Bill Szymczyk
Author: Stuart Grundy and John Tobler
Publication: The Record Producers (book excerpt)
Date: 1982

THERE CAN'T BE too many people whose surnames have eight letters, none of which is a vowel, but it hardly needs to be said that there were better reasons for Bill Szymczyk (pronounced "Simzick" by the way) joining our pantheon of producers.

While he is neither part of the old guard nor one of the young pretenders, Bill has been involved with a substantial number of the top acts during the 1970s, and was selected by the Who, a superstar act if ever there was one, as producer of their 1981 comeback album. When we interviewed him, he was living and working in the pleasant sounding suburb known as Coconut Grove in Miami, Florida, where he owns his own studio and runs his own company, Pandora Productions. It seems to be a comfortable set-up, built during the latter part of the 1970s, with the proceeds of 'One Of These Nights' by the Eagles. Like many of the producer/engineers who can afford it, Bill felt that there could be little wrong in having a studio which was continually available to himself, and the hits which have emerged from it seem to indicate that his decision was a wise one.

[...]

But all the time I was doing those albums with B.B., I was going out to Cleveland to see some friends of mine who lived there, to visit them, and I saw this band out there, a three-piece band that sounded like a ten-piece. I said, "Boy, that guitar player's good!", and it was Joe Walsh playing with the James Gang. So I went back to ABC and told them that I wanted to sign this band. They said, "What? Now you want to sign bands? We've got enough on the roster", and I said, "That's true, but I don't like any of those acts. Let me have this guy and his band", so they agreed to sign the James Gang for a seventeen hundred dollar advance, which was Walsh's first contract – seventeen hundred dollars which the three of them split – and we made an album called Yer Album, the first James Gang LP'. Szymczyk also produced their follow-up, The James Gang Rides Again.

[...]

Although there were no commercial triumphs among the albums he made for Tumbleweed while living in Colorado, it was during this period that Szymczyk produced the first Joe Walsh album Barnstorm at Caribou Ranch, following the latter's departure from the James Gang at the end of 1971. 'It was the very first album ever done at Caribou, which belonged to Jimmy Guercio, who's Chicago's producer, and he owns this huge ranch about eight thousand feet up, near Nederland, Colorado, which is about an hour and a half out of Denver. At that time, he was getting into the movie business, making and directing a movie called Electra Glide In Blue which starred Robert Blake, and so he wasn't around his studio at all, and it was still being built. So I went up to see him, met him, and said, "Look, I'm living around here too, and I'd like to make records here. So could you hurry up with your studio, and then while you're making your movie, I can rent it out". It was on the second floor of a barn, and it was so new that the bottom floor still had dirt floors – he hadn't finished that floor, and when you walked in, it looked like a barn, with stacks of lumber, sacks of concrete, and lots of stuff just hanging around. But if you went up the stairs to the second floor, you were in electronics city, with best top of the line equipment. So he finished the studio off, but as a matter of fact, there wasn't even a bathroom in the place, so if you wanted to go to the bathroom, you had to go outside, just like a farmer. We had great tape machines and a great console, but you had to go outside to take a pee!'

Barnstorm was one of the first records which Bill Szymczyk produced independently, as opposed to working for a record company. 'That was about the only good thing that came out of the Colorado period, because at the start of that, I spent eight months doing nothing while we were trying to get ourselves a deal together, and then nothing happened for Tumbleweed, but it was the independent things, like The Morning After by the J. Geils Band, and Barnstorm, which really started my growth as an independent producer – those two records are the basis of every-thing relating to where I am today.' However, neither was a huge commercial success, although few would argue about their artistic merits, something which might not apply to the two albums Szymczyk produced during 1972/3 with Jo Jo Gunne, a group largely composed originally of ex-members of the celebrated Los Angeles group of the late 1960s, Spirit.

'I had always loved Spirit when Jay Ferguson was in it, and when the group broke up, and Jay and Mark Andes formed Jo Jo Gunne, I liked that first album they made, which Tom Dowd helped them with, with things like "Run Run Run" and "Shake That Fat", and a couple of others. I thought they were a really good rock'n'roll band with really good songs, and when their management called me up to do their second record, I said I'd be very pleased to work with them. I think we made a couple of great records, but nobody ever heard them for some reason.

