Dayton Burr Howe's nickname "Bones" has stuck with him for most of his life, from his early days working with Elvis Presley to his later years collaborating with the 5th Dimension and Tom Waits. He earned it from his classmates at Sarasota High School, who called him that because of his lanky, near skeletal, frame.

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Howe and his family moved to Sarasota when he was 8. As an adolesecent, Howe loved jazz and spent much of his time learning to play the drums, a youthful passion that became a vocation. Not long after he left Sarasota for good, Howe became part of the foundation of late 20^th-century American popular music. He was one of Los Angeles’ top sound engineers, record producers and performers during the 1950s, '60s and '70s and, later, he became one of Hollywood’s most sought-after music coordinators, earning abundant commercial and critical accolades. But he’s still not a household name like his peers Phil Spector, Quincy Jones and close friend Lou Adler.

“He’s an essential figure in the sonic reality that was birthed out here,” says L.A.-based rock historian Harvey Kubernik. “His imprints and fingerprints are on all these terrific performers this town created.”

The list of major acts with whom Howe worked closely as an engineer, recorder, producer or performer includes Elvis, Frank Sinatra, the Mamas and the Papas, the Association, the Turtles, Waits and the Fifth Dimension. He coordinated the music for Back to the Future, Stand by Me and dozens of other major motion pictures.

All the success hasn’t changed him. Kubernik describes Howe as a “soft-spoken Southern gentleman.” By all accounts, Howe, who’s now 90 years old, is a friendly and modest character. His 1969 Grammy for Record of the Year for the 5th Dimension’s “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In (The Flesh Failures)” sits on a bookshelf in his home, and his more than two dozen gold and platinum records lounge in a nearby box.

Never a schmoozer or publicity hound (which might explain why he declined to be interviewed for this story), Howe was content to be a “doer,” an attitude that enabled him to create a body of work that rivals anyone who has ever sat behind the board at a recording studio. That ethos dates to his childhood in Sarasota.

Howe was born into a prosperous Minneapolis family on March 18, 1933. His father Burr Howe served as an ambulance driver during World War I before becoming a prominent stockbroker. His mother, Ann Elizabeth Hankinson, was an early-20^th-century debutante and the 1929 Howe-Hankinson union received extensive coverage in the society pages of Twin Cities newspapers. Bones was the couple’s first child; another boy, Stanley, came along three years later.

The Howe family moved permanently to Sarasota in 1941 and took up residence on Siesta Key. According to Minneapolis publications, the Howe family had long ties to the Sarasota area, having spent portions of several winters here during the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, the city of Sarasota had just 11,000 residents.

Howe and his brother attended The Out-of-Door Academy, where Howe was a fixture on the honor roll and became involved with numerous extracurricular activities. He participated in music and theater projects while competing on the swim team for coach Agnes Jeter, who ran Camp Yonahlossee in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, one of the country’s oldest summer camps for girls, for more than 60 years. In seventh grade, Howe won Out-of-Door’s annual award for scholarship and captained his eighth-grade team to victory on field day.

He went on to attend Sarasota High, where he continued his academic excellence and expanded his involvement in after-school activities. He joined student government and served in the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps. He also participated in the school’s music program, while also spending tireless hours working on his own drumming skills.

Now known as “Bones,” Howe began performing in several local jazz combos. After graduation, Howe headed to Atlanta to study electrical engineering at Georgia Tech. For a time, he also participated in Georgia Tech’s Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps program. Ever a fixture of the society pages, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune made note of Howe’s return for Christmas break each year. In January 1955, for example, a story appeared complimenting the drumming skills he showed off at a ball for fraternity and sorority members.

While in college, Howe started paying his dues as a jazz drummer, performing six nights a week at gigs in Atlanta clubs. Touring musicians who came through the area encouraged him to bring his talents to Southern California, including legendary jazz drummer Shelly Manne, one of his heroes.

Upon graduation, Howe did just that. He turned down a job with the Howard Hughes Corporation and moved to L.A. in 1956 with plans to get into the music business. Over time, his ties to Sarasota grew thinner. In September 1952, Howe’s father died at age 54. Three years later, his mother remarried and moved back to Minneapolis.

Howe, meanwhile, pounded the Southern California pavement until lodging his foot in the door at Radio Recorders, one of L.A.’s major studios. Initially, he spent his days editing radio programs for the Armed Services Radio Network, but the depth of his talents soon shone through. His background in electrical engineering gave him an unmatched technical virtuosity. He displayed a unique talent for cutting tape on recordings, removing hiccups in otherwise excellent takes.

Howe was also among the first to embrace stereo recording technology. This, combined with his skills and experience as a musician, meant he was a perfect middleman between the two sides of the glass in a recording studio. 

