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    Roy Thomas Baker, Who Helped Produce ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ Dies at 78

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    Among the most successful music producers in the 1970s and ’80s, he helped churn out hits for acts like Queen, the Cars, Journey and Foreigner.Roy Thomas Baker, who was among the most successful music producers of the 1970s and 1980s and who helped produce Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” one of the most unconventional pop hits, died at his home in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., on April 12. He was 78.His death was announced by Bob Merlis, a spokesman, who said in a statement that the cause was unclear.Besides Queen, Mr. Baker collaborated with other well-known bands like the Cars, Journey, Mötley Crüe and Foreigner while working as a producer and sound engineer at several recording studios over the course of his career.He is perhaps best known for helping to produce the nearly six-minute-long “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen. In an interview with The New York Times in 2005, Mr. Baker said that the song was “ageless” because “it didn’t confine to any given genre of music.”“I thought it was going to be a hit,” said Mr. Baker, who produced the song with Queen. “We didn’t know it was going to be quite that big. I didn’t realize it was still going to be talked about 30 years later.”Roy Thomas Baker was born on Nov. 10, 1946, in Hampstead, England. He began his career at Decca Studios in London in 1963, working as a second engineer to Angus Boyd (Gus) Dudgeon, an English record producer who would later become known for his collaborations with Elton John; and Tony Visconti, an American producer who went on to work with artists like David Bowie and Marc Bolan.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      David Edward Byrd, Whose Posters Captured Rock’s Energy, Dies at 83

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      David Edward Byrd, who captured the swirl and energy of the 1960s and early ’70s by conjuring pinwheels of color with indelible posters for concerts by Jimi Hendrix, the Who and the Rolling Stones as well as for hit stage musicals like “Follies” and “Godspell,” died on Feb. 3 in Albuquerque. He was 83.His husband and only immediate survivor, Jolino Beserra, said the cause of death, in a hospital, was pneumonia brought on by lung damage from Covid.Mr. Byrd made his name, starting in 1968, with striking posters for the likes of Jefferson Airplane, Iron Butterfly and Traffic at the Fillmore East, the Lower Manhattan Valhalla of rock operated by the powerhouse promoter Bill Graham.For a concert there that year by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Mr. Byrd rendered the guitar wizard’s hair in a field of circles, which blended with the explosive hairstyles of his bandmates, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell.For a 1968 concert at the Fillmore East by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, David Edward Byrd rendered the guitar wizard’s hair in a field of circles, which blended with the explosive hairstyles of his bandmates, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell.Design sketch via “Poster Child: The Psychedelic Art & Technicolor Life of David Edward Byrd,” by David Edward Byrd and Robert von Goeben; final poster, Bill Graham Archives, LLCMr. Byrd also put his visual stamp on the Who’s landmark rock opera, “Tommy,” producing posters for it when it was performed at the Fillmore East in October 1969 and again, triumphantly, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York a few months later. In 1973, he shared a Grammy Award for his illustration work on the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s rendition of “Tommy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Shel Talmy, Who Produced the Who and the Kinks, Dies at 87

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      Though he was American, he helped define the sound of the British Invasion after settling in London in the early 1960s.Shel Talmy, a Chicago-born record producer who helped unleash the id of the British Invasion with a raw, grinding sound on proto-punk salvos like “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks and “My Generation” by the Who, died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87.His death was announced on his Facebook page, where he had been sharing reminiscences about many of his past recordings with a long list of acts, which also included Manfred Mann, Chad & Jeremy, the Easybeats and a teenage David Bowie, who at the time was using his given surname, Jones.Mr. Talmy’s climb to the top of the British music scene actually began in Los Angeles, where he had lived since his teens. In 1962, he was working as a recording engineer at a studio in Hollywood when he headed for London for what he expected would be a five-week vacation, hoping he might scrape together enough work there to pay for the trip.Before he left, his friend Nick Venet, who produced the Beach Boys for Capitol Records, offered him the acetates of some of his hit records to help Mr. Talmy drum up work. In a 2012 interview with Finding Zoso, a fan site devoted to the Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, whom Mr. Talmy used on many sessions, he recalled that Mr. Venet had told him: “Help yourself to my discs, whatever you want to use you can use. You can tell them it was yours.”Once in London, Mr. Talmy passed off hit records like “Surfin’ Safari” as his own in a meeting with Dick Rowe of Decca Records. “I thought, what the hell,” he said in an interview with the music writer Richie Unterberger, “I’m not going to be here long. I might as well be as brash as possible.” By the end of the meeting, he said, Mr. Rowe had told him, “You start next week.”Mr. Talmy had already notched his first hit, “Charmaine,” a country-inflected number by the Irish vocal trio the Bachelors, when his ruse became obvious. But by that point he was on his way.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Fiery Sounds of the Monterey International Pop Festival

