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Glen Lockett, the influential file producer who, working beneath the title Spot, helped outline the jet-turbine sound of American punk rock within the Eighties, recording groundbreaking albums by Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Minutemen and plenty of others, died on March 4 in Sheboygan, Wis. He was 71.
His loss of life, in a nursing house, was introduced in a Fb submit by Joe Carducci, a former co-owner of SST Information, the iconoclastic Hermosa Seashore, Calif., label the place Mr. Lockett made his title. Mr. Lockett had been hoping for a lung transplant in recent times after a protracted battle with pulmonary fibrosis, and he had spent a lot of the final three months in a hospital after a stroke.
Because the in-house producer for SST from 1979 to 1985, Mr. Lockett managed the blending board on landmark recordings that helped carry American punk from deafening gigs in garages and basements to the mainstream — the college-radio mainstream, at the very least.
He produced or engineered greater than 100 albums for SST, together with classics like Black Flag’s “Broken” (1981), Descendents’ “Milo Goes to Faculty” (1982), Meat Puppets’ first album (1982), Minutemen’s “What Makes a Man Begin Fires?” (1982) and Hüsker Dü’s “Zen Arcade” (1984).
Partly as a result of SST had restricted budgets within the early days, but in addition due to bands’ needs and Mr. Lockett’s manufacturing philosophy, he sometimes opted to file stay within the studio — all members taking part in without delay — with minimal studio results, as a substitute of the widespread business observe of recording one instrument at a time and utilizing overdubs and results like digital delay and outboard reverb.
Consequently, he was capable of translate to vinyl the uncooked, speedy howl of punk that, in a stay setting, despatched our bodies crashing and elbows flying.
“Our first time within the studio with him was for our first Minutemen file, ‘Paranoid Time,’ a seven-song, seven-inch EP, in July of 1980,” Mike Watt, the band’s bassist and co-founder, recalled in an e mail. “He recorded and combined us that one evening. I feel we began at midnight and ended just a few hours later.”
“Spotski,” Mr. Watt added, “at all times was about making an attempt to seize what was us, like with this file — sort of like a ‘gig in entrance of the microphones’ journey, the place he big-time mentioned he didn’t wish to get in the way in which of us making an attempt to carry what we had that made us what we have been.”
Mr. Lockett’s sensibility dovetailed with the angle of SST, which the rock critic Byron Coley as soon as described as “archly xenophobic,” referring to the label’s revulsion for the extremely processed sounds being stamped out by the foremost labels within the hit factories of Los Angeles.
“There was a basic dismissal of what rock radio had turn into, so Spot was bent on capturing what the band was placing out, with out softening, buffering or tampering with it,” Mr. Carducci mentioned in a telephone interview.
The label’s storm-the-barricades ethos may not have resulted in chart-topping hits, however SST made waves within the business, rising from “a cash-strapped, cop-hassled storefront operation to simply probably the most influential and fashionable underground indie of the ’80s,” because the music journalist Michael Azerrad wrote in a 2001 article for The New York Occasions.
Whereas he was dedicated to the punk trigger — an avid curler skater, he used to wheel round Los Angeles hanging fliers for gigs by SST bands — he by no means let the do-it-yourself minimalism espoused by many within the style restrict his musical scope.
He was a talented guitarist who additionally performed clarinet, banjo, mandolin, drums and even bagpipes; he typically joined Minutemen onstage, Mr. Watt mentioned, to play his clarinet through the band’s jams between songs.
Earlier than he fell into the nascent Southern California punk-rock scene within the late Nineteen Seventies, Mr. Lockett had been performing, recording and writing about jazz for a neighborhood newspaper in Hermosa Seashore, house of the Lighthouse, a nightclub lengthy thought-about a mecca of West Coast jazz.
A musical omnivore, he later developed a fascination for conventional Irish music and began a small label of his personal, No Auditions, for which he recorded various eclectic, Irish-inflected solo albums after he moved from Los Angeles to Austin, Texas, in 1986. He was additionally a photographer, and revealed a e-book of his work, “Sound of Two Eyes Opening,” in 2014.
“Evidently the entire historical past of punk rock, and particularly the stuff that occurred in L.A., relies on lots of myths,” he mentioned in a 2018 interview revealed on the Crimson Bull Music Academy web site. “There have been much more influences and concepts about life and tradition that most individuals both don’t have a clue about, or aren’t actually all that prepared to just accept.”
Glenn Michael Lockett, who later dropped an “n” from his first title, was born on July 1, 1951, in Los Angeles, the youngest of two kids of Claybourne Lockett (who glided by Buddy), a furrier who later labored as a clerk within the submit workplace of the Ambassador Resort, and Cynthia (Katz) Lockett, an workplace supervisor at a neighborhood music academy. His father had served in World Warfare II as one of many famed Tuskegee Airmen.
He’s survived by his sister, Cynthia Cyrus.
Rising up in Leimert Park in South Central Los Angeles, Mr. Lockett developed an early love of post-bop jazz.
He obtained his first guitar at 12 and was quickly taking part in together with British Invasion, Motown and surf-rock hits. As his musical vocabulary developed, he ultimately turned fascinated with the musically bold progressive rock of the early Nineteen Seventies. At one level he additionally unsuccessfully auditioned for the genre-hopping rock auteur Captain Beefheart.
By the mid-’70s, nonetheless, Mr. Lockett, like lots of future punk figures, had grown weary of prog, with its pomposity and self-consciously elaborate compositions and preparations. After he helped mates construct a recording studio referred to as Media Arts in Hermosa Seashore, he started recording jazz teams, and was impressed by the direct and unfiltered studio strategy of the combos he recorded.
Jazz musicians “didn’t need something fancy,” he mentioned within the Crimson Bull interview. “They only wished to get the issues down, and so they didn’t care if somebody performed a nasty word or not.”
That spirit carried over to his subsequent musical chapter, which started when he was working as a waiter at a vegetarian restaurant. It was there that he met Greg Ginn, who would later be a founding father of each Black Flag and SST Information.
Regardless of their differing musical influences, Mr. Lockett would often jam with Mr. Ginn and the opposite members of a band referred to as Panic, which later advanced into Black Flag.
When a Black Flag live performance at a park in close by Manhattan Seashore erupted right into a melee, Mr. Lockett knew he wished to supply the band. “That present was simply so loopy,” he informed Crimson Bull Academy. “I mentioned, ‘I obtained to file this band earlier than they get killed.’”
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