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Elliot Mazer—the prolific engineer and producer who worked on records by Neil Young, the Band, Linda Ronstadt, and more—has died, Rolling Stone reports. He died at his San Francisco home on Sunday (February 7) of a heart attack, Mazer’s daughter Allison confirmed to RS. She added that her father had been battling dementia for years. Mazer was 79.
Mazer’s career as a producer stretches back to the early 1960s, when he worked on Dave Pike’s Bossa Nova Carnival LP and jazz records by Clark Terry. As the ’60s came to a close, Mazer began to work with singer-songwriters whose style was increasing in popularity at the time. He shaped albums by Gordon Lightfoot, outlaw country icon Jerry Jeff Walker, and Linda Ronstadt before his working relationship with Neil Young began.
Mazer first produced Young on 1972’s Harvest, which remains one of Young’s most popular albums. It was Mazer who assembled a group of Nashville studio musicians to record the album in Nashville and at Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch barn in Redwood City, California. Following Harvest, Mazer worked with Young on a number of records, including the 1973 live album Time Fades Away, the long-lost Homegrown (which was recorded in 1975 and finally officially released last year), 1983’s Everybody’s Rockin’, and more.
Mazer’s work as an engineer and producer continued for decades. In 1978, he engineered the Band’s iconic live album The Last Waltz. He spent the ’80s and ’90s producing a wide variety of groups, from Dead Kennedys to the Dream Syndicate to Emmylou Harris. Mazer’s family has asked that all donations be given to MusiCares.