Bill Szymczyk was a year ahead of me at our grade school, junior high school, and high school. He was the producer for BB King's most popular albums.
From Wikipaedia [via HR],
He [Szymczyk] successfully lobbied ABC to let him work with B. B. King, whose own record label was a subsidiary of ABC and who was a long time idol of Szymczyk. After convincing King that he could improve his sound to make him more appealing to a wider audience, King himself agreed to let Szymczyk produce for him.[4] Among the albums he produced for B. B. King are the 1969 live album Live & Well, King's first ever top-100 album. He produced the follow-up studio album Completely Well, which featured "The Thrill Is Gone", the biggest hit of King's career and his signature song. He would continue to produce blues albums throughout the early 1970s for the likes of King and Albert Collins.[5]
Szymczyk was moved several times while working for ABC Records; first to Los Angeles when ABC acquired Dunhill Records and Szymczyk took over production for the West Coast operations, and later to Denver when he decided to form his own label, Tumbleweed Records. He worked for a while as a disc jockey at radio station KFML, and continued to produce albums in New York and Los Angeles, such as the J. Geils Band's 1971 album The Morning After, recorded at the Los Angeles Record Plant. He did extensive work at the Colorado studioCaribou Ranch, where would be the center of his operations for the rest of the 1970s.[3]
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B. B. King
- Live & Well (1969)
- Completely Well (1969)
- Indianola Mississippi Seeds (1970)
- Live in Cook County Jail (1971)