Combative, pioneering and inspirational

Awhite Jewish boy in a tough black neighbourhood of Los Angeles, David Axelrod started drinking in the local speakeasies and juke joints when he was 15. ‘‘If you were in diapers and you had cash, they would serve you,’’ he recalled. ‘‘We went there because we could get a drink. Cops didn’t care; they were paid off. You just had to be cool.’’

In the clubs he fell in love with jazz, blues, R’n’B and swing. It was the start of a passion that was to lead to a career in which he abseiled down the face of American music.

Composing, arranging, producing and performing, he mixed jazz, R’n’B, rock, neoclassical and baroque pop, and produced hits for the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley and the soul singer Lou Rawls. He created a psychedelic rock setting of the Catholic Mass in Latin, and did the same for Jewish liturgy.

He set William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience to a quixotic blend of breakbeats and sweeping strings. That was followed by a gospel-jazz-rock version of Handel’s Messiah.

In the 1970s his career went into a tailspin of drug addiction and broken marriages, and at one point he was reportedly living in a one-room shack.

His fortunes revived in the 1990s when his old recordings were rediscovered by the hip-hop generation and his beats were sampled by Dr Dre, the Wu-Tang Clan, Lauryn Hill, DJ Shadow, De La Soul, Lil Wayne and others.

Axelrod was a notoriously combative character and any pleasure at this upturn in critical appreciation was rather outweighed by his anger when the royalties failed to materialise.

‘‘These sons of bitches use it and don’t want to pay for it. It shouldn’t be called gangsta rap, it should be called thievery rap,’’ railed Axelrod, who never shrunk from speaking his mind. ‘‘I’m reading that I’m one of the most sampled artists ever, and I’m going, ‘Where the hell is the money?’ ‘‘

David Axelrod was born in Los Angeles in 1933.

His father, a left-wing trade union organiser, died when David was 12. His older brother, Sonny, died at Iwo Jima while serving in the Marines that same year.

He turned delinquent, roaming the mean streets of South Central LA and skipping classes.

You might have imagined that a 15-year-old white boy would have stood out in the black clubs of Los Angeles circa 1948, but it seems nobody batted an eyelid.

‘‘I was raised by blacks. For a while I thought I was black,’’ he said.

Streetwise and revelling in the nickname ‘‘Ax’’, he fought 15 bouts as an amateur boxer, winning all but one. He also bore a scar from a knife wound to his stomach as a result of a teenage street fight.

Axelrod moved to New York to escape trouble and hung out in the city’s jazz clubs at the height of the bebop era.

Unable to stand the cold winter, he joined the Marines.

After his discharge he returned to Los Angeles where he married the first of four wives and became a heroin addict. He took the drug for ten years until he swapped it for a 17-year cocaine habit.

In 1955 he was drinking in a jazz club when he was befriended by the pianist Gerald Wiggins. Axelrod was unable to pay his bar tab. Wiggins settled the bill and offered him a lift home.

Wiggins taught him to read music, and Axelrod landed a job with a label where he began to produce jazz recordings.

By 1964 he had joined Capitol Records just as the label struck gold with the Beatles.

He set up the label’s black music division and a succession of hits followed, including Lou Rawls’s Dead End Street and Cannonball Adderley’s Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!.

He also signed the flaxenhaired, blue-eyed actor David McCallum from The Man From UNCLE. McCallum could not sing, but after reading that he had broken Clark Gable’s record for volume of fan mail, Axelrod surmised that there was a commercial killing to be made, and went on to record four hit records with the actor.

As his ambition gathered pace, he composed, arranged and conducted the Electric Prunes’ gloriously over-the-top Mass in F Minor, the surreal quality of which was encapsulated by the sight of Axelord’s musicians miming an acid-rock version of Kyrie Eleison on the Pat Boone Show. The track also featured in the film Easy Rider.

He did it again with the album Release of an Oath, which included a psychedelic version of the Jewish prayer Kol Nidre.

George Harrison was so impressed with his arrangements that he tried to sign him to the Beatles’ Apple label.

His next project was a musical rendering of Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem Howl, but the recording was abandoned in 1970 when Axelrod’s 17-year-old son, Scott, died from a drug overdose.

Axelrod was devastated, but the tragedy failed to cure him of his own cocaine addiction, and he did not stop using the drug until a near-death experience in 1981 in which his pulse shot up to 266 beats per minute.

His romantic life was turbulent. A marriage vow was ‘‘something that when you say it you mean it, like if you owe someone money and you promise to repay them,’’ he said.

However, when his fourth wife Terri was hospitalised after a car crash in 1986, he spent several years as her full-time carer and they remained married for a quarter of a century.

She survives him along with his three sons: Michael; Dana, a film and record producer; and Brian.

He visited Britain in 2004 to play a rare concert at London’s Festival Hall with a 26-piece orchestra, which the Times reviewer described as ‘‘sensual and balmy and bursting with celestial wonderment’’. In later years he lived as a recluse, but still composed every day, ‘‘just to stay in shape’’.

David Axelrod, record producer, was born on April 17, 1933. He died of lung cancer on February 5, 2017, aged 83