Larry Keyes was a recording engineer from 1963 to 1998. He was originally with Columbia Records and continued on when it was later bought by SONY. Some of the artists he worked with include Barbra Streisand, Paul and Linda McCartney, and Leonard Bernstein. Larry earned a Gold Record for his work on a reengineering of Janis Joplin recordings and was nominated for a Grammy for recording Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra performing "The Planets". It's still widely considered one of the best sounding classical recordings by vinyl enthusiasts. He was also a member of the Board of Governors of NARAS.
Larry‘s son, Jim, recalls that his father was one of the first engineers to mix in quad. "He did the quad mix of Leonard Bernstein‘s "The Mass". Upon hearing the mix, Bernstein autographed the session score, handed it to Dad and said "This will be valuable after I‘m dead". The day Bernstein died, Dad came home and said, 'Well, now we‘ll see.'"
For a short time in the 1970s, Larry and another Crestwood resident, Don Puluse, started their own company, Ax Electronics. Well-known band Chicago was their first client. The band came to Crestwood, and Larry and Don recorded them on the stage at P.S. 15. Larry eventually returned to Columbia Records. He passed away in 2007.
Renowned producer, Elliot Mazur, sent the following to Jim when his father passed away. "I first started working with Larry in the late '60s. I was producing various records and, at that time, Larry was a staff mixer at Columbia. Larry was a musician and an engineer. He knew and loved music and was able to draw his love of music into his work. Very few engineers are musicians, and very few engineers have Larry's technical chops and patience."
"We put together a 2 LP package called Joplin In Concert. It was the first posthumous Janis Joplin recording. The tapes we found ranged from audio cassettes up to 16 track masters. Our goal was to make each side of the record feel like a live show. To do this, Larry had to set up something like six machines. We would start one and on cue start an applause loop and then the next tune. We had to rehearse this many times. Each tune required real-time mixing too. Any mistakes would require a new start or a series of edits. The result was amazing, and it stands up today. In recent years, other engineers have remixed the same tapes, and they do not sound as good as Larry's mixes from the '70s."