Riff: ‘She Told Herself She Couldn’t Die Because She Had To Write His Story’

Illustration by Tom Gauld

If his life had gone just a bit differently, Curt Boettcher might have been another Brian Wilson. Joseph Gordon-Levitt might be playing him in a modern-day biopic. College students would steal and hoard their parents' copies of his records. As it stands, Boettcher — a pop-music producer whose heyday was the late '60s — now survives in rock history mostly as a liner-note credit. He could have been, but never was. Yet he enjoys a godlike status among a select group of music fans, for whom obscurity is more enticing than fame.

Boettcher started out as a golden boy. In the early '60s, just barely out of his teens, he released two albums with a folk act called the GoldeBriars. By 22, having landed in Los Angeles, he was producing hits for Tommy Roe and the Association, making him an early architect of a vocal pop sound we've either come to love or unfairly detest. As a vocal arranger, he would craft cat's-cradle harmonies; as a producer, he set bubble gum in resin, laying track after track until featherweight tunes felt as dense as paperweights (though always with something slightly off: choirboy vocals with a demon-child aspect). If you have ever slow-danced to "Cherish" by the Association at a wedding, you have Boettcher, in part, to thank, or to blame.

His biggest break came when Gary Usher, a staff producer for Columbia Records, heard him recording in another studio down the hall. "I'm over at Studio Three West with Brian Wilson," Usher said in a 1988 interview. "All of a sudden, I heard a sound, and the instant I heard it, I froze, just like someone had thrown a bowling ball at me. . . . And Brian looked at me, I looked at Brian, and we both said simultaneously, 'What is that?' " The two raced down the hallway to find "this little kid with an earring." Usher, who would eventually persuade Columbia to hire Boettcher, said he was "light years" ahead of Wilson.

The two collaborated on an album called "Present Tense" under the name Sagittarius, while, by 1968, Boettcher had put together a group of his own: the Millennium, a project as ambitious as the name suggests. Thanks to Usher's patronage, Columbia gave Boettcher and company plenty of leeway; the band's debut album, "Begin," is said to have cost more than $100,000, making it, reportedly, the most expensive rock record the label had ever produced. Those who heard "Begin" loved it. But not many did; it flopped spectacularly.

The Millennium wouldn't play live. Their singles missed the U.S. charts. Columbia lost interest. Internal tensions broke up the band, and Boettcher never fully recovered. In 1972 he released a solo record, but it was a commercial failure. He recorded an album with a group called California, but it was shelved. In 1979, he oversaw a 10½-minute disco remix of the Beach Boys' "Here Comes the Night," which was about as good as you would expect.

It's tempting to give Boettcher a messianic cast — the world just wasn't ready for his vision; he just wasn't made for these times — but I think the truth is sadder and more mundane. He may have been a genius, but he wasn't a hustler, and he also had terrible luck. In the '80s, he tested positive for H.I.V. In 1986, his air-conditioner sprang a leak and his carpets developed mildew. About a year later, having developed a lung infection, he checked himself into a hospital, where he died of a heart attack on June 14, 1987, at 43. Not famous and not remembered — not by most, anyway.

At the time of Boettcher's death, at least one person was doggedly searching for him: Dawn Eden, an 18-year-old student at New York University. Raised mostly by her mom in Texas and New Jersey, Eden had been obsessed with pop music since age 10, when she began visiting the D.J.'s at the local Top 40 radio station after school. While her college dorm mates revered Prince and Bruce Springsteen, she was hanging out in a '60s revival scene, romanticizing an era she never lived through. Eden only knew about Boettcher through a friend whose father had been a D.J. in the '60s. The first time she heard the opening chords of "It's You," the first single from "Begin," she got goose bumps. It wasn't just the music. It was the person the music pointed to.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 9, 2013

An earlier version of this article omitted part of the title of a book by Dawn Eden. It is "My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds With the Help of the Saints" (not merely "of Saints").

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