Mack Emerman, 89, founder of Criteria Recording Studios, where acts including Eric Clapton, James Brown and the Bee Gees made some of their most famous records, died Tuesday in Miami of complications from pneumonia, said his daughter Bebe Emerman.
The Criteria studio, which he opened in 1959 in North Miami, has been operated by the Hit Factory since 1999. About 250 gold or platinum singles and albums were recorded at Criteria, which became known as Atlantic Records South when Emerman formed an alliance with label co-chairman Jerry Wexler and producer Tom Dowd.
The records include "Layla" by Clapton's group Derek and the Dominos, James Brown's "I Feel Good," "Eat a Peach" by the Allman Brothers Band and portions of huge 1970s hits such as "Saturday Night Fever" by the Bee Gees, Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" and "Hotel California" by the Eagles.
"I used to see 'recorded at the Hit Factory Miami' written in the back of some of my favorite CDs," singer Nelly Furtado said in 2008. "When I finally cut an album there, I understood why. The whole building has this creative magic."
Maxwell Louis Emerman was born in 1923 in Erie, Pa., and began playing jazz trumpet while attending Duke University. With his wife and two daughters, he came to South Florida in 1953 to work in his father's candy business in Hialeah. He soon began recording live jazz and set up a studio in his garage, running cables into the family living room, where the musicians performed, his daughter said.
With a loan from his father, he built Criteria, regarded as Miami's first world-class recording studio. Other musicians who recorded there included Black Sabbath, Bob Dylan, Gloria Estefan, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Lenny Kravitz, Lynyrd Skynyrd and R.E.M.
"Cults are not so unfathomable; they represent the dire extreme of something we all do, which is seek meaning and connection in our lives, all the while making bad decisions and not always knowing what we’re getting ourselves into.
...The utopian alternative they offer is short-lived at best, a perverse con or death sentence at worst."
"I’ll have the alfalfa sprouts and a plate of mashed yeast.”
"Five years after leaving the group and hearing a bunch of people say, 'That sounds like a cult,' I’m ready to admit I was brainwashed."
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When asked why the public was hungry for personal advice from a public person, she proposed that an increasingly mobile society had heightened feelings of isolation.
"There is a lot more searching for answers these days," Brothers told the Washington Post in 1979. "And a lot more answers too. But we're missing friends and kinship roles. So you rent a friend. Like Dr. Joyce Brothers."
...One demographic that did not seek her advice was her own family.
"She totally loses her objectivity," her husband told UPI in 1985. "With her family, she's abysmal."
Readers don’t pick up self-help books just to ruminate on life’s dilemmas, but to be guided to solutions. The new series of self-help books published by the London-based School of Life, co-founded by the Swiss-born popular philosopher Alain de Botton, echoes the school’s lofty approach to problems, claiming to be “intelligent, rigorous, well-written new guides to everyday living.” Yet to peruse the School of Life’s calendar of classes is to fall into a vortex of jargon pitched somewhere between the banal banter of daytime talk shows and the schedule for a nightmarish New Age retreat,...
