Classic Replay with Grammy Winning Record Producer Jack Douglas

Published Oct 14, 2024, 7:00 AM

Join @TheBuzzKnight for this Classic Replay with the great Record Producer Jack Douglas. He is responsible for producing some of the greatest rock music ever made from artists like Aerosmith, Cheap Trick and many more. He was the last person to produce John Lennon. Jack is in the news because Reservoir Media has acquired the producer royalties of Jack's catalog, describing it as "a cornerstone of rock music history."

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Buzz Night here for the Taking a Walk podcast, and we're going to go to another classic replay. It was back in August we had a virtual walk with a record producer legend, Jack Douglas. He was the last person to produce John Lennett. He worked for so many years with Aerosmith, with Cheap Trick and others. He is music history and let's check out this classic replay with Jack Douglas. Next on Taking a Walk.

Well, Jack, how did you first know that music had sunk its meat hooks into you and would never let go?

I guess when I was about four or five years old. You know, my parents they listened to a lot of music. They weren't musical themselves, but they listened to this. So there was always a ton of music in my house, in the Bronx, in our apartment. I was totally into, you know, getting like, you know, listening to how much is that Dog in the window?

And I also loved, like, I mean, these are seventy eights I'm talking about. Also loved like all of the story books that came out Bugs Bunny, Stephen and Tyler and I talked about this.

We had the same collection of the Tortoise and the Hair and Bozo under the Sea. That was a favorite of both of ours. So I was into music and storytelling at a very early age. And my dad worked in a freight yard in Hunt's Point in the Bronx. He decided that because they had a nice console in the living room, that they listened to their music. My dad listened to opera and my mom listened to what was then called the race music, basically blues and R and B and so it was a good contrast. Plus you know the pop stuff that was on the radio on Big Band and Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and all those folks. But my dad got you got to hint that a train was coming in, and on the one of the trains coming in from Chicago was a bunch of electronic equipment, and so you know, they Tilford regularly. I mean, that was like part of the perks of working in a freight yard. And he decided that he was going to get me my own record player so that I could stop putting these records on their console in the living room. And so he went in the middle of the night and he got He saw webcor of Chicago on a box, said record you figure said record players, who stashed it, and he brought home for my birthday. I think it was maybe I was six or seven somewhere in there, you know, I don't And anyway, he put it under my bed and then came into wishing me happy birthday, and he said, present under your bed. I looked under it, and I pulled it out and unwrapped it, and both my father and I were like, what the hell is this. It was a tape recorder. It wasn't It wasn't a record player. It was a tape recorder, a webcres, a small one. And we got and we read the instruction manual, and we went down to Canal Street and bought a bunch of tape, and I started recording TV themes, which I really loved off the television. There were all these great themes. I love Lucy, and I remember every one of them so well, Abin Gistello and I mean, all these shows, but they're still going in my head, Highway Patrol Dragnet. I would record these things and listen to them. I knew I was definitely in the music. Also. Also, the the thing that I noticed that my parents noticed too, is that they would take me to see movies that were way over my head because I was a kid. But you went to the movies on a regular basis back in those days. And I could come out of the theater and sing the main themes to the movies, the melody lines in the right key as well, so they kind of knew something was going on. And I would I would record street sounds that hang that we lived near an elevated subway, and I would record the train gone by and feedback and all kinds of weirdness. I like to stick the microphone down my mom's old vacuum cute cleaner tube and record those sounds and then and then listen to them back at the slower speed. And my dad once he said to me, I had hit these funky mono headphones on, you know, for like a radio. Anyway, he said to me, what are you listening to? One day and I said, oh, I'm making my own music. Dad. He said, oh, let me listen now. I was listening pretty loud, and he put them on. It was the vacuum cleaner and he threw threw it down. He said, he said, that's not music. I said it is to me. That's music to me, and so he figured, I've got this music then going on, And maybe a month or so later, apparently a silvertone series acoustic guitar fell off a freak car and he gave it to me, along with a Melbay chord book, and he said, now you can make music. And I learned how to play, and so I was in it from real early and studied music in high school, went to a high school that specialized in arts and science, studied theory and top position, and ended up playing in rock bands and I was off and running.