One item of interest in the field of record producing relates to the relationship between producer and artist – while it is regarded as absolutely essential that a rapport should be developed between the two parties, there are various levels to this rapport, as Szymczyk explained: 'With Joe Walsh and I, at this point, it's almost like we're brothers, because we've been together for twelve or thirteen years now, and that's probably the ideal situation – if he's in the studio playing his guitar, and I'm in the control room playing my instrument, the board, and if we're both thinking the same way without having any verbal communication, then that to me is the ultimate rapport, where he'll be punching in a guitar solo, and I'll go "Ni-ni", and he'll go "Ni-ni", and we'll talk in little disconnected syllables, but both understand what the other's saying. It very seldom happens – it takes a lot of time to get to that point, obviously. Walsh and I have it, Joe Vitale and I have it, but I'd say that was about it. The Eagles and I have been together for a long time, but when you're dealing with five guys in a band, it's a lot, and you have to spread your attention out five ways, so it gets diluted somewhat. But the ideal situation is when you can get so good together that you don't need verbal communication and just go on and do it.'

There are, of course, exceptions to any rule, one such in Bill Szymczyk's case being a time in 1973 when he was invited to co-produce a Rick Derringer album by the artist himself. 'What happened was that Rick Derringer had this idea, which I still think is brilliant. He had been working in Edgar Winter's band, and with Johnny Winter, and producing them, and he had decided that he wanted to go out on his own, make his own album. His original premise was that he was going to get twelve different producers, each of whom would produce one track, and I thought that was a great idea, and I was the first one who actually did anything – we wound up doing two tracks, I think, the first things that were done. And he was talking to Richard Perry, to Glyn Johns, to a lot of other people, and it was a really neat concept, but the first one who agreed to do it, and had the time, was me, so we did a tune called "Uncomplicated" up at Caribou, and I got my band – Joe Vitale, Joe Walsh, Paul Harris, my guys – and we made this record in a matter of two or three days. Then we went back to New York, and I went back to work. Every now and then, I'd talk to Rick, ask him how things were going, and he'd say, "We're having trouble with our schedules", and this and that, and after about six months, he called me up to say that he needed to get the record finished, and asked me if I'd like to do it. I guess the scheduling and everything just got too nuts for him, all that trying to get different people to do his stuff, so I wound up doing the whole record.' Derringer, himself a producer, seems never to have worked with Bill Szymczyk again, and the album in question, All American Boy, was not a major success, which perhaps indicates that it is impossible to achieve serendipity between an artist, who is also a producer, and his producer. Perhaps another problem which arose revolved around the fact that Szymczyk, like several other of the subjects in this book, was trained initially as an engineer, and has been unable to delegate knob-twiddling and fader setting to others. 'I've tried a couple of times to get up from behind the board and just be a producer, and I find that within eight minutes, I'm reaching over the engineer's shoulders and tweaking this, and touching that, and after two or three hours of that, he says, "Would you sit down?" I just can't resist it – if I'm going to make records, I've got to do it the only way I know how. That's the way I learned, and that's the way I operate.'

Another LP released in 1973, in which Szymczyk was heavily involved, was Joe Walsh's second solo LP, The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get, which contains the track which, for many years, remained Walsh's best known song, 'Rocky Mountain Way', with which, it is somewhat surprising to discover, Szymczyk was not totally connected. 'The exact story of how that happened goes like this – Joe and I had had our first falling out, and he decided that he wanted to produce himself, so he brought the band down here, to Florida. This was when we were all living in Colorado. So he came down here, and worked with Ronnie and Howie Albert, and at the time they did that track, it was just a shuffle, and he didn't have any words for it, but it was great, a slow shuffle blues. They brought it back to Colorado, and I thought it was nice, but a few months later, Joe was having difficulty finishing the record, so he asked me to help him finish it, and I agreed. By that time, he had written some words for it, but there was more to it than just adding vocals. I think the only thing we kept from the original track was the drums and the piano – we wound up overdubbing everything else, and doing it all over again, all the guitars and synthesisers and the talk box and everything, up at the ranch. The track and the overdubs were done maybe a year apart – it was one of the first tracks he started, and one of the last ones we finished for that album.

