest songs) and Rauf Ülgün on bass. Nihat recorded every show during the tour on a cheap boom box as a reference tape. So the songs on the album are what was left on the tape after the end of the tour. For the album release, the sound quality was to be cleaned up in a studio, including fixing pitch problems, and excellent liner notes had been written. Unfortunately, a certain miscreant uploaded the concert tape to YouTube, and the album was never released, though it has since been bootlegged.

For a book about Erkin 26 years ago I wrote a short chapter and called him a greater psychedelic musician than Jimi Hendrix, and I still believe this… Although Erkin has died, his eastern modal raga rock lives on.