McCartney was not in town for I’m the Greatest, but he did help write and arrange the ballad Six O’Clock, featuring the ex-Beatle and Linda McCartney on backing vocals.
Perry had helped make pop history the year before as producer of You’re So Vain, which he would call the nearest he came to a perfect record. Simon’s scathing ballad about an unnamed lover, with Voormann’s bass runs kicking off the song and Jagger joining on the chorus, hit No. 1 in 1972 and began a long-term debate over Simon’s intended target. Perry’s answer would echo Simon’s own belated response.
“I’ll take this opportunity to give my insider’s scoop,” he wrote in his memoir. “The person that the song is based on is really a composite of several men that Carly dated in the ’60s and early ’70s, but primarily, it’s about my good friend, Warren Beatty.”
Perry’s post-1970s work included such hit singles as The Pointer Sisters’ Neutron Dance and DeBarge’s Rhythm of the Night, along with albums by Simon, Ray Charles and Art Garfunkel.
He had his greatest success with Stewart’s million-selling The Great American Songbook albums, a project made possible by the rock star’s writer’s block and troubled private life.
In the early 2000s, Stewart’s marriage to Rachel Hunter had ended and Perry was among those consoling him. With Stewart struggling to come up with original songs, he and Perry agreed that an album of standards might work, including The Very Thought of You, Angel Eyes and Where or When.
“We were at a back table in our favourite restaurant as we exchanged ideas and wrote them down on a napkin,” Perry wrote in his memoir. Stewart softly sang the options. “As I sat there and listened to him sing, it was clear that we both sensed we were on to something,” Perry added.
Perry was a New York City native born into a musical family; his parents, Mark and Sylvia Perry, co-founded Peripole Music, a pioneering manufacturer of instruments for young people.
With his family’s help and encouragement, he learned to play drums and oboe and helped form a doo-wop group, the Escorts, that released a handful of singles. A music and theatre major at the University of Michigan, he initially dreamed of acting on Broadway. Instead, he made the “life-changing” decision in the mid-1960s to form a production company with a recent acquaintance, Gary Katz, who would go on to work with Steely Dan among others.
By the end of the decade, Perry was an industry star, working on Captain Beefheart’s acclaimed cult album, Safe As Milk and the debut recording of Tiny Tim and Ella Fitzgerald’s Ella, featuring the jazz great’s interpretations of songs by the Beatles, Smokey Robinson and Randy Newman.
In the early 1970s, he would oversee Streisand’s million-selling Stoney End album, on which the singer turned from the show tunes that made her famous and covered a range of pop and rock music, from the title track, a Laura Nyro composition, to Gordon Lightfoot’s If You Could Read My Mind.
“I liked Richard from the moment we met. He was tall and lanky, with a mop of dark, curly hair and a big smile, which his big heart,” Streisand wrote in her memoir. “At our first meeting, he arrived laden with songs, and we listened to them together. Whatever hesitation I may have felt about our collaboration soon vanished and I thought, ‘This could be fun, and musically liberating.’”
