Terry Manning [Tape Op #58] had already changed my life before I ever met him. Like many of us in the recording and record-making community, his work with Big Star, Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top, and Booker T. & the M.G.’s, along with countless others, had shaped my listening ahead of my even knowing it. And that’s the perfect word to describe him most completely, in fact – in the studio, as a friend, a mentor, and as the musical father figure he would become for me – he was always “ahead.”
I wouldn’t have a career without Terry. Some demos I’d recorded were making the rounds and they’d found their way to him at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas (the legendary studio he co-owned for two decades). Without meeting (or even talking to) me, he got on an airplane, flew to Miami, and sat outside Island Records founder Chris Blackwell’s office – without an appointment, refusing to leave until he’d meet with Terry about the demos. Blackwell was Terry’s business partner at Compass Point, and Terry told him to sign me with the deal-breaker condition that Terry produce the record. As a direct result of Terry’s actions, Phil Ramone [Tape Op #50] (who’d heard of the meeting and wanted to snatch me out from under Blackwell) offered me a record deal. I told Ramone that to consider his offer, I too had a deal-breaker condition: that Terry produce the record.
I’d met Terry by this point, our first conversation lasting nearly three hours as we talked about everything, from the bass sound on The Beatles' “Paperback Writer” to the snare sound on Radiohead's “Fake Plastic Trees.” And, most importantly, about how neither one really mattered in the end or by themselves because, “What matters is how you make someone feel,” as Terry said to me. “When you know what tools to use, and how to use them and when you know what the rules are and how to break them, then you can really make somebody feel something.” He became my Obi-Wan Kenobi on the spot.
I signed with Phil Ramone, and Terry and I made my debut record, Anger’s Candy, together at Compass Point. I wasn’t exactly a nascent record maker but, as I worked with him, I learned quickly that I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. He was indeed so very far ahead of me. He was ahead in his understanding, including being ahead in his love of recording tools, which was effortlessly balanced by his disregard for those who fetishize them. Additionally, he was ahead, with his eyes-on-the-horizon evangelism about the emotion we were after with each idea, each part, and each track. “Make decisions,” he told me. “That’s the key. Decide now. Trust yourself. Print that effect, keep that happy accident, and embrace that surprise. But, for the love of god, record it correctly. There’s a right way to do the wrong thing.”
He wasn’t a producer or engineer who kept his “secrets” close to the chest. On the contrary, he wanted to share what he’d learned, whether it had been at Stax or at Abbey Road, because he valued knowledge almost as much as he valued the communication of it. He was a walking Library of Alexandria, and the doors were always open.
When I started producing and recording records at my own studio in Greenwich Village, he was a constant lighthouse of encouragement and judgment I could trust. Always on my “Red Team” (a small group of record makers that I send work to that I’m close to finishing for objective critique), he was always able to look at the leaves and branches of the trees of a record and see how they would affect the forest of it. Most importantly, he was always paying me the greatest respect by telling me the truth. I could trust his praise because I could trust his criticism. In what was a full-circle moment for each of us in 2013, he joined the record label I founded, ECR Music Group, bringing his own imprint, Lucky Seven Records, under our umbrella.
I was walking down the street in New York on March 25th of this year, when I got a text from a friend. It read, “Did Terry Manning die?” I stopped in the middle of 6th Avenue suddenly, just as my heart leapt into my throat. Terry and I had spoken only a few weeks earlier; his abrupt and unexpected death was unimaginable to me. But it was true.
“You’ve gotta do stuff,” he once said to me. “Right up until you can’t anymore, you've gotta keep doing stuff.” And he did, releasing a new record of his own just this past January.
The shapes and sizes of the loss of a lifelong friend aren’t measurable, and the ripples from the impact of an indispensable figure in a profession aren’t quantifiable. “Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with,” wrote Mark Twain. Joy was the currency I watched Terry deal in above all; the joy of making music. It is the privilege of my lifetime to have divided so much of that joy with him over the years. I’ll have to divide that joy with others now, and I will. But with Terry on my shoulder and in my heart – urging me on, demanding that I do better, and forever pushing me forward. Always ahead.
