Andy Paley, Whose Imprint Was All Over Pop Music, Dies at 73

New York Times

27-11-2024

Andy Paley, a music producer, composer and rock 'n' roll chameleon who worked with artists as varied as Madonna, Jerry Lee Lewis and Jonathan Richman, and who helped resuscitate the career of the Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson after his much-chronicled emotional flameout, died on Nov. 20 in Colchester, Vt. He was 73.
The death, at a hospice facility, was caused by cancer, his wife, Heather Crist Paley, said.
A curator of the spirit of classic 1960s pop, Mr. Paley played many roles over an ever-evolving career. He got his start in the late 1960s as the frontman for a Boston-area power pop outfit called the Sidewinders, which briefly included the future FM radio staple Billy Squier on guitar and opened for groups like Aerosmith.
Later that decade, he banded with his brother, Jonathan, to form a highly regarded, if short-lived, pop duo, the Paley Brothers. With their winsome looks and mops of blond hair, they appeared in the pages of teen bibles like 16 Magazine and Tiger Beat and toured with the pop confection Shaun Cassidy.
A skilled multi-instrumentalist, Mr. Paley often went on the road with his close friend Mr. Richman and filled in on keyboards on Patti Smith's 1976 tour of Europe.
During the 1980s, he began to produce for Seymour Stein, the visionary label chief of Sire Records. Influenced by studio wizards like Phil Spector, Mr. Wilson produced songs for numerous performers, including Debbie Harry, K.D. Lang, NRBQ, Little Richard and Brenda Lee.
Whatever the project, Mr. Paley infused it with infectious energy and vision, his friend Lenny Kaye, the renowned guitarist and rock savant, said in an interview. 'He understood pop sensibility,' he added, 'but also how to make songs unique so that they weren't formulaic, utilizing chordings and lyrics that could reveal ever new byways of emotion.' (Mr. Kaye produced the Sidewinders' only album, from 1972.)
Mr. Paley was also a songwriter. Among his many credits, he helped write two songs for Madonna's 1990 album 'I'm Breathless' — 'Now I'm Following You' and 'I'm Going Bananas' — released in conjunction with the film 'Dick Tracy,' which starred Madonna and Warren Beatty. Mr. Paley produced and contributed songs to the film's soundtrack album as well.
Five years later, he produced and co-wrote several songs for 'Young Blood,' a return-to-roots album by the combustible rock 'n' roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis. And he wrote songs for the cartoon series 'The Ren & Stimpy Show' and 'SpongeBob SquarePants.'
Even as an intimate of musical luminaries, Mr. Paley maintained the wide-eyed wonder of a fan. 'I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would work with Brian Wilson and Darlene Love, or that Jerry Lee Lewis would one day record a song I'd written with him in mind,' Mr. Paley said in a 1990 interview with The Los Angeles Times. 'These are people I listened to when I was a little kid, who meant more to me than anything.'
Andrew Douglas Paley was born on Nov. 1, 1951, in Washington, D.C., the middle of five siblings of Henry D. Paley, a prominent college administrator, and Cabot (Barber) Paley, a teacher and social worker.
His family moved to Crescent, N.Y., near Albany, and later Brooklyn. Andy attended the Putney School, a boarding school in Vermont, but left at 15 to pursue a music career.
In his later teens, he divided his time between New York and Boston, where he befriended Mr. Richman, the future Modern Lovers singer and songwriter, who was busking in Harvard Square. The two would later collaborate frequently.
Mr. Paley soon helped found a band called Catfish Black, which became the Sidewinders. The Sidewinders had a running residency at the New York rock crucible Max's Kansas City, where Mr. Paley got to know the likes of Andy Warhol and Lou Reed.
Endlessly connected in the music world, Mr. Paley and his brother earned a rare distinction, filling in for an ailing Joey Ramone as lead singers on a Ramones recording of Ritchie Valens's 'Come On Let's Go,' which was featured in the band's 1979 cult-classic film, 'Rock 'n' Roll High School.'
Nearly a decade later, Mr. Paley played a big role in helping Brian Wilson make his eponymous debut solo album, released in 1988. It marked a formal re-emergence for Mr. Wilson after years of mental struggles, erratic behavior and drug abuse, which began in the 1960s.
A constant presence at those sessions was the notorious psychotherapist Eugene Landy, who was credited with helping stabilize Mr. Wilson but who was also criticized for exerting a suffocating control over virtually every aspect of Mr. Wilson's life.
In an unpublished letter from Mr. Landy to Seymour Stein and the music executive Lenny Waronker, the Mr. Landy referred to himself as Mr. Wilson's 'partner in business and life' and complained, in passive aggressive terms, about the copious credits that Mr. Paley received on the Wilson album as a songwriter, instrumentalist, vocalist and a co-producer.
'The sheer number of times his name comes up makes it seem as though Brian used him as a crutch,' Mr. Landy wrote. Mr. Wilson, he added, had told him that he was in the process of 'figuring out where Andy begins and where I end.'
In a 1996 interview, Mr. Wilson called Mr. Paley 'the most frighteningly talented person that I've met and the greatest musical genius I've come across in many years — maybe my whole life.'
In addition to his wife and brother, Mr. Paley is survived by his twin sons, Jackson and Charlie, and his sisters Brewster, Debby and Sarah Paley. He lived in Grand Isle, Vt., surrounded by Lake Champlain.
Mr. Paley and Mr. Wilson went on to record multiple albums' worth of material, his brother said in an interview, most of which has yet to be released, aside from occasional bootlegs. In a 2015 interview with Cue Castanets!, a Phil Spector fan site, Mr. Paley called his working relationship with Mr. Wilson 'a true 50/50 collaboration in every way, including production.'
'When you get together with someone to collaborate you might have a storehouse of ideas in your head that might fit with your partner's ideas,' he said. 'That's how it worked with me and Brian. We both wrote lyrics. We both wrote melodies. We both came up with chords.'
'The best songs,' he added, 'just happen.'