Joel Sill:

I don’t know if you knew him but Joel Dorn died this morning. He went to his doctor’s office with an eye pain and collapsed with a massive heart attack that took him. If you didn’t know Joel you missed something. He was one of a kind. He traveled his own road but was happy to take you along if you were real. He produced some great records. Not many people knew he was deaf in one ear and would check his mixes twice, once on the left and once on the right each time with his good ear. He lived his life like he mixed his records, there was no middle, no center, no compromise, just being honest with what he had. He worked as head of A&R at Atlantic for Ahmet and Jerry but couldn’t take the corporate bullshit and went back to the streets. Lance Freed and I went to see him in New York and pitch him songs when he was producing Bette Midler or Roberta Flack or the Manhattan Transfer or someone and we walked into his office. He looked healthy and clear. His office didn’t have a scrap of paper or a sound system. I asked why so neat and he said he’d been robbed the night before, "that’s the only way my office gets cleaned up". We came back about 2 months later to pitch some more tunes and the first thing he asked was "do you guys have any blow"? Lance said "I thought you cleaned up", Joel said "I did but I got a call from the devil, now what about the blow and have you got any hits"? He was a wonderful person, a great father, a great producer (the only producer of the year 2 years in a row) a great DJ and an amazing friend who saw the world in a unique way and was able to share it the way he saw it. He will be missed. The long and winding road is a little shorter without him.