Richard Perry, record producer behind 'You're So Vain' and other hits, dies at 82

ENT

Richard Perry, record producer behind 'You're So Vain' and other hits, dies at 82

2024-12-25 08:59 Last Updated At：09:11

Richard Perry, a hitmaking record producer with a flair for both standards and contemporary sounds whose many successes included Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” Rod Stewart’s “The Great American Songbook” series and a Ringo Starr album featuring all four Beatles, died Tuesday. He was 82.

Perry, a recipient of a Grammys Trustee Award in 2015, died at a Los Angeles hospital after suffering cardiac arrest, friend Daphna Kastner said.

“He maximized his time here,” said Kastner, who called him a “father friend” and said he was godfather to her son. “He was generous, fun, sweet and made the world a better place. The world is a little less sweeter without him here. But it's a little bit sweeter in heaven.”

Perry was a onetime drummer, oboist and doo-wop singer who proved at home with a wide variety of musical styles, the rare producer to have No. 1 hits on the pop, R&B, dance and country charts. He was on hand for Harry Nilsson’s “Without You” and The Pointer Sisters' “I’m So Excited,” Tiny Tim’s novelty smash “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” and the Willie Nelson-Julio Iglesias lounge standard “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.” Perry was widely known as a “musician’s producer,” treating artists like peers rather than vehicles for his own tastes. Singers turned to him whether trying to update their sound (Barbra Streisand), set back the clock (Stewart), revive their career (Fats Domino) or fulfill early promise (Leo Sayer).

“Richard had a knack for matching the right song to the right artist,” Streisand wrote in her 2023 memoir, “My Name is Barbra.”

Perry’s life was a story, in part, of famous friends and the right places. He was backstage for 1950s performances by Little Richard and Chuck Berry, sat in the third row at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival during Otis Redding’s memorable set and attended a recording session for the Rolling Stones’ classic “Let It Bleed” album. A given week might find him dining one night with Paul and Linda McCartney, and Mick and Bianca Jagger the next. He dated Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda among others and was briefly married to the actor Rebecca Broussard.

In Stewart's autobiography, “Rod,” he would remember Perry's home in West Hollywood as “the scene of much late-night skulduggery through the 1970s and beyond, and a place you knew you could always fall into at the end of an evening for a full-blown knees-up with drink and music and dancing.”

In the '70s, Perry helped facilitate a near-Beatles reunion.

He had produced a track on Starr’s first solo album, “Sentimental Journey,” and grown closer to him through Nilsson and other mutual friends. “Ringo,” released in 1973, would prove the drummer was a commercial force in his own right — with some well-placed names stopping by. The album, featuring contributions from Nilsson, Billy Preston, Steve Cropper, Martha Reeves and all five members of The Band, reached No. 2 on Billboard and sold more than 1 million copies. Hit singles included the chart toppers “Photograph,” co-written by Starr and George Harrison, and a remake of the 1950s favorite “You’re Sixteen.”

But for Perry and others, the most memorable track was a non-hit, custom made. John Lennon’s “I’m the Greatest” was a mock-anthem for the self-effacing drummer that brought three Beatles into the studio just three years after the band’s breakup. Starr was on drums and sang lead, Lennon was on keyboards and backing vocals and longtime Beatles friend Klaus Voormann played bass. They were still working on the song when Harrison’s assistant phoned, asking if the guitarist could join them. Harrison arrived soon after.

“As I looked around the room, I realized that I was at the very epicenter of the spiritual and musical quest I had dreamed of for so many years,” Perry wrote in his 2021 memoir, “Cloud Nine.” “By the end of each session, a small group of friends had gathered, standing silently along the back wall, just thrilled to be there.”

McCartney was not in town for “I’m the Greatest,” but he did help write and arrange the ballad “Six O’Clock,” featuring the ex-Beatle and Linda McCartney on backing vocals.

Perry had helped make pop history the year before as producer of “You’re So Vain,” which he would call the nearest he came to a perfect record. Simon’s scathing ballad about an unnamed lover, with Voormann’s bass runs kicking off the song and Jagger joining on the chorus, hit No. 1 in 1972 and began a long-term debate over Simon’s intended target. Perry’s answer would echo Simon’s own belated response.

