Wolf Run Productions

Gimme Some Truth: The Making of John Lennon's Imagine Album https://share.google/OHgbFLrEtaS3fVDMZ

This film won a Grammy award for longform video. I was the online editor, post production coordinator, and audio technician. Only the producers and the artists get the iconic gramophone statue, but I got a certificate. Wish I could find it.

Gimme Some Truth: The Making of John Lennon's Imagine Album Behind-the-scenes footage to document the production of one of John Lennon's most enduring works. A fluid context of conflict, community, and craftsmanship.

I’ve learned a lot about Lennon… but never from this perspective.

In 1968, a woman came home from a vacation to find her husband sitting with another woman in her house. She didn't scream. She didn't cry. She asked if they'd like to join her for dinner. What she did next over the following 47 years left behind something far more powerful than revenge.
It was a warm spring day in 1968. Cynthia Lennon had just returned from a two-week holiday in Greece. She was tired from traveling. She was looking forward to being home.
She walked into Kenwood — the grand house in Weybridge that she and John had shared for years — and something felt wrong. The lights were on. The doors were unlocked. But the house was quiet. No sign of Julian, their five-year-old son. No sign of the housekeeper.
Then she heard something. A muffled sound from one of the rooms.
She found them there. John Lennon and Yoko Ono, sitting together, both in bathrobes, having spent the night. Yoko looked up and said, casually, "Oh, hi."
And Cynthia — stunned, heart breaking, the world dropping out from under her — did not scream. Did not throw things. Did not cry in front of them.
Instead, with a calm that surprised even herself, she invited them to join her for dinner.
She later said she regretted the words as soon as they left her mouth. John simply said, "No thanks." She left the room and quietly broke down.
That was the end of six years of marriage.
The divorce that followed was not gentle. John initially tried to blame Cynthia, claiming she had been unfaithful with a man named Roberto Bassanini, a contact she had made through family in Italy. Cynthia denied it. The truth became impossible to hide when Yoko became pregnant with John's child. Cynthia countersued. John offered her £75,000. "That's like winning the pools for you," he told her over the phone. "So what are you moaning about?"
In the end, the settlement was £100,000, custody of Julian, and a small ongoing payment.
Cynthia took what was hers. And she left.
She did not sell stories to the newspapers. She did not go on television to tear him apart. She did not try to destroy the image of the man the world worshipped. She simply picked up her son and moved forward.
History often forgets what happened next — or rather, who showed up.
Paul McCartney refused to pretend Cynthia didn't exist. While the rest of the Beatles world moved on with John and Yoko, Paul drove out one afternoon to visit Cynthia and Julian at Kenwood. He arrived at the door holding a single red rose.
"I'm so sorry, Cyn," he told her. "I don't know what's come over him. This isn't right."
He stayed for a while. He joked gently about their own futures, making her laugh in the middle of one of the hardest seasons of her life. And on that drive out to see her, something had begun to form in his mind — a melody, a few words.
He had been thinking about Julian. A five-year-old boy whose father had just walked away. A little boy who didn't understand why his family had broken apart.
The song started as "Hey Jules."
It became Hey Jude.
"Take a sad song and make it better."
One of the greatest songs ever written came from a man refusing to let a woman and her child feel completely abandoned.
Years later, Cynthia moved to North Wales, enrolled Julian in Ruthin School, and eventually opened a restaurant called Oliver's Bistro — a place where she cooked, waited tables, and worked early mornings to late nights. She built something quiet and real out of the rubble of her former life.
While John filled the front pages of every newspaper in the world, she peeled potatoes and helped her son with his homework.
In 1978, she published her first memoir, A Twist of Lennon. John tried to block it. But it was not a book of revenge. It was warm and human and written without cruelty. In 2005, she published a second book, simply called John. This one went further — she wrote about the violence, the infidelities, the difficult years. And even then, even in the hardest passages, there was more love in her words than anger.
She did not want to destroy the myth of John Lennon.
She wanted people to understand the man.
When John was shot and killed on December 8, 1980, Cynthia did not use the moment for herself. She grieved — for the father of her son, for the boy she had fallen in love with at art college in Liverpool, for the man he had been before everything changed. She focused on Julian. She helped him through the kind of loss that has no clean ending.
She kept doing what she had always done.
She stayed. She held things together.
Cynthia Lennon died on April 1, 2015, in Mallorca. She was 75 years old. Julian was by her side. Paul McCartney remembered her with warmth and tenderness. Ringo Starr offered a message of peace. And Yoko Ono herself wrote that Cynthia had been a great person and an extraordinary mother.
There is something the world often gets wrong about this story.
Cynthia Lennon is not a footnote in Beatles history. She is not the sad first wife left behind by a more interesting story. She is proof that it is possible to walk through tremendous pain without letting it turn you into someone who causes pain in return.
She had every reason to be bitter. Every reason to be loud about it.
She chose something harder.
She chose to heal.
And in choosing that — in raising Julian with steadiness and love, in writing honestly rather than viciously, in living quietly rather than loudly — she left something behind that will outlast almost every headline ever written about the Beatles.
You can go through the worst kind of loss and still come out with your dignity fully intact.
Cynthia Lennon proved it.

