Remembering Joe Meek: A Man Out Of His Own Time
Every February 3, I take a moment to honor "The Day The Music Died." That was the tragic day in 1959 when rock 'n' roll pioneers Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, and Buddy Holly all perished in an early morning Iowa plane crash. It was a loss of historical significance that will not be soon forgotten. However, exactly eight years later in 1967, the music world experienced another loss with the controversial suicide of legendary producer Joe Meek.
Like many other artistic visionaries, Joe Meek was a man out of his element in his own time. The eccentric ‘sixties British record producer was born some thirty years too soon. His passions for the supernatural, space travel, extraterrestrial life—and on a much more personal basis, his homosexuality—led to a degree of misunderstanding and persecution, yet would have not seemed out-of-place four decades later.
He was born Robert George Meek on April 5, 1929 in Newment, Gloucestershire, England. His connections with the occult began at an early age when his grandmother nicknamed him “Joe” after a deceased uncle, almost as if channelling a departed spirit. As a youth, Meek spent much time tinkering with electronic devices, eventually leading to a stint in the Royal Air Force as a radio technician and an early job with a British electrical utility.
By 1953, Meek landed his first musical production job recording acts for Radio Luxembourg. In 1956, he produced his first hit record, “Bad Penny Blues” by The Humphrey Lyttleton Band. The success of this and subsequent recordings led the forward-thinking engineer to form his own production company in 1960.
Meek then set up a studio, RGM Sound, in his own flat at 304 Holloway Road in London. Using a shoestring budget and electronic gadgetry that would have made Rube Goldberg proud, he fashioned some of the eeriest-sounding pop records to grace the British charts in the early ‘sixties. Meek’s obsession with science fiction and the occult imbued a certain futuristic and ghostly quality upon most of his recordings. This seemingly otherworldly possession prophesized the similarly coolly detached new wave and synth-pop sounds of the eighties and the techno dance mixes of a few years later.
As early as 1961, Meek recorded the Gothic rockabilly of British shock artist Screamin’ Lord Sutch, and issued an experimental E.P. of Space Age Bachelor Pad music, appropriately titled I Hear A New World. The latter used odd instrumentation and reverb to evoke an interpretation of music from the moon. While it was both an artistic and a commercial failure, it is best appreciated as a piece of camp forty years later.
In America, Joe Meek is little more than a blip on the Top 40 radar screen, known only for producing The Tornadoes’ otherworldly “Telstar” and The Honeycombs’ trashy “Have I The Right.” However, Meek’s lesser-known British-only releases were even spacier. In actor John Leyton’s singing debut, “Johnny Remember Me,” the protagonist is haunted by the ghostly voice of a dead lover calling from across the moors. On record, the effect was chilling! A lesser effort, Peter Jay’s queasy “Paradise Garden,” painted the hereafter with sickly reverberating choirs and compressed harp music. What most psychics conjure through a séance, Joe Meek could evoke with reverb, echo, weird instrumentation, and compression.
Another vital driving force behind Joe Meek’s musical vision was his obsession with singer Buddy Holly. When the bespectacled Texan toured England in 1958, Meek made a point of meeting him, and the two became friends. Meek’s infatuation with the singer eventually led to the pair attending a Tarot card reading. There, Holly drew cards that foretold his death on February 3, 1958. History shows that he would die in a plane crash exactly one year later!
In a somewhat misguided attempt to keep his departed friend’s legacy alive, Meek sought out singers who could clone Holly’s sound. One of them was a youth named Mike Berry, who later played Mr. Spooner on UK sitcom “Are You Being Served.” Berry’s 1961 debut, “My Baby Doll,” blatantly aped Holly’s “hiccup” vocal style and the pizzicato strings of his final recordings. It was followed with the cheesy “Tribute To Buddy Holly.” Not only did the song plagiarize the chord progression of “Peggy Sue,” but was overproduced with enough reverb and electronic limiting to evoke ghostly spirits hovering over an Iowa cornfield on a frigid winter night. The effect was hokey but incredibly haunting in spite of itself.
Joe Meek spent the remainder of his life producing marvelously futuristic pop singles, facing legal persecution over his homosexuality, and battling paranoid delusions brought on by mental illness and drug abuse. Sadly, eerily, and ironically, his end came on February 3, 1967—exactly eight years after Buddy Holly! A heavily delusional Meek shot his landlady to death, and then turned the gun on himself. It was truly the day the music died.
