The most “underrated guitarist” Shel Talmy ever worked with
Some people will always be perplexed by the role of the producer in creating a record, and while those will question whether they do anything of importance, the work that bands like The Who and The Kinks did wouldn’t be the same without someone like Shel Talmy in control.
Despite being born and raised in the US, the vast majority of Talmy’s finest works were done in the UK, working alongside the crop of acts who were deemed to be at the forefront of the British Invasion. Predominantly pushing a sound that merged pop aesthetics of the time with scuzzy guitar riffs, what these acts were producing was hugely reflective of changing ideas in artistry, and Talmy was at the epicentre of all of it.
His contributions were integral to these bands developing their early sound, and had he not been there ushering them in this direction, it’s possible that they would never have discovered a sound that works for them, nor would they have had the bravery to go on and create more ambitious works later on in their career. The Who and The Kinks would both part ways with Talmy as their producer later in the ‘60s, but what they learned from him was something they both carried through into their conceptual records that came out at the end of the decade and in the early ‘70s.
While now these works from the 1960s sound simplistic and dated by modern standards, there’s plenty of elements to be found in them that were revolutionary for the time. However, as with a lot of cases, the producer can only do so much to bolster the sound of an artist, and if you’re not working with outstanding musicians in the first place, then you’re left with not much to improve upon and polish.
One of Talmy’s masterpieces is his production of ‘You Really Got Me’, which is seen as being one of the first garage rock songs to enter the mainstream, and provided a foundation for future punk records that came over a decade later. This early single saw The Kinks reach number one in the UK charts, and created something of a frenzy whereby other bands suddenly wanted to capture the same energy that they delivered on the record.
The sound he got from the guitars was incredible, and unlike anything else heard at the time, but he insists that most of the legwork was the masterwork of Dave Davies. “Dave Davies is one of the most underrated guitarists of all time,” Talmy told SongFacts. “He really was a very good guitarist. He was trying to experiment – he had his little Pignose amplifier, but we got it hooked up to a [Vox] AC10, and I was using some techniques I worked out on how to get a raunchier sound with distortion.”
This “raunchy” guitar sound is ultimately what makes the song so instantly impactful, but there are plenty of other examples of where Davies’ brilliance and Talmy bringing it to the forefront stand out in the band’s early output, especially tracks like ‘All Day and All of the Night’ and ‘Till the End of the Day’.
Speaking about the chemistry that they had, Talmy added: “It helped that Dave was as good as he was, and that he was quite happy to listen.” When you’re blessed with someone so easy to work with like this, it’s got to be much easier to make a masterpiece.