You actually played in a folk band associated with Bobby Kennedy in sixty four.

Tell me about that.

I was writing his campaign songs when he was running for the Senate. I mean, that was just an oddball thing I was, you know, I was. I was really young, fifteen or sixteen, and I was doing the thing in the village, you know, where you bust in the street or if you could get into a place where you didn't have to be over eighteen eighteen was the drinking age. I would get in and play for whatever, you know, basically traditional folk songs, singing them. And this guy came up to me and he said, hey, you write songs too, and I said yes, and he said, you like a job for the summer. Oh, by the way, this particular guy came to a Young Democrats meeting that I was playing at, was you know, at near NYU. So I said, how much does it pay, this summer job? And he said, well, it doesn't pay anything really, but you get to travel a bit and you'll eat and you'll have some fun. Well that was, you know, playing these rallies for for JFK. I actually ended up playing the last one at Madison Square Garden following the Ronettes. So you know, one of my claims to fame is I played at the garden, the Old Garden, and that was I think that was the Democratic National Convention that was held that year. That was. That was a good start for me, and I learned a lot about politics and turning traditional folk songs into campaign songs.

You've masteredly figured out the art of collaboration. Did you learn that when you went to the Institute of Audio Research?

There?

No, no, no, no, no, not at all. Collaboration began as soon as I got my own rock band together. You know, it was not I made sure that the people were in the band. We were real contributors were created even though we were young. These were guys that had most of them a little older than me, but they all had good ideas and and and then I went on the road. After I came back from Liverpool, I went on the road for years and played with a ton of people from the Angels, my boyfriend back and I would play either guitar or bass, play with Chuck Berry for a while. You know, I toured, I was. I was on three different Mad labels, Columbia, Epic, and Bell as a writer and as an artist. The last label that I was on was the was t Neck and my band was being produced by the Isley Brothers. And after that is where I made the decision to go to the other side of the glass and enrolled in the Institute of Audio Research and also got a job at Record Plant as the janitor. They both happened around the exact same time as my day job. I was a motorcycle messenger in Manhattan. I was living in the East Village, but that paid great money because I would I would ride that bike all through winter and it meant that the nights I could, I could gig with the band. So it was you know, all I had to do was call up and say the dispatcher and say I'm on. And I had this Norton Commando. In the winter, I'd have knobby wheels on it so I could get around in the snow. And then the winter paid great money, so it was like really cool.

But when you became the janitor, you must have had your sights on becoming a recording engineer.

Well I did. In fact, I wanted to be a producer as well and a composer. And the funny thing was, while I was the janitor at night, I was also a client because I was scoring the original ABC after school specials for the producer Danny Wilson and such. Danny's still active, it's great, but I went to work producing music for his show, which was the Call Over seven and it was the original ABC after school specials, and so at night I would be a client. In the daytime, I was the janitor, but I was you know, I would beg other engineers if I could just sit in on their sessions so I could learn between and I worked my way up from general worker. Actually after janitor you're just cart and stuff around and Record Plant also ran a school for us, you know, guys that were on the way up. So I learned a lot there and I became a tape librarian and I went into the editing booth. I was an editor, then I was an assistant engineer, doing tons of stuff, you know, working with great rock bands that were coming through Record Plan and also early mornings, I was doing jingles for the Forward and Airlines and you know all those big commercials when you had the big orchestra dates and earythm session. And I was also doing artists demos, so I did all of Billy Joel's demos for him to get his deal Lumbia. I did Patty the Bell demos, and these are four track, so they would want to come in and listen to what it sounded like before they went in and invested in the big rooms to do it. And that's a great learning experience when you have to record all this stuff for track, especially if you've got a big rhythm section that's you know, I was in a hurry. It didn't take me long. Honestly. They would let me at midnight. They would let me come in and record whoever I wanted for free, you know, like local bands, and you know, I really made my bones by bringing in groups and recording them and learning how to do it right.

What a fascinating time it must have been in that area. It's still a fascinating area that whole the whole scene. And since this podcast is called taking a Walk, I have to ask you, even though we're virtual, so did you ever get sort of in a creative block where things were kind of jammed up? And would you just go for a walk in the village to free your mind?