“Bones came to pop music through the side door of jazz,” jazz journalist Kirk Silsbee says. “He was a part of the jazz fraternity as much as any of the musicians. They appreciated that about him—that he had been a working musician and knew how to record the drums.”

“His jazz background informed the clarity of his music,” Kubernik says of the approach Howe developed as an engineer and producer. “He liked to record live and be in the room with the artists, not lodged behind the console. He liked distinct-sounding instruments.”

Not long before moving to Los Angeles, Howe saw Elvis Presley play at Florida Theatre—now the Sarasota Opera House—in downtown Sarasota. He paid $1 to get in and didn’t like what he saw. Howe, a jazz aficionado, was not into the countrified sounds that Elvis brought to town. But their paths later crossed at Radio Recorders. Howe recorded a series of Elvis sessions in late 1956 and early 1957 with producer Stephen Sholes and engineer Thorne Nogar. Rather than a standard one-off session, Elvis booked the studio for a month and cranked out piles of new content, including “All Shook Up.” During those sessions, Howe gained a new respect for Presley’s abilities and commitment to his craft. At the same time, Elvis marveled at the way Howe breathed new life into otherwise flawed takes with his tape-cutting acumen.

In 1958, Howe landed his first major hit as an engineer with Sheb Wooley’s “The Purple People Eater.” As was often the case, the engineer’s name was not listed on the single, an omission that contributed, in part, to the relative obscurity of these essential collaborators in the making of popular music. Still, by the end of the '50s, Howe was one of the most respected audio engineers in the business, even if he wasn’t a household name.

“Engineers often were considered ‘backroom boys,’” Kubernik says. “There wasn’t this preoccupation with the roles of the engineer that we see now. Howe was doing his job and would be in an occasion trade photo, but everybody was preoccupied with the lead singers in the rock bands and the sensitive singer-songwriters.”

Key to Howe’s success was his willingness to say yes to everything. He worked long days before heading home to his family in the San Fernando Valley. By that time, Howe had three children, two boys and a girl, from his first marriage. (In 1965, after a divorce, he married actress Melodie Johnson, now Melodie Johnsone Howe, an accomplished mystery writer.)

In 1961, audio recording pioneer Bill Putnam hired Howe and brought him to United Western Recorders, which gave Howe the opportunity to work with what was then the most cutting-edge recording equipment in the world. Over the next 18 months, Howe engineered Frank Sinatra’s Sinatra Swings album and recordings by Bobby Vee and the Everly Brothers. He also developed the pop sensibilities that informed the rest of his career. Highlights during Howe’s time at United-Western included spoken word recordings by Lenny Bruce and Jack Kerouac, as well as sessions by jazz legend Ornette Coleman.

In 1962, Howe made the unprecedented decision to become an independent engineer. He soon started collaborating with producer Lou Adler. Together, Howe and Adler helped create the dreamy Southern California pop sound of the mid-1960s, building sweeping, soaring sounds into the surf rock of Jan and Dean, the folk rock of the Mamas and the Papas and singer-songwriter Barry McGuire, and the down-home groove of Johnny Rivers. For a time, Howe served as both drummer and engineer for the Grass Roots, a band that Adler formed out of his studio cadre.

The Adler-Howe team trapped on tape some of the era’s most iconic songs. At the time, they worked closely with members of the Local 47 Hollywood Musicians Union, a group consisting of drummer Hal Blaine, keyboardists Don Randi and Larry Knechtel and bassist Joe Osborn. They came to be known as the “A-Team,” but have since gone down in history as “The Wrecking Crew.”

During his time with Adler, Howe began working his way into the producer’s chair. He took Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and transformed it into radio gold with the Turtles. He collaborated with the Association to create the vibrant “Windy” and lush chamber pop of “Never My Love,” both of which became massive hits. By the end of 1967, Howe went his own way as a producer and found his muse in an L.A.-based vocal group introduced to him by Johnny Rivers. Rivers had described them as “the Black Mamas and the Papas.”

Known initially as the Versatiles, the five-piece group adopted a psychedelic flair and became known as the 5th Dimension. Much like what he’d accomplished with the Mamas and the Papas, Howe took a fantastic group and built the architecture of top 40 radio around them, crafting something that was simultaneously familiar and new.

A big part of the 5th Dimension’s success was the ability to find material that played to the group’s smooth, soulful voices. The band's first hit, in fact, was a song that the Mamas and the Papas had previously recorded called “Go Where You Wanna Go.” They went on to score major hits with “Up - Up and Away,” which earned the group a half-dozen Grammys, as well as “Stoned Soul Picnic.”

