Extraordinary musical figure, adequate documentary

Tom Dowd (1925-2002) was best known to top-flight jazz, soul and rock musicians, and detail-oriented music fans who read through all of an album’s liner notes. Dowd’s credits as engineer or producer can be found on back covers and in CD booklets of seminal recordings by Ray Charles, Ruth Brown, Joe Turner, LaVern Baker, The Clovers, The Drifters, The Coasters, Bobby Darin, John Coltrane, MJQ, Ornette Coleman, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Machito, Roland Kirk, George Shearing, Charlie Mingus, Cream, Eric Clapton, Buffalo Springfield, Sonny & Cher, The Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, to name just a very few.

Dowd was one of the critical elements behind Atlantic’s ascendancy in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and helped Stax find their audio groove. He was both an engineer and a producer, but more importantly he was a studio catalyst whose musical sensibility and golden ears led musicians to their best work, which he then captured on tape. Fellow producer Phil Ramone calls Dowd a “coach,” and his multiple roles as engineer, producer and musical confidant are echoed by the likes of Eric Clapton and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Billy Powell. It was Dowd who suggested the unusual downbeat that marks Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love,” it was Dowd who captured the energy of the Allman Brothers at the Fillmore East, and it was Dowd who first captured on tape everything Otis Redding had to offer, resulting in the seminal album Otis Blue.

Dowd’s career spanned the early days of direct-to-disc recording, in which the balance of musicians was engineered live, through mono and half-track stereo (the latter of which Dowd was one of the first to use for LP production), through overdubbing on multi-track tape, to the unlimited tracks, automation and editing possibilities of today’s digital studios. His biggest step forward was the introduction of an eight-track recorder at Atlantic, which revolutionized the way pop music was recorded, and in turn the music itself. The ability to record first and mix later freed engineers to focus on sound capture, and the ability to lay down individual tracks at different times divorced recording from the aesthetic of a live band.

This documentary is filled with the music of Dowd’s productions and features interviews with Dowd, Ahmet Ertegun, Jerry Wexler, Ray Charles, Mike Stoller, Phil Ramone, Eric Clapton, members of the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and others. There’s superb archival photos and film footage, including snippets of Dowd working in the studio and control room and performance footage of Booker T & The MGs, Otis Redding and more. There’s a wonderful shot of the Baldwin piano on which Jim Gordon played “Layla,” and a recitation of the instrument’s other guests, including Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Gregg Allman, Billy Powell, and Dr. John.

There’s a lot of great material here, but like the sequence in which Dowd fiddles with the individual tracks of “Layla,” the film doesn’t gel into a coherent statement. The staged studio recreations feel like a cheat, and the super congenial tone, though apparently representative of Dowd’s temperament, turns this into more of a tribute than a documentary This film is worth seeing for the archival footage and newly struck interviews, but while it provides context for Dowd’s work, it’s not nearly as moving as his actual music. DVD extras include three deleted scenes, additional interview clips, a photo gallery and a “making of” showing the set-up for filming the recording studio recreations. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]