It was at this point, around the beginning of 1974, that Bill became involved with the Eagles, a collaboration which has arguably provided him with his greatest kudos and success. The circumstances in which group and producer came together were somewhat odd, to say the least. 'The Eagles had cut their first two albums in England with Glyn Johns, and they were well into the third one, which became On The Border. They had done about ten tracks, but they decided they weren't happy with what was happening, so they quit recording, came back to the States and went on tour for the summer, or something like that, while they were looking for another producer. By happenstance, their manager was Irving Azoff, who was just getting under way on his own, but another act he had was Joe Walsh, and as a result, Joe wound up opening a couple of dates for the Eagles, or it may have been the other way round – I can't remember who was the headliner – but they played on the same bill together for a couple of gigs. Joe and I had just finished The Smoker You Drink, so after the gig, it was hotel rooms, cassettes, what have you got there, and the Eagles asked who'd produced Joe's album. "Bill Szymczyk". "Right, let's get him". And that's how it happened – we had a meeting at Chuck's Steak House, next to the Record Plant in LA, and three days later, we were making On The Border. Of course, I was scared to death taking over from Glyn, and I had met him a few times and he knew how I felt about him, so I told the band at that meeting that there was only one condition on which I could do the album, and that was that I must call Glyn and ask him for permission to take over. So I called Glyn up, and he said, "Of course, mate, I don't like them anymore anyway". So that's basically what happened, and there's a little postscript – when we had finished the album, it included two of the tracks that had been done with Glyn, "Best Of My Love" and "You Never Cry Like A Lover", so they kept two out of the ten they had started. After I was finished with the album, I went to England for some reason or another, and I took a test pressing along, before the record was released, and my wife and I went to Glyn's house for dinner and everything, after which we played the album. We were about eight bottles of wine into it, and I said to him, "Well, how did I do?" and he said, "I'm not really sure I like that". But that was OK.'

Prior to Szymczyk's involvement with them, the Eagles had been carving a significant name for themselves as leaders of a second wave of Californian country rock bands, with several Glyn Johns produced hits under their belt. But the turning point for the band, at least in commercial terms, seems to have come with the arrival of Szymczyk. Three hit singles came from the album, although curiously, the biggest, 'Best Of My Love', was one of the two tracks remaining on the album which had been produced by Glyn Johns, although the other two, 'Already Gone' and 'James Dean', were Szymczyk's first hits with the Eagles. 'There was a lot of stuff about dead heroes on that album, which mostly came from Bernie Leadon. The tune "My Man" was written about Gram Parsons (a country rock pioneer who overdosed on drugs during 1973) and Bernie was one of those LA country type people. "James Dean" was also on the record, and that was right in the Nixon era, when everything was really odd – the outlook wasn't real bright at the time. And what else can I tell you about that album? The very first track I cut with the Eagles was "Already Gone", and that was also Don Felder's first guitar overdub as an Eagle.' (Don Felder was in fact recruited by the Eagles as an additional guitarist during the recording of On the Border).

By this time, Bill Szymczyk was becoming one of the most in-demand producers in the world, although when special circumstances intervened, he was still more than willing to help out an old friend, as occurred when Joe Walsh was recording his third solo LP, So What. 'Joe and I have these periods every three or four years where, for one reason or another, we decide we're not going to work together for a while, and that was one of those times. With that album, I actually did the basic tracks on three or four songs, but then he finished it with a fellow named John Stronach. But there is one track on there, "Song For Emma", which was about his daughter, who was killed in a car accident, and so there was nobody that could do that but me. The way we did it was that I took a four-track recorder up to his house, and he played the piano part over and over – there was no one take. It was a really emotional time, and that night I took all the four tracks, went down to the studio, and he went to bed. He didn't hear the track again until I had done everything to it, then he came in and sang it.'

