Joel Dorn – Take The Shot

Happy Heavenly Birthday to the Late/Great Producer Joel Dorn...

There’s an old swing tune with a lyric that goes “Some cats know.” Record producer Joel Dorn “knew” in a big way. “Joel talked in jazz, walked in jazz and thought in jazz,” Doo-Wop legend Dion DiMucci told me shortly after JD “got his hat” (Lester Young speak for having “checked out,” “split the planet…”) Dion nailed it, but that’s only part of the story – there was his love of classic comedy, (W.C. Fields, Laurel & Hardy, Three Stooges etc…) surrealism, (Fellini and Magritte were among his faves) basketball, photography and cop shows.

JD (AKA The Masked Announcer)- photo by Marilyn Cvitanic

Back in the late sixties/early seventies I used to buy records on the Atlantic label by artists I’d never heard of, simply because Dorn’s name appeared on the back of the jacket. His pedigree was flawless. The artists he produced included Roberta Flack, Max Roach, Herbie Mann, Les McCann and Eddie Harris, Bette Midler, Mose Allison, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Yusef Lateef, Leon Redbone and the Neville Brothers to name a few. Dorn himself, I would later discover years later was just as singular as any of them and seriously funny – Larry David funny.

JD was a great talker, particularly on the phone (um, this is when they were still plugged into the wall...). A call from Joel when he was soaking in the bathtub usually meant you were in for an impromptu marathon or a detour at the very at least. As the water dripped gently in the background he’d read to you from his notebook, in that cool, commanding baritone, a liner note or some individually twisted pearl of wisdom, while his body undoubtedly was turning into an enormous prune.

There were lots of things I agreed with Joel on, from his taste in comedy - Shemp was his Stooge (mine too), to great photography - from the hot flash of Weegee’s eerie street scenes to the jazz portraits and Zen landscapes of his friend, Lee Friedlander. Then there was his infamous musical aesthetic, which helped shape my understanding and taste in music since I was a teenager. But there were a few holes in his Swiss cheese. I’ve gotta admit I was never the biggest Bobby Darin or Peter Allen fan on the block and he’d roll his eyes and groan whenever I’d wax poetic over hippie folk singers like the Incredible String Band, or “out jazz cats” like Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler.

When it came to TV we clearly went our separate ways. I didn’t even own one when I first walked into the offices of 32 Records in 1996 to interview Dorn for my book on Rahsaan Roland Kirk. He basically sent me home and refused to talk to me before I watched Seinfeld three times. After I’d seen the show twice I groaned that it was “nothing more a yuppie version of McHale’s Navy.” “I told you three times!” he growled and slammed the phone down. Somehow the third time was the charm and it hit me like an electronic koan straight to the brain. Suddenly I, like the millions of folks out there in television land, understood that Seinfeld was a perfect paradigm of its time.

Then there's the issue of sports. In my book, sports were for jocks and jocks were square… period the end. Ever since the Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show I had no interest in games - whether football, baseball, basketball or hockey. Hockey was totally out of the question. “The only reason Jews play hockey” I told him, “is to take revenge on their mother.” He liked that and added it to his repertoire of snappy retorts. I once played soccer for a short time in the early seventies after Pele joined the Cosmos, brought to NYC by Nesuhi Ertegun of Atlantic Records! Besides soccer was “the People’s Sport,” played in communist countries around the globe. Years later, when I fell in with jazz musicians in NYC, I found myself awkwardly silent whenever sports came up in conversation. Once I even made the terrible mistake of calling the great drummer, Roy Haynes, for an interview during a Yankees playoff. I'm still looking for that piece of my head he tore off.

Joel was ridiculously funny. He wrote some of the best liner notes that ever graced the page of a CD booklet. True to his love of Seinfeld, his observations had everything and nothing to do with the music. Both his vernacular and writing were heavily peppered with sports lingo. Whenever he spoke highly of someone, they were "at the top of their game." He titled a Rahsaan Roland Kirk release, A Standing Eight (a boxing term for when the ref stops the bout and counts to eight, while determining if one of the fighters is fit to continue). Then there was The Heavy Hitter by Eddie Lockjaw Davis, which featured Kadir Nelson’s great baseball painting “Jock” on its cover. There was also Hit Jazz, with a disc that looked like a hardball and of course the name of Dorn’s most successful record label, 32, was inspired by a number worn by many great running backs from Gayle Sayers to Jim Brown and O.J. Joel once told me the real reason he named the label 32 was that Charlie Parker died with thirty-two cents in his pocket (too bad Phil Schapp is no longer around to verify the story).

But the line of Joel’s that still resounds in my brain to this day, came whenever I vacillated over anything. He’d be right there, like an Old Testament basketball coach in his perpetual blue sweatshirt barking at me to “Take the shot!” I know somebody’s gonna get a good laugh out of this, but I probably learned about confidence and taking charge of a situation from Joel Dorn (the “Bart Simpson of Atlantic Records” as he called himself) more than anyone I’d ever met. When I was thinking about turning an article, I was writing about Rahsaan into a book, he urged me to “Take the shot.” Then he picked up the phone and called Dorthaan Kirk to ask for her cooperation and blessing, which started the ball rolling. By the way, Joel didn’t just “take the shot” on his last opus, the 5CD box set, Homage A Nesuhi, he gave it everything he had. He sent the ball flying into the bleachers, got his hat and suddenly left the stadium to the shock of his family, friends and fans on December 17, 2007.