Jack Nitzsche

I have spent the better part of this summer immersed in the deluge of work that Jack Nitzsche made, played, partook in, or produced in any way. A small piece on Jack in the LA Weekly is here and a look at his soundtrack work through the seventies and eighties will be forthcoming in the next issue of Stop Smiling Magazine. Jack not only helped build Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, but made killer surf instrumentals (even re-imagining Link Wray’s tough “Rumble” as some sort of Wagner-ian heavyosity) and scored movies like The Exorcist, Performance, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, as well as some of Sean Penn’s directorial efforts. Oh, and he was a key player on Rolling Stones singles like “Paint It, Black” and “Satisfaction.” (Mick called “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby?” the ultimate freak-out.”) Jack also played a crucial role in jump-starting the careers of Neil Young, Mink DeVille, Graham Parker, as well as Ry Cooder. That’s a lot of music to swim through, and it should be no surprise that the booklet accompanying the recent Hearing is Believing set has lots of pics just of his little black book, showing connections to every record label and major player on the LA scene. He could turn Monkees into porpoises and he could make Marianne Faithfull into “Sister Morphine” even outside the confines of the song. Hell, he even produced the Germs, though that might not be the right word for it, as he did more drugs than Darby and the band hated the guy. “Jack was pretty steady,” Neil Young once said, “he was just fucked up all the time.” Doubt it? Check the chopped and screwed version of “Da Doo Run Run” he orchestrated to show that even back then, Jack was on some heavy medicine.

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