“I’ll take this opportunity to give my insider’s scoop,” he wrote in his memoir. “The person that the song is based on is really a composite of several men that Carly dated in the ’60s and early ’70s, but primarily, it’s about my good friend, Warren Beatty.”

Perry’s post-1970s work included such hit singles as The Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance” and DeBarge’s “Rhythm of the Night,” along with albums by Simon, Ray Charles and Art Garfunkel. He had his greatest success with Stewart’s million-selling “The Great American Songbook” albums, a project made possible by the rock star’s writer’s block and troubled private life. In the early 2000s, Stewart’s marriage to Rachel Hunter had ended and Perry was among those consoling him. With Stewart struggling to come up with original songs, he and Perry agreed that an album of standards might work, including “The Very Thought of You,” “Angel Eyes” and “Where or When.”

“We were at a back table in our favorite restaurant as we exchanged ideas and wrote them down on a napkin,” Perry wrote in his memoir. Stewart softly sang the options. “As I sat there and listened to him sing, it was clear that we both sensed we were on to something,” Perry added.

Perry was a New York City native born into a musical family; his parents, Mark and Sylvia Perry, co-founded Peripole Music, a pioneering manufacturer of instruments for young people. With his family’s help and encouragement, he learned to play drums and oboe and helped form a doo-wop group, the Escorts, that released a handful of singles. A music and theater major at the University of Michigan, he initially dreamed of acting on Broadway. Instead, he made the “life-changing” decision in the mid-1960s to form a production company with a recent acquaintance, Gary Katz, who would go on to work with Steely Dan among others.

By the end of the decade, Perry was an industry star, working on Captain Beefheart’s acclaimed cult album, “Safe As Milk” and the debut recording of Tiny Tim and Ella Fitzgerald’s “Ella,” featuring the jazz great's interpretations of songs by the Beatles, Smokey Robinson and Randy Newman. In the early 1970s, he would oversee Streisand’s million-selling “Stoney End” album, on which the singer turned from the show tunes that made her famous and covered a range of pop and rock music, from the title track, a Laura Nyro composition, to Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind.”

“I liked Richard from the moment we met. He was tall and lanky, with a mop of dark, curly hair and a big smile, which his big heart,” Streisand wrote in her memoir. “At our first meeting, he arrived laden with songs, and we listened to them together. Whatever hesitation I may have felt about our collaboration soon vanished and I thought, ‘This could be fun, and musically liberating.’”

AP Music Writer Maria Sherman and AP Entertainment Writer Jonathan Landrum Jr. contributed.

Pope urges 'all people of all nations' to silence arms and overcome divisions in Christmas address

2024-12-25 21:05 Last Updated At：21:10

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis in his traditional Christmas message on Wednesday urged “all people of all nations” to find courage during this Holy Year “to silence the sounds of arms and overcome divisions” plaguing the world, from the Middle East to Ukraine, Africa to Asia.

The pontiff's “Urbi et Orbi” — “To the City and the World” — address serves as a summary of the woes facing the world this year. As Christmas coincided with the start of the 2025 Holy Year celebration that he dedicated to hope, Francis called for broad reconciliation, “even (with) our enemies.”

"I invite every individual, and all people of all nations ... to become pilgrims of hope, to silence the sounds of arms and overcome divisions,'' the pope said from the loggia of St. Peter's Basilica to throngs of people below.

The pope invoked the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica, which he opened on Christmas Eve to launch the 2025 Jubilee, as representing God’s mercy, which “unties every knot; it tears down every wall of division; it dispels hatred and the spirit of revenge.”

He called for arms to be silenced in war-torn Ukraine and in the Middle East, singling out Christian communities in Israel and the Palestinian territories, “particularly in Gaza where the humanitarian situation is extremely grave,” as well as Lebanon and Syria “at this most delicate time.”

Francis repeated his calls for the release of hostages taken from Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.

He cited a deadly outbreak of measles in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the suffering of the people of Myanmar, forced to flee their homes by “the ongoing clash of arms.” The pope likewise remembered children suffering from war and hunger, the elderly living in solitude, those fleeing their homelands, who have lost their jobs, and are persecuted for their faith.

