Jack Douglas Isn't Dead. Modern Production Is.

Jack Douglas died on a Monday night in May, and the silence that followed was louder than anything Pro Tools ever spit out of a laptop speaker. He was 80. Lymphoma took him, which is the kind of blunt, ugly fact Douglas himself would have preferred over some sanitized press release. The man spent his life chasing truth in sound, the least we can do is tell the truth about how he left.If you don't know the name, you know the records. Toys in the Attic. Rocks. Get Your Wings. Double Fantasy. That's not a discography, that's a load-bearing wall in the architecture of rock and roll. Pull those albums out and the whole building shifts. Douglas produced them, engineered them, bled into them, and made them sound like a bar fight breaking out in a cathedral.The Kid From the Record PlantDouglas came up at the Record Plant in New York City, scrubbing floors and patching cables before anybody handed him a fader. He rose through the ranks the old-fashioned way, by being smarter and more stubborn…