Another connection with Walsh concerned Souvenirs, the breakthrough LP by Dan Fogelberg. 'Joe produced that. It was his first shot out of the box at producing another artist, and he just fell in love with Danny's songs. So, in order to get him started, I offered to engineer some of the tracks, and I did six or eight to get him under way. After that, he finished it by himself quite successfully.' A further 1974 production, although one which was virtually ignored in Britain, was that of There's The Rub for the English band, Wishbone Ash, while among the 1975 LPs bearing Szymczyk's name were several which he co-produced with his 'protege', Allen Blazek, including the final two albums in the J. Geils sequence, an album by Elvin Bishop titled Struttin' My Stuff, and This Time We Mean It by the then virtually unknown REO Speedwagon. 'Allen found me in Colorado back in 1972, and he was my assistant from then until about the time we're discussing, when he had learned enough, and started to get his own act together as a producer/engineer. We're still together, and we still co-produce things, like the Mickey Thomas album, and I see myself as his mentor to some extent. For example, when I went to do the Who, I took Allen with me, number one just to have someone to talk to – but I don't think you can teach anyone how to be a producer, not putting it down in writing. You can teach them how to engineer, because that's all technical – information in and information out – but ninety per cent of producing is mental. It's handling people and being a go-between, being a diplomat, being hard one minute and easy the next, going with the flow or trying to change the flow, and the only way anyone can learn it is by observation over a long period of time. Allen was my second engineer for eight years before he decided to give it a shot on his own, and now he's a full-blown producer, but he's got his own style. It's different from mine, although there's a lot of me in him, but he's refining it to his own benefit, his own modus operandi.'

Probably the most significant of the Szymczyk-Blazek co-productions in 1975 was the Elvin Bishop LP. 'I was real busy at that time, and I had known Elvin Bishop from years before, when I engineered a Paul Butterfield album called East West when I was living in New York. So I told Elvin that I'd be happy to make his record, but I wouldn't be able to be there all the time – I'd be there for the tracks and the vocals, and I'd definitely be there for the mixes, but I introduced him to Allen, who would be there constantly. In fact, I was very involved in several tracks, and as luck would have it, one of them was "Fooled Around And Fell In Love", which was a hit, and was sung by Mickey Thomas, who Allen and I are now co-producing as a solo artist.'

Whatever else 1975 provided, there can be no doubt that the production which gained Szymczyk most kudos during the year was the production of the fourth Eagles LP, One Of These Nights, which became the group's fastest selling album up to that point, achieving gold status within one week of release. 'That album was obviously the first one that I started from scratch with them, and the band had just gone from four pieces to five with the addition of Don Felder. We were also going further and further away from the country influence and more towards the rock 'n'roll influence, and we were looking at it a little more electric. So that album took, I think, six months to record, which nowadays seems like a minute. Sometimes, I can be notoriously slow, but in the case of the Eagles, a lot of it, I would say, isn't my fault. I'm not of the ilk of say, Mike Chapman, who can go in the studio and knock out an album in two weeks – for some reason, I can't do that. I like to work an eight, ten, twelve hour day, but I'm a little more meticulous than a lot of people, I think – I keep looking for a little more, a little more, give me an insurance take, and that sort of thing. Then I'll edit for two days, getting all the choice little details into the tracks, so I'm not fast by any means. But One Of These Nights took me half my year – up until then, I'd been making between five and eight albums per year, but all of a sudden, it was down to three, and the Eagles did start taking up a lot of my time. But on the other hand, we started to get highly successful too with One Of These Nights, so I guess I looked at it that way, that it was worth it.' When the LP was released, it pushed the Eagles into the superstar bracket, providing three major hit singles in the title track, 'Lyin' Eyes' and 'Take It To The Limit'. However, the internal politics of the group were beginning to become frayed, with the result that founder member Bernie Leadon grew increasingly disenchanted with his role, no doubt largely due to the move away from country rock and towards harder-edged straightforward rock music.

'Mr Natural would go to the beach and leave the rest of us to do the tracks. He was driving around in a school bus at the time, and I can remember one instance in particular, when we were at the Record Plant in LA. We were listening back to some tracks we had done the night before, and we had worked until two a.m., and it was now two o'clock in the afternoon. Bernie was laying on a couch in front of the board, so we really couldn't see him, because the rest of us were all back behind the console. We were trying to decide on which of this bunch of takes we were going to use, and everybody had their opinion. So I asked Bernie what he thought, and he got off the couch and said, "I think I'm going surfing", and he got up, walked out of the studio, and we didn't see him for three days.' However, among Leadon's contributions to the album was an instrumental track which he called 'Journey Of The Sorcerer', which much more recently has achieved a measure of familiarity in Britain as a result of its being used as the theme music to The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, something of which Szymczyk was unaware. 'And that's my favourite track on the album, too – that's amazing. I'm glad somebody picked up on it. It was a fairly spacey record, and I had quite a bit to do with that, because by now, everybody knows there was this big rift going on, and Bernie only had one other tune on the album, and he wanted to do this instrumental. Nobody else in the band was in favour of it, but I thought it was really nice, so we did it. It was a banjo theme, and we put strings on it, and some backwards guitar and some space sounds and stuff like that. I really enjoyed that cut, and I still listen to it now, but I liked our original title for it better – "Journey Of The Sorcerer" seems a little wimpy for me, because our working title was "Fellini In Florida".'