No? No, I didn't have time for that at all. No. If I had a block, I had to work it out while it was behind the board. But I mean I made some terrible blunders. I was recording Paddy Labelle's demos and the guy put these old boards, especially the four track boards were all tubes and they had giant transformers and the bass player and I thought, man, I'm doing this. This demo sounds so good because there's a full rhythm section and her and you know I and I said, and you have to do everything live. You have to do your reverb or your compression. Everything has to be done on the fly right away because there's no going back to it. And so I'm doing this and I'm thinking, Wow, I'm really good here, and the bass player came in. I couldn't wait to play it for Patty because I thought, she's not even going to have to do a master. This is it. And the bass player came around behind me and he put his beer next to me. I didn't see it, and the remote for the tape machine it was in between me and the remote for the tape machine, and I went to hit the remote and hit the beer, and the beer went into the transformers and flame shot out, and literally I burned the board down. The flames were coming out of the faders. I destroyed the room that the board was gone, and I got fired immediately. The owner, Chris Stone came he said, you're fired. Patty LaBelle went to him and said it wasn't his fault at all. And Roy Scala, who was the chief engineer, who quite famous guy, he was my mentor. He said to Christone, he said, why don't we listen to the tape, And because the tape was still there, he said, lit's listen to the take us. If it's good, he'll make more money for the studio than that board cost, which was on its way out. Anyway, they listened to the tape and the next day Chris Stone called me up. I was like, oh, my career is over. I've got to do this is terrible. Christone called me up and said, well, they decided to give you another chance and and he said, but we're going to give you a pay cut from sixty five dollars a week to sixty dollars a week. I said, fine, So you know, I got but you know you trip along the way for sure, you know, But yeah, I never had time to go. I mean, for me, I was on the course that I wanted to be on. I was learning by working as an assistant, working on projects that had either lousy producers are really good ones, and I would be taking oaks on this works, this doesn't work. And I was an assistant on American Pie and I watched how all these bits and pieces of that song were edited together to make that masterpiece. Now that that works. So I mean I worked with a lot of a lot of producers along the way as both an assistant and then as an engineer, which I became like the rock guy, probably because I played music rock for so long. But those notes really helped me understanding what worked with an artist and what didn't.

So as you were in that recording, you know, engineer mode there, I wanted to get your reaction to some folks that you worked with that were pretty amazing.

I'm going to start with Miles Davis.

Well, I was. I mean, first of all, he was great in the studio, not not at all, be treated everybody great, the fellow musicians, the crew. Mostly I assisted on those sessions. I assisted on Miles, I assisted on Nina Simone because Jay Messina was the jazz guy, and Jay would always bring me in to do these jazz states, Mike McNairy record Brothers, and so I got to you know, I'd be working hand in hand with him on these great sessions. But I was, you know, a giant Miles fan, John Coltry fan, and and I was, you know, I didn't know what to expect. You know, you always hear Miles turns his back on you. And Miles, Miles was the sweetest guy in the studio because he understood that in the studio probably unlike a live performance, that is a collaborative situation and the crew is important. So he was just really sweet. And he loved Jamie Sina because they wore the same shoe sizes, and Jay would always come in with like a really cool pair of shoes and might also say Jay, hey, j can't you do his voice? But you would ask Jay to pick him up a pair of those shoes when he was at the store, and j would deliver him over to his brownstone on the West Side near where Jay lived. He was great. Nina Simone scared me working with Nina. I would be, you know, putting the setting a mic and interview because she'd be singing and playing piano and she just look at me like, are you sure that's in the right place that she could be looking? I think it is the fun stuff. Who else?

James Gang again.

I was assisting on James Gang's sessions. They were brothers. They brought the mother in one time. I guess they were from Indiana or something like that. The funny thing is, you know, recently I've become really good friends with, well the last few years, with Joe Walsh. When I'm out in la I see him quite often because he works at Ringo and I see Ringo quite often. I got to talking to him and I said, you remember that album you were doing that record plant James Kang and he said sure, I said I was. I was the other engineer and he said, you got to be shitting me. Wow, that's crazy. Yeah, I said, yeah, that was me. And that was Bill Simsick was engineer producer. I guess Bill went on to work with the Eagles. In fact, he invited me down to Miami to listen to when he had this motel that he had converted and Coconut Grove into a studio. He invited me down to listen to what he was doing. Yeah, that was fun. And those guys were very cool and very professional in the studio.

