Grammy Award winning producer, engineer and mixer Greg Ladanyi died in a fall from a stage in Cyprus in September. He was 57. His first job as an engineer was with Captain Beefheart.
In 2005 Greg Ladanyi described working with Captain Beefheart on Bluejeans and Moonbeams.
It was the most bizarre, twisted experience for me. This was before I was an engineer and before I went to the Sound Factory. I was the business side of Stronghold Studios, and my partner, Al Thomas, owned the studio. I found the job, brought them in, and they paid us $5,000 for studio time. We spent the money in two days paying our bills. But there was a clash with Al and the producer, and they wanted their money back. There was no way, but we didn’t say that. I just said [to producer Andy DiMartino], “I’ll do this.” I had this personality that was effective that way. So I was on the phone with Al every 20 minutes. “How do I patch this thing in?” I knew what things were and I had live mixing experience, but never in a studio. And it was weird because Beefheart was out of his mind. He was trippin’, the band was trippin’, and I was only 21 years old. We were there all night and they were doing this stuff that all sounded like spaghetti to me. But I loved the feeling of being in the studio. Oh, that was amazing. So I had a pretty big crash course in personalities, the studio, delivering, and that was when I got the job at the Sound Factory as a second engineer.
Interview with Greg Ladanyi at Sony Creative Software
Greg Ladanyi memoriam at Studio Expresso
Interesting to read this, particularly the references to the band "trippin". I once met a guy who new Don from the San Francisco area and his opinion, with which I strongly agree, is that Don's rapid health decline in the early 80s, and his current obviously ill but fairly stable state, were almost certainly due to either excessive LSD use or use of a poor/contaminated batch which damaged him neurologicaly.
LSD Insight or Insanity?
What was garbage and lies in the 60's is still garbage and lies. I and many friends consumed many batches of "good", "bad", "weak", "strong", "organic", "synthetic" substances and had no symptoms that Don apparently suffers from. I really doubt that any "trippin" is the cause of his health concerns.