Within the storied London rock scene of 1969, Tony Visconti was dwelling a dream, even when he didn’t know the complete extent of it on the time. “I used to have these soirees at my condo in Earl’s Courtroom and, on any given night time, I might have Marc Bolan and David Bowie there, and the three of us can be jamming,” he stated. “I by no means thought to document any of that as a result of I had no thought they have been going to develop into legends.”
Because it turned out, the music that Visconti went on to supply for each Bolan and Bowie is a part of what turned them into legends. He oversaw the ten greatest studio albums Bolan made with T-Rex, in addition to many units with Bowie, together with such albums as The Man Who Offered the World, Younger Individuals, the famed Berlin trilogy, involving Low, Heroes and Lodger, in addition to his last, revelatory creation, Black Star.
These are hardly the one musicians that Visconti’s imaginative and prescient has encompassed. On the daybreak of the Seventies, he produced albums that superior the evolution of British folks, through recordings with Strawbs, Ralph McTell and Mary Hopkin, prog-rock, by bands like Light Large and the Canterbury scene’s Caravan, and African music, courtesy of Osibisa, the Ghanaian-Caribbean rock group who turned the primary act from that continent to maintain a serious profession in each the UK and the US. Within the many years since, Visconti hasn’t slowed down, working with vital trendy acts like Kaiser Chiefs, Damon Albarn’s the Good, the Unhealthy and the Queen, and Esperanza Spalding. “In line with my lawyer, I’ve produced about 2,000 recordings,” Visconti stated as we talked in his music-crammed condo in New York’s West Village. “It’s a whole lot of work.”
Now, there’s lastly a consultant survey of it, contained in a four-CD, 77-song field set titled Produced by Tony Visconti. The sprawl of artists and kinds it options – which incorporates songs by different key artists he labored with like Skinny Lizzy, Procol Harum and Joe Cocker – speaks to the producer’s specific view of his position. “In listening, you’ll notice that there’s no ‘Visconti sound’,” he stated. “I’m not Phil Spector, or somebody who is available in and says, ‘We’ll do it my manner.’ Producing must be a protecting occupation. You’re there to ensure an artist’s splendid sound is recorded the best way they want to hear it.”
The artists Visconti has labored with, which frequently skew British, belie his true background. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he grew up listening to his mom, an newbie singer, carry out Neapolitan folks songs and his father, a carpenter, play mandolin and guitar. He realized to play the ukulele at 5 and shortly discovered he had a aptitude for a number of devices.
As a young person, Visconti sang and wrote songs, together with a neighborhood hit, carried out along with his first spouse, Siegrid Berman, titled Lengthy Hair, whose lyrics defended younger males sporting that androgynous type. (Paradoxically, Bowie pulled a parallel PR stunt in his youth by making a faux motion referred to as the “Society for the Safety of Lengthy-Haired Males”). Visconti’s tune landed him a job on the big music publishing firm the Richmond Group, and there he made an important reference to Denny Cordell, who held the same place at Island Data in London. Cordell employed Visconti to help a session for Georgie Fame that included a posh horn half to be performed by the jazz nice Clark Terry.
Marc Bolan and Tony Visconti. {Photograph}: Redferns
Visconti’s capability to jot down charts for the musicians within the session saved Cordell an arranger’s charge, prompting him to ask him to work again to London. Impressed by the Beatles’ breakthrough, Visconti already had a robust anglophone streak. “The American bands on the time simply performed primary rock’n’roll, primarily based on blues chords,” he stated. “The British teams used diminished chords, augmented chords, the stuff of jazz. It was actually subtle.”
Initially, a number of the English teams Cordell assigned Visconti to work with have been suspicious of him. “With Manfred Mann, there was nice animosity,” Visconti stated. “My accent and vocabulary was nonetheless very American, so each time I’d say a phrase there can be snickers. It took me some time to get them to belief me.”
From there, Visconti rose quick, changing into considered one of three American producers who would show essential to the event of British rock. They included Jimmy Miller (additionally from Brooklyn), who labored with Site visitors, the Rolling Stones and Blind Religion, and Joe Boyd (from Boston), a linchpin of the UK folk-rock motion who guided the careers of Fairport Conference, Nick Drake and John Martyn. “All of us gravitated in the direction of one another,” Visconti stated. He labored immediately with Miller on the Stones’ 1968 TV particular Rock and Roll Circus, writing its incidental music. One other early session he labored on yielded Joe Cocker’s debut album, which featured outstanding guitar work from Jimmy Web page simply earlier than he fashioned Led Zeppelin. “He was a player-for-hire then,” Visconti stated. “For £12, you bought three hours.”
These classes may very well be brutal on Cocker. Whereas making an attempt to get his basic primal scream on With a Little Assist from My Associates, Cordell had the singer yell out 25 instances, doubtlessly breaking a vein. “I by no means noticed anybody be so merciless to a different human being,” Visconti stated.
On the identical time, Cordell inspired Visconti’s development, pushing him to scout new expertise. His first discover was a band then named Tyrannosaurus Rex. “I heard them on John Peel’s present, went right down to see them at a membership and fell in love,” the producer stated. “Marc was like an angel. And his phrases have been greater than lyrics. They have been poetry.”