Another one that I love to mention is the one and only Alice Cooper.

Well, uh, that that was pretty cool because I loved working with Bob Ezram. Bob was He was a funny caddy. He was and he is extremely talented musician and arranger and writer. And he was a guy that I learned both pro and con from because he had a he had. His talent was so supreme that his ideas were always good, but there was never a lot of room for the for the band, in particular Alice's band, their ideas. It was like Bob laid down the law, and that's how you did it, and they were used to that working with him, and so I thought, and I don't think I can ever ever do it that way, but and you know, I'm not as talented as Bob, but I can work around it. But Alice sessions were great, and I worked on Schools Out and Billion Dollar Babies with Bob. And then after doing the Dolls album, the first album, Bob came to me and he said, you know you're because Todd didn't show up very much and I had a good relationship with the band. Would we would keep that going? And Bob told me, he said, you know you're you're producing this now as well you should be producing. And so I'm going to give you the next Alice album to produce because it's the it's the last group album. And then Alice is going solo with me, and he said, I don't like funerals, and so you're going to produce it, which was Muscle of Love. They put Jack Richardson in there with me too to keep an eye on.

And what would bring your first encounter with cheap Trip.

That was I had relatives in Waukeshaw, Wisconsin, my brother in law, he said to me, you've got to come see this band that's playing at the Sunset Bowl Bowling Alley in Waukeshaw. They're really good, and I thought, God, my brother in law was taste of music is just terrible. But what the hell, I got nothing else to do. So we went to the bowling alley and Cheap Trick was playing and they were I mean, and they knocked me out. They were incredible. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. And I had known about them because they were already making noise, not signed, but already making noise around the Midwest. I told them that right then and there. I said, I think I can get you a deal and I'd like to produce you, and they said okay. So the next day I called up my Epic Records and said, get out here and see this band, and if you don't sign them, I'll take them to RCA. And because my reputation with CBS Records, which was Columbia and Epic, because my relationship was good with him, he came out and they were signed shortly after the Epic Records, and shortly after that I was out there. We did a quick pre production mostly they had so much material. It was crazy insane amount of material. It was just a matter of making sure it was recordable, edited a little bit here and there. You know. It wasn't like I had to do any co writing with them at all. They were really self contained in that department. I didn't do very much arranging except maybe on the overdubs, things like Mando Cello or I mean, we knocked off I think thirty basic tracks in two weeks when we went into record play and then, you know, I said, well, these songs will put on the back burner because I don't think they quite fit on this album, which the first album is a lot of social and political statements in it. I thought, we're going to go to college radio with this, and we'll put these other ones on the back burner. Other Go Go Girls, I Want You to Want Me, Surrender. We'll put those on the back burner for the next record. Unfortunately, the next record I was doing aerosmith to draw the line. That took a year to do, so I never got to them to the second album, which I had, and I didn't get back to them until Buddhico, But that proved to be pretty good. Fifteen million records and still selling. Tell me about your encounter with the who well who were coming in to do I think it was called the Lighthouse Project something like that, and it wasn't Who's Next, but it was the material that was going to make cup Who's Next, And so they wanted to record all this material, and the they said, give us your chief engineer. They were gigging around the northeast at the time, but give us your chief engineer. And so the chief engineer was a guy named Jack Adams, and he was not a rock engineer, but he was the chief engineer. He was an R and B guy, and he didn't like rock music very much at all, and so knowing that, they put me on the date to assist him. And so I, you know, the equipment came into the into the room, all Keith drums, and I set up like I was setting up for a big rock day like Mountain or one of those kind of dates where it's going to be heavy and loud, and ually miked all the tom toms and stuff that Jack normally would do, because an R and B session is very different. And then the band came in and I said, let's Jack Adams wasn't there yet, and I said, you guys want to roll something so I could get the room totally set up? Sure, and so I rolled tape and they started jamming, and they started jamming on Baby Don't Do It, Don't Break Your Heart? And I said to hey, do you mind if I get a friend of mine to