Music producer Rob Fraboni served as best man at Eric Clapton's first wedding, consulted on the mixing of U2's landmark "Joshua Tree" and hangs out with his neighbor Keith Richards.

Fraboni has enough rock 'n' roll tales to fill a book, but he's coming to Minneapolis Aug. 4 to speak before a screening of the Band's "Last Waltz" at the Parkway Theater. He was the producer of the classic movie's soundtrack album.

Although he was raised in suburban Los Angeles and now lives in Connecticut, Fraboni, 60, happens to be one of us, sorta. His mom was from Ely, his dad from Virginia, Minn., and they met in Hibbing. Fraboni's aunt sold her house in Hibbing to the Zimmermans, after their son, Bob Dylan, had moved out East. That's another story. Here are a few of Fraboni's choice tales.

On "The Last Waltz"

Even though engineer/producer Fraboni had worked closely with the Band and Dylan in the 1970s, he went to the Band's 1976 all-star farewell concert as a guest of Clapton. "I helped out Eric. When he was doing his solo in 'Further on Up the Road,' the sound guys were having an argument and his guitar wasn't loud enough in the mix and I just pushed his guitar [volume] up all the way and that caused a surge in the crowd, which kind of amazed me at the time," Fraboni recalled.

At the concert, Robbie Robertson, the Band's leader, asked Fraboni to produce the soundtrack recording. "I spent 18 months doing post-production," he said.

Of course, there were oddities dealing with a cast that included Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Neil Diamond and others. For instance, just before going onstage to perform, Dylan signed a release specifying which three of his songs could be used in the movie. "So he didn't let them roll camera on the other songs," Fraboni said.

When reviewing the concert's tapes, Fraboni discovered a hum on all of Garth Hudson's organ tracks. So Hudson transcribed the entire concert and then re-recorded his parts. "But it took him three months to do what he'd done in one night," Fraboni said.

On being Clapton's best man

Over billiards in England, Clapton lost a bet to his manager, who had proposed that he could get Clapton's name in the British papers the next day. The story: The rock star was going to marry Pattie Boyd, about whom he'd written "Layla." So Clapton called Boyd in the States to propose but when she didn't answer, he phoned Fraboni and dictated a proposal to deliver to Boyd before she could hear the news elsewhere.

Naturally, Fraboni became best man and made the arrangements for the wedding in Tucson, Ariz., where Clapton was about to start a tour. After the reception in a Holiday Inn conference room, the Claptons invited the Frabonis to their room for a drink. "I turned on the radio," Fraboni recalled, "and what was on? 'Layla.' So I filmed them with an 8-millimeter camera dancing to 'Layla' in their room."

On producing Dylan's "Planet Waves" in 1973

"I was 22. It was the first time I'd ever made a record live in the studio. And it was done in four days. Bob said to me, 'I've been carrying this song around in my head for the last five years and I haven't written it down. Now that I go to record it, I don't know how I want to do it.' So we ended up doing five versions of 'Forever Young,' of which two ended up on the record."

Fraboni said Dylan was mercurial, unpredictable -- a triple Gemini who kept changing his mind. He displayed a dry sense of humor and a disdain for chitchat. One night, he had an assistant roll in a TV so he could watch a Barbra Streisand special and asked Fraboni to record the audio.

Dylan never said much to the members of the Band, who backed him up. Said Fraboni: "He'd just start to play the first eight bars in a certain feel and then the Band would jump in. There was no conversation about it. There were no chord charts written out or anything. These guys would just watch his hands [on guitar] and follow him."

On Shangri-La, the studio he designed for the Band

It's now owned by Beej Chaney, guitarist/singer of Minneapolis' legendary Suburbs. The house-cum-studio in Malibu, Calif., is for sale for $4.1 million. Fraboni wouldn't buy it. "Not for that kind of money," he said. "We paid $195,000 for that property in 1975. Elvis had rented the place in the '60s for a couple of years. Mr. Ed, the talking horse, lived in the stable in the guest house in the offseason of the TV series. I just sent Beej a message today because Edward Sharpe is interested in using the place. It might be the last thing recorded there."

On the future of the Rolling Stones

"There's very loose talk about a Stones tour for next year but Charlie [Watts] is not into doing a big, long two-, three-year thing," said Fraboni, who is close to Keith Richards. "It's not very far along except Keith would like it to happen and he's been trying to get Mick [Jagger] into it. If all that crazy stuff hadn't gone down between Keith and Mick over the book [Richards' 2010 memoir "Life"], something might have gone down by now."