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<\/a>By Alex Williams<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Published March 10, 2023 Updated March 11, 2023, 10:49 a.m. ET<\/p>\n\n\n\n Glen Lockett, the influential record producer who, working under the name Spot, helped define the jet-turbine sound of American punk rock in the 1980s, recording groundbreaking albums by Black Flag, H\u00fcsker D\u00fc, Minutemen and many others, died on March 4 in Sheboygan, Wis. He was 71.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His death, in a nursing home, was announced in a Facebook post<\/a> by Joe Carducci, a former co-owner of SST Records, the iconoclastic Hermosa Beach, Calif., label where Mr. Lockett made his name. Mr. Lockett had been hoping for a lung transplant in recent years after a long battle with pulmonary fibrosis, and he had spent most of the last three months in a hospital after a stroke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the in-house producer for SST from 1979 to 1985, Mr. Lockett controlled the mixing board on landmark recordings that helped bring American punk from deafening gigs in garages and basements to the mainstream \u2014 the college-radio mainstream, at least.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He produced or engineered more than 100 albums<\/a> for SST, including classics like Black Flag\u2019s \u201cDamaged\u201d (1981), Descendents\u2019 \u201cMilo Goes to College\u201d (1982), Meat Puppets\u2019 first album (1982), Minutemen\u2019s \u201cWhat Makes a Man Start Fires?\u201d (1982) and H\u00fcsker D\u00fc\u2019s \u201cZen Arcade\u201d (1984).<\/p>\n\n\n\n 10 Essential Recordings<\/p>\n\n\n\n Selections of hardcore American punk recorded by Spot<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In part because SST had limited budgets in the early days, but also because of bands\u2019 wishes and Mr. Lockett\u2019s production philosophy, he typically opted to record live in the studio \u2014 all members playing at once \u2014 with minimal studio effects, instead of the widespread industry practice of recording one instrument at a time and using overdubs and effects like digital delay and outboard reverb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a result, he was able to translate to vinyl the raw, immediate howl of punk that, in a live setting, sent bodies crashing and elbows flying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOur first time in the studio with him was for our first Minutemen record, \u2018Paranoid Time,\u2019 a seven-song, seven-inch EP, in July of 1980,\u201d Mike Watt, the band\u2019s bassist and co-founder, recalled in an email. \u201cHe recorded and mixed us that one night. I think we started at midnight and ended a few hours later.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSpotski,\u201d Mr. Watt added, \u201calways was about trying to capture what was us, like with this record \u2014 kind of like a \u2018gig in front of the microphones\u2019 trip, where he big-time said he didn\u2019t want to get in the way of us trying to bring what we had that made us what we were.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mr. Lockett\u2019s sensibility dovetailed with the attitude of SST, which the rock critic Byron Coley once described as \u201carchly xenophobic,\u201d referring to the label\u2019s revulsion for the highly processed sounds being stamped out by the major labels in the hit factories of Los Angeles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere was a general dismissal of what rock radio had become, so Spot was bent on capturing what the band was putting out, without softening, buffering or tampering with it,\u201d Mr. Carducci said in a phone interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The label\u2019s storm-the-barricades ethos might not have resulted in chart-topping hits, but SST made waves in the industry, growing from \u201ca cash-strapped, cop-hassled storefront operation to easily the most influential and popular underground indie <\/a>of the \u201980s,\u201d as the music journalist Michael Azerrad wrote in a 2001 article for The New York Times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While he was committed to the punk cause \u2014 an avid roller skater, he used to wheel around Los Angeles hanging fliers for gigs by SST bands \u2014 he never let the do-it-yourself minimalism espoused by many in the genre limit his musical scope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He was a skilled guitarist who also played clarinet, banjo, mandolin, drums and even bagpipes; he often joined Minutemen onstage, Mr. Watt said, to play his clarinet during the band\u2019s jams between songs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before he fell into the nascent Southern California punk-rock scene in the late 1970s, Mr. Lockett had been performing, recording and writing about jazz for a local newspaper in Hermosa Beach, home of the Lighthouse, a nightclub long considered a mecca of West Coast jazz.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A musical omnivore, he later developed a fascination for traditional Irish music and started a small label of his own, No Auditions, for which he recorded a number of eclectic, Irish-inflected solo albums after he moved from Los Angeles to Austin, Texas, in 1986. He was also a photographer, and published a book of his work, \u201cSounds of Two Eyes Opening,\u201d<\/a> in 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt seems that the whole history of punk rock, and especially the stuff that happened in L.A., is based on a lot of myths<\/a>,\u201d he said in a 2018 interview published on the Red Bull Music Academy website. \u201cThere were a lot more influences and ideas about life and culture that most people either don\u2019t have a clue about, or aren\u2019t really all that willing to accept.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Glenn Michael Lockett, who later dropped an \u201cn\u201d from his first name, was born on July 1, 1951, in Los Angeles, the youngest of two children of Claybourne Lockett (who went by Buddy), a furrier who later worked as a clerk in the post office of the Ambassador Hotel, and Cynthia (Katz) Lockett, an office manager at a local music academy. His father had served in World War II as one of the famed Tuskegee Airmen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He is survived by his sister, Cynthia Cyrus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Growing up in Leimert Park in South Central Los Angeles, Mr. Lockett developed an early love of post-bop jazz.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He got his first guitar at 12 and was soon playing along with British Invasion, Motown and surf-rock hits. As his musical vocabulary developed, he eventually became fascinated with the musically ambitious progressive rock of the early 1970s. At one point he also unsuccessfully auditioned for the genre-hopping rock auteur Captain Beefheart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the mid-\u201970s, however, Mr. Lockett, like a lot of future punk figures, had grown weary of prog, with its pomposity and self-consciously elaborate compositions and arrangements. After he helped friends build a recording studio called Media Arts in Hermosa Beach, he began recording jazz groups, and was inspired by the direct and unfiltered studio approach of the combos he recorded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jazz musicians \u201cdidn\u2019t want anything fancy,\u201d he said in the Red Bull interview. \u201cThey just wanted to get the things down, and they didn\u2019t care if someone played a bad note or not.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That spirit carried over to his next musical chapter, which began when he was working as a waiter at a vegetarian restaurant. It was there that he met Greg Ginn, who would later be a founder of both Black Flag and SST Records.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite their differing musical influences, Mr. Lockett would occasionally jam with Mr. Ginn and the other members of a band called Panic, which later evolved into Black Flag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When a Black Flag concert at a park in nearby Manhattan Beach erupted into a melee, Mr. Lockett knew he wanted to produce the band. \u201cThat show was just so crazy,\u201d he told Red Bull Academy. \u201cI said, \u2018I got to record this band before they get killed.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Spot, Record Producer Who Captured the Fury of 1980s Punk, Dies at 71 A lifelong jazz aficionado, he changed course to produce bands like Black Flag and H\u00fcsker D\u00fc for the influential SST label. By Alex Williams Published March 10, 2023 Updated March 11, 2023, 10:49 a.m. ET Glen Lockett, the influential record producer who, working under the name … <\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a>