ED CHERNEY
In Memorial to Our Friend, Partner and Brother Ed Cherney
Ed Cherney, who passed away in October 2019 at the age of 69, garnered a long list of credits and awards as a producer and engineer during a career that spanned more than 40 years.
His career began to take off when he moved to Los Angeles from his native Chicago in the late 1970s. There, he assisted the legendary team of engineer Bruce Swedien and producer Quincy Jones for eight years, starting with Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall album, before striking out on his own. Over the years his credits grew to include some of the biggest names in music: Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr, the Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, Bob Seger and Bette Midler, among many others.
He won four Grammy Awards, for his work with Bonnie Raitt, Willie Nelson and Buddy Guy. He won an Emmy and eight TEC Awards, and was inducted into the TEC Hall of Fame. In March 2021, The Recording Academy honored Cherney with a Trustee Award at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards.
Cherney founded the Recording Academy’s Producers & Engineers Wing in 2004. The following year, he co-founded METAlliance, which promotes quality standards in the art and science of recording music.
Those are some of the highlights of a long and distinguished career. But what of the man? His engineering and production colleagues at METalliance shared their memories.
“I don’t know how to describe someone who was such a beacon of light. He had the most positive spirit. And it all came from the heart,” says Jim Pace, METalliance executive director. “When the phone rang and you saw it was Eddie, it was a call you always took.”
“He was one of the bright lights in my life,” agrees Al Schmitt. (Sadly, Al also passed, in April 2021). “We chatted almost every single day that I was heading into Capitol Studios. I was always in a good mood after I talked to Eddie.”
“The thing I most remember about him was his laugh,” says Frank Filipetti. “When he told a joke and then started laughing, everybody cracked up, even if the joke wasn’t funny—which very rarely happened.”
“He was relentlessly kind and considerate. He was so clear about how he saw us as professionals,” says George Massenburg. “He would be so happy if you got a gig, he’d want to talk to you about it. And he’d be the last guy on Earth to call one of your clients and take a gig from you. That really impressed me.”
Cherney was unique, says Elliott Scheiner. “I can’t think of anybody that was like him in this business. Ed was a mensch, in every regard.”
He was also selfless, says Chuck Ainlay, “After he started the P&E Wing, he had to stop working to run it for a year or two. Who else would give that much of themselves to the cause, to get health insurance and royalties for producers?” Anyone else’s career might be over after a two-year hiatus, he says. “But Ed came back raging with more great music.”
It was Bonnie Raitt’s 1989 album Nick of Time, produced by Don Was, that first brought Cherney to the attention of many of his peers. “I knew of Eddie, but I wasn’t aware of the greatness of his work until that point,” says Filipetti. “It became such a hit that it was obvious that this was a master at work. He’s never disappointed since.”
Ainlay agrees: “It stayed in my car—the cassette!—on repeat. Not only was the music great, but sonically it fit the music. It was an unbelievable album.”
Niko Bolas recalls working as an assistant at Record One: “I always remember when the tape boxes would come in and they sounded better than the other stuff we were setting up for overdubs. I’d see Ed’s name on the track sheet. That’s where I first learned who he was.”
He continues, “I cut an album once and it went to him to mix it. I heard my tracks come back and whenever I’d hit play it took me a while to remember that I was supposed to be listening to the engineering, because I was so lost in listening to this great record. You realize that somebody engineered all those sounds so that you didn’t notice there was any engineering. Eddie was really good at disappearing.”
Ainlay remembers a METalliance event at Capitol Studios where he and Cherney were demonstrating how they record a band. “I had all these ideas of the microphones I would use, and Eddie said, ‘Let’s not worry about that. Let’s ask the kids what they think we should use, put them up and see how it sounds.’ I learned a lot from that, because the choices that we made weren’t necessarily choices I would have made. But Eddie made everything sound good. And it was just so effortless.”
“The assistants all liked him, because he had a sense of humor and he treated them like gentlemen,” says Schmitt. “If they had a question, no matter what it was, he would answer it. There was no secret to what he did. He was an open book.”
Schmitt recalls visiting Cherney on a session. “The piano sounded different, but the way it fitted in the track was perfect. He showed me; he had the two mics, X-Y, over the high end of the strings. It was unlike any miking I’d seen on a piano. But it fitted in; there was a clarity there. I was amazed. If someone told me to do that, I would tell them they were nuts.”
“His passion, politically and as a humanitarian, was followed up by the way he treated people,” says Filipetti. “He treated people, even those like me who he sometimes didn’t agree with, with the utmost respect. I will never forget that. Many times, in today’s world, you’re dealing with people who, if you believe a certain way, they don’t want to talk to you, or they don’t respect you. He really respected people, and his passion was amazing.”
Scheiner worked on two Crossroads Guitar Festival broadcasts with Cherney, he says. (Cherney and Scheiner were among those nominated for an Emmy Award for outstanding sound mixing for the 2004 festival, which was broadcast on PBS.) “The first one we did, there was a problem with timecode. I was freaking out. Ed stood behind me and started to rub my shoulders and said, ‘There’s nothing to worry about. This will all be fine.'”
“I had a session that was completely coming unglued,” Bolas also recalls. “I had it so loud in the control room because it was the only way I could clear the noise of everybody else out of my brain. I started feeling this thing on my shoulders. I turn around and there’s Ed and he’s smiling. He said, ‘Niko, how come YOU always get in trouble?’ I laughed so hard I stopped worrying.”
“When people ask about what makes a great engineer, people talk about their miking or their intuitive sense of the sound of an instrument,” says Filipetti. “But in reality, a great engineer knows how to keep a session going. It’s about psychology and about personality. When the room is down, being able to pick it up. When the tension rises, being able to dissipate it. When things are going bad, misdirecting and moving into another area.
“Ed’s intuitive sense of that was so unbelievable. He just naturally did this and would come up with the right joke or the right thought at the right time or be able to bring that session to its potential.”
As Cherney commented in a previously unpublished Pro Sound News magazine interview from 2011:
“You find this thing you want to dedicate your life to, and it becomes a compulsion to do it. You were lucky enough that you figured out what your special purpose in life was! Now, it doesn’t dictate how you’re necessarily going to make a living doing it, but for its own sake—for the sake of the art—you want to excel at it. You want to grow and you want to be able to do it well, whether you make two pennies doing it or not—and hopefully it works out, you can make a living and have a life doing it.”
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