Last night I watched an absolutely fascinating documentary on Tom Dowd. I'd never heard of him before, yet he did so much in his lifetime that I'm familiar with. It's one of those stories that, if somebody made it up, one would say "that's preposterous -- nobody did that" and yet Tom Dowd really did.
Imagine a 16 year old Physics whiz, studying at Columbia University. It's 1941. At night, he haunts the jazz clubs, meeting legendary acts that we still revere today. Through a twist of fate, he ends up engineering recordings. This is back in the day of direct-to-acetate discs, mind you.
Soon, he's drafted into the Army, where he's sent right back to Columbia to work on something called the "Manhattan Project". Yeah, that Manhattan project -- the kid is helping design the first atomic bomb.
His night job is getting him lots of attention, though, in the music world. The war ends, and he's sent off to Bikini Island to study A-bomb tests. Mind you, he still hasn't completed school!
After the tests, he returns to Columbia to find they want him to study 1939-era Physics, when the Physics world has totally been changed by the advent of the Bomb -- which he helped create. Dowd drops out to concentrate on his music career.
And what a career. Dowd engineered recordings for the likes of John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Cream, Lynyrd Skinner, the Allman Brothers, and many many more.
Oh, and while he's doing all this, he pretty much invents the use of multiple track recording techniques and the equipment to make it possible. Just freakin' amazing.
Toward the end of the show, Dowd sits at a console and demonstrates just how he mixed "Layla" for Eric Clapton's Derek and the Dominoes. I was totally blown away.
If you're the least bit interested in music, history, or even Physics (!) you've got to see this film.
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