One of the more predictable high spots of the album was 'Take It To The Limit', a track on which bass player Randy Meisner takes the lead vocal. Before Meisner left the group, his remarkable on-stage performances of the song were more often than not showstoppers, as the rest of the Eagles have freely admitted. 'Recording Randy's voice when we recorded that song took a bit of time, but his voice was perfectly suited to that. Around that time, I was really influencing the Eagles insofar as my greatest love in music has been black music and rhythm and blues, and I had been turning those guys on to all these various records, especially the Philadelphia International label records. The tune of "Take It To The Limit" is based on "If You Don't Know Me By Now" by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes – I told them to listen to that record, because it was really good. So Randy started to write a real laid back three-chorded thing, and we put the strings on it. I like that record too, even though it took a little time for Randy to do it. He's got a great voice.'

The departure of Bernie Leadon left a vacancy in the Eagles, which eventually was filled by Joe Walsh. Although it would be logical for Bill Szymczyk, who had both discovered Walsh, and later worked with the Eagles, to have master-minded that replacement, apparently such was not the case. 'I had very little to do with that, and as a matter of fact, I was not a great fan of that move. Joe had his own career going very well at the time, and I almost didn't want to see him joining a group again, so I was actually a little bit against that move, although since then it has obviously paid off quite well. That was strictly the Eagles and Joe getting together and hanging out, and his being invited to join the band.'

The first Eagles LP to include Joe Walsh was the epic Hotel California, which was eagerly awaited for what seemed at the time like an interminable period to fans of both the band and the guitarist. 'Yeah, it did take a long time. But I have always considered that we went from the "B" list to the "A" list with One Of These Nights – that was when people began to think, "Oh, these guys are for real, they're going to be around for a while", and after we'd taken six months to do One Of These Nights, then we took about nine months to a year to make Hotel California, and that was with Walsh. I think the expectancy was also exaggerated by the fact that Joe had joined the band – that brought in all his fans, who all of a sudden became Eagles fans, and some of them probably weren't even quite sure who the Eagles were, and thought that the Eagles was Joe's new band. Even to this day, when they go to play Cleveland, which is Joe's home town, and where he played all his bar band days, you might as well bill it as Joe Walsh and the Eagles, because in Cleveland, he's still bigger than the Eagles.'

As a rest from the cosmic cowboy rock of the Eagles, Szymczyk was reunited with Jay Ferguson, who by this time had seen Jo Jo Gunne collapse after their promising beginning. The first of the three albums on which they worked was All Alone In The End Zone, which, if not a huge seller, was a significant point in Szymczyk's life. 'I had actually moved to Florida here in June 1974 – I had lived in Colorado for three years, and that became extremely boring, because I was born in Michigan, about four blocks from Lake Michigan. If you've ever been there, it's like being on an ocean – straight coastline up one side and down the other. You can't see the land on the other side, so it's just like being on an ocean. Then I went to New York – no, Key West with the Navy, then to New York, then to LA. I had always been near a large body of water, and while I enjoyed the mountains for the first year, thinking it was nice and calm, it just got calmer and calmer, until after about three years, it got too calm. So I moved down here, and after I got some big cheques, I set up my own studio. Every engineer/producer wants his own studio, and this is the house that One Of These Nights built. And with All Alone In The End Zone, that was when I first got the nucleus of my current session band together, which is Joe Vitale on drums, and a bass player from Miami here named George "Chocolate" Perry, and that album had Walsh on it, naturally, plus another guy from down here on guitar, Joey Murcia. So I really love that album to this day – in fact, I listened to it about a month ago, and still got off on it. The title track of that album is one I'm particularly fond of, because Jay and I wrote that song together. He had a couple of lines and this theme, but no words for it – it was his first solo album after Spirit and Jo Jo Gunne, this was him stepping out on his own for the first time, so that title, All Alone In The End Zone, was pretty appropriate. And I'm a sports freak, so we wrote all these great sports lines and put the crowd in – it's a term used in American football, you see, and the End Zone is where you score. In American football, when they throw you a pass, and as receiver, you're standing all alone in the End Zone with the ball coming your way, it's that split second of nirvana just before you know you're going to score.

