Meet an unlikely bad boy

In the hierarchy of rock prestige, singers and lead guitarists are at the top of the heap, record producers are somewhere in the middle, and arrangers are down there with roadies and tour accountants.

So what did Jack Nitzsche do to get himself a career retrospective CD, most of whose 26 tracks feature his work as an arranger?

For one thing, Nitzsche, who died in 2000 of cardiac arrest at age 63, lived like a singer or a lead guitarist. He indulged in the excesses of the rock lifestyle, took up with actresses (Carrie Snodgress) and singers (Buffy Sainte-Marie, his wife for a time), got arrested here and there, and generally assumed an aura of eccentric hipster cool.

He also was in the right place at the right time, hooking up with such upward-bound engines as Phil Spector, the Rolling Stones and Neil Young. And he ultimately transcended the role of arranger, becoming a producer, songwriter, recording artist and, finally, an Academy Award-winning film composer.

“The Jack Nitzsche Story: Hearing Is Believing,” out this month on London-based Ace Records, isn’t the definitive overview of this broad career. Because of licensing expenses and restrictions, some of Nitzsche’s most notable work is absent -- his landmark “Performance” film score, the Stones songs featuring his piano playing (“Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing in the Shadows”) and choral arrangements (“You Can’t Always Get What You Want”), such Spector classics as Ike & Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High,” and Young’s Buffalo Springfield track “Expecting to Fly.”

In relying on lesser-known work, though, the collection gains the element of surprise, and still demonstrates Nitzsche’s distinctive touch. Classically trained and rock-’n’-roll inclined, he was an admirer of Stan Applebaum’s arrangements on records by the Drifters and other Leiber & Stoller R&B; acts, and he would call on that sensibility in his role as a key architect of Spector’s “wall of sound” -- represented on “Hearing” by the Righteous Brothers’ typically majestic “Hung on You.”

Even in his earlier, more anonymous assignments in the early 1960s, Nitzsche often managed to assert his individuality. In Bobby Darin’s “Not for Me,” a crazed piano solo drops in from nowhere. He similarly shook up conventional proceedings behind Frankie Laine and Eddie Hodges with incongruently aggressive guitar leads. And Jackie DeShannon’s “Needles and Pins,” which Nitzsche co-wrote with Sonny Bono and also arranged, formed an early blueprint for the folk-rock genre.

The artists represented on the CD form a remarkably diverse roster -- Doris Day and Stevie Wonder, Tim Buckley and Graham Parker, Marianne Faithfull and the James Gang. But when it comes to a Nitzsche oeuvre, the key name is Jack Nitzsche. The album opens with his instrumental “The Lonely Surfer,” which made the Top 40 in 1963, and ends with his closing theme from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

In his own music (film scores and instrumental albums such as “St. Giles Cripplegate”), Nitzsche conjured an atmosphere and mystique entirely his own. It’s a musical world that all but demands a second Nitzsche retrospective.