TOM DOWD, 1925-2002
Dec 1, 2002 12:00 PM, Blair Jackson
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This Month in Mix
The recording world lost one of its true giants when legendary engineer, producer and audio innovator Tom Dowd succumbed to emphysema on October 27 at the age of 77. His career spanned six decades and encompassed sessions with a mind-boggling array of great artists in rock, pop, jazz and R&B from the mid-'50s until just before his death. He never lost his enthusiasm to work with musicians or cut a hot track in the studio: “It's still a rush,” he told Mix in 1999, the year he was elected into the TEC Hall of Fame. “You get a glow, and you think, ‘Hey, I'm lucky to be here.’”
And we were all lucky that Dowd decided to forego a promising career in physics to pursue his love of music. In New York City in the late '40s, he worked as a freelance engineer; then, he latched onto the fledgling Atlantic Records label for a quarter-century, working as the company's technical guru, principal engineer and later a top producer. It was Dowd who introduced Atlantic to stereo in 1952, and who designed the label's pioneering 8-track studio on West 60th Street in 1960. He built consoles and other equipment from scratch, and single-handedly came up with miking principles in the late '50s and early '60s that are still popular today. Though he is perhaps best known for the work he did in New York, he also made extraordinary records in Muscle Shoals and Memphis. From the '70s on, Dowd worked mostly out of Miami, where he helped put Criteria Studios on the map. His records were noted for their naturalness and their clarity; he was, in a sense, one of music's great documentarians, capturing the magic in the room but not imposing his own sound on the artists with whom he worked.
And what a collection of musicians benefited from Dowd's easy-going but conscientious manner! In the jazz world, he engineered multiple projects with such notables as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Hank Crawford, Eddie Harris, Mose Allison, Herbie Mann, Milt Jackson, Charles Mingus, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Bobby Short, Nat Adderly and Freddie Hubbard. He was behind the board for all of The Drifters' early hits and for early rock-era titans such as The Coasters, The Clovers, Ben E. King and Bobby Darin. He engineered some of the greatest soul records to come out of Atlantic, cutting classics by Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke and The Bar-Kays. He produced or engineered scores of important rock albums, too, including numerous dates with Cream, the Young Rascals, the Allman Brothers, Eric Clapton, Derek & The Dominos, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Wet Willie, Dr. John, Delaney & Bonnie, Black Oak Arkansas, Dusty Springfield and Rod Stewart, to name just a few. If you want your mind blown away by the sheer scope of his career, check out his listing on http://allmusic.com.
Dowd had great ears and a big heart; few figures in our business were so universally loved and respected. Up until his last days, Dowd had a twinkle in his eye and a good story on the tip of his tongue — he was quite the raconteur, his sharp memory overflowing with anecdotes about the business that he loved so much. And though now we'll miss his warmth, his graciousness and his joie de vivre, his legacy is both enduring and inescapable.
Check out Mix's two-part Tom Dowd interview from 1999: Part 1 Part 2
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