Phil Ramone, 1934–2013

last updated 8 January 2015

Phil Ramone shaped the sound of modern music. Over more than half a century, the prolific producer and engineer masterminded chart-topping albums by Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Paul McCartney, Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Carly Simon, Stan Getz, and countless others. His talent for drawing out great performances was so legendary that he was even hired to engineer Marilyn Monroe’s famously breathy rendition of “Happy Birthday” at President Kennedy’s televised 1962 Madison Square Garden party. Ramone later called the event “the most fun I’d ever had,” but he wished Monroe could have performed the song in his studio. “She comes out and sings that song like it’s never been sung before or since,” he said, “and all we have is some crummy 16 mm film footage of it.”

Ramone grew up in New York City, and his musical talent and dedication were apparent from an early age, said the Los Angeles Times. “While most 10-year-olds were out playing ball, I was inside playing the violin,” he recalled. Ramone studied at the Juilliard School, but soon drifted from classical music to jazz and pop and apprenticed at a Manhattan recording studio. In 1958, he co-founded his own studio, A&R Recording, and “built a reputation as a versatile engineer, working on pop fare like Lesley Gore, as well as jazz by John Coltrane and Quincy Jones,” said The New York Times. His greatest partnerships were with Billy Joel and Paul Simon. He picked up one Grammy in 1976 for his production work on Simon’s LP Still Crazy After All These Years, and another in 1980 for Joel’s 52nd Street, and named his sons—William and Simon—after the singers. “I always thought of Phil Ramone as the most talented guy in my band,” said Joel. “He was the guy no one ever, ever saw on stage.”

Ramone was happy to remain in the background, said The Times (U.K.). “The record producer is the music world’s equivalent of a film director,” he wrote in his memoir. “But unlike a director (who is visible and often a celebrity in his own right), the record producer toils in anonymity. We ply our craft deep into the night behind locked doors.”