Legendary producer Jack Richardson dead at 81

Jack Richardson (R) and his son Garth.

Legendary Canadian music producer Jack Richardson died on May 13 after a lengthy illness. He was 81.

Richardson, known to his friends as “The Bear,” became famous recording the Guess Who and through his breakthrough work with Alice Cooper and Bob Seeger in the late ’60s and early ’70s, which made him one of most successful music producers in Canadian history.

“Jack Richardson was not only a creative innovator, in the entertainment industry” wrote his partner and longtime friend Bob Ezrin in a press release, “but he also brought a new level of technical expertise to a burgeoning industry and through teaching and mentoring for over half a century raised the level of quality of all Canadian music production and engineering.

“Jack began as a musician, playing bass in The Westernaires and later The Bobby Gimby Orchcestra and became a groundbreaking creative executive at McCann Ericson Advertising where he met his future partners and where he discovered and first produced the Guess Who,” Ezrin added. “He and his partners left the agency and pooled their personal resources to form Nimbus 9, the soon to be world-renowned production company and record label, and to sign and record the Guess Who, helping them become the highest selling group in the world at the time. To the world, Jack symbolized the new Canadian music business: powerful, positive, tireless, intelligent, innovative and excellent. In 2002 the Juno Award for Producer of the Year was renamed The Jack Richardson Award.

“In the mid 1980s he retired from active production and became a professor in the Music Industry Arts program at Fanshawe College in London, Ont., and also taught at the Harris Institute in Toronto. In 2003 he was awarded the Order of Canada for his unique contribution to Canadian Arts and Culture.”

Richardson is survived by his wife of 62 years, Shirley, his son Garth, who followed in his footsteps producing the likes of Rage Against the Machine and Nickelback and co-founded the Vancouver-based Nimbus School of Recording Arts with Ezrin, and his daughters Brooke, Tracy and Kelly. His oldest son Craig died in 2009.
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