Like many other artistic visionaries, Joe Meek was a man out of his element in his own time. The eccentric ‘sixties British record producer was born some thirty years too soon. His passions for the supernatural, space travel, extraterrestrial life—and on a much more personal basis, his homosexuality—led to a degree of misunderstanding and persecution, yet would have not seemed out-of-place four decades later.
He was born Robert George Meek on April 5, 1929 in Newment, Gloucestershire, England. His connections with the occult began at an early age when his grandmother nicknamed him “Joe” after a deceased uncle, almost as if channelling a departed spirit. As a youth, Meek spent much time tinkering with electronic devices, eventually leading to a stint in the Royal Air Force as a radio technician and an early job with a British electrical utility.
By 1953, Meek landed his first musical production job recording acts for Radio Luxembourg. In 1956, he produced his first hit record, “Bad Penny Blues” by The Humphrey Lyttleton Band. The success of this and subsequent recordings led the forward-thinking engineer to form his own production company in 1960.
Meek then set up a studio, RGM Sound, in his own flat at 304 Holloway Road in London. Using a shoestring budget and electronic gadgetry that would have made Rube Goldberg proud, he fashioned some of the eeriest-sounding pop records to grace the British charts in the early ‘sixties. Meek’s obsession with science fiction and the occult imbued a certain futuristic and ghostly quality upon most of his recordings. This seemingly otherworldly possession prophesized the similarly coolly detached new wave and synth-pop sounds of the eighties and the techno dance mixes of a few years later.
As early as 1961, Meek recorded the Gothic rockabilly of British shock artist Screamin’ Lord Sutch, and issued an experimental E.P. of Space Age Bachelor Pad music, appropriately titled I Hear A New World. The latter used odd instrumentation and reverb to evoke an interpretation of music from the moon. While it was both an artistic and a commercial failure, it is best appreciated as a piece of camp forty years later.
In America, Joe Meek is little more than a blip on the Top 40 radar screen, known only for producing The Tornadoes’ otherworldly “Telstar” and The Honeycombs’ trashy “Have I The Right.” However, Meek’s lesser-known British-only releases were even spacier. In actor John Leyton’s singing debut, “Johnny Remember Me,” the protagonist is haunted by the ghostly voice of a dead lover calling from across the moors. On record, the effect was chilling! A lesser effort, Peter Jay’s queasy “Paradise Garden,” painted the hereafter with sickly reverberating choirs and compressed harp music. What most psychics conjure through a séance, Joe Meek could evoke with reverb, echo, weird instrumentation, and compression.
Another vital driving force behind Joe Meek’s musical vision was his obsession with singer Buddy Holly. When the bespectacled Texan toured England in 1958, Meek made a point of meeting him, and the two became friends. Meek’s infatuation with the singer eventually led to the pair attending a Tarot card reading. There, Holly drew cards that foretold his death on February 3, 1958. History shows that he would die in a plane crash exactly one year later!
In a somewhat misguided attempt to keep his departed friend’s legacy alive, Meek sought out singers who could clone Holly’s sound. One of them was a youth named Mike Berry, who later played Mr. Spooner on UK sitcom “Are You Being Served.” Berry’s 1961 debut, “My Baby Doll,” blatantly aped Holly’s “hiccup” vocal style and the pizzicato strings of his final recordings. It was followed with the cheesy “Tribute To Buddy Holly.” Not only did the song plagiarize the chord progression of “Peggy Sue,” but was overproduced with enough reverb and electronic limiting to evoke ghostly spirits hovering over an Iowa cornfield on a frigid winter night. The effect was hokey but incredibly haunting in spite of itself.
Joe Meek spent the remainder of his life producing marvelously futuristic pop singles, facing legal persecution over his homosexuality, and battling paranoid delusions brought on by mental illness and drug abuse. Sadly, eerily, and ironically, his end came on February 3, 1967—exactly eight years after Buddy Holly! A heavily delusional Meek shot his landlady to death, and then turned the gun on himself. It was truly the day the music died.
posted by Trash Culture Connoisseur at 6:36 PM
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