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      Revisiting the event’s memorable set list, 57 years later.Ravi Shankar onstage at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967.Ted Streshinsky/Corbis, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,Fifty-seven years ago today, the Monterey International Pop Festival — the three-day event that arguably invented the modern music festival — concluded in a blaze of glory. That Sunday boasted quite a bill: Ravi Shankar mesmerized the crowd with a set of ragas that lasted more than three hours. The Who obliterated the calm with a proto-punk set which ended when Pete Townshend smashed his guitar. Jimi Hendrix attempted a one-up by lighting his on fire. The headliners the Mamas & the Papas had the unenviable task of following all that.I’ve had Monterey Pop on the brain recently, since last month I published an in-depth piece about the life and legacy of “Mama” Cass Elliot. (I began the essay with a self-deprecating joke that Elliot made onstage at the festival, which took place just six weeks after she’d given birth to her daughter.) The story of Monterey Pop is entwined in the story of the Mamas & the Papas: The group’s leader, John Phillips, was one of the organizers of the festival, and he even wrote the event’s de facto theme song, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” which was recorded by the folk singer Scott McKenzie. The Mamas & the Papas were perhaps the most famous band on the bill at the time, but that would soon change. The festival — like D.A. Pennebaker’s era-defining, fly-on-the-wall documentary “Monterey Pop” — was a snapshot of the precise moment when the prevailing sounds of folk-rock began to give way to a louder, gnarlier kind of rock ’n’ roll practiced by Hendrix, the Who and another of the weekend’s breakout stars, the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company, Janis Joplin.One of the things that makes Pennebaker’s documentary so valuable is the fact that it captured, in vivid liveliness, so many musical luminaries who would soon be gone: Joplin, Hendrix, Elliot and Otis Redding, who died in a plane crash before the film was released. Pennebaker and his crew shot these artists in intimate, immediate close-up, pioneering the visual language of concert documentaries to come.Today’s playlist revisits some of Monterey Pop’s legendry set list, specifically focusing on the songs performed in Pennebaker’s film. It’s a mix of live cuts and studio versions, of flower-child folk and rabble-rousing rock. It is unlikely to inspire you to go full pyromaniac like Hendrix, but just in case, you might want to have a fire extinguisher handy.Lookin’ for fun and feelin’ groovy,LindsayListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Ultimate Dad Rock Playlist

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      What is dad rock? You know it when you hear it, so listen to 10 songs from Wilco, the Grateful Dead, Steely Dan and more.Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, the patron saint of dad rockEnric Fontcuberta/EPA, via ShutterstockDear listeners,This Sunday is Father’s Day, and I would like to celebrate the only way I know how — with a playlist of dad rock.What is dad rock? You know it when you hear it, but it’s difficult to define exactly, as I learned when I considered the supposed genre in an essay I wrote four Father’s Days ago*. One thing I want to make clear is that, while it’s an easy concept to poke fun at, I don’t consider the term “dad rock” to be an insult, per se. A lot of great music falls into the category, and you certainly don’t have to be a dad to enjoy it. Much of what I was grappling with in that essay was the fact that, in my 30s, I have come around to loving a lot of what I once dismissed as “dad music.” Perhaps, spiritually speaking at least, I am a dad.I associate dad rock with a certain laid-back, lived-in proficiency — an age and comfort level at which you no longer feel you have to prove your virtuosity but can just sit back and let it speak for itself. Accordingly, quite a few of the songs I’ve chosen here represent bands (Wilco, the Who and Pink Floyd, to name a few) in the middle years of their careers, polishing the rougher edges of their sounds while remaining indelibly themselves. Quite a few — from artists like Steely Dan, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Bruce Springsteen — are straight from my own dad’s record collection, and, as you’ll see below, he even makes a cameo, offering a corrective to his only complaint about this newsletter.Last week, a website I had never heard of called Merchoid conducted a questionably scientific poll that asked 3,000 Americans, “Which band truly epitomizes dad rock today?” The names that appeared in the Top 10 responses were horrifying: Nickelback, Blink-182, Red Hot Chili Peppers … Limp Bizkit?! Sure, I get that time marches on and that the pop-punk and nü-metal fans of yesteryear are aging into fatherhood. But something about the antic scatting of the Chili Peppers or the teenage-boy humor of Blink-182 does not square with the easygoing cool I associate with dad rock.So consider this playlist a rejoinder to that list, or maybe just an argument starter. But whatever you do, make sure you consider it The Amplifier’s way of saying happy Father’s Day.Turn it up! That’s enough,Lindsay*My own father really enjoyed the article, except the part where I told the entire readership of The New York Times that he used to drive a Ford Taurus. Sorry, Dad.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bob Heil, Whose Innovations Enhanced the Sound of Rock, Dies at 83

