Elliot Mazer, the longtime producer and engineer who helped create albums for Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt and The Band, among others, died at his home in San Francisco on Sunday. He was 79 years old. Mazer’s daughter Alison confirmed the producer’s death, adding that the cause was a heart attack after years of struggling with dementia..
“Elliot loved music,” says his sister, Bonnie Murray, Rolling Stone. “He loved what he did; he was a perfectionist. Everyone has a lot of respect for him, and he’s been suffering for a few years. “
Mazer is best known for producing several Young albums, starting in 1972 Harvest. He would produce the 1973 live LP Time disappears, his lost 1975 album House made – which Young finally launched last year – as well as in 1983 Everyone is rocking and 1985 Old methods. He also introduced Young to digital recording. “Elliot Mazer was in the right place at the right time,” Young told Jimmy McDonough in his biography, Shakey. “He let me do my music and recorded it.”
Mazer was born on September 5, 1941 in New York City. Soon after his birth, his parents moved the family to Teaneck, New Jersey, where he and Bonnie grew up. His neighbor, Bob Weinstock, owned the jazz label Prestige Records and hired Mazer when he was just 21, where he organized tapes and distributed records to radio stations. The first album he worked on was from 1962 Coltrane Standard, gathered from a collection of John Coltrane outtakes that he had found.
Following Prestige Records, Mazer got a job at Cameo-Parkway, an independent label from Philadelphia. “It was an incredible place,” he told the Shadowplays website in 2011. “He had his own studio. There were composers, artists and musicians there all the time. I was the jazz guy, but I loved pop records, so I ended up working with Chubby Checker. “
In the late 60s and early 70s, Mazer took his love of pop and started working on albums like Big Brother and the Holding Company Cheap emotions and the 1970 Ronstadt LP Silk Bag. “He was a mysterious guy to me,” says Ronstadt Rolling Stone. “But I didn’t know what I was doing at the time; I didn’t know how to sing yet. I recorded this song at ten o’clock in the morning, when we could enter the studio, and he got me really good musicians and introduced me to the people who organized it. ”(“ What you hear is Linda’s second opinion of the song, ”Mazer later recalled in the notes in the 2006 booklet Linda Ronstadt’s Best: The Capitol Years. “She was so tired after she entered the control room and fell asleep. ”)
During a dinner in Nashville in early 1971, he met Young, who spontaneously asked him to produce Harvest. According Shakey, Mazer was only vaguely familiar with Young because his girlfriend played After the gold rush constantly. Mazer connected Young to musicians from Nashville like bassist Tim Drummond, drummer Kenny Buttrey and steel pedal guitarist Ben Keith. Together with pianist Jack Nitzsche, Young dubbed them Stray Gators. Most of the album was recorded at Mazer’s Quadrafonic Studios, as well as inside the barn at Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch in Redwood City, California.
Mazer was there to witness Young’s famous quote during the recording, when he rowed Graham Nash – who had overdubbed the vocals on the record – to the middle of the lake to play the album for him. “What he did was connect his home as the left speaker and the whole barn as the right speaker, and they played Harvest, ”Nash recalled. “And at the end of that, Elliot Mazer goes down to the lake and says, ‘Neil, how are you? Neil turns and yells: ‘More barn! ‘“
“We all knew there was something very special going on,” Mazer told McDonough of Harvest. “Looking back, I really don’t think I felt comfortable with him, even though we spent hours and hours in the studio. The great pain he felt and his mood swings – heavily controlled by drugs – kept everyone at a distance. “
Mazer also produced several albums for Gordon Lightfoot, including 1968 Back here on earth and 1969 Sunday Concert, as well as designed the band’s live album in 1978 The Last Waltz.
In addition to production and engineering, Mazer was an innovator in the music industry, working at the Stanford University Computer Center for Music and Acoustic Research (CCRMA) and working at His Master’s Wheels, his San Francisco studio. He co-invented “D-Zap” – a device that detected dangers in the studio – and AirCheck, a monitoring system that identifies music for radio and TV broadcasts. Later, Mazer and co-creator Jon Birge sold the system to Radio Computing Services.
The family asked that all donations be made to MusiCares.
Additional reporting by David Browne