New book tells the American story of Tommy LiPuma
If someone was going to write a book about legendary producer Tommy LiPuma, Ben Sidran would be the perfect candidate.
So he did it, condensing years of research and around 80 hours of interviews with LiPuma to produce The Ballad of Tommy LiPuma, which was released earlier this week.
But what about that 80 hours of tape?
“To be fair, I rolled tape with Tommy for years, so I have all this incidental, coincidental and specific stuff that went back a very long time,” said Sidran. “It was only the last four, five years that I started transcribing it and talking to Tommy about writing a book. But I have tapes with Tommy that go back 30 years.”
For Sidran, it was a labor of love and not just a tribute to his friend, who passed away in 2017 at the age of 80, but the telling of an unforgettable story and time.
“Tommy passed away a couple years ago and he really represented a classic American record business story in the sense that it told the story of a great guy, but also of an amazing industry, and the industry has collapsed, as we all know,” said Sidran. “So Tommy’s story really traces the rise and, in some ways, the end of this cultural tsunami that we knew of as popular music. Today, one stream on Spotify is worth .006 cents, which means that if you get a…