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      A groundbreaking audio engineer, he provided the large-scale systems that brought tours by the Who and the Grateful Dead to life.Bob Heil’s career as a groundbreaking sound engineer who brought thunder and rich sonic coloring to tours by rock titans like the Grateful Dead and the Who began behind a pipe organ in a 1920s movie palace.Mr. Heil, who helped usher rock into its arena-shaking era by designing elaborate sound systems that allowed rock juggernauts of the late 1960s and ’70s to play at volcanic volumes, first learned to appreciate the full spectrum of musical tones as a teenager, when he took a job playing the massive Wurlitzer pipe organ at the opulent Fox Theater in St. Louis.“We had to voice and tune 3,500 pipes, from one inch to 32 feet,” he said in a 2022 video interview with the audio entrepreneur Ken Berger. “Voicing taught me to listen. Very few people know how to listen. Listening, you’ve got to mentally go in and dissect.”Mr. Heil died on Feb. 28 of cancer in a hospital in Belleville, Ill., his daughter Julie Staley said. He was 83. His death was not widely reported at the time.Although he worked behind the scenes, Mr. Heil was enough of a force that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland credited him with “creating the template for modern rock sound systems” In 2006, the Hall installed a public display containing his mixing boards, speakers and other items.Mr. Heil developed some of the first effective sound systems for large rock concerts in the 1970s. The two men here were unidentified.via Heil SoundWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Who’s Tommy’ Review: Going Full Tilt

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      Will the Who’s rock opera about a traumatized boy hit the jackpot again?That its plot makes no sense is not really the problem with “Tommy.” When it first appeared as a concept album, in 1969, it was, after all, billed as a rock opera. And let’s face it, if you’ve ever paid attention to its story unstoned, you’re going to have some questions, just as you might with “The Magic Flute.”Nor can you complain about the rock part of the billing; there’s some pretty magic guitaring going on, and some righteously harmonized vocals.Translations to film and the stage have offered additional pleasures. The 1975 movie gave us Tina Turner in top form — enough said. The original 1993 Broadway musical, with its flying Tommy and galloping pinball machine, was a visual groundbreaker, warmed by excellent performances. Even the colder, coarser revival that opened Thursday at the Nederlander Theater, long since rebranded as “The Who’s Tommy,” offers the excitement of big, poppy belting.Who’s Tommy indeed! And whose? Despite all its incarnations, the experience that makes the most powerful use of Pete Townshend’s infernally catchy songs remains the one that takes place in the ear’s imagination. Largely freed from the burdens of literalness, the album did not need to make sense to make history.Today, though, unless you’re a die-hard fan who thrills automatically to every lick and lyric, you may want something that calls itself musical theater to offer more than a full-tilt assault on the senses. This production — directed, like the original, by Des McAnuff — won’t provide that, being less interested in trying to put across the story (by McAnuff and Townshend) than in obscuring it with relentless noise and banal imagery.To be fair, the story, set during World War II and the two decades after, probably benefits from some obscurity. We first meet Tommy Walker as a cheerful 4-year-old (Olive Ross-Kline, alternating with Cecilia Ann Popp). But when his father (Adam Jacobs) returns after several years in a prisoner-of-war camp, and kills the lover that his mother (Alison Luff) has acquired in the meantime, the boy is traumatized. Witnessing the shooting, he instantly loses his ability to hear, speak and see, leaving him a shell of a child, defenseless against his parents’ rages and his pedophile uncle (John Ambrosino). It also makes him, for a musical, a bizarre protagonist, spending most of his time staring into a large, symbolic mirror.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      12 Key Music Collections, From Future to the Who

