Richard Perry, a successful record producer with a flair for both standards and contemporary sounds whose many hits included Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” “The Great American Songbook” series, has died by Rod Stewart and a Ringo Starr album with all four Beatles, died. tuesday He was 82 years old.
Perry, who received a Grammys Trustee Award in 2015, died at a Los Angeles hospital after suffering cardiac arrest, friend Daphna Kastner said.
“He maximized his time here,” said Kastner, who called him “Dad’s friend” and said he was her son’s godfather. “He was generous, funny, sweet and made the world a better place. The world is a little sweeter without him here. But it’s a little sweeter in heaven.”
Perry was a doo-wop drummer, oboist and singer who proved at home in a wide variety of musical styles, the rare producer to have No. 1 hits on the pop, R&B, dance and country charts.
He was on hand for Harry Nilsson’s “Without You” and The Pointer Sisters’ “I’m So Excited,” Tiny Tim’s new “Titoe Through the Tulips,” and the Willie Nelson-Julio Iglesias lounge standard “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.”
Perry was widely known as a “musician producer,” treating artists as peers rather than vehicles for his own tastes. Singers turned to him whether they were trying to update their sound (Barbra Streisand), turn back the clock (Stewart), revive their careers (Fats Domino) or fulfill an early promise (Leo Sayer).
“Richard had a knack for matching the right song with the right artist,” Streisand wrote in her 2023 memoir, “My Name Is Barbra.”
Perry’s life was a story, in part, of famous friends and the right places. He was backstage at 1950s performances by Little Richard and Chuck Berry, sat in the third row at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival during Otis Redding’s memorable set, and attended a recording session for the classic album “Let It Bleed” by the Rolling Stones.
A given week might find him dining with Paul and Linda McCartney one night, and Mick and Bianca Jagger the next. He dated Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda among others and was briefly married to actor Rebecca Broussard.
In Stewart’s autobiography, “Rod,” he recalled Perry’s house in West Hollywood as “the scene of many a night school in the 1970s and beyond, and a place where you knew you could always fall at the end of a knee-deep night with drink, music and dancing”.
In the 1970s, Perry helped facilitate a near-Beatles reunion.
He had produced a song on Starr’s first solo album, “Sentimental Journey,” and was approached by Nilsson and other mutual friends. “Ringo,” released in 1973, would prove that the drummer was a commercial force in his own right, with some well-placed names.
The album, with contributions from Nilsson, Billy Preston, Steve Cropper, Martha Reeves and all five members of The Band, reached number two on Billboard and sold over 1 million copies. Hit singles included the chart-topping “Photograph,” co-written by Starr and George Harrison, and a remake of the 1950s favorite “You’re Sixteen.”
But for Perry and others, the most memorable issue was an unsuccessful tailoring. John Lennon’s “I’m the Greatest” was a mock anthem for the gentle drummer who brought three Beatles into the studio just three years after the band broke up. Starr was on drums and lead vocals, Lennon was on keyboards and backing vocals, and Beatles friend Klaus Voormann played bass. They were still working on the song when Harrison’s assistant called, asking if the guitarist could join. Harrison arrived soon after.
“As I looked around the room, I realized I was at the epicenter of the spiritual and musical quest I had dreamed of for so many years,” Perry wrote in his 2021 memoir, “Cloud Nine.” “At the end of each session, a small group of friends had gathered, standing silently along the back wall, excited to be there.”
McCartney wasn’t in town for “I’m the Greatest,” but he did help write and arrange the ballad “Six O’Clock,” featuring the former Beatle and Linda McCartney on backing vocals.
Perry had helped make pop history the year before as the producer of “You’re So Vain,” which he would call the closest he’d come to a perfect record. Simon’s scathing ballad about an unnamed lover, with Voormann’s bass kicking off the song and Jagger joining in on the chorus, hit No.1 in 1972 and began a long-running debate about Simon’s intended purpose. Perry’s response would echo Simon’s own late response.
“I will take this opportunity to give my first information,” he wrote in his memoirs. “The person that the song is based on is really a composite of various men that Carly dated in the ’60s and early ’70s, but mainly, it’s about my good friend, Warren Beatty.”
Perry’s post-1970s work included hit singles such as The Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance” and DeBarge’s “Rhythm of the Night,” along with albums by Simon, Ray Charles, and Art Garfunkel. He had his greatest success with Stewart’s albums, “The Great American Songbook,” a project made possible by the rock star’s writer’s block and troubled private life. In the early 2000s, Stewart’s marriage to Rachel Hunter had ended and Perry was one of those comforting him. With Stewart struggling to come up with original songs, he and Perry agreed that an album of standards could work, including “The Very Thought of You,” “Angel Eyes” and “Where or When.”
“We were at a back table in our favorite restaurant as we exchanged ideas and jotted them down on a napkin,” Perry wrote in his memoir. Stewart softly sang the options. “As I sat there and listened to her sing, it was clear that we both felt we were on to something,” Perry added.
Perry was a native New Yorker born into a musical family; his parents, Mark and Sylvia Perry, co-founded Peripole Music, a pioneering manufacturer of instruments for young people. With the help and encouragement of his family, he learned to play the drums and oboe and helped form a doo-wop group, the Escorts, which released a handful of singles.
A music and theater major at the University of Michigan, he initially dreamed of acting on Broadway. Instead, he made the “life-changing” decision in the mid-’60s to form a production company with a recent acquaintance, Gary Katz, who would go on to work with Steely Dan, among others.
By the end of the decade, Perry was an industry star, working on Captain Beefheart’s acclaimed cult album “Safe As Milk” and the debut recording of Tiny Tim and Ella Fitzgerald’s “Ella,” featuring the jazz great of Beatles songs. , Smokey Robinson and Randy Newman.
In the early 1970s, he would oversee Streisand’s million-selling “Stoney End” album, in which the singer abandoned the tunes that made her famous and covered a variety of pop and rock music , from the title track, a composition by Laura Nyro. , in “If You Could Read My Mind” by Gordon Lightfoot.
“I liked Richard from the moment we met. He was tall and fat, with a mop of dark, curly hair and a big smile, than his big heart,” Streisand wrote in her memoir. “At our first meeting, he came loaded with songs, and we listened to them together. Any doubts I may have felt about our collaboration soon disappeared and I thought, “This could be fun and liberating musically.”
AP Music Writer Maria Sherman and AP Entertainment Writer Jonathan Landrum Jr. they contributed to it.