Notes

The following originally appeared in the GRAND JUNCTION FREE PRESS:

Some record producers would do anything to elicit a proper performance from a player. 

Some cajoled.  Some bribed.  Some sputtered and blustered.  But only the infamous British producer Joe Meek, having grown frustrated with the playing of the late Mitch Mitchell one day, whipped a pistol out of his drawer, pointed it at the drummer’s head, and threatened to shoot Mitchell between the eyes if he didn’t nail the take.

Mitchell survived the recording session and went on to great success as part of Jimi Hendrix’s Experience.   But he never forgot the day Joe Meek threatened his life, and he was one of many musicians not terribly surprised to hear the tragic news that emerged from Meek’s home studio at 304 Holloway Road in London on February 3, 1967.   It was on that day, exactly eight years after Meek’s idol, Buddy Holly, perished in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, that Meek wigged out for the final time.   After a night spent popping pills and penning paranoiac notes, Meek murdered his landlady, then swallowed the barrel of his shotgun and stained the walls of his studio with his own tortured brain.  It was a grievous (but sadly predictable) end for a man who revolutionized the pop music recording industry.

Meek was born Robert George Meek in 1929, and grew up in the bucolic countryside of Gloucestershire, England.  His brothers were all strapping, manly types, but young Joe was more effeminate (perhaps thanks to his mother, who always wanted a daughter and therefore dressed Joe as a girl during his earliest years).  While still living on the family farm, Joe became enamored of electronics and began to craft his own radio sets.  He even built the first television set seen in his hometown. 

After a stint in the Royal Air Force (where he was trained as a radar technician), Joe moved to London and landed a job with IBC Studios.  Although many of the more established engineers at IBC scoffed at some of his outlandish recording techniques, there was no denying his ability to elicit new, unusual sounds, and he eventually worked his way up to producing records for the likes of Petula Clark and Lonnie Donegan.

But Joe was never much of a team player, and he became convinced that the other technicians at IBC were stealing his ideas.  After he wrote “Put a Ring on Her Finger” (which guitar great Les Paul turned into a Top 50 hit in the United States), Meek had the wherewithal to build his own London studio above a leather goods shop.  It was from here that Meek produced his best-known work. 

In 1962, Meek (a life-long science fiction fan) was inspired by the recent launch of the world’s first communications satellite, and wrote a song for the band with which he had been working for much of the past year, the Tornados.  That song, “Telstar,” sold more than five-million copies and became the first song by a U.K. rock band to top the American charts, a good year before the Beatles officially launched the British invasion.  Although Meek scored other hits in the next few years, his growing alcoholism, drug addiction and mental illness would eventually send him spiralling downward to his wretched end.

We’ll further detail the tragic story of Joe Meek in the future.  Check back here in future weeks for the story of a man whose talent was only exceeded by his psychoses.