Henry Lewy, a noted sound engineer whose influential work can be found on some of the leading records of the 1970s and '80s, has died. He was 79.
Lewy, who had been out of the recording business since the late 1980s, died April 8 in Prescott, Ariz., of complications from a fall, said family friend Bob Burton.
The list of rock music giants Lewy worked with reads like a who's who of '60s and '70s recording, including the Mamas and the Papas, the Flying Burrito Brothers, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen and Van Morrison.
But his most notable collaborations came from his association with Joni Mitchell, with whom he made 13 albums over 14 years.
Lewy was born in Magdeburg, Germany, a city near Berlin, and his father was the well-to-do co-owner of a farm machinery business. But the fortunes of the Jewish family declined with the rise of Hitler.
By the late 1930s, Lewy's family bribed their way out of the country for passage to England. They arrived Sept. 1, 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland.
They stayed in England six months before immigrating first to Canada and then to Savannah, Ga. Three years later, the family moved to Los Angeles. Lewy graduated from Hollywood High School in 1945.
After serving in the Army during World War II, Lewy went to radio school under the GI bill and found work in stations in San Diego, Las Vegas and Los Angeles as a disc jockey and engineer. He lived in South America for a time in the 1950s, joined a circus and engineered a German invention called the Dancing Waters, which had 16 centrifugal pumps and colored lights.
Audiences loved it, Lewy recalled in interviews over the years, but he didn't.
"It took 15 hours to set up and eight hours to tear down," he told BAM magazine in 1983. "It was exhausting."
He returned to Los Angeles in 1959, joined Liberty Records and helped engineer some of the original Chipmunks sessions. After working on demo recordings with Crosby and Stills, he learned about Mitchell from Crosby, a former boyfriend.
"David told me he had just split up with Joni and he was looking for someone who would help her make her second album," Lewy recalled.
"She didn't need a producer per se, but more a third ear, a catalyst between her and her material."
The first Lewy-Mitchell collaboration was "Clouds." He also worked on "Blue," "The Hissing of Summer Lawns," "Hejira" and "Wild Things Run Fast," among others.
