THERE’S UNFINISHED BUSINESS FOR LEGENDARY WHO/KINKS PRODUCER SHEL TALMY…
“David Bowie reminded me of myself!” SHEL TALMY
FOR PIONEERING independent producer Shel Talmy, being in the right place at the right time was an intuitive art. Only once did he feel his timing was off. “With David Bowie, we were five or six years ahead of where the market was,” he says of the then Davy Jones, whose flop You’ve Got A Habit Of Leaving he produced in 1965. “He was brash, and I was brash too. He reminded me of myself!”
For ’60s music lovers, Talmy hardly needs introduction. His early releases with The Kinks and The Who ripped up the pop production rule book, their explosive punk-before-punk sound – notably on You Really Got Me and My Generation – sending needles into the red. British rock music would never sound quite the same again. “I wasn’t much older than those bands, so it was all an exciting adventure,” says Shel. “We all wanted to push boundaries.”
Born in Chicago in 1937, Talmy was a child prodigy who regularly appeared on the
US TV gameshow Quiz Kids.
After high school and college in Los Angeles, studying psychology, he trained as an engineer at LA’s Conway Studios. In a jaw-dropping display of brass neck while on holiday in London in 1962, Talmy convinced Decca A&R head Dick Rowe that acetates given to him by LA producer Nick Venet were his own work. Not surprisingly, he was given a job.
Now 84 and based in LA, Talmy has taken to posting on Facebook the stories behind the myriad productions that followed, spanning everything from cult Mod stars The Creation, to The Easybeats’ Friday On My Mind and Roy Harper’s Folkjokeopus; dozens of obscure freakbeat and girl-groups also received his sizzling mid-’60s sonic treatment. Inevitably, perhaps, Talmy also details how The Who’s manager Kit Lambert – “a total scumbag,” says Shel – manoeuvred to replace him as the band’s producer soon after 1965’s debut My
Generation. The resulting High Court battle was settled in Talmy’s favour, with the producer receiving royalties from the group’s next three albums. It was only in 2002 that
Talmy granted The Who access to My Generation’s original master tapes. “I didn’t want royalties,” he says. “I just wanted to keep recording them.”
Thankfully, Talmy’s relationship with The Kinks lasted the full term before his contract ran out in summer 1967. “Ray [Davies] was very difficult sometimes,” he says. “But as a commentator on English life in that period he was better than anybody else. (Laughs) People have noted, though, that when he took over as producer, they only had one more big hit, with Lola…”
Although his work-rate slowed dramatically in the ’70s, when Talmy felt “labels weren’t run by music people any more”, he still steered several more intriguing sessions, such as the reunited Small Faces – “a disaster” – and The Damned’s Stretcher Case Baby 7-inch. In 1979, after writing Whadda We Do Now, Butch?, a novel starring Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a “bored” Talmy moved back to the US.
Today, after three decades of recording sporadically, Talmy is itching to get back in the studio. He already has “a couple of projects lined up” and wants “to maybe help people whose careers are flagging”. The ‘Talmy sound’ may soon be back.