Glen Lockett, an influential report producer who, working beneath the title Spot, helped outline the jet-turbine sound of American punk rock within the Eighties, recording groundbreaking albums by Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Minutemen and plenty of others, died on March 4 in Sheboygan, Wis. He was 71.
His loss of life, in a nursing residence, was introduced in a Fb put up by Joe Carducci, a former co-owner of SST Information, the iconoclastic Hermosa Seaside, Calif., label the place Mr. Lockett made his title. Mr. Lockett had been hoping for a lung transplant in recent times after an extended wrestle with pulmonary fibrosis, and he had spent many of the final three months in a hospital after a stroke.
Because the in-house producer for SST from 1979 to 1985, Mr. Lockett managed the blending board on landmark recordings that helped carry American punk from deafening gigs in garages and basements to the mainstream — the college-radio mainstream, at the very least.
He produced or engineered greater than 100 albums for SST, together with classics like Black Flag’s “Broken” (1981), Descendents’ “Milo Goes to School” (1982), Meat Puppets’ first album (1982), Minutemen’s “What Makes a Man Begin Fires?” (1982) and Hüsker Dü’s “Zen Arcade” (1984).
Partly as a result of SST had restricted budgets within the early days, but in addition due to bands’ needs and Mr. Lockett’s manufacturing philosophy, he usually opted to report reside within the studio — all members taking part in directly — with minimal studio results. It was a departure from the widespread trade observe of recording one instrument at a time and utilizing overdubs and results like digital delay and outboard reverb.
In consequence, he was capable of translate to vinyl the uncooked, fast howl of punk that in a reside setting despatched our bodies crashing and elbows flying.
“Our first time within the studio with him was for our first Minutemen report, ‘Paranoid Time,’ a seven-song, seven-inch EP, in July of 1980,” Mike Watt, the band’s bassist and co-founder, recalled in an electronic mail. “He recorded and combined us that one night time. I believe we began at midnight and ended a number of hours later.”
“Spotski,” Mr. Watt added, “all the time was about making an attempt to seize what was us, like with this report — sort of like a ‘gig in entrance of the microphones’ journey, the place he big-time mentioned he didn’t wish to get in the way in which of us making an attempt to carry what we had that made us what we had been.”
Mr. Lockett’s sensibility dovetailed with the angle of SST, which the rock critic Byron Coley as soon as described as “archly xenophobic,” referring to the label’s revulsion over the extremely processed sounds being stamped out by the main labels within the hit factories of Los Angeles.
“There was a normal dismissal of what rock radio had change into, so Spot was bent on capturing what the band was placing out, with out softening, buffering or tampering with it,” Mr. Carducci mentioned in a telephone interview.
The label’s storm-the-barricades ethos won’t have resulted in chart-topping hits, however SST had an influence within the trade, rising from “a cash-strapped, cop-hassled storefront operation to simply essentially the most influential and fashionable underground indie of the ’80s,” because the music journalist Michael Azerrad wrote in a 2001 article for The New York Occasions.
Whereas he was dedicated to the punk trigger — an avid curler skater, he used to wheel round Los Angeles hanging fliers for gigs by SST bands — Mr. Lockett by no means let the do-it-yourself minimalism espoused by many within the style restrict his musical scope.
He was a talented guitarist who additionally performed clarinet, banjo, mandolin, drums and even bagpipes; he typically joined Minutemen onstage, Mr. Watt mentioned, to play his clarinet throughout the band’s jams between songs.
Earlier than he fell into the nascent Southern California punk-rock scene within the late Seventies, Mr. Lockett had been performing, recording and writing about jazz for a neighborhood newspaper in Hermosa Seaside, residence of the Lighthouse, a nightclub lengthy thought of a mecca of West Coast jazz.
A musical omnivore, he later developed a fascination for conventional Irish music and began a small label of his personal, No Auditions, for which he recorded a variety of eclectic, Irish-inflected solo albums after he moved from Los Angeles to Austin, Texas, in 1986. He was additionally a photographer and printed a e-book of his work, “Sounds of Two Eyes Opening,” in 2014.
“Evidently the entire historical past of punk rock, and particularly the stuff that occurred in L.A., is predicated on lots of myths,” Mr. Lockett mentioned in a 2018 interview printed on the Purple Bull Music Academy web site. “There have been much more influences and concepts about life and tradition that most individuals both don’t have a clue about, or aren’t actually all that keen to just accept.”
Glenn Michael Lockett, who later dropped an “n” from his first title, was born on July 1, 1951, in Los Angeles, the youngest of two youngsters of Claybourne Lockett (who glided by Buddy), a furrier who later labored as a clerk within the put up workplace of the Ambassador Resort, and Cynthia (Katz) Lockett, an workplace supervisor at a neighborhood music academy. His father had served in World Conflict II as one of many famed Tuskegee Airmen.
He’s survived by his sister, Cynthia Cyrus.
Rising up in Leimert Park in South Central Los Angeles, Mr. Lockett developed an early love of post-bop jazz.
He acquired his first guitar at 12 and was quickly taking part in together with hits by British Invasion bands and Motown and surf-rock teams. As his musical vocabulary developed, he turned fascinated with the bold progressive rock of the early Seventies. At one level he unsuccessfully auditioned for the genre-hopping rock auteur Captain Beefheart.
By the mid-’70s, nevertheless, Mr. Lockett, like lots of future punk figures, had grown weary of prog, with its self-consciously elaborate compositions and preparations. After he helped pals construct a recording studio known as Media Arts in Hermosa Seaside, he started recording jazz teams, and was impressed by the unfiltered studio method of the combos he recorded.
Jazz musicians “didn’t need something fancy,” he mentioned within the Purple Bull interview. “They simply wished to get the issues down, and so they didn’t care if somebody performed a nasty word or not.”
That spirit carried over to his subsequent musical chapter, which started when he was working as a waiter at a vegetarian restaurant. It was there that he met Greg Ginn, who would later assist discovered each Black Flag and SST Information.
Regardless of their completely different musical influences, Mr. Lockett would sometimes jam with Mr. Ginn and different members of a band known as Panic, which developed into Black Flag.
When a Black Flag live performance at a park in close by Manhattan Seaside erupted right into a melee, Mr. Lockett knew he wished to supply the band. “That present was simply so loopy,” he instructed Purple Bull Academy. “I mentioned, ‘I acquired to report this band earlier than they get killed.’”
