Glen "SPOT" Lockett, the in-house producer and engineer for SST Records throughout the late '70s and '80s, has died at 72 years old. SPOT produced everyone from Black Flag, Minutemen, Descendents, and Hüsker Dü to Misfits' 1983 album Earth A.D./Wolfs Blood and a handful of Saint Vitus records. News of Lockett's death comes from co-owner of SST Records Joe Carducci. We wish Lockett's friends and family all the best at this time.
"I hate to type out the words but… SPOT passed away after 10am today/Saturday (Mar. 4, 2023) at Morningside Healthcare in Sheboygan, Wisconsin," said Carducci. "His nurse told me he woke up alright but later showed no pulse and several attempts to revive him failed. He had cancelled a planned photography exhibit in late 2021 when he found his fibrosis began to impair lung function. Since then he'd been on oxygen and was hoping for a lung transplant, but a stroke about three months ago put him in the hospital.
"I was hoping he was recovering speech but realistically he was not likely at his age and condition to become a candidate for a lung transplant, though that would have solved his health problems. SPOT didn't dwell alot on his personal history but I believe he was born in Los Angeles, grew up in the Crenshaw neighborhood, moved to Hermosa Beach in the mid-70s, moved to his favorite Black Flag tour stop, Austin Texas, in the mid-80s and then to Sheboygan to be near his favorite Celtic music scenes in Milwaukee and Chicago.
"His father was Claybourne Lockett who was a Tuskegee Airman who flew British Spitfires and SPOT told me once his mother was Native American and from New Orleans. His older sister has advanced dementia. SPOT was a musician and writer and photographer who spelled his name in all caps with a dot in the middle of the O. His principal sideline was as a record producer-engineer and an architect of the natural approach to recording a band in the punk era. He started in Hermosa Beach playing and recording jazz and he took the primacy of live jazz playing into recording bands against prevailing attempts to soften or industrialize a back-to-basics arts movement in sound.
"When approaching the mixing board SPOT would assume an Elvis-like stance and then gesturing toward all the knobs he would say in a Louis Armstrong-like voice, 'This is going to be gelatinous!' His recorded work as player and producer is listed at discogs.com. I'll be going through his writing with an eye toward publishing a collection including his writings on jazz for the Hermosa Beach free weekly. He spent recent years writing the novel, Decline and Fall of Alternative Civilization, and producing a radio-like dramatization of it which is online.
"Last year he posted new SPOT music at his bandcamp page. In recent weeks I read off lists of the names of his well-wishers to him and SPOT nodded at the mentions of his friends from around the country and the world."
