Tandyn Almer

Tandyn Douglas Almer (July 30, 1942 – January 8, 2013) was an American musician, composer, lyricist, and record producer. Almer wrote, co-wrote, or produced numerous songs performed by other artists in the 1960s and 1970s, including The Purple Gang, the Garden Club, Dennis Olivieri, and The Beach Boys.

Almer was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Almer attended a music conservatory in Minnesota, and became fascinated with the jazz of John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Ahmad Jamal. At age 17, he quit high school and moved to Chicago to become a jazz pianist. In the early 1960s he relocated to Los Angeles, where his musical interests shifted to pop and rock. He attended Los Angeles City College.

His most prominent achievement was writing the 1966 Top Ten hit "Along Comes Mary" for The Association. Claudia Ford, wife of Association producer Curt Boettcher, claimed that Almer wrote "Along Comes Mary" as a slow song. Boettcher helped Almer arrange the tune, sang the vocal on the demo, and accelerated the tempo. That version, as provided to the Association, became the group's breakthrough single from their debut album, which Boettcher produced. The two also co-wrote "Message of Our Love," another song on the same album. After the success of "Along Comes Mary", Almer was featured alongside Frank Zappa, Graham Nash, Roger McGuinn, and Brian Wilson on Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, a 1967 CBS TV News feature presented by Leonard Bernstein. Almer's sole commercial release under his own name was a 45 rpm single, "Degeneration Gap", on Warner Bros. in 1969.

In 1970 he produced the Dennis Olivieri album Come to the Party. While a songwriter for A&M Records in the early 1970s, he was introduced to and became friends with Wilson; in a 2010 interview, Wilson characterized Almer as his "best friend." According to musician Joseph Deaguero, who introduced Almer to Wilson, "Everyone thought he was going to be the next Dylan or Elton John. Tandyn was totally an eccentric, but he was in a league of his own. You listen to his music and say, ‘God, this guy was really good.’ ” The two collaborated in the early 1970s on several projects, including an aborted album of re-recorded Beach Boys songs with topical lyrics for A&M and the Beach Boys singles "Marcella" and "Sail On, Sailor".

Almer invented a waterpipe called the Slave-Master, described by Jack S. Margolis and Richard Clorfene in A Child's Garden of Grass as "the perfect bong".

He moved to the Washington, D.C. area in the mid-1970s to work on a film soundtrack; after the project fell through, Almer lived there for the remainder of his life. Although he wrote songs for the annual Hexagon satirical revue and several fake books (consisting of simplified arrangements of popular songs), he mainly subsisted on "intermittent royalty checks." His bipolar disorder often resulted in "erratic mood swings" and abject insomnia; according to Thomas Bernath (a musician who befriended Almer), "He used to tell me the music got better the longer he stayed awake. He didn’t feel like playing until he had been awake for two or three days.” Almer continued to record prolifically, amassing a private collection of hundreds of tapes.

Almer died on January 18, 2013, aged 70, from a combination of illnesses, including atrial fibrillation, congestive heart failure, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Shortly after, Along Comes Tandyn, an album of vintage recordings of his songs, was released in 2013 on Sundazed Records. In the liner notes, Parke Puterbaugh, a former senior editor of Rolling Stone, called Almer “one of the lost and hidden voices of the '60s," adding that Almer "left behind a body of work that's ripe for rediscovery.”