Sound Man by Glyn Johns

Career retrospective of a record producer extraordinaire

Though I appreciate all kinds of music, the bulk of my listening time tends to be devoted to rock music of the 1960s and ‘70s (I was born in the middle of that period). With few exceptions, I generally don’t pay a whole lot of attention to who produces or engineers a recording. I have come to learn over the years, however, that if the name Glyn Johns is attached to an album, I’m probably going to like it and maybe even love it. Through his work as producer or sound engineer on such landmark albums as Who’s Next, Abbey Road, Let It Bleed, Led Zeppelin I, Slowhand, The Eagles, and many more, Johns did much to shape the sound of rock and roll during its formative and peak years. In his 2014 autobiography Sound Man, Johns recalls his stellar career recording some of the biggest names in popular music. If, like me, you’re a fan of Johns’s work, you’ll want to read this.

In Sound Man, Johns offers up a little bit of information about a lot of different people he’s worked with, so the approach could be characterized as broad in scope but shallow in depth. Johns has contributed his production, engineering, and/or mixing skills to hundreds of albums over the course of his career, and here he discusses about fifty of the most important projects and artists with whom he’s worked, so you get a few pages on each. As a result, the chapters are short, and the reading is brisk. At times, Johns seems to have compiled the narrative from his old appointment calendars. It’s not unusual for him to rattle off the names of a half dozen artists in a single paragraph: I worked on this, this, and this project; hopped on a plane to somewhere; had a meeting with so-and-so; than went back to mixing that album.

If you’re a fan of classic rock of the ‘60s and ‘70s, you will enjoy Johns’s perspective on the music business. His narrative does extend to 2014, but the bulk of the book deals with the classic bands of rock’s glory days. Johns has interesting stories to tell about the artists with whom he’s worked, but there aren’t really any major revelations here. This is very much a career memoir about the recording industry. Most of Johns’s anecdotes of his interactions with rock stars take place within the recording studio. There aren’t a lot of personal stories here. Johns never did any drugs, which probably kept him from penetrating the inner circle of many rock artists. The exception might be his relationship to the Rolling Stones. He worked on several of their records, accompanied them on tour, and formed a close friendship with Bill Wyman. Johns gives you a behind-the-scenes look at the personality dynamics within the band. If you’re a big fan of the Rolling Stones, however, you’ve probably read other books about them, so what Johns has to say here won’t surprise you. Beyond the Stones, Johns gives a fair amount of coverage to the Beatles, the Steve Miller Band, and the Eagles. Many of the moments that Johns recalls have since become familiar nuggets of rock-and-roll lore that most fans are already aware of, but Johns was actually present at these important turning points in music history.

In addition to the Hall of Fame-level artists that Johns discusses, he also mentions many musicians and bands that will be unfamiliar to those who aren’t British and didn’t grow up in the 1960s. That’s part of the fun of this sort of book, however—discovering previously unknown bands and nuggets of music history. Knowing Johns was behind the helm of their recordings makes me want to look up some of these artists who were previously unknown to me. I may not have learned a whole lot about the Rolling Stones or the Beatles from reading this book, but I did learn a lot about Johns and about how rock records were made in the good ol’ days. That, for me, made Sound Man a worthwhile read.