Chairman at the Board

December 15, 2020
Behind-the-scenes tales from the producer and engineer of albums by leading 1970s pop acts. Schnee started his music career as a teenager in 1964, playing keyboards in a garage-rock act called the LA Teens. The band went nowhere, but cutting singles introduced him to recording studios, where he developed a knack for the close listening that record-making demands. His first love was R&B, and he has worked with acts like Gladys Knight and the Pointer Sisters. His most prominent production gigs, though, were with adult-contemporary artists like Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon, Art Garfunkel, Boz Scaggs, and Huey Lewis. (His work on Steely Dan's 1977 album, Aja, is probably his most admired achievement, earning him the first of his two engineering Grammys.) Schnee is a respected name in the production world thanks to his well-trained ear and persnickety approach to studio details, and he's right to assume his main audience consists of fellow producers; two appendices detail his philosophy of recording, and he sometimes lapses into jargon. The appeal for casual music fans is shakier. The author's recollections of most artists are anodyne; almost every big-name performer is a class act, at worst grousing about the presence of instruments in the mix. Diva behavior is mostly kept anonymous, though Schnee does recall Julio Iglesias being officious and Rickie Lee Jones driving Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro to stab his drumsticks into his kit. A certain politesse, he argues, is necessary to get the best out of artists, and he knows his place. "I'll go to the mats for something I believe in, but I'll never force it because the artist's name goes in big letters on the front of the album and the producer's in little letters on the back. As a result, I have a good relationship with anyone I've ever worked with." A modest and modestly revealing memoir of life among the soft-rock titans.

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