End Zone was released in 1976, while during the following year came another LP with Ferguson, Thunder Island. 'The title track as a single was a hit record, but the album never managed to go along after the hit. It seems like we made two good singles in two albums, but for some reason, no one picked up on the albums, and there was no follow through. For Jay's third album, Real Life Ain't This Way, I credited myself as executive producer, because it was another of those cases where the album had to be done, and I was doing ten things at once, so Ed Michel, another guy who I taught to engineer, brought up through the ranks, produced it with Jay. I came in as often as I could to listen to the tracks and make suggestions – I was just working basically as an overseer, rather than an actual day-to-day producer behind the board.'

Another 1977 album, and one which seemed a strange choice for Szymczyk to produce, was Hurry Sundown by a somewhat typical southern American boogie band, the Outlaws, which Szymczyk dismisses as an attempt, 'to make them a little more refined. I realised halfway through the one album I did with them that the combination wasn't right.' Of far greater interest to both Szymczyk and, apparently, the world at large, was the penultimate (at the time of writing) Joe Walsh album, But Seriously Folks which was released in 1978 – it became Walsh's biggest-selling album to date, largely because it contained a substantial hit single in 'Life's Been Good'. 'Yeah, Joe's life story, a big hit and a great song. The only producing I had to do on that was to convince him that it was valid, and that he wasn't being a complete idiot. More than anybody ever has, he really laid the rock star life on the table, and let it all hang out. And there's a great story about another track on that LP, an instrumental called "Theme For Boat Weirdos", a thematic thing. How that came about was that it was during January, and we wanted to get the band together to rehearse for a week or so prior to actually coming in to record the album. We thought about going up to North Carolina, where I have a cabin – my little hideaway – taking the band up there with a little four-track to do demos and learn the songs, and about a week before we were scheduled to go, about three feet of snow fell out there, which meant there was no way we could go. So we really had to hustle and try to figure out something else, and we finally got this seventy-two-foot yacht called The Endless Seas up in Fort Lauderdale, and we loaded a four-track on it, a set of drums, electric piano, some guitars and amps and so on, and we went down to the Keys, and anchored down there, and made demos for a week, one of which was so good that we couldn't top it. If you're looking for spontaneity, that was done on a four-track on a boat in the middle of the ocean, and we couldn't beat it re-recording in the studio, so we used it. That album was a prize, a great one.'

Another facet of Walsh's work which has intrigued a number of people over the years is his bizarre choice of album titles. Talking to Szymczyk, somewhat of an insider, went some way towards providing an explanation. 'Every album title he has ever had has been silly – You Can't Argue With A Sick Mind, The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get – we had gone through all these titles, like The Smoker was a phrase that he made up about five years prior to us making that record. When we'd finished it, I suggested The Smoker for its title, and Joe said nobody would understand it, but I convinced him that it was an amusing idea after cajoling him for three months, and that started the silly title precedent. So when we got to doing But Seriously, Folks, I came up with that title, and he felt he had to have a completely ridiculous cover, so he tried to sit at a table under water while he was fully dressed. He had to do it three times before he got it right, because the light under water was obviously weird.'

One major reason for Bill Szymczyk's production output slowing down almost to a standstill in recent years has been his involvement with the Eagles. Following the highly successful Hotel California was obviously a problem, in that the next album should not be inferior, although the resulting gap of nearly three years was not something that either group or producer wanted. By the time The Long Run was eventually released, the musical climate had changed so markedly, in England particularly, that the album could hardly be counted a success. 'We called that "the long one" – even though I may be meticulous, for that album, I considered that I was working fast, and the band were slow. But we started The Long Run with the intention of putting out a double album, and as a result, although previously we would sometimes have a track or two left over at the end of an album, for that one we had six or eight over, because we were already eighteen months into it, and we still hadn't finished it. If it had been a double LP, we might still be working on it today. And that kind of process doesn't leave a whole lot of room for me to do anything else, although I haven't been working any less. In direct contrast, we knocked out the Eagles live album in a month – the big difference, of course, is that everybody knows the songs in front, and we don't have to wait two months for somebody to write words for the last chorus of a particular song. Everybody knows the material, and it's just a matter of putting it down perfectly in technical terms.'