On the band’s first 4 albums, their sound was treasured, fey and acoustic, however after Bolan heard Visconti play electrical guitar he was impressed to jot down the rocker Journey a White Swan, a tune that shot to No 2 on the British charts in 1970. By the beginning of the next yr, the band shortened its identify to T Rex and Bolan created rousing songs like Sizzling Love, a UK No 1 many imagine kicked off the glam-rock motion. Early hippie supporters like Peel have been incensed. “He thought he was betraying himself and going for the massive cash,” Visconti stated. “Marc was very damage by that.”
In the meantime, Bolan’s success solely escalated, fired by Get It On, a worldwide smash, and adopted by a string of different large UK hits. “Marc was so canny,” the producer stated. “He created the maxi single, which gave you two B-sides, so children have been getting, primarily, an EP for the value of a single.”
In America, nonetheless, T Rex have been seen as a one-hit marvel. Visconti blames Bolan himself. “When he came visiting, he would play Get It On with a 20-minute guitar solo, like he was Jimi Hendrix,” he stated. “The children needed to listen to primary rock’n’roll. His attendance at reveals dropped instantly.”
Whereas Visconti cherished T-Rex’s rootsy type of rock, he discovered a extra subtle – if initially baffling – artist in Bowie. His debut album “was in every single place”, he stated. “On some tracks, he seemed like Anthony Newley. Then there was this foolish comedy tune like The Laughing Gnome, the place his voice is sped up like a pixie.”
Bowie’s supervisor, Ken Pitt, who, Visconti stated, was additionally Bowie’s lover on the time, needed him to do West Finish musicals. “David would have gone that manner had he not met me,” the producer stated. “Pitt hated me as a result of he felt I took David away from him and satisfied him he may very well be a rock star.”
Visconti within the Allaire Studios in Woodstock, New York, in 2001. {Photograph}: Tony Visconti/AP
Even so, Visconti handed on producing Area Oddity, the primary single Bowie needed him to supervise, contemplating it gimmicky and exploitative of all the eye round Nasa’s Apollo moon shot. Although they got here collectively for the more durable rocking album The Man Who Offered the World, Visconti’s hatred of Bowie’s new supervisor, Tony Defries, meant he didn’t work on the star’s peak glam albums, together with Ziggy Stardust. He did, nonetheless, produce a stay double set in 1974 that featured songs from that period and, the following yr, he co-produced Younger Individuals. Bowie determined to document that set in Philadelphia to seize town’s basic soul sound, solely to seek out that the type’s creators, together with Thom Bell, wouldn’t work with him. “They stated, ‘We don’t need some blond man stealing our sound,’” Visconti recalled. As a wry response, Bowie described his model of the sound as “plastic soul”. Whereas the consequence turned successful, on the time Bowie was deep into cocaine, imperiling his well being. “The one factor he would absorb was a glass of milk,” the producer stated. “He was getting no diet. I stated, ‘What the hell are you doing to your self?’ I truthfully thought we have been going to lose him.”
Fortunately, he rallied for the Berlin trilogy, which Visconti believes represents a few of his most adventurous work. The collection kicked off with the extremely uncommercial album Low, which represented Bowie’s response to the label consistently bugging him to make Ziggy Two. Whereas its follow-up, Heroes, was extra assertive, fired by what Visconti referred to as “a Wagnerian power”, it retained an amazing sense of daring. The duo reached a artistic zenith on Scary Monsters in 1980, an album they thought-about “our Sgt Pepper”. Instantly afterwards, nonetheless, Bowie had his assistant name Visconti to inform him that, for his subsequent undertaking, he needed to work with Nile Rodgers. “I used to be crushed!” Visconti stated.
Though he wasn’t a fan of Bowie’s breakthrough single with Rogers, Let’s Dance, “it turned his first world-wide No 1 hit, which was its function,” he stated. Quickly, Visconti had his personal large hit within the UK with Finest Years of Our Lives, by the pop group Fashionable Romance. He went on to supply a variety of hit artists, from the Boomtown Rats to Elaine Paige, extending his will to create as eclectic a listing as doable. In that vein, Visconti is especially pleased with his groundbreaking work with Light Large. “They have been probably the most experimental band I ever labored with,” he stated.
He’s proud, too, of his work with Hopkin, who turned his second spouse, and the mom of twoof his 4 kids. (His different two kids are by his third spouse, Might Pang, identified for her romantic relationship with John Lennon.) “When Mary Hopkin sings, she makes you a slave to her singing,” Visconti stated. “It’s the purest voice, with the deepest sense of longing.”
He turns into emotional when discussing one other stand-out work in his profession: Blackstar. The day earlier than recording started, Bowie requested a personal assembly with Visconti, throughout which he took off the woolly cap he was carrying to disclose a head made bald by chemotherapy. He informed the producer he was solely sturdy sufficient to document just a few hours a day. “There have been days he couldn’t are available in,” Visconti stated. “However when he bought in entrance of the microphone, he sang his balls off. I’d by no means seen him happier.”
Bowie was particularly thrilled to be making an album with actual jazz musicians within the Donny McCaslin Band, one thing he’d by no means achieved earlier than. He totally anticipated to outlive his most cancers, so it shocked Visconti to the core when he died two days after the album appeared. “I did a whole lot of crying,” he stated. “It was like dropping a greatest pal.”
In that context, the producer has a particular appreciation for his capability to maintain working as he approaches his eightieth birthday subsequent yr. “It’s nearly 60 years that I’ve been doing this,” he stated. “In that point, I’ve been a greater document producer than I’ve been a husband. If you’re listening to this field set, you’re listening to my real love.”
