George Marino obit

George Marino, Legendary Mastering Engineer, Dies

He worked at New York’s Sterling Sound for almost 40 years and on albums from the likes of Stevie Wonder, Metallica, Whitney Houston and Arcade Fire. 

He was not on the list.

George Marino, an engineer who mastered such classic albums as Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy and Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction, died Monday after a yearlong bout with lung cancer. His age was not immediately available.

A three-time Grammy winner, Marino joined Sterling Sound in 1973 and worked at the New York mastering facility ever since.

“Sterling Sound and the music industry as a whole has suffered a tremendous loss,” the company said in a statement. “Words cannot express the sorrow we feel. George was family to us all, and we will miss him dearly.”

Marino mastered an untold number of albums — AC/DC’s Highway to Hell, Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet, Metallica’s 1991 eponymous release, Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head, Whitney Houston’s Whitney and Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs, which won the 2011 Grammy for album of the year, were among the highlights. He also mastered some of the annual Grammy nominee CDs for the Recording Academy.

A guitar player, Marino landed his first job in the industry as a librarian and assistant at Capitol Studios in 1967, then apprenticed in the mastering department, helping cut rock, pop, jazz and classical albums. When Capitol closed its New York studio, he joined the fledgling Record Plant, eventually becoming a partner in the recording-mastering studio, before heading to Sterling Sound.

“R.I.P. George Marino, we will miss you,” guitarist Joe Satriani tweeted.

Over the course of Marino's nearly 40 years with Sterling, he mastered and/or remastered albums by Kurban (band), AC/DC, Cat Stevens, Led Zeppelin, Guns N' Roses, Metallica, DIO, Cheap Trick, Arcade Fire, Whitney Houston, Coldplay; Cyndi Lauper; Journey; Kiss; Mötley Crüe; The Cars; Bon Jovi; Arctic Monkeys; Dan Fogelberg; Iron Maiden; Fountains of Wayne; Incubus; Joe Bonamassa; Jimi Hendrix; Joe Satriani; Michael Bublé; Weezer; Leonard Cohen, My Morning Jacket, The Tragically Hip, 3 Doors Down, Alice Cooper, Billy Squier, Cinderella, M-Squad, Sarah Brightman, The Psychedelic Furs, Tommy James and the Shondells, Bob Dylan, John Mellencamp, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ringo Starr, Santana, Josh Groban, Southside Johnny, Willie Nile, Elvis Presley, Fall Out Boy, Ozzy Osbourne, Cheap Trick, Blondie, Hanson, Jimmy Page and hundreds of others.

Marino mastered many of John Lennon's and Yoko Ono's albums, one of them being Double Fantasy with producer Jack Douglas. Double Fantasy had been out a few weeks when Douglas and Lennon decided to have a song they had just finished, Yoko Ono's "Walking on Thin Ice", mastered with Marino at Sterling Sound for a single release. On the evening of December 8, 1980, after finishing up a session at the Record Plant, Douglas said to Lennon "See you in the morning" as they planned to have breakfast together at 9am before heading to Sterling, but John Lennon was gunned down 20 minutes later on his way back to the Dakota.