~Humans of Club

At the USC commencement for Marshall Business School, I got to be the showrunner. Coach Pete Carroll was the keynote speaker and also stood to present diplomas for a time. He also presented a bit of a problem. Of the four stages where the presentations took place, the line for his got out of hand. Everyone wanted their graduation picture with Pete. We handled it by pausing the procession briefly and playing a USC promotional video while we realigned the graduates.

The program went smoothly, aside from a couple of technical glitches (equipment unrelated to our production) during the diploma presentations. A VERY few graduates (out of 2300) didn't hear their names read by computerized voice while they were on the big screens but all-in-all a successful show call.
What a privilege to work at this historic venue. I even got to cue the lighting of the iconic flame.
Again, thanks to Mark Wood Entertainment & Production for the opportunity.

Tomorrow, I'll be working the USC commencement ceremony at the L.A. Coliseum. This year though, I won't be making the announcements, I'll be calling the show. That means I'll be standing on a platform out there by the cameras, in communication with all the production teams, giving them cues to make sure everything runs in order.
Wish me luck.
Thanks to Mark Wood Entertainment and Production for the opportunity. (That's Mark, lower-left)

New Mac Studio M2 Ultra

I'm thrilled! I finally got a player that handles both DVD-A and SACD multichannel discs with my surround system without rewiring.
In the early 2000s, I attended a recording industry seminar at the Beverly Hilton. There I met one of the featured speakers, Elliot Scheiner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliot_Scheiner

Aside from being an accomplished record producer, he is one of the foremost proponents of the multchannel music format and has remixed many classic albums for it. Notably, he did Eagles' Hotel California but also artists like Steely Dan, Elton John, Billy Joel and the seminal digital recording, The Nightfly by Donald Fagen.
Scheiner set a standard for the placement of instruments, vocals and their effects throughout the surround soundfield. One of his devices is that the center channel (which in movie theaters for instance, is mostly only dialogue) contains primarily lead vocal, drums and bass... all dry, ie. without effects like reverb. When listened to soloed (without the other channels) it sounds like you are standing right next to the singer in the studio.
Sometimes for live recordings, Scheiner would put the listener virtually in the middle of the band. Imagine the singer and rhythm section arrayed in front of you but the horns, strings and background vocalists to the rear.
Famously, Pink Floyd toured with a gigantic quadrophonic sound system. When I saw the 1973 DSOTM show at Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, there were TWO quad systems- one for the pavilion and one for the lawn section. I remember stacks of A7 cabinets some facing in, some facing out at the corners of the building and even more at the top of the hill on each side. The recorded sound effects... the cash registers, the clocks, the footsteps, the voices, the synths... all swirled around the entire concert venue.
You can have that in your living room.

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- YouTube Ray Wolf, a native of Copley, Ohio, a small rural township outside of Akron, has been performing as a vocalist and musician since the age of twelve. As a per...

Another masterpiece of production. Sold a lot of records, made a lot of money.

https://americansongwriter.com/the-album-todd-rundgren-produced-to-mock-the-boss-i-didnt-care-if-it-succeeded-or-not-i-just-wanted-to-make-fun-of-bruce-springsteen/?fbclid=IwY2xjawOF3j1leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFOVjVnT1Bla0xhNVF3T1hMc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MghjYWxsc2l0ZQEyAAEeOpzQYTmZ5eIyfDvPczEett_l2KlbmFIKdLAbeBwA9NfCud7R4yMqamqB3a4_aem_gFq0gjpPjgL3PUre0BDd_g

The Album Todd Rundgren Produced To Mock The Boss: “I Didn’t Care if It Succeeded or Not; I Just Wanted To Make Fun of Bruce Springsteen!” Todd Rundgren once produced an album with the set goal of making fun of Bruce Springsteen. Find out which album that was.