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.
