There are so many stories of accomplished musicians becoming accomplished engineers and producers — Don Was, Steve Albini, Todd Rundgren, Jim Bryson, Mike Dubue, Brian Eno, Quincy Jones, Nile Rodgers, Linda Perry and Jeff Lynne to name a few. You don’t really find many accomplished engineers and producers who aren’t also musicians, but it’s less common to find people who started out as accomplished, well-known engineers and producers who later went on to become famous musicians in their own right.
I started thinking about this after going down an Alan Parsons Project hole. Kind of a guilty pleasure because their/his records always sound so damn good — at any volume. They’re warm, balanced, creative and pristine. But of course they are — Parsons had two decades of experience as a Grammy-nominated engineer before he put out his first album. So we’ll start with him.
Alan Parsons
In 1967, Parsons was a tape duplication grunt at EMI. As the story goes, he heard Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and decided he wanted to be part of the creative process. He bootlicked his way into an assistant engineer role at EMI Recording Studios (now Abbey Road Studios). Just 18 years old, he found himself as the tape op on The Beatles’ Get Back (Let It Be) sessions with Glyn Johns. I’ve read that the first time his name made it on the credits of an LP sleeve was for being an assistant engineer to Geoff Emerick on Abbey Road a year later — but I can’t find it. The earliest credit I found for Parsons was for being an engineer, along with Peter Brown, on Pink Floyd’s 1970 album Atom Heart Mother.
By this time, Parsons was engineering five albums a year, and then around seven a year by 1972. Finally, when his engineering prowess on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon earned him a Grammy nomination in 1973, his workload tripled. It was in this period that he ran into Eric Woolfson in the cafeteria at Abbey Road. Woolfson was starting a management career and had already signed Carl Douglas, who delivered the goods in the form of the massive hit Kung Fu Fighting. Parsons asked Woolfson to manage him and Woolfson expressed an interest in being part of any musical “project” Parsons might be interested in. They were so stoked on the idea that Parsons turned down Pink Floyd’s invitation to engineer Wish You Were Here. Instead, he and Woolfson spent the second half of 1975 recording Tales of Mystery & Imagination, the first Alan Parson Project album. It dropped in May 1976 and got into the Top 40 in the U.S. The followup I Robot got into the Top 10. The group only had one No. 1 song, and it happened in Canada. Eye In The Sky topped the chart here in October 1982 — thought it only reached No. 3 on the U.S. Billboard 100.
Norman Smith
The nickname Norman Smith gave himself was quite different from the one bestowed on him by John Lennon. Smith was the long-time engineer working alongside George Martin on the first six Beatles records — up to and including Rubber Soul, which he also mixed. Finding him to be rather staid, Lennon referred to him as Normal Smith. After Rubber Soul, Smith graduated to the role of a junior producer. Among the first artists he was assigned was the fledgling Pink Floyd. He guided them through their debut Piper At The Gates of Dawn, while The Beatles constructed Sgt. Pepper in the studio next door. He also produced Floyd’s followup A Saucerful of Secrets, as well as the studio album in the Ummagumma double set. After that he served as executive producer on both the More soundtrack and Atom Heart Mother while the boys learned the ropes. Just as Rolling Stones producer Jimmy Miller sat in when Charlie Watts struggled with the drums on You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Smith subbed for Nick Mason on Remember A Day — the last Floyd song to feature a Syd Barrett guitar solo. Smith also provides backing vocals on Remember A Day.
As he wrapped up his involvement with the Floyd, Smith launched his own recording career. A demo he wrote and recorded called Don’t Let It Die ended up being his first single, after fellow producer Mickie Most told him to put it out himself rather than pitching it to Lennon, as Smith intended. And just like that, the career of Hurricane Smith was a go. Don’t Let It Die was a No. 2 hit in the U.K. The followup Oh Babe What Would You Say hit No. 1 on the U.S. Cash Box charts and No. 3 on the Billboard 100. Even so, you can safely categorize Smith as a one-hit wonder in the U.S.
