Spot, record producer who captured the fury of 1980s punk, dies at 71

Glen Lockett, an influential record producer who, working under the name Spot, helped define the jet-turbine sound of American punk rock in the 1980s, recording groundbreaking albums by Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Minutemen and many others, died on March 4 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He was 71.

His death, in a nursing home, was announced in a Facebook post by Joe Carducci, a former co-owner of SST Records, the iconoclastic Hermosa Beach, California, label where Lockett made his name. Lockett had been hoping for a lung transplant in recent years after a long battle with pulmonary fibrosis, and he had spent most of the past three months in a hospital after a stroke.

As in-house producer for SST from 1979-85, Lockett controlled the mixing board on landmark recordings that helped bring American punk from deafening gigs in garages and basements to the mainstream — the college-radio mainstream, at least.

He produced or engineered more than 100 albums for SST, including classics such as Black Flag’s “Damaged” (1981), Descendents’ “Milo Goes to College” (1982), Meat Puppets’ first album (1982), Minutemen’s “What Makes a Man Start Fires?” (1982) and Hüsker Dü’s “Zen Arcade” (1984).

In part because SST had limited budgets in the early days, but also because of bands’ wishes and Lockett’s production philosophy, he typically opted to record live in the studio — all members playing at once — with minimal studio effects, instead of the widespread industry practice of recording one instrument at a time and using overdubs and effects such as digital delay and outboard reverb.

As a result, he was able to translate to vinyl the raw, immediate howl of punk that, in a live setting, sent bodies crashing and elbows flying.

“Our first time in the studio with him was for our first Minutemen record, ‘Paranoid Time,’ a seven-song, seven-inch EP, in July of 1980,” Mike Watt, the band’s bassist and co-founder, recalled in an email. “He recorded and mixed us that one night. I think we started at midnight and ended a few hours later.”

“Spotski,” Watt added, “always was about trying to capture what was us, like with this record — kind of like a ‘gig in front of the microphones’ trip, where he bigtime said he didn’t want to get in the way of us trying to bring what we had that made us what we were.”