Terry Brown
Terry couldn’t have asked for a better musical education, working in “four of the top independent studios in London” during the height of the UK pop revolution of the sixties. He started at Olympic Studios, where he learned the ropes before tackling ‘Substitute’ for The Who in his first engineering role, under the careful eye of Pete Townshend. From there he’s worked with Procul Harum, Manfred Mann, Joe Cocker, Traffic, The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band… you name it, he’s worked with them all.
It was a twist of fate that brought Terry to Toronto. At the time he was working at Morgan Studios, “on Willesden High Road, Monty Babson and Barry Morgan, they were very successful,” he recalls. A call out of the blue led to his involvement in a series of commercials for Labatts beer, with organist and arranger Doug Riley, who had come over from Canada for the project. Problems with unions ensued – “Labatts were on strike, and the musicians’ union were threatening to go out in sympathy because they were not Canadian musicians who played on these commercials, so they were going to have to rerecord it all,” he explains. “So I jokingly offered to come over, and he seriously accepted!” Three days later, he was on a plane to Toronto.
It didn’t take long for Terry to put down his roots, much to his surprise. “It was so exciting, the energy here was just phenomenal,” he explains. “I ended up recording an album with a band called Motherlode, we had a Top 10 hit with ‘When I Die’, so that kind of cemented it for me.” With Doug Riley, Terry saw the opportunity to set up a studio. “The studios over here, when I came over to do the recording, were just that much farther behind the London studios. I think we were eight-track at Morgan, and here it was still four-track,” says Terry, who opened the doors of the Toronto Sound Studios in November 1969. “By the time we’d got it finished it was sixteen-track, and then, within a year of starting, we moved up to twenty-four tracks, so there was this huge jump in the track count. You could really take on a multi-track project, it changed everything.”
In the four years that followed, Terry made his name as an engineer and producer of repute. He knew Vic Wilson “from the biz,” and when Vic’s new band was having troubles with completing their first record, Terry got the call that started his long and highly productive relationship with Rush, lasting until ‘Signals’ in 1982. Where the “Broon” nickname came from, Terry does not know. “I’m not really sure who was the king of the nicknames, I think it was Geddy but they were all into it!” he laughs. “Big Bill Broonsie was one that Neil used to sort of throw at me a few times, he was an old blues player, from the Bayou I think, I don’t know what the connection was!” Terry collaborated with a number of other bands, including Max Webster and Klaatu, the project of one of his assistant engineers John Woloschuk. Klaatu’s second album ‘Hope’ earned Terry a Juno award for ‘Best Engineer’!
When Terry’s time with Rush came to a halt, there were plenty of takers for his skills. In 1986 he produced the first album for Blue Rodeo, ‘Outskirts’. It was a huge success in Canada and spawned the hit single, ‘Try’. The following year he worked with Cutting Crew, recording ‘(I Just) Died In Your Arms’ which was a hit all over the world, taking the US Billboard Number 1 slot. Later he mixed albums for Fates Warning, Moist, the Killjoys and Matthew Good, and each time, he drew on his experiences with Rush. “There are situations where I work with bands where I have been the producer and I’m still pulling in the input from the band, because I’d always felt that was important, but then that’s probably a throwback to those days with the boys anyway.” Terry has kept his hand in with the more progressive end of the scale. He worked on Dream Theater’s 1999 album ‘Scenes From A Memory’, and in 2004 he produced on the self-titled debut album for Tiles. He’s also kept friends with Nick Van Eede of Cutting Crew, co-producing his new project ‘Grinning Souls’.