Producer and band manager Gerry Bron has died at the age of 79.
He worked closely with Uriah Heep for many years. He gave the band their name, managed their affairs and served behind the desk for their 1970 debut album Very ‘Eavy, Very ‘Umble, then every subsequent release until 1980′s Conquest.
His label Bronze Records was home to acts including Heep, Motorhead, Colosseum and the Damned. Bron also worked in the mainstream pop arena with Manfred Mann and Gene Pitney.
His son Richard tweeted: “Very sadly my father passed away yesterday morning very unexpectedly. Rest in peace Dad – we all love you.”
Bron was a controversial figure in the history of Heep. Earlier this year he told Classic Rock‘s Dave Ling how he aligned himself with keyboardist and lead songwriter Ken Hensley: “Ken and I were a great team. I didn’t get on that well with the rest of the band.”
But Heep frontman Mick Box once said of him: “He was very, very open-minded about everything. If you wanted to try something and it was in the realms of what he considered to be sensible, he’d try it and sometimes to great effect, or sometimes you’d try it and he would develop it.”
In 2004 Bron told DMME: “My feeling is that by being a manager and a producer you get better results, because part of production – if it’s good production – is management. Actually, they ought to go together, and I’ve never worked any other way.”
An interviewer once asked Bron the question: what do you think is your greatest achievement in life?
He replied: “I suppose that when you die, when you finally leave something behind, I feel I’ve made a series of records that were successful and I think it’s nice to have success. I’m very keen to see other people succeed, I get a lot of pleasure out of people doing well. And I feel I’ve done a little bit of that myself as well. But my greatest achievement – I’ve never really thought about it. Keeping my wife happy, probably.”
Bron is survived by his younger sister, actress Eleanor Bron. A memorial Facebook page has been set up to share memories of the man and his work.
-Classic Rock Magazine
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