Richard Perry, a hitmaking record producer with a flair for both standards and contemporary sounds whose many successes included Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” Rod Stewart’s “The Great American Songbook” series and a Ringo Starr album featuring all four Beatles, died Tuesday. He was 82.
Perry, a recipient of a Grammys Trustee Award in 2015, died at a Los Angeles hospital after suffering cardiac arrest, friend Daphna Kastner said.
“He maximized his time here,” said Kastner, who called him a “father friend” and said he was godfather to her son. “He was generous, fun, sweet and made the world a better place. The world is a little less sweeter without him here. But it’s a little bit sweeter in heaven.”
Perry was a onetime drummer, oboist and doo-wop singer who proved at home with a wide variety of musical styles, the rare producer to have No. 1 hits on the pop, R&B, dance and country charts. He was on hand for Harry Nilsson’s “Without You” and The Pointer Sisters’ “I’m So Excited,” Tiny Tim’s novelty smash “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” and the Willie Nelson-Julio Iglesias lounge standard “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.” Perry was widely known as a “musician’s producer,” treating artists like peers rather than vehicles for his own tastes. Singers turned to him whether trying to update their sound (Barbra Streisand), set back the clock (Stewart), revive their career (Fats Domino) or fulfill early promise (Leo Sayer).
“Richard had a knack for matching the right song to the right artist,” Streisand wrote in her 2023 memoir, “My Name is Barbra.”
Perry’s life was a story, in part, of famous friends and the right places. He was backstage for 1950s performances by Little Richard and Chuck Berry, sat in the third row at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival during Otis Redding’s memorable set and attended a recording session for the Rolling Stones’ classic “Let It Bleed” album. A given week might find him dining one night with Paul and Linda McCartney, and Mick and Bianca Jagger the next. He dated Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda among others and was briefly married to the actor Rebecca Broussard.
In Stewart’s autobiography, “Rod,” he would remember Perry’s home in West Hollywood as “the scene of much late-night skulduggery through the 1970s and beyond, and a place you knew you could always fall into at the end of an evening for a full-blown knees-up with drink and music and dancing.”
In the ‘70s, Perry helped facilitate a near-Beatles reunion.
He had produced a track on Starr’s first solo album, “Sentimental Journey,” and grown closer to him through Nilsson and other mutual friends. “Ringo,” released in 1973, would prove the drummer was a commercial force in his own right — with some well-placed names stopping by. The album, featuring contributions from Nilsson, Billy Preston, Steve Cropper, Martha Reeves and all five members of The Band, reached No. 2 on Billboard and sold more than 1 million copies. Hit singles included the chart toppers “Photograph,” co-written by Starr and George Harrison, and a remake of the 1950s favorite “You’re Sixteen.”
But for Perry and others, the most memorable track was a non-hit, custom made. John Lennon’s “I’m the Greatest” was a mock-anthem for the self-effacing drummer that brought three Beatles into the studio just three years after the band’s breakup. Starr was on drums and sang lead, Lennon was on keyboards and backing vocals and longtime Beatles friend Klaus Voormann played bass. They were still working on the song when Harrison’s assistant phoned, asking if the guitarist could join them. Harrison arrived soon after.
“As I looked around the room, I realized that I was at the very epicenter of the spiritual and musical quest I had dreamed of for so many years,” Perry wrote in his 2021 memoir, “Cloud Nine.” “By the end of each session, a small group of friends had gathered, standing silently along the back wall, just thrilled to be there.”
McCartney was not in town for “I’m the Greatest,” but he did help write and arrange the ballad “Six O’Clock,” featuring the ex-Beatle and Linda McCartney on backing vocals.
Perry had helped make pop history the year before as producer of “You’re So Vain,” which he would call the nearest he came to a perfect record. Simon’s scathing ballad about an unnamed lover, with Voormann’s bass runs kicking off the song and Jagger joining on the chorus, hit No. 1 in 1972 and began a long-term debate over Simon’s intended target. Perry’s answer would echo Simon’s own belated response.
“I’ll take this opportunity to give my insider’s scoop,” he wrote in his memoir. “The person that the song is based on is really a composite of several men that Carly dated in the ’60s and early ’70s, but primarily, it’s about my good friend, Warren Beatty.”
Perry’s post-1970s work included such hit singles as The Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance” and DeBarge’s “Rhythm of the Night,” along with albums by Simon, Ray Charles and Art Garfunkel. He had his greatest success with Stewart’s million-selling “The Great American Songbook” albums, a project made possible by the rock star’s writer’s block and troubled private life. In the early 2000s, Stewart’s marriage to Rachel Hunter had ended and Perry was among those consoling him. With Stewart struggling to come up with original songs, he and Perry agreed that an album of standards might work, including “The Very Thought of You,” “Angel Eyes” and “Where or When.”
“We were at a back table in our favorite restaurant as we exchanged ideas and wrote them down on a napkin,” Perry wrote in his memoir. Stewart softly sang the options. “As I sat there and listened to him sing, it was clear that we both sensed we were on to something,” Perry added.
Perry was a New York City native born into a musical family; his parents, Mark and Sylvia Perry, co-founded Peripole Music, a pioneering manufacturer of instruments for young people. With his family’s help and encouragement, he learned to play drums and oboe and helped form a doo-wop group, the Escorts, that released a handful of singles. A music and theater major at the University of Michigan, he initially dreamed of acting on Broadway. Instead, he made the “life-changing” decision in the mid-1960s to form a production company with a recent acquaintance, Gary Katz, who would go on to work with Steely Dan among others.
By the end of the decade, Perry was an industry star, working on Captain Beefheart’s acclaimed cult album, “Safe As Milk” and the debut recording of Tiny Tim and Ella Fitzgerald’s “Ella,” featuring the jazz great’s interpretations of songs by the Beatles, Smokey Robinson and Randy Newman. In the early 1970s, he would oversee Streisand’s million-selling “Stoney End” album, on which the singer turned from the show tunes that made her famous and covered a range of pop and rock music, from the title track, a Laura Nyro composition, to Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind.”
“I liked Richard from the moment we met. He was tall and lanky, with a mop of dark, curly hair and a big smile, which his big heart,” Streisand wrote in her memoir. “At our first meeting, he arrived laden with songs, and we listened to them together. Whatever hesitation I may have felt about our collaboration soon vanished and I thought, ‘This could be fun, and musically liberating.’”