From:   "Dik de Heer" 
Date:  Tue Apr 22, 2003  1:19 am
Subject:  Born To Be With You : Jack Nitzsche
 
JACK NITZSCHE

Born Bernard Alfred Nitzsche, 22 April 1937, Chicago, Illinois
Died 25 August 2000, Los Angeles, California

Composer / producer / arranger / keyboardist.

Jack Nitzsche was an important behind-the-scenes figure in popular music
for 40 years and developed a career as a film composer that included nearly
three dozen movie scores.

Nitzsche grew up in Howard City, Michigan, which he left at 18 in 1955 to
attend Westlake College of Music in Hollywood. He remained based in the 
Los Angeles area for the rest of his career. After college in 1957 he found work
as a music copyist. He was hired at Specialty Records by Sonny Bono, with
whom he would work extensively over the next several years. He also worked
at Capitol Records and Original Sound Records. At Original Sound, he wrote
"Bongo Bongo Bongo," (a # 78 hit in 1960), an instrumental that was recorded
by Preston Epps as one of the follow-ups to his hit "Bongo Rock".

His first wife, Gracia Nitzsche, sang on several sessions with the Blossoms,
including Duane Eddy's "Dance With The Guitar Man". 

Nitzsche began getting arranging jobs, and when writer/producer Phil Spector
relocated to the West Coast, he went to work with Spector, arranging many of
Spector's hits, among them "He's a Rebel" by the Crystals and "Be My Baby"
by the Ronettes. He also scored his own recording contract with Reprise
Records, which released his instrumental "The Lonely Surfer" in the summer
of 1963. It became a Top 40 hit, and Nitzsche followed it with an album of
the same title, but he did not go on to a successful recording career, though
he did release a few more albums. His next success came with a song he
co-wrote with Sonny Bono : "Needles and Pins", initially a small hit (# 84) for
Jackie DeShannon in 1963, and a US Top 20 hit the next year when it was 
covered by the British group the Searchers. (The song was revived for a chart 
entry by Smokie in 1977 and became a Top 40 hit for Tom Petty and the 
Heartbreakers with Stevie Nicks in 1986.)

Nitzsche's work with Spector stood him in good stead with another British
Invasion group. In the fall of 1964, he played on sessions for the Rolling
Stones album The Rolling Stones, Now!, beginning a long association with
the group that would find him contributing to such Stones recordings as "Play
with Fire," "Paint It, Black," and "You Can't Always Get What You Want"
(choral arrangement).

In 1965, he wrote his first film score, for the low-budget Village of the Giants,
though it would be another five years before he really began to work in films 
consistently. In the meantime, he continued to produce, arrange, and record 
with a wide variety of musicians including Tim Buckley, Bobby Darin, Doris
Day, Marianne Faithfull, Frankie Laine and the Monkees and he had a long 
association with Neil Young. 

Nitzsche got his chance to return to movie work in 1970 with Performance,
starring Mick Jagger. It really launched his career as a composer of film
scores. By 1973, he was working on major studio films like The Exorcist, 
and in 1975 he earned an Academy Award nomination for his music to One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. By the 1980s he was working full-time on film 
scores, averaging two a year during the decade. He got another Academy
Award nomination for An Officer and a Gentleman in 1982, and, with Will
Jennings and Buffy Sainte-Marie (at the time, Nitzsche's wife), he won the
Oscar for best song for "Up Where We Belong," which had already become
a # 1 hit for Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes.

Nitzsche's film work slowed after the early '90s, his last film score coming
with The Crossing Guard in 1995. He died at 63 of cardiac arrest brought on
by a bronchial infection. 

The "Lonely Surfer" Reprise LP (1963) was reissued on CD by Collector's 
Choice in 2001.