Shel Talmy, Who Produced the Who and the Kinks, Dies at 87

Shel Talmy, the American-born record producer who helped unleash the id of the British Invasion with a raw, grinding sound on proto-punk salvos like “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks and “My Generation” by the Who, died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87.

His death was announced in a post on his Facebook page, where he had been sharing detailed reminiscences about many of his past recordings with a long list of acts, which also included Manfred Mann, Chad & Jeremy, the Easybeats and a teenage David Bowie (who at the time was using his given surname, Jones).

Mr. Talmy’s climb to the top of the British music scene actually began in Los Angeles, where Mr. Talmy, who was born in Chicago, had lived since his teens. In 1962, he was working as a recording engineer at a studio in Hollywood when he headed for London for what he expected would be a five-week vacation, hoping he might scrape together enough work there to pay for the trip.

Before he left, his friend Nick Venet, who produced the Beach Boys for Capitol Records, offered him the acetates of some of his hit records to help Mr. Talmy drum up work. In a 2012 interview with Finding Zoso, a fan site devoted to the Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, whom Mr. Talmy used on many sessions, he recalled that Mr. Venet had told him: “Help yourself to my discs, whatever you want to use you can use. You can tell them it was yours.”

Once there, Mr. Talmy passed off hit records like “Surfin’ Safari” as his own in a meeting with Dick Rowe of Decca Records. “I thought, what the hell,” he said in an interview with the music writer Richie Unterberger, “I’m not going to be here long, I might as well be as brash as possible.” By the end of the meeting, he said, Mr. Rowe had told him, “You start next week.”

Mr. Talmy had already notched his first hit, “Charmaine,” a country-inflected number by the Irish vocal trio the Bachelors, when his ruse became obvious. But, by that point, he was on his way.