Jack Douglas, Renowned John Lennon and Aerosmith Producer, Dead at 80

New York, NY (May 13, 2026)—Producer and engineer Jack Douglas, whose career began at New York’s Record Plant and went on to work with John Lennon, Aerosmith, Cheap Trick and a host of others, has died. He was 80.

Douglas’ family broke the news in a social media post, posting separately that he succumbed to complications from lymphoma. “As many of you who follow him know, he produced great music and lived a colourful life. We know that he touched many of your lives. He will be missed,” the family wrote.

Born in the Bronx, New York City, on November 6, 1945, Douglas started out as a folk musician songwriter and performer, moving to England and playing in several bands before returning to his hometown. In 1964, he contributed a jingle for Robert F. Kennedy’s Senate campaign. He went on to study at New York’s Institute of Audio Research, where he was in the first class to graduate.

After an unsuccessful attempt to get a job at A&R Recording in New York after graduation, Douglas walked into Record Plant and was hired on the spot—as a janitor, the same career path every aspiring engineer took at the famed facility. He was first recognized for his engineering chops at there while working with Pete Townsend on Lifehouse, an aborted project that would eventually emerge as 1971’s Who’s Next. Douglas soon advanced through the ranks, and before long was working on records by the likes of Miles Davis, the James Gang, Alice Cooper, Cheap Trick, Alice Cooper, Patti Smith, Supertramp, the New York Dolls and, perhaps most notably, Aerosmith and John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

After being tapped to engineer Lennon’s 1971 album Imagine, produced by Phil Spector, Douglas employed an old upright piano he’d discovered in one of the building’s storage closets while working as a janitor. The piano, also favored by Townsend during his brief time at Record Plant, became known as “the John Lennon piano.” Douglas would subsequently produce the final project by Lennon and Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy, which was released just a few weeks after Lennon’s murder in 1980. The album won Douglas a Grammy Award.

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Douglas was sometimes referred to as the sixth member of Aerosmith, a soubriquet earned from engineering and producing the band’s breakthrough classic hit albums of the 1970s. Aerosmith’s debut LP had been something of a disappointment, so the band’s managers, Steve Leber and David Krebs, approached Bob Ezrin to produce the follow-up. Ezrin instead recommended Douglas, who had previously worked with the New York Dolls, whom Aerosmith’s managers also handled. The relationship produced Get Your Wings (1974), Toys in the Attic (1975), Rocks (1976) and Draw the Line (1977), which all went multi-platinum. As Martin Porter and David Goggin wrote in their book Buzz Me In, “Only at Record Plant could a janitor go platinum.”

Douglas maintained many long relationships with his artists, reuniting with Aerosmith to work on albums in 2004 and 2012, for example. His relationship with Lennon, which began with the pair swapping stories about Liverpool, extended throughout the former Beatles’ life. Indeed, he was working with Lennon on Ono’s “Walking on Thin Ice” just hours before Lennon was shot. Douglas also worked on multiple projects with Patti Smith, Blue Öyster Cult, the New York Dolls and Cheap Trick. Indeed, he was instrumental in getting Cheap Trick signed, produced their debut studio project, then produced their breakthrough 1978 live album, At Budokan, which was mixed by Jay Messina. He worked with the band on a string of subsequent albums as well.

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In a statement after his death, his family wrote: “He most enjoyed being with his family—his wife, his four children and five grandchildren—and he died peacefully, with us surrounding him. He lived an incredible life and was an amazing storyteller. He was very, very funny and goofy and loved to tell jokes. He loved what he did, and he worked til the very end. We will miss him a lot.”