Hamilton native Peter Moore wins Grammy
LOS ANGELES — Music engineer Peter Moore — a Hamilton native — has helped turn a box of old Bob Dylan recordings into a Grammy award.
Moore and producer Jan Haust, a native of London, Ont., captured the Grammy for best historical album for “The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11,” featuring music of Dylan and Toronto’s The Band. The duo shared the award with Steve Berkowitz, Jeff Rosen and Mark Wilder.
In the past, Moore and Haust have spent endless hours cold calling strangers in the hope of locating material for their historical musical endeavours.
Moore compares his work to an archeologist, except that instead of dusting away at dinosaur bones, he’s flattening out crusty old audio tapes unearthed from a mouldy storage room.
“You take a good educated guess and start digging down,” said Moore, who grew up in Hamilton and is now based in Toronto.
In the case of “The Basement Tapes,” the search was a little easier in some respects.
The f abled recordings “sort of appeared in a locker” when The Band’s Garth Hudson was going through items in storage, said Haust.
After hearing about the discovery, Haust encouraged Hudson to send the tapes to Canada for restoration.
Moore attended the University of Western Ontario and after graduating in 1982, he founded MDI Productions and moved his operation to Toronto.
He has produced rock, jazz, and classical recordings as well as film and TV scores, and has been associated with the work of the Cowboy Junkies in the past.