Pilgrims were lined up on Christmas Day to walk through the great Holy Door at the entrance of St. Peter’s Basilica, as the Jubilee is expected to bring some 32 million Catholic faithful to Rome.

Traversing the Holy Door is one way that the faithful can obtain indulgences, or forgiveness for sins during a Jubilee, a once-every-quarter-century tradition that dates from 1300.

Pilgrims submitted to security controls before entering the Holy Door, amid new security fears following a deadly Christmas market attack in Germany. Many paused to touch the door as they passed and made the sign of the cross upon entering the basilica dedicated to St. Peter, the founder of the Roman Catholic Church.

“You feel so humble when you go through the door that once you go through is almost like a release, a release of emotions,'' said Blanca Martin, a pilgrim from San Diego. "... It’s almost like a release of emotions, you feel like now you are able to let go and put everything in the hands of God. See I am getting emotional. It’s just a beautiful experience.”

Hanukkah, Judaism’s eight-day Festival of Lights, begins this year on Christmas Day, which has only happened four times since 1900.

The calendar confluence has inspired some religious leaders to host interfaith gatherings, such as a Hanukkah party hosted last week by several Jewish organizations in Houston, Texas, bringing together members of the city’s Latino and Jewish communities for latkes, the traditional potato pancake eaten on Hanukkah, topped with guacamole and salsa.

While Hanukkah is intended as an upbeat, celebratory holiday, rabbis note that it’s taking place this year as wars rage in the Middle East and fears rise over widespread incidents of antisemitism. The holidays overlap infrequently because the Jewish calendar is based on lunar cycles and is not in sync with the Gregorian calendar, which sets Christmas on Dec. 25. The last time Hanukkah began on Christmas Day was in 2005.

Christians in Nineveh Plains attended Christmas Mass on Tuesday at the Mar Georgis church in the center of Telaskaf, Iraq, with security concerns about the future. “We feel that they will pull the rug out from under our feet at any time. Our fate is unknown here,” said Bayda Nadhim, a resident of Telaskaf.

Iraq’s Christians, whose presence there goes back nearly to the time of Christ, belong to a number of rites and denominations. They once constituted a sizeable minority in Iraq, estimated at around 1.4 million.

But the community has steadily dwindled since the 2003 US-led invasion and further in 2014 when the Islamic State militant group swept through the area. The exact number of Christians left in Iraq is unclear, but they are thought to number several hundred thousand.

German celebrations were darkened by a car attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg on Friday that left five people dead, including a 9-year-old boy, and 200 people injured. President Frank-Walter Steinmeier rewrote his recorded Christmas Day speech to address the attack, saying that “there is grief, pain, horror and incomprehension over what took place in Magdeburg.” He urged Germans to “stand together” and that “hate and violence must not have the last word.”

A 50-year-old Saudi doctor who had practiced medicine in Germany since 2006 was arrested on suspicion of murder, attempted murder and bodily harm. The suspect’s X account describes him as a former Muslim and is filled with anti-Islamic themes. He criticized authorities for failing to combat “the Islamification of Germany” and voiced support for the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

Barry reported from Milan. Associated Press writers Melanie Lidman in Jerusalem, Rashid Yehya in Teleskaf, Iraq and David McHugh in Frankfurt, Germany contributed to this report.

Richard Perry, record producer behind 'You're So Vain' and other hits, dies at 82

ENT

Richard Perry, record producer behind 'You're So Vain' and other hits, dies at 82

Next Article

Pope urges 'all people of all nations' to silence arms and overcome divisions in Christmas address

Desi Bouterse, a dictator convicted of murder who twice ruled Suriname, has died at 79

Azerbaijani airliner with 67 people onboard crashes in Kazakhstan leaving 32 survivors

Fate of Trump’s Cabinet picks unclear as Republicans prepare to take power in Senate

Russia targets Ukrainian energy infrastructure on Christmas Day

News Digest 7 a.m.

King Charles III is set to focus on healthcare workers in his traditional Christmas message

1,000-yard rushers are keeping pace with 1,000-yard receivers for a change in the NFL