CRAIG LEON
Craig Leon (born 7 January 1952) is an American-born record producer, composer and arranger currently living in England. Leon was instrumental in launching the careers of many recording artists including The Ramones and Blondie. Active in pop music production from 1974–1998, Leon has focused on classical composition, orchestration, arrangement, and recording from 1998 to the present. (More from Wikipedia)
Bomp! Records released a single for the Poppees in March 1975 (just the third single for Bomp!), “If She Cries” b/w “Love of the Loved”. The young producer for the 45, Craig Leon, who also played piano on the “B” side, was the producer for the seminal first album by Ramones the following year.
(December 2010)
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Mick Farren starts his liner notes for Destroy All Music by noting: “On August 16th, 1977, at least two events occurred of major rock & roll significance. Elvis Presley died on his Graceland toilet, and the Weirdos cut three songs for Bomp! Records, ‘Destroy All Music’, ‘A Life of Crime’ and ‘Why Do You Exist?’. The session – in a home studio in Tujunga – was produced by Craig Leon, who had overseen the Ramones’ first album. It was a hot damp night in Los Angeles, and, by all accounts, the weather was much the same in Memphis.
“Even the Weirdos copped to the fact that the death of Elvis was fractionally more important than their first record. ‘The King Is Dead’ was scratched into the metal stamper of the Bomp release ‘Destroy All Music’ that became a classic of late 1970’s L.A. punk, and prompted critic Mark Deming to call the band ‘one of the best and brightest American bands of punk’s first wave.’”
(March 2017)
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Madeline Ridley of SS-20 has a short performance called “Monitoring Madeline for Two Decades and Other Scenes” on a double-LP compilation album of alternative rock, spoken word, and poetry called English as a Second Language (1983) that has an amazing 84 cuts. Others represented on the album include Charles Bukowski, Dave Alvin of the Blasters, John Doe and Exene Cervenka of X, Henry Rollins and Chuck Dukowski of Black Flag, Tito Larriva of the Plugz, Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles, Jeffrey Lee Pierce of the Gun Club, record producer Craig Leon, prominent DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, and Kim Fowley.
Her work is also on two other similar compilation albums, Voices of the Angels (Spoken Words) and Neighborhood Rhythms (Patter Traffic) that feature many of the same artists and were released in the same time period.
(December 2017)
