Rock Producers With The Most Billboard Hits Of The '70s

Much of what we think of as "classic rock" is guitar-based music of the 1970s, when rock splintered into slightly different divisions like hard rock, arena rock, country rock, jam rock, and power pop. While singers dominated the stage and the guitarists and drummers created a soundtrack for the youth of the age, it's the largely unheralded producers who helped that sound take shape. The mainstream music industry was a relatively small place in the 1970s, and once a producer proved they could help bands hone their sound and get the perfect-sounding record, they tended to get as much work as they wanted, crafting more hit records throughout the decade.

As such, a few producers dominated the times, overseeing the studio process and directing various engineers and studio musicians to create radio-friendly tracks and albums that consumers clamored to buy. These four hitmakers — including Ted Templeman, who discovered Van Halen at a Los Angeles nightclub, and longtime Eagles collaborator Bill Szymczyk — generated a massive volume of songs that made it onto the Hot 100 during the '70s.

After a stint in the moderately successful '60s band Harpers Bizarre, drummer Ted Templeman settled into a job as an in-house producer at Warner Bros. Records in the early 1970s, where he established long working relationships with several major bands. Largely defined by his association with Van Halen, Templeman's '70s output included the groundbreaking hard rock foursome's first two LPs, "Van Halen" and "Van Halen II." But Templeman also possessed enough of a tender touch to lead production on works by singer-songwriters Carly Simon and Nicolette Larson, and three albums for idiosyncratic genre-bender Van Morrison. 

Templeman produced so many albums for the Doobie Brothers that he was virtually a member of the sprawling group, helping them evolve from a jammy, bluesy collective into a pop-rock band. Including hits like Van Halen's "Dance the Night Away," Simon's "It Keeps You Running," Larson's "Lotta Love," Morrison's "Wild Night," and the Doobie Brothers' Grammy Award-winning "What a Fool Believes," Templeman produced more than 30 Hot 100 hits throughout the decade. 

After establishing himself as a forward-thinking studio technician with his '60s band the Nazz, Todd Rundgren carried on multiple, parallel careers in the 1970s. Not only did he release music under his own name and with his band, Utopia, but he also offered up his services as a studio musician and producer. Rundgren produced all of his own '70s albums and those of Utopia, as well as top-selling LPs by then-significant '70s musicians we completely forgot about, like Grand Funk Railroad and Badfinger, and "Bat Out of Hell" by Meat Loaf, a best-selling classic rock album that never actually hit No. 1. He even headed up the work of less bombastic acts as disparate as Daryl Hall and John Oates and the Patti Smith Group. 

Rundgren made both of Grand Funk's No. 1 hits, "The Loco-Motion" and "We're an American Band," plus "Day After Day" and "Baby Blue" for Badfinger, and all of Meat Loaf's '70s hits, including "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." The producer's total 1970s smash count: about two dozen.

Elton John was one of the most commercially and artistically dominant musical figures of the 1970s. While billed as a solo artist, John's output was more of a team effort, as he almost always collaborated with lyricist Bernie Taupin and, in that decade, producer Gus Dudgeon. Responsible for that rich and full yet spacey sound that emphasized John's stellar piano work, Dudgeon produced 11 studio LPs for the musician throughout the decade, from his 1970 self-titled album up through 1976's "Blue Moves." Dudgeon can thus take partial credit, as a producer at least, on nearly two dozen Elton John songs that reached the Hot 100 during that era. 

The producer also landed work from other rock and rock-adjacent stars. Chris Rea's two late-'70s albums yielded the three biggest hits he'd ever have, such as "Fool (If You Think It's Over)," and they were produced by Dudgeon. Kiki Dee, best known for her 1976 duet with John, "Don't Go Breaking My Heart," scored a few hits on her own, all from LPs organized by Dudgeon, who also oversaw production on works by flash-in-the-pan bands like Audience and Shooting Star. Altogether, Dudgeon shepherded just over 30 singles onto the Hot 100.

Thanks to his connection to the Eagles, Bill Szymczyk got plenty of production work in the 1970s. Some of his earliest credits came with bluesy hard rockers the James Gang, such as the minor hit "Funk No. 49," a rock song you've definitely heard but probably can't name. And when their star guitarist Joe Walsh went solo, Szymczyk went along with him, producing "Life's Been Good" and other hits. Ultimately, Szymczyk produced three LPs for the former and four for the latter. He also helmed studio projects for the boisterous and bluesy J. Geils Band as well as Rick Derringer (post the McCoys) and Jay Ferguson (post Spirit). Szymczyk's work appears on Derringer's only hit, "Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo," and Ferguson's sole Top 10 single, "Thunder Island." 

But mostly, Szymczyk helped the Eagles come together and develop their decade-dominating sound. The band responsible for two of the top three best-selling albums ever maybe couldn't have achieved that without the leadership of Szymczyk, who produced all but one of their studio LPs. Add up all those acts' Hot 100 entries, and the number that Szymczyk produced throughout the 1970s is right around 30.