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      Whitney Houston’s gospel music, Future’s prolific mixtape run, a chunk of Joni Mitchell’s archives and a soundtrack of Brooklyn’s early discos arrived in new packages this year.Artists were eager to revisit the past in 2023 — some tweaking recent albums (like Taylor Swift), others revisiting long-dormant work in the vaults (like the two surviving Beatles). Boxed sets and reissue collections serve a different purpose, helping put catalogs and musicians into context, and bringing fresh revelations to light. Here are a dozen of the best our critics encountered this year.Julee Cruise, ‘Floating Into the Night’(Sacred Bones; one LP, $22)The absorbing, unconventional debut album from the deep-exhale vocalist Julee Cruise, who died in 2022, was produced by Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch; the three had previously collaborated on music for Lynch’s 1986 alt-noir film “Blue Velvet.” This batch of songs, released in 1989, plays as an extension of that fun-house mirror, lightly terrifying universe, with twisted 1950s melodies meeting destabilizing, plangent guitars meeting Dali-esque shimmers. “Falling” became the theme song for “Twin Peaks” in instrumental form, but its full vocal version is the essential one. Songs like that, “The Nightingale” and “Into the Night” feel, even now, sui generis — not exactly dream-pop or new age, but something utterly amniotic. And lightly harrowing, too. JON CARAMANICADeYarmond Edison, ‘Epoch’(Jagjaguwar; five LPs, four CDs, 120-page book, $130)Anna Powell Denton/JagjaguwarBon Iver didn’t come out of nowhere. Before he started that project, Justin Vernon was in DeYarmond Edison, a pensive, folky but exploratory band that made two albums before splitting up; other members formed Megafaun. DeYarmond Edison — Vernon’s middle names — delved into folk, rock, Minimalism and bluegrass, learning traditional songs but also experimenting with phase patterns. It made two studio albums and left behind other songs, including “Epoch.” This extensively annotated boxed set includes songs from Mount Vernon, DeYarmond Edison’s jammy predecessor, along with DeYarmond Edison’s full second studio album (though only part of its first), unreleased demos, intimate concerts, collaborations outside the band and Vernon’s 2006 solo recordings. It’s a chronicle that opens up the sources of a style getting forged. JON PARELESWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘The Who’s Tommy’ Will Return to Broadway This Spring

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      An acclaimed revival of the musical plans to open in March at the Nederlander Theater.“Tommy” is returning to Broadway.A Chicago-born revival of the classic rock opera, which got strong reviews and sold well at Goodman Theater over the summer, will open at the Nederlander Theater in March.Set in and around London over a number of years starting during World War II, the show is about a boy who stops communicating after several early traumas, embraces and excels at pinball, and begins to have messianic delusions. The story is considered an expression of generational anger.The musical, whose full title is “The Who’s Tommy,” began as a concept album in 1969, and the original stage production opened on Broadway in 1993. It won five Tony Awards, including for its score by Pete Townshend of the Who. Townshend not only wrote the music and lyrics, but is also credited with writing the book with Des McAnuff, who directed the original and is now directing the revival.Writing in The Chicago Tribune, the critic Chris Jones called the revival “truly a ready-for-prime-time stunner” and said “Broadway has nothing else like this wizardry going on.”The revival’s lead producers are Stephen Gabriel and Ira Pittelman. Gabriel said he had loved the show since his high school band played the songs at a school dance, and jumped at producing the project when McAnuff said he wanted to revisit the material.“What we saw in Chicago reaffirmed my original thought that the piece was ahead of its time,” Gabriel said. “I always knew the music would resonate again, but I think the story, with its themes of trauma and bullying, goes toward conversations we have today — that’s discussed more freely and thoughtfully now, and when the show presents those themes, the audience leans in.”The revival is scheduled to begin previews March 8 and to open March 28; casting has not yet been announced. The show is being capitalized for up to $17 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; Gabriel said he expected the actual budget to be closer to $15.5 million.“Tommy” is at least the fifth musical revival announced for this season, joining “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Spamalot,” “The Wiz” and “Cabaret.” More