Jack Douglas has died. He was 80 years old. He died on Monday due to complications from lymphoma. He was behind some fundamental albums released between the 70s and 80s including Toys in the Attic by Aerosmith and Double Fantasy by John Lennon & Yoko Ono. Over the course of his career he has also worked with The Who, Lou Reed, Miles Davis, Alice Cooper, Knack and even Allen Ginsberg.
Born in the Bronx, he started out in the 1960s as an aspiring folk singer. He wrote songs for Robert Kennedy's 1964 election campaign. Driven by his passion for the Beatles, despite not having a work permit or even a visa, in 1965 he boarded a cargo ship bound for Liverpool with some friends. In a 2017 interview he said he managed to evade immigration officials and go to the mainland to buy a copy of Rubber Soul. A newspaper article about his adventure allowed him and his friends to be taken off the ship and stay for a time in Liverpool before being sent back to America.
Returning to New York, Douglas enrolled at the Institute of Audio Research. After graduating he found work at the newly formed Record Plant Studio as a cleaner. He started from the bottom, but managed to become a sound engineer assistant. One day, while he was editing some tapes for a Lennon session, his idol entered the studio. Douglas told him about the escape to Liverpool and the Beatle realized that he was one of those “crazy Yanks” he had read about in the newspapers. “He gave me a ride home in his limousine. I started working on his record as an assistant. We became friends.”
Douglas is credited as sound engineer on the album Imagine and continued to collaborate with Lennon and Yoko Ono. He contributed to the sessions Lifehouse by The Who (a project that later gave birth to Who's Next), Of Berlin by Reed and the New York Dolls' self-titled debut. While working with them, he was encouraged by Bob Ezrin to make the leap and become a producer. The opportunity to do so came thanks to an emerging band from Boston, Aerosmith. Douglas is one of the producers of the second album Get Your Wings and he produced it himself Toys in the Attic from 1975, a huge success thanks to songs like Sweet Emotion And Walk This Way. It was Douglas who gave Steven Tyler the inspiration for the lyrics Walk This Way recreating a scene from Frankenstein Junior by Mel Brooks. He continued to collaborate with the band for Rocks of 1976 and Draw the Line from 1977.
In the meantime he continued to work with others: he and Bob Dylan produced sessions with Allen Ginsberg and he got his hands on Radio Ethiopia of the Patti Smith Group and on Cheap Trick's records including the self-titled debut and the famous Live at Budokan of 1978. He returned to work with Lennon and Ono on their last album together, Double Fantasy. “Having been with John in Los Angeles during the time when he was incredibly depressed,” he said after Lennon's death, “the only thing that makes me feel a little less bad is knowing that when he died he was happy, perhaps happier than he had ever been. During the sessions Double Fantasy he always told anecdotes about how records were made in the Beatles' time.”
Douglas again worked with Aerosmtih (and also with solo Joe Perry) at the time Rock in a Hard Place in 1982 and then for the blues covers album in 2004 Honkin' on Bobo and for the band's latest album of unreleased songs, Music From Another Dimension! in 2012. The producer's other works include albums by Graham Parker, Zebra, Starz, Supertramp and Slash.
From Rolling Stone US.