Howe’s most significant accomplishment with the 5th Dimension was the group’s signature song, “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In.” Howe united two sections of the musical Hair into one powerhouse single. Initially, he planned “The Age of Aquarius” as a single, but decided it wasn’t a complete song, just an introduction. But he’d gone to see Hair with his wife Melodie and was impressed by the crowd response to the “Let the Sunshine In” refrain in “The Flesh Failures,” a song toward the end of the show. He spoke with the show’s creators—James Rado, Gerome Ragni and Galt MacDermot—and got their approval to stitch the pieces together into one song.

Howe’s initial cut ran nearly five minutes. He agreed to allow that version to be released as a single, but feared that the song’s length would scare off radio execs. He was right. In fact, a chance meeting at Hollywood hot spot Martoni’s convinced Howe to whittle down the song’s length. Radio programmer Bill Drake came over to Bones and Melodie’s table to say hello. He told Howe that he loved “Aquarius” and thought it would be a hit, but he believed it was too long to reach its full potential on the charts.

After dinner, Howe went into the studio, recut a more radio-friendly, 3:50 version of the song and made history. “Aquarius” sold more than 3 million copies, spent six weeks at No. 1, and earned Grammys for Record of the Year and Best Vocal Performance by a Group.

While working with the 5th Dimension, Howe crossed paths with Elvis Presley again for one of the most significant events in Presley’s career.

With Steve Binder, Howe served as co-producer for Elvis’ 1968 comeback special on NBC, one of the most legendary televised music productions in history. Coming off Elvis’ interminable—and often derided—turn as a movie star, the show reintroduced his dynamism as a live performer.

Howe’s role in the special was so significant that he’s depicted by actor Gareth Davies in Baz Luhrmann’s recent Elvis film. In the scene, Presley, played by Austin Butler, convinces Binder (played by Dacre Montgomery) and Howe to work on the made-for-television program.

“Bones walked me through the sessions—Elvis singing live while doing knee kicks or wanting the lights down for ‘Memories,’” says Kubernik, who wrote the liner notes for a 50^th anniversary box set devoted to the special. “He’s right there guiding the sessions. Elvis Presley knew how essential Bones Howe was to his career, which then set up the 1969 to 1977 world of Elvis Presley.” That’s when Presley returned to the road and adopted a more contemporary sound and look.

In the early 1970s, Howe also began mentoring a young Tom Waits, producing his first three albums. He placed sparse instrumentation and upright bass over Waits’ observational ballads, giving them a lived-in, after-hours feel that called to mind Howe’s background in jazz and spoken word recording. Kirk Silsbee first met Bones at a Tom Waits concert at the Roxy on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip.

“This older guy was sitting across from me, stuck out his hand and said, ‘My name is Bones,’” Silsbee recalls. Sislbee asked him about working with Waits. Howe spoke about Waits’ unique ability to absorb ideas for songs from conversations with strangers, a skill that helped the young musician articulate the kinds of things that people felt and remembered, but couldn’t quite explain.

A couple years later, Silsbee renewed his acquaintance with Howe while at a show at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel with a friend.

“There was a couple in front of us, and the man turned around and said, ‘Hi, my name is Bones, and this is Melodie,’” Silsbee said. While Silsbee and Howe renewed their conversation about Tom Waits, Silsbee’s friend started chatting with Melodie about her mystery novels. “We had this crossfire going, with Bones and me talking about music and [my friend] and Melodie talking about Melodie’s work,” Silsbee says.

“When the lights came up after the show, Bones said, ‘Give me your address. I want to send you something,’” Silsbee says. “Two days later in the mail, I got an unopened, original EP that Bones recorded for Lenny Bruce in 1962. Lenny had the idea that he’d sell it at his gigs. Now I own this very rare Lenny Bruce EP, and I treasure it,” Silsbee says.

In the 1980s, Howe began a new chapter in his career when Melodie put him in touch with people in the movie business. Howe wound up coordinating the music for films like Back to the Future, Stand by Me and La Bamba. Initially, he worked independently, but later became a vice president at Columbia TriStar until his retirement in the early 1990s.

While in the business, Howe lived in the San Fernando Valley, but has since relocated to Santa Barbara. Well into his 80s, he performed as a drummer in jazz combos across Southern California and Arizona and has recorded a few albums in retirement, too. At home in Santa Barbara, he took up tennis and helped copy edit Melodie’s books.

Surprisingly, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has never come calling for Howe, despite his remarkable body of work. Kubernik thinks Howe is perfectly fine with that.

“I’d never look at it as something he would be preoccupied with or even care about,” Kubernik says. "Even a nomination would put him under the microscope.”

“Producers are often seen as Svengalis who shape these worlds of sounds while the engineers are day workers who carry out their wishes,” Silsbee says. “But smart producers know that a good engineer can bring their vision to light, and Bones was certainly in the top ranks.”

Featured photo: Bones Howe with 5th Dimension and songwriter and arranger Jimmy Webb at Sound Recorders in 1967 in Los Angeles. / Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images