Glen Lockett, higher recognized professionally as Spot, a producer and engineer of among the most vital essential punk and post-punk data of the early Nineteen Eighties, has died at 72, associates have confirmed.
Spot was behind the boards for a lot of the important SST Data releases that put that L.A.-based unbiased label on the map between 1980-85, together with such scene-changing recordings as Husker Du’s “Zen Arcade” and “New Day Rising,” Black Flag’s “Broken” and “Jealous Once more,” and albums by the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, the Descendents, Saccharine Belief and the Misfits.
Joe Carducci, a co-owner of the SST label in the course of the interval when Spot was the imprint’s unofficial home producer, introduced the dying in a Fb put up, saying Spot had been discovered lifeless shortly after 10 a.m. Saturday at a well being care facility in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. In response to Carducci, Spot had suffered from fibrosis and was on oxygen for impaired lung operate, and “hoped for a lung transplant” previous to his situation worsening when he was hospitalized after a stroke three months in the past.
Mike Watt, of Minutemen fame, posted on Twitter: “Good individuals, we simply misplaced my outdated buddy Spotski, a horrible blow. he recorded the Minutemen’s first stuff, I’m going method again w/this man. Brother matt took this shot six years in the past when Spotski came over our Pedro city… man, it is a horrible blow. I like you Spotski eternally.”
Keith Morris, Black Flag’s unique lead singer, paid tribute in a Fb picture of himself kissing Spot on the cheek, writing, “SPOT’s gone. R.I.P. Mr. Lockett you had been a very good dude!”
Wrote Carducci, “SPOT was a musician and author and photographer who spelled his title in all caps with a dot in the midst of the O. His principal sideline was as a document producer-engineer and an architect of the pure strategy to recording a band within the punk period. He began in Hermosa Seashore taking part in and recording jazz and he took the primacy of dwell jazz taking part in into recording bands towards prevailing makes an attempt to melt or industrialize a back-to-basics arts motion in sound. When approaching the blending board, SPOT would assume an Elvis-like stance after which, gesturing towards all of the knobs, he would say in a Louis Armstrong-like voice, ‘That is going to be gelatinous!’”
Spot was additionally well-known as a photographer whose working documenting the South Bay within the late ’70s and ’80s had been the main target of books and gallery displays. A hardbound version of pictures from that place and period, “Sounds of Two Eyes Opening,” was revealed in 2014.
Carducci wrote that “SPOT didn’t dwell quite a bit on his private historical past,” however he recounted particulars that he knew of his former SST comrade, saying he was born in Los Angeles to a Tuskegee airman father and a Native American mom. Raised within the Crenshaw space, Spot moved to Hermosa Seashore within the mid-’70s, after which, because the golden period of SST wound down within the mid-’80s, decamped from L.A. to Austin after which Sheboygan (“to be close to his favourite Celtic music scenes in Milwaukee and Chicago,” Carducci stated).
Spot was additionally a author in addition to photographer, whose work appeared within the Hermosa Seashore-based free weekly the Simple Reader within the late ’70s. At the moment, he was an avid curler skater, in addition to a documentarian of the South Bay’s skating tradition.
Jazz was considered one of Spot’s first loves. “I’d been raised listening to post-bebop jazz,” he stated in an interview with Red Bull Music Academy. “Going again into the ’50s, I’d be at household barbecues the place they’re taking part in Thelonious Monk, and stuff like that.” Within the ’70s, he stated, “I used to be actually enamored with loads of what I suppose you’ll name progressive rock. That entire period with idea albums, when jazz fusion began occurring, earlier than it was bullshit.”
He discovered work at a brand new studio being inbuilt Hermosa Seashore, the Media Arts Studio, and started to study the ropes as musical scenes shortly modified. In a 2018 interview, he advised Simple Reader, “I simply walked up the steps and stated, ‘Properly I hear you’re constructing a studio. I’m in search of a studio to do one thing in.’ It was method in its early phases, within the grunt work of doing development and constructing it. However after I noticed what was up there, I instantly noticed the potential of what may very well be there.”
An opportunity assembly with Black Flag guitarist and future SST co-owner Greg Ginn whereas he was moonlighting as a waiter on the vegetarian restaurant Backyard of Eden modified the whole lot. Ginn, who had been studying Spot’s critiques within the Simple Reader, challenged him. “(Ginn) would say, ‘Why aren’t you all these different bands?’ I assumed there was actually no unbiased scene value speaking about, however he was on to a complete new factor.” Watching a small riot get away in Manhattan Seashore’s Polliwog Park whereas Black Flag did an early gig there lit Spot up. He remembered pondering, “I acquired to document this band earlier than they get killed’” — resulting in that band’s all-important 1980 EP “Jealous Once more.”
Of SST’s no-budget operation, he stated, “We needed to go in there, get issues arrange fast, undergo the tracks fast, after which get the stuff blended fast, as a result of that was on a regular basis and all the cash we needed to work with. It needed to get performed.” There was little time, cash or philosophical inclination to tinker over manufacturing. “Every thing was primarily based on the thought of taking part in the music proper while you had been taking part in it dwell, after which recording that,” he stated. Speaking about Husker Du’s extremely influential double album “Zen Arcade,” he stated, “All the session, from primary tracks to last combine, was roughly a few hundred hours. Which isn’t very a lot time in any respect. None of it was good. However we simply needed to get it performed.”
Spot break up with SST in 1986, telling the Crimson Bull interviewer, “The dynamic of how the label functioned, beneath that mannequin, simply didn’t work too effectively. I labored with them till I kinda couldn’t work with them anymore. It’s actually unhappy.”
In 2018, Spot returned to Hermosa Seashore for an exhibit on the Pacific Coast Gallery in downtown Hermosa titled “Trip the Wild Wheels,” at which period fine-art prints of his ’70s and ’80s work had been additionally bought. A signatu
In 2019, he served because the narrator of an audiobook novel by G.S. Oldman titled “The Decline and Fall of Different Civilization,” which satirized South by Southwest and different parts of the choice rock scene that had succeeded punk and post-punk.
Stated Spot in a 2018 interview along with his alma mater newspaper, Easy Reader, “Individuals have at all times requested, ‘Once you’re recording a band, how do you make that second occur?’ No, you don’t make that second occur. You simply set issues in movement that may enable the factor to occur. It’s like theater I suppose: One thing goes to occur on that stage, however you’ve gotta make that stage invite the second. And when it occurs, you’ve acquired to acknowledge it.”