One of the major critical accusations concerning Eagles Live was that it seemed as though the excellent sound quality and level of performance could never have been achieved through a genuine live recording, and that a considerable proportion of what appeared on the record had been overdubbed subsequently in the studio.

'I beg to differ with that. We did patch the tracks up here and there, but everybody does that with a live album. The band does sound like their albums in concert, and I'd say that seventy per cent of that record is live. Not that it's easy to record a singing drummer like Don Henley, because you have to make sure that your vocal mike is aimed in a particular way to prevent a lot of leakage, which presents problems. So that should prove that all Henley's vocals are live, because it would be almost impossible to overdub keeping the drum track and putting on a different vocal. I rest my case...'

Work with the Eagles, and the enormous success which ensued, led to Bill Szymczyk becoming substantially in demand as a producer – in 1981 he produced the Who LP, Face Dances, as well as three tracks for Bob Seger on the latter's big hit album Against The Wind, one of which, the title track, was also a hit single.

'Bob Seger's a Michigan boy, and I was introduced to him by Glenn Frey from the Eagles, who used to be in Bob's band back in the bar days of the early sixties. They've been really good friends for a long long time, obviously, and Seger had always produced his own records. He'd been plugging away for years, steadily getting more acceptance, and then, with "Beautiful Loser" and "Stranger In Town", the lid blew off, and he is now a major star. For years, Glenn Frey had been telling me that I ought to produce Bob, that we'd be great together, and I could only say that I wondered when the Eagles would give me time off to do it. "Oh no," he said, "you've got to finish our album first, and then you can produce Bob," and that's exactly what happened – after The Long Run was over, Seger was two or three tunes short on his new album. He is writing songs constantly, so he'll go in and do three or four songs, then stop to record them before he writes some more. So after the Eagles, I had a month or so to spare, and he came down here to Florida and we knocked out those three tunes in three or four weeks and put them on the album. It was the first time he had been produced by anyone other than himself, but he loved it, and told me he wanted me to do the next album.'

Despite his track record, Szymczyk was still over-awed by being asked to produce the Who. 'Apart from the fact that I had never worked with them before, Face Dances was the first album that I had made outside the United States. I went to England to do it, and the first few weeks were petrifying, because it was like history repeating itself. Here I am again with another legend, and it has to be handled in a totally different way from somebody like Walsh. The act has to trust you – you have to have mutual confidence in each other, and gaining that confidence can be done in an innumerable number of ways. With the Who, Pete Townshend and I have known each other socially for about ten years, and when it came time for them to do a new album, the first with Kenny Jones, and on a new label, it was like a new beginning. Everything was new, so they wanted a new producer, and Pete and I had hinted to each other over the years that we would like to make a record together. One of his favourite albums is Hotel California, and really, that's what got me the job with them, that album. Your reputation goes before you, and it's like, "You hear the way that sounds? Do that to me". But with the Who, it was very difficult sometimes to maintain my objectivity – I found that I had crawled into the forest and couldn't see the trees, which was difficult, because it was such a big shot for me. It took almost a year to make Face Dances, but it wasn't constant work – they toured three or four times, and in actual studio time, it took about five months. I have to tell you one thing – the songs that Pete Townshend wrote are just amazing, and when I can stand back from it and listen to it as a whole, the album is brilliant, and as a writer, Pete has grown by leaps and bounds. I think that Kenny Jones has been a great addition to the band, and I really love the record, but it was such a big deal to me that I can't be certain that I'm being completely objective about it.'

