Frank Farian, Milli Vanilli mastermind, RIP

Frank Farian, the dance music producer who found stardom with Boney M and earned notoriety as the mastermind of Milli Vanilli, died Tuesday at his home in Miami. His death was confirmed by Farian's publicists. He was 82 years old.

Farian specialized in gaudy, glitzy disco, patenting a formula with Boney M's 1970s hits "Daddy Cool," "Rasputin," and "Mary's Boy Child/Oh My Lord." Each of these songs was a cornerstone of Eurodisco but only "Rivers of Babylon" -- a number-one hit throughout the continent -- cracked the American Top 40, so he adapted his formula for the age of MTV with Milli Vanilli. Hiring a pair of models as frontmen for his studio singers, Farian kept his focus on big beats and melody, a standard practice for Farian that nevertheless created a huge controversy when it was brought to the spotlight by Los Angeles Times reporter Chuck Philips in 1990. The duo's Grammy for Best New Artist was revoked, sending Farian into a temporary silence that he'd later break by producing No Mercy, whose "Where Do You Go" became a Top Ten hit in 1996. 

Born Franz Ruether on July 18, 1941, in Kirn, Germany--he'd occasionally use his birth name as a songwriting credit--Frank Farian was raised by his mother after his father died while serving in World War II. Once he fell in love with rock & roll, he renamed himself Frank Farian and abandoned his training as a chef to pursue a career as a performer. "Shouting Ghost," a record he released with Frankie Boys Schatten, didn't make waves in 1964 but his solo cover of Otis Redding's "Mr. Pitiful" gave him a foothold within the music industry.

Farian never quite abandoned his solo ambitions. He released records all through the 1970s, having a hit with a Schlager rendition of Dickey Lee's mawkish country tune "Rocky," and continued to do so in the 2020s, releasing a version of Kool & the Gang's "Cherish" featuring his daughter Yaninan. He reoriented himself as a producer in 1975 with the release of "Baby Do You Wanna Bump." an interpolation of Prince Buster's ska standard "Al Capone" with the titular phrase pasted over a familiar rhythm. Instead of releasing "Baby Do You Wanna Bump" and its accompanying album 'Take the Heat off Me" as his own, he issued it under the name Boney M., then hired Bobby Farrell to act as the frontman for a group featuring Liz Mitchell, Marcia Barrett, and Maizie Williams.

Farrell never sang on a Boney M. record but that did nothing to stop the group's momentum. "Daddy Cool" became a number-one hit in Germany, spilling over to the rest of Europe and the UK, launching a string of Top Ten hits that ran until the end of the decade.

Farian spent much of the 1980s adrift but he did have a few noteworthy ventures, such as producing Meat Loaf's "Blind Before I Stop," along with a random hit. His concoction Far Corporation--a studio act featuring Robin McAuley and a good chunk of Toto--wound up scaling the charts with their relatively straightforward rendition of "Stairway to Heaven" in 1985, the same year they released the album "Division One."

Farian's fortunes changed when he discovered Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, a pair of models who yearned to be musicians. Signing the pair to a management contract, Farian followed the blueprint he established with Boney M: he had session musicians sing the lead vocals, leaving Pilatus and Morvan to mimic the recordings on stage and television. Farian's pop instincts served him well. Replicating the bright, lively sound of post-Madonna dance-pop and not skimping on the material--hiring professional songwriter Diane Warren for "Blame it on the Rain," one of the group's biggest hits--Farian made "Girl You Know It's True" (released in other territories as "All or Nothing"), an album designed to rule the American airwaves. "Baby Don't Forget My Number," "Girl I'm Gonna Miss You" and "Blame it On the Rain" all reached number one on the Billboard charts in 1989, success that led to Milli Vanilli winning the Grammy for Best New Artist in February 1990.

Millie Vanilli's facade started to crack while on the Club MTV tour in the summer of 1989 when it became apparent the duo was lip-synching to prerecorded tapes. Swiftly becoming a walking punchline, Pilatus and Morvan insisted on singing on the group's second album, prompting Farian to fire the models. In November 1990, the Los Angeles Times published an article by Chuck Philips that confirmed that the duo did not sing on their award-winning album. Pilatus said, "We are true singers, but that maniac Frank Farian would never allow us to express ourselves." 

Within a week, Milli Vanilli's Grammy was revoked and the group became the subject of numerous consumer fraud protection lawsuits. Despite being hired hands, Pilatus and Morvan bore the brunt of the criticism for the controversy, with Farian remaining out of the spotlight. Nevertheless, Farian didn't work much in the early 1990s and when he did return to action, it was firmly within the Eurodisco realm he helped create. He first resurfaced with La Bouche and Le Click, but it was the Latin-pop trio No Mercy that brought him back to the Top Ten in 1996 with their pulsating "Where Do You Go."

Farian's work was the subject of the jukebox musical "Daddy Cool," which opened in London's West End in August 2006 and was staged intermittently into the 2010s. 

In 2022, Farian revealed that he had heart surgery that consisted of a pig heart valve being inserted in his chest. He is survived by three daughters and a son, and his partner Chinya Onyewenjo.