Bob Rock
Winnipeg-born Vancouerite Bob Rock started out as an engineer, became a famous musician, and then an even more famous record producer. He got an apprentice gig at Little Mountain Sound Studios in Vancouver in 1976 and worked with artists on the local punk scene, including Art Bergmann and Young Canadians. He moved up to being a recording engineer and sound mixer, collaborating with Bruce Fairbairn. Rock and high school buddy Paul Hyde formed The Payola$ in 1978 and put out their debut album No Stranger To Danger in 1982 after Rock worked as an engineer and mixer on Loverboy’s classic 1981 album Get Lucky. Stranger To Danger won four Juno awards. In 1986, Rock worked with Fairbairn on Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet. He went back to recording in 1987 when The Payola$ became simply Rock & Hyde — the same year Rock engineered and mixed Aerosmith’s Permanent Vacation. The popularity of that album led The Cult’s Billy Duffy to approach Rock about producing their next record, Sonic Temple. This led to Mötley Crüe’s Dr. Feelgood the same year, and Metallica’s self-titled black album in 1991. It doesn’t get much bigger than that. Most recently, he plugged in his guitar again on the 2023 album Lustre Parfait, featuring songs recorded over several years with Tragically Hip frontman Gordon Downie.
Daniel Lanois
Gatineau’s Daniel Lanois started his career in the late ’60s engineering, recording and producing acts like Raffi and Simply Saucer with his brother Bob in the basement of the family home in Ancaster (Hamilton). This led to the purchase of an old home in Hamilton, which he, Bob and Bob Doidge acquired and turned into Grant Avenue Studio in 1976. There they worked with bands like Martha & the Muffins and The Spoons. Around this time he first started collaborating with Brian Eno, who got him involved with U2, co-producing 1985’s The Unforgettable Fire. Lanois did the next U2 album, The Joshua Tree, himself and it won the 1987 Grammy for Album of the Year.
Lanois launched his own recording career with the release of the critically acclaimed Acadie in 1989 — the first of his eight studio albums. Following Acadie, he got back to work with U2 on Achtung Baby and All That You Can’t Leave Behind. He collaborated with Peter Gabriel on his soundtrack album Birdy and co-produced his classic 1985 LP So — his best-selling release. He also worked on Gabriel’s platinum-selling Us (1992). In the interim he produced Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy! He has also made acclaimed albums for with and for Robbie Robertson, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson and others.
Felix Pappalardi
Felix Pappalardi studied classical music in college and became a Greenwich Village folkie in the ’60s, eventually securing a gig as an arranger for Elektra Records. From there he got into engineering, producing albums by Joan Baez, The Youngbloods and, most critically, Cream’s Disraeli Gears. Pappalardi and wife Gail Collins wrote Strange Brew with Eric Clapton.
In the late 60s, Pappalardi worked with a band called The Vagrants, and then a solo album by their guitarist Leslie West. The album was called Mountain — which became the name of the hard rock four-piece he (on bass) and West formed in time to play Woodstock. The band toured extensively for a number of years before Pappalardi was forced to step back from performing due to hearing problems. Pappalardi, West and Collins collaborated on all the Mountain albums, which Pappalardi also produced. Collins did the famous artwork for the Mountain albums and the pair worked together until she shot and killed him in 1983.
Butch Vig
Madison, Wisconsin’s Bryan “Butch” Vig got his first taste of music-making by providing some electronic music for the Slumber Party Massacre soundtrack in 1982. But his musical background dates back to childhood piano lessons and the acquisition of a drum set after watching The Who destroy one on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. He played in a few garage bands, but didn’t catch a foothold in the music biz until he and university pal Steve Marker built and founded Smart Studios and Boat Records in the mid-’80s. In 1991 he produced The Smashing Pumpkins’ debut album Gish, and the iconic Nevermind by Nirvana. This led to his work on the Smashing Pumpkins’ followup, the acclaimed Siamese Dream, as well as Sonic Youth’s Dirty (1992) and Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star (1994).
His own career started to take off when he co-founded Garbage with Marker and Scottish singer Shirley Manson. Their self-titled debut album sold more than four million copies on the back of the hits Only Happy When It Rains, Queer and Stupid Girl. The followup matched its predecessor in sales. They also contributed the theme song to the James Bond film The World is Not Enough. With all this success, Vig can basically do whatever he wants — including starting an alt-country band in 2011 and pseudo psychedelic folk outfit 5 Billion in Diamonds in 2017.
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Area Resident is an Ottawa-based journalist, recording artist, music collector and re-seller. Hear (and buy) his music on Bandcamp, email him HERE, follow him on Instagram and check him out on Discogs.