commit and jam with you guys. It was Leslie West, who was in the next room, and so they said, no, we love Leslie West. So I went and I got Leslie and he came in and he jammed. I think that particular jam session is available Leslie West and the who playing Baby Don't Do It recorded. It sounded really good, sounded like the Who. I got it all tuned down up. Jack came into the room. Finally. I love Jack Adams. He was a fabulous R and B guy and later disco too. He did. But he came into the room and he said, oh, what is this? And I said, you know, it's the Who. He's like, Who What? Who? I'm like. The last album Jack was Tommy. It was unbelievable huge, It wasn't into it that much. They came into the into the booth and they said, let's hear that back. What we just jammed, so we know it sounds like So I got to spun the tape backwards and and they listened to it, and Pete went over and franked now the big Westlake monitors in that room, you know, five hundred watts on each side. Fabulous sound. He cranked the monitors right up loud, and I could see that Jack was very Jack I was very uncomfortable with that, and he was like, oh my god, no you And then they went back out in the room and Jack said to me, I can't I can't do this. Kit Lambert was producing, by the way. It was a crazy maniac but I love I loved watching him. I learned a lot. He would conduct the band like it was an orchestra because his father was a very famous conductor in England. So Jack said to me, I can't do this. This is this is awful. There's no broove, there's no soul. So I said, well, you know, you get through it, Jack, don't worry. He said, no, I'm not going to get through it at all. You're going to get through it, huh. He said, yeah, he goes. I want you to go into the production room, which was basically in the control room, there was a wall sepperate it. He said, call me up on the phone, name at the board and tell me something terrible has happened that I will have to leave. Said, why don't you just tell them something? He goes, no, I need to react to this. So Jack Adams lived on a houseboat and on the seventy ninth Street Pier, Hudson River. So I called him up and I was really quiet. You could hear me in the room if you care to listen. And the phone rang and Jack picked up. I said, Jack, He said, yeah, said I have something really terrible to tell you. Now. Pete Townsend was still in the room, and Jack kind of was obvious that he was loud, and he went something terrible. What happened? Now, Pete and Keith they're looking at him. And I say to Jack, your houseboat's on fire and it's sinking in the Hudson River. And then he repeated that my houseboat's on fire and it's thinking that, and then he kind of put in, like in quotations, I live in a houseboat. And then he said my dog. He didn't have a dog, but he threw that in for a little extra stuff. I have to go the other engineer will take over. I took the reins. The first song that we recorded was Don't Get Fooled Again, live vocals, and it was hair raising, and we recorded on ten tracks. At some point the front office heard that I was in charge, and they were a little worried, but they sent somebody down to keep an eye on me, and they sent me an assistant. And it was good. Exactly. Got to be really good friends with those guys. And after the gigs they would say, this would be like one o'clock in the morning, and they go and now we're going to go out and have some fun. Okay, you're going with us, kid, Okay. So I would go out with them and we would meet at the Navarro Hotel, which was on Central Park South, small hotel, boutique hotel. They had the whole ninth floor, which was maybe eight rooms. This way it kept them away from regular clients, and Keith and Pete had the two front suites which face Central Park beautiful and on the ninth floor. Now this is a building that had high ceilings, and so I would go there and we would meet in Pete's room and then go out to some after hours place or just you know, they knew all these spots. I was in New Yorker. I had no idea these pludies existed. You know, they get a couple of limos and off we'd go. But anyway, every night I would go up there Heath. I mean, everybody came through the door into Pete's sweet but Keith would open the window on his suite and crawl across the ledge outside the building and then open up Pete's window and climb in. This is like nine very high floors, and no one thought that was unusual except me. Everyone was like, hey, Keith, what are we doing tonight? And I'd be like, oh my god, that's a little bit I saw. I ran into Pete at si R at a rehearsal just a few years ago. He was coming to a meeting and he had a girl with him that he was producing, and I ran into him. I said, hey, Pete, I mean it's been years, I said, remember me and Jack? And he goes, heere Jack Douglas, Oh yeah, wow, spend a lifetime since I've seen you. And I said yeah yeah. And he introduced me to the artist that he was with, and he introduced me. He said a thousand years ago, he said to her, we worked with Jack and made him famous. Thanks, thanks, Pete. Thanks, It's true, that's outstanding. Yeah.