Having produced the Who, there can be no doubt that Bill Szymczyk is regarded by his peers as a top class producer. At the start of 1981, he was working on new LPs for Joe Vitale, the drummer in the Szymczyk session band, and for Mickey Thomas, with whom he had worked when the latter was a member of Elvin Bishop's band, as well as the projected LP with Bob Seger. Yet he is by no means ready to think of retirement, nor even a slackening of his work load. 'I think, I'm sure, in fact, that I'm still learning. I'll finish an album and feel great about it, and then I'll hear something on the radio and know I'm not there yet. I listen to a lot of other people's work, although sixty to seventy per cent of what I listen to is black R&B records, and when the disco craze hit, I was well into it. Then that kind of lightened up, and now I find I'm listening to things like the Police and the Pretenders, what I call the thinking man's New Wave. I was left cold by the original New Wave – I thought that had all been done in garages in the fifties and sixties. And with Townshend, he was the original punk, you know? And with the original New Wave, like the Sex Pistols, it was just outrage for the sake of outrage, and to me, it seemed that music was secondary. It wasn't until they started to make really good music that I started to get into it.'

As far as his future plans go, one major decision has already been reached. 'I'm going to be here in Florida for another couple of years, and after that, I'm going up to the Carolinas. I've lived here in the tropics for six years going on seven, and if you follow my life and where I have lived geographically, I'm long overdue for a move. To be honest with you, if I didn't have the studio, I'd probably be moving now. I'd like to get up on the coast of North or South Carolina, or Virginia, somewhere where you get the seasons changing and a little snow, a little autumn, a little spring – if you're in the same place for a long time, it tends to get a little boring, and after the idyllic weather here for seven years, there's a tendency to get a little tropic fever.'

Bill Szymczyk Discography

As an engineer (1964–1969)

Paul Butterfield Blues Band
East West

Tom Rush
The Circle Game

Jim and Jean
Changes

Eric Andersen
'Bout Changes And Things Take Two Lorraine Ellison

Stay With Me (N.B. Szymczyk worked on part of this LP, but not on the title track)

As a producer (1967–1981)

Harvey Brooks
1967 How To Play Electric Bass

Ford Theatre
1968 Time Changes

B. B. King
1969 Live And Well
1969 Completely Well
1970 Indianola Mississippi Seeds
1970 Live At Cook County Jail

Denny Doherty
1970 Watcha Gonna Do

Freedom
1970 Freedom (mixed)

The James Gang 1969 Yer Album
1970 James Gang Rides Again
1971 Thirds
1972 Live In Concert

Silk
1969 Smooth As Raw Silk

J. Geils Band
1971 The Morning After
1972 Ladies Invited
1973 Bloodshot
1974 Nightmares
1975 Hotline (co-produced with Allen Blazek)
1975 Live/Blow Your Face Out (co-produced with Allen Blazek)

Danny Holien
1971 Danny Holien

Albert Collins
1971(?) There's Gotta Be A Change

Dewey Terry
1972 Chief

Joe Walsh
1972 Barnstorm
1973 The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get (co- produced with Walsh)
1974 So What
(produced one track, 'Song For Emma')
1978 But Seriously Folks
1980 All Night Long
(from Urban Cowboy soundtrack)

The Fabulous Rhinestones
1973 Freewheelin'

Jo Jo Gunne
1973 Bite Down Hard
1973 Jumpin' The Gunne

Rick Derringer
1973 All American Boy
(co-produced with Derringer)

Michael Stanley
1972 Rosewood Bitters
1973 Friends and Legends
1975 You Break It, You Bought It
1975 Ladies Choice
1977 Stagepass (co-produced with Allen Blazek)

Eagles
1974 On The Border (all but two tracks)
1975 One Of These Nights
1976 Hotel California
1979 The Long Run
1980 Live

Dan Fogelberg
1974 Souvenirs (produced by Joe Walsh, Szymczyk engineered part of LP)

Wishbone Ash
1974 There's The Rub

Elvin Bishop
1975 Struttin' My Stuff
(co-produced with Allen Blazek)
1976 Hometown Boy Makes Good
(Executive Producer)

REO Speedwagon
1975 This Time We Mean It
(Executive Producer)

Jay Ferguson
1976 All Alone In The End Zone
1977 Thunder Island
1979 Real Life Ain't This Way (Executive Producer)

Outlaws
1977 Hurry Sundown

The Who
1981 Face Dances

Joe Vitale
1981 Plantation Harbor

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