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Phil Ramone Legendary Music Producer Dies at 72

Phil Ramone Dies, A former violin prodigy and expert engineer, he worked with Dylan, Sinatra, McCartney, Bennett, Charles, Streisand, Simon, Joel and Bacharach and spent more than 50 years in the business.

Phil Ramone, the instinctive music producer whose mixing mastery for Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Paul Simon and Billy Joel helped fashion some of the most sumptuous and top-selling albums of his era, has died. He was 72.
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The 14-time Grammy winner and 33-time nominee once dubbed "The Pope of Pop" was hospitalized in late Feb. with an aortic aneurysm in New York and died Saturday morning at New York Presbyterian Hospital, according to Ramone's son Matt.

A native of South Africa who at age 10 performed as a violinist for Queen Elizabeth II, Ramone spent years working as a songwriter, engineer and acoustics expert in New York before charting a path that would make him a trusted studio partner in the eyes (and ears) of the industry's biggest stars.

Among the albums on which he worked were Streisand's 1967 live A Happening in Central Park; Paul & Linda McCartney's Ram (1971), sandwiched between the Beatles and Wings eras; Dylan's aching Blood on the Tracks (1975); Simon's pop classic Still Crazy After All These Years (1975); Joel's critical and commercial breakthrough The Stranger (1977); Sinatra's last-gasp Duets (1993), a model of technical wizardry; and Charles' final album, the mega-selling Genius Loves Company (2004).

Ramone served as a songwriter in New York's famed Brill Building music factory and worked early on with Quincy Jones, Tom Dowd, Creed Taylor, Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller and Burt Bacharach & Hal David, among others. In 1959, he launched the A&R Recording studios on Seventh Avenue in New York, where Blood on the Tracks and so many other classics were recorded.

Asked to describe his philosophy as a producer, Ramone told Sound on Sound magazine in 2005: "I served a long time as an engineer and watched many famous producers work, and I decided on the personality that came most easily to me, which is the more relaxed; to give artists encouragement when needed.

"Players are like prodigies, thoroughbreds," he added. "You have to handle them with care."

Born on Jan. 5, 1941, Ramone at age 3 began studying the piano and violin, and he attended the Juilliard School in New York as a teenager. Although he was an accomplished performer and composer, he was attracted to the technical side of music and became a wizard working with the dials.

In 1964, Ramone engineered the classic bossa nova album Getz/Gilberto, from American saxophonist Stan Getz and Brazilian guitarist Joao Gilberto. It would become one of the biggest-selling jazz albums of all time and earn him his first Grammy, for best engineered recording. It also won the album of the year Grammy.

Later in the decade, he worked with folk superstars Peter, Paul and Mary, then won another Grammy in 1969 as co-producer of the original Broadway cast album of Promises, Promises, with music and lyrics by Bacharach and David.

Ramone's career reached another level in 1975 when he produced Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years -- which featured the No. 1 single "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" and won Ramone a Grammy for album of the year -- and Blood on the Tracks.

About the Dylan album, Ramone said: "It turned out to be the best four days of what Bob Dylan does, which is he wanders from song to song, sometimes coming back to the first one. Other than changing the roll of tape, you just had to let it all happen."

In 1977, he produced Kenny Loggins' Celebrate Me Home, Phoebe Snow's Never Letting Go and Joel's The Stranger, which kicked off a seven-album, decade-long relationship with the Long Island-raised singer-songwriter. He and Joel were "both lunatics," he once said.

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