So then it's nineteen sixty excuse me, nineteen seventy one.

Well, sixty nine is when I went to record plants. The very first project, interestingly enough, that I worked on as a general worker because we had the move tapes was Woodstock. Can you imagine? So the van would pull up with the tapes from the show that we're recorded live, and then I would bring him to the various studios where the artists were fixing the tapes. You ran into Hendrix and Rosby. Still's a nasher all in there. It's amazing. I'm like, wow, I'm in the right place here. But yeah, go ahead, Well.

Well, excuse me. Seventy one you would engineer.

Imagine one of the engineers.

Yeah, tell me about your first of a lifetime encounter with John.

You know, first of all, I was an incredible Beatle fan, had been for years, I mean just ord a fanatic, really loved them. I even went to Liverpool in sixty five on a tramp steamer and bought Rubber Soul. The week it came out that winter November December, bought it in Liverpool. I got deported for a lot of reasons for playing in bands without a work permit, from escaping from a ship, blah blah blah. I made a lot of noise, and I was in all the newspapers and even in the mirror in London. I was stories about my adventures. But I was on the front pages of the Liverpool in particular the Liverpool Echo, which is the big newspaper in Liverpool. And I got deported and changed mind you really, they won't take any chances that was going to escape again. And that was in sixty five. So now go forward so many years and I'm at record plant working and John is down the hall in another room with everybody doing overdubs, and you know, working on Imagine. He'd come over from England where they'd done a bunch of tracks, and now they were doing some more tracks and doing all the overdubs. My job, because I was a good editor, was down the hall in another small room, was to edit these some of these tracks and prepare them for more for multi tracking, because there were run eight tracks and they wanted to go to sixteen track. There were handwritten notes from John. You know, don't edit the masters. Make sure you edit the copies that you're going to make when you're going to edit here. Anyway, I was hearing most of the album before anybody else was hearing it, because I was editing and transferring. About four or five days into this whole project, the door opened and said John comes into the room. And nearly peed myself because I didn't think I would be having contact with him. I thought, I'm good enough having this gig as an editor. And he sits down. He says, okay, if I hang out in here, I'm just looking for a place that's not so noisy. I knew he was, and I figured he was trying to get away from Phil, who had a terrible reputation specter that is, and so he sat on a couch on the other side of a console so I only could see his feet up on the glass and cigarette smoke. And I said, I'm editing your stuff, and he was like, yay, okay, thanks, so you're doing a great job. He just kind of blew me off and he sat there and smoked, and about five minutes into this process of me working quietly, I said to him, I've been to Liverpool and his head popped up and he said really. He said, where are you from. I said, I'm born and raised in New York City, So why would you want to go to Liverpool? Everybody there wants to come here, including me, and you know it's it's not a great place, not a tourist place. I said, well, I was a musician, and you know, I really wanted to swim into Mersey. I wanted to know everything about the music scene there, and which was really cool because I got to hang in the original Caravin Club, which was amazing thing to do back then. So he looked at me and he said, well, how did that work out? And I said, well, good and bad. I said bad, I got deported, but good. I made a lot of noise before I did. And he looked at me and he said, were you one of the crazy Yanks that was in all the newspapers And I said, yeah, that was me, because it's me and my buddy I talked to going with me. Yeah, another guitar player. He said, you know, we looked at the pictures of these two guys on the front page of our newspaper that we put out an album that should have been just us all over the front page, these two Yanks making all this noise in Liverpool. And I said, yeah, that was me. And he said, and in one of the pictures that was on the front page as my guitar les Paul custom. He said to me, right, well, he remembered that because that made the impression on them. He said to me, you still had that less Paul. He said, no, it's a long gone. He said. I can't believe all the places I walk into and there's this guy I'm meeting now. That was someone that you know, we laughed about, you know, in Liverpool and did all this stuff. He said, what are you doing? I said, like, I said, I'm editing your stuff because you're an engineer. I said yes. He goes, okay, you're on the project, said, Yoko is going to know that there's some deeper meaning in us meeting you. You know. After a session or two, he said, dude, where do you live? And I told him in the village. He said, we do too. We're on Bank Street. Let me give you a ride home. And then one time on the way down to the village, you see the only place where we can get a late bite to eat and I said, sure, I know a million places where I can get you in the back door. And suddenly he asked me for my phone number. He called me up. He said, I listen, I have to go to this party and there's going to be all these people there. It was Abbi Hoffman and that Crewiously just come with me because I don't really know them, and you can watch my back. Started hanging with him and we became friends, and then he said to me, listen, I want you to do these Yoko records. Okay. So I met with Yoko and she said, what makes you think you can do my records? And I said to her, because I was really an avant guard John Cage Fan and all these ourgard jazz guys. And I said to her, because I don't care if when you play the piano you're inside it or outside of it. And she said that's good. That's good. And so I did just all these records with her. Sometimes John would be producing them, or we'd be sitting next to me while we did them. It was a good run with her, and because of that trust, that's why I ended up producing, because they both trusted me will While I was doing the muscle.

