BRIEF ENCOUNTERS WITH ELLIOT MAZER!

The first time I met producer Elliot Mazer (Janis Joplin, Neil Young) was in the office of Arnold Shaw, the General Professional manager of E.B. Marks music. Elliot was with another Philadelphia producer Billy Jackson (The Tymes) who was playing “Wonderful, Wonderful” (Raleigh/Edwards), for Shaw (the publisher) which was the follow up to the Tymes’ #1 hit, “So Much In Love”.

The next time I saw Elliot was on my first trip to Philadelphia, where I was trying to get some of my songs recorded by the artists who were dominating the charts, like Chubby Checker, Dee Dee Sharp, and Bobby Rydell. Producer/songwriter Jerry Ross (who I met in Harold Lipsius’ Jamie/Guyden record office trying to sell a master), took me up to Sigma Sound where I met all the top producers in Town.

Over the next few years, I’d run into Elliot at airports, getting brief, but always interesting reports about his recording activities. He’d start a story about a Janis Joplin session at LAX, and finish it up a few weeks later when I’d run into him at at JFK in N.Y. After a while I got used to hearing partial stories about producing Linda Rondstadt, or the Band’s “Last Waltz”.

When I was General Professional manager of Warner Brothers Music, we had a co-publishing deal with Neil Young and I had the privilege of hearing The “Harvest” album, produced by Mazer, months before its release. For weeks “Heart of Gold” was #1 with a bullet, in my office.

Now thirty years later, after reconnecting with Elliot on FACEBOOK I find he still has interesting stories, and I discovered they just reissued a remastered digitized version of “Harvest”…which I can’t wait to hear!

Copyright 2009 by Artie Wayne https://artiewayne.wordpress.com/about-artie-wayne/