If you don’t know who Tom Dowd is, check your CDs.
You’ll find his name on the back of a half-century of albums by Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Cream, The Allman Brothers Band, Derek and the Dominos, Rod Stewart, Lynyrd Skynyrd and countless others. As staff engineer and producer for Atlantic Records from the ’50s onward, Dowd worked with them all. More importantly, he literally helped shape contemporary music by pioneering various recording techniques and designing the modern mixing console. Oh, and he worked on the Manhattan Project. The remarkable life of this unsung hero gets the bio treatment in this Grammy-nominated rockumentary, which brims with archival footage and interviews with music biz giants from Eric Clapton to Ahmet Ertegun — and, of course, Dowd himself. You’ll know him after this.