Of Love album.

We were out in La, which he told me to do. He said, come out to La, your producer, you can do it, or wherever you want. And Warners is in La, so bring it out there. I'm out there. That was his lost weekend, and so I became one of the original Hollywood vampires. I was doing that Nalys too, whom you know I frequently. I drove the getaway car. That was my gig, get them out of trouble. Interesting and I had a long, long relationship with him. I miss him, and I think the world is it would be a different place that he lived.

If you could describe his creative process, what would it be.

He worked on songs for months, if not years. He had a germ. He would work on it. And you know when you see that film he brought, he brought the Jackson film. He brought stuff to the studio to work on. Here's something I have. He always was preparing, he was always writing. I mean some of the songs on Double Fantasy were years old that he had demoed numbers of times, and so he was well prepared. The thing that he had no patience for lollygagging in the studio, you know which is why he hated Phil. Phil would want, you know, fifty takes, whereas for me and I would always have him to do a live vocals frequently within the first five takes. You had it, and he knew it, and I knew it, and the musicians knew it as well. It wasn't and I was always a step ahead of him the whole time we were working, and so he loved that. He liked to be, you know, somebody was always prepared for him to do what he wanted to do. And I think that's why we got along. In the last few years before he passed away, I became very good friends with Jeff Emeric and he would be over my house for dinner. We would do mixes together. We had a lot of time when we talked about John and he said to me, I wish I knew the John that you talk about, because he knew the angry John from the Apparently he could get very angry and the Beatle I know that alcohol didn't It was not good for John at all. It was kind of he would get angry that I saw while we were in California. He was just he was just amazing. That whole summer we were working on that record, and then later into the fall, while we were doing Walking into Nice.

You ran into these guys from Boston in seventy four named Daro Smith. How many How many years were shaved off of your life from beginning that ride with them?

Ten years? Ten years were shaved off my life, not those years, but later years. I mean, I'm thirty years sober. But there's there's a lot of you knows. As their drug got used, you just got worse. I mean I was always like the straight guy, you know, I thought to keep this session together when it was over, when the session was over, there, I was smoking your joint when it was over. But yeah, as their drug use got worse, they exposed me to a few things that later in my life became a problem. And then so yeah, I lost some time, but none of it while I was working with them.

Now, how often did crisis management enter into your job description working with them?

It depends on what you call crisis management. You know, get your wings, toys in the attic rocks, they were all they were all really creative periods for the band, and and they welcomed my input so that I was like a member of the band. We did months sometimes of pre production, and and it wasn't till we were doing draw the Line that it became became a problem because they would stay in there. We were in a had been a nunnery of state New York, Westchester County actually, and they all had their own rooms and free Some of them wouldn't come out of their rooms for three four days. That was the That was the crisis. As far as working with them or having fights or not so much. No, you know, I've always been the good politician. You know, my thing is listen to the band first. First of all. You know, my job is to make a band's dreams come true, you know, not mine. And you know they understood that. That's the way it was. And so although we didn't have to talk about it, that's the way I approached all of that stuff with them. We worked hard together, you know. I mean, sure Stephen would come in and say, I get sing that better, and I was saying, I don't know if you can. But if he said he could sing it better, I went with it.

