Ted Templeman: A Platinum Producer’s Life in Music by Ted Templeman as told to Greg Renoff

450 pp., $19.95, ECW

As an introduction to the often misunderstood art of record production, young Ted Templeman could not have found a better session to observe. Through friends in the music biz, the young singer/drummer found himself in a Capitol Records  studio behind the soundboard. 

On the other side of the glass, Frank Sinatra was recording the song “That’s Life”…and running roughshod over the session’s nominal producer, Jimmy Bowen. Here, the artist was making his own decisions and giving the band directives asking no second opinion. But I mean, hey, it’s Frank Sinatra.

Templeman’s main gig was as member of the sunshine pop group Harper’s Bizarre (they had a hit with a 1967 cover version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The 59^th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy”). But as his desire to perform waned he kept focused on the thought: I could be the Man Behind the Glass. And one that would work with an artist, not let them call the shots.

And he did, forging a successful career for over two decades while he working with Van Morrison (on his #1 hit “Wild Night”), Little Feat, Eric Clapton, Sammy Hager, Aerosmith, Carly Simon, and Nicolette Larson (he admit to nicking the chords for her smash “Lotta Love” from Ace’s “How Long,” while adding a sax solo and disco beat for radio). But readers will likely be most interested in Templeman’s two most successful and longest-lasting collaborations: the Doobie Brothers and Van Halen. 

There’s a lot for fans of the Doobies here. How “Black Water,” a throwaway B-side that no one thought much of, became a #1 nationwide hit after one radio station in Roanoke, Virginia started playing it. Or how an unconfident Michael McDonald – still unsure of his place in the band while supposedly “subbing” for original lead singer Tom Johnston –  thought “Takin’ It To the Streets” would be a flop. Templeman would even dust off his own skin thumping skills, playing on “What a Fool Believes.”

And there’s even more Van Halen stories, right from the beginning when Templeman became their champion after seeing them in a near-empty Hollywood club (“It was like they were shot out of a cannon,” he recalls). He was wildly impressed with the energy and skill of guitarist Eddie Van Halen (“I’d never been as much impressed with a musician as I was with him that night”).

In fact, the world likely would have never had Eddie Van Halen’s signature guitar workout “Eruption” had Templeman not happened to overhear Eddie simply warming up with finger exercise in the studio, then demanding the guitar virtuoso actually record it. 

He was less enthused with singer David Lee Roth’s limited vocal abilities, even going so far as to suggest to some before recording VH’s debut album that the flamboyant front man be replaced with the singer from another band he’s worked with, Montrose. A man by the name of…Sammy Hagar (though it would be years before Templeman saw that switch actually come about). 

A fascinating bit of VH history is how Templeman relays the solo EP he made with Roth while Eddie Van Halen hemmed and hawed on their next record – the smash Crazy from the Heat (with “California Girls” and “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody”)– inadvertently exacerbated tensions within the band, which directly led to Roth’s exit. 

Though his professed naivete about at shock at that outcome seems disingenuous. As his rejection to producing the band’s next record – now fronted by Sammy Hagar – because “it wasn’t really Van Halen” without Roth. Templeman writes that he’d only take the job of the band renamed themselves Van Hagar or something similar. The band declined. And in the words of Larry David, they did pretty, pretty good with Hagar. Better than some of Templeman’s relationships with various Morrisons and Doobies and Van Halens ended up.

Throughout, Templeman also gives a lot of credit to his engineer for many of his records, Don Landee (though that relationship would fray as well). Nevertheless, Templeman (via Renoff) comes off as an engaging and friendly narrator and tour guide behind the making of some of classic rock’s biggest records. 

This review originally appeared at HoustonPress.com