You co wrote Kings and Queens, didn't you.

Yes? Did you see that's at the point where the band wasn't writing. I mean I contributed a lot as a writer previous to that, but I always thought that's my job as a producer. You know, people told me many years later that was a big mistake, but I don't. I don't think so, because now every producer is a writer. You know. It's like that's where you get your publishing and blah blah blah blah. But at that point I had to start writing because they were losing their productivity. I like Kings and Queens.

I think it's Oh, I love that one. I love that too. That's a great one, but so many great ones.

You know, being in Boston for so long and part of the Boston scene, you got a big fan of Aerosmith right here.

Oh great, Yeah, I'm still a big fan. I'm the peace Out tour should be interesting. When they were doing Vegas the residency in Vegas, my my son was in the band as a percussionist. My son, Colin is a Latin jazz guy, a couple of Grammy nominations as a jazz artists. But Joe liked to work with him on his solo stuff, and so when they did this residency, he wanted him to play all the tambourines and congas and bells, and so that's what he was doing. Could sing too.

So what are you working on now, Jack, she's.

Because I have a label. Yeah. Well, the first act that we signed was the Detroit Youth Choir, and they, of course were huge hits on America's Got Talent twice there were huge hits and and so I produced that record in Detroit called rock Spell. I called it Detroit Rock Band with this youth choir singing classic R and B s. It's available on our site. And then the next artist I signed was Robin Taylor Xander, who's Robin Xander's son. That album is out now. We just dropped acoustic and acoustic version of I and Low, although the single version of it is already out in the whole record is available on every platform. Detroit Youth Choir won us a Gospel about two weeks ago, won us a gospel version of the Grammys for the record that we did, so that's pretty cool. And last week I was in Los Angeles talking with Disney because Disney has picked up the Detroit Youth Choir for a mini series called Choir, and so we have the record and they have the the miniseries could be a good combination. I've been doing a lot of film scores. I've got on a person personality crist I just worked with Marius Grss and Ron Howard on a personality Crisis One Night Only, which is on Showtime. Now. I've got two films going into the festival circuit that I composed the music for. One is called The Trust in Love Contemporary Ron Tom takes place in Malibu, and the other one is The Carol Dotas Story, which is the documentary about the first topless dancer in San Francisco, which is cool. I just last night watched the completed film with my score, and it's pretty cool. It's amazing how what footage they have of that period that she was, what was happening in San Francisco from nineteen sixty four through the early seventies, a lot San Francisco. It was amazing. And then I've got an artist named Ellie Low that is I'll be in the studio in Los Angeles with her this coming month producing her. She's really amazing. She's out of Atlanta. And then my partner on we have two labels under one umbrella. I have Confidential Records, New York City, dot com n Y that's Confidential Records NYC dot com a good website too. And my partner under the same umbrella is Make Records, and he's a little bit different than me. He's signing members of Ghosts and he's got a group called Silver Plains. It's a little harder rock than what I usually do. Well. I produce outside acts. I have a request for some group in England called Xander and the Pirates. I might I may do that. I may do it. And and I today got a message from a guy who has since we were speaking of the who has the license for all of this, UH has all this ant whistle incomplete material that the family has licensed to him to complete. So that could be interesting. I started listening to it today. You know that's keeping me very busy. All of this, I mean, the label keeps me really busy and on the go all the time. You know, people said, you want, you know, actually retire. What am I going to do? You know, I'm qualified to be the bag boy at stopping shop. Even though right up on the wall up there you see John Jack Douglas, doctor of Music. It is right up there on the wall. But that'll get you a bag boy job, and now there aren't any bag boy jobs because I made it and you got to pack at yourself, so I would basically be unemployed. So I like what I'm doing.

I am so grateful for our friend Drew Lane for connecting us out of Detroit, and so glad that you've been on Taking a Walk. Thank you for the stories and for the music. Jack Douglas, amazing.

You're very welcome. Good to see you. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Taking a Walk podcast. Share this and other episodes with your friends and follow us so you never miss an episode. Taking a Walk is available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts