A wooden ruler striking a headless snare drum helped David Z build the sharp crack that opens Fine Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy." David Z, the Grammy-winning producer and recording engineer whose experiments helped shape the Minneapolis Sound, died on August 2, 2026, at a hospital in Burbank, California. He was 78.

Born David Bruce Rivkin and known professionally as David Z, he began on the other side of the studio glass. In the 1960s he played guitar on regional records by the Chancellors and the High Spirits, then spent part of the early 1970s in Los Angeles as an A&M Records staff songwriter. After returning to the Twin Cities in 1974, he taught himself recording engineering and made the control room his instrument.

That change in vantage point placed him at Sound 80 when a teenage Prince needed a decisive demo. Prince's first manager, Owen Husney, introduced the two in 1976, and Rivkin engineered the four songs that helped secure Prince's Warner Bros. contract. Husney later described Rivkin as a quiet but vital contributor to many projects, according to The Minnesota Star Tribune. The assessment fit a producer whose most consequential work was often heard more clearly than his name was seen.

On August 3, 1983, Rivkin sat in a Record Plant mobile truck outside First Avenue and routed roughly 24 microphone inputs for a Prince benefit concert. The Current reported that the performances of "Purple Rain," "I Would Die 4 U," and "Baby I'm a Star" captured that night became the versions heard in the film and soundtrack. Prince later added bass overdubs, while Rivkin edited the title song from about 14 minutes to nine, turning a one-night performance into a durable studio document without sanding away its live force.

His work on Prince's "Kiss" showed the same instinct for building with unlikely materials and then leaving room around them. Prince had handed an unfinished acoustic sketch to Mazarati, a group Rivkin was producing. Rivkin programmed a Linn 9000, shifted a hi-hat pattern through delay, and used that rhythm to gate guitar chords. Prince heard the track, added his own vocal and guitar, stripped away the bass and other parts, and decided the result was too strong to give away. As Rivkin explained to Mix, Prince reclaimed the song for himself. The resulting record reached number one in 1986.

Rivkin's imagination was not confined to Prince's orbit. He worked with Steven Greenberg on Lipps, Inc. projects surrounding "Funkytown," and he guided young artists including the Jets and Jonny Lang through major recording sessions. For "She Drives Me Crazy," he combined the ruler-struck drum with a 12-bit Linn sample, then sent the blend through an upside-down speaker resting on another snare. Mix described how that layered process produced the hollow, instantly recognizable hit at the center of a U.S. number-one single.

His credits eventually reached Etta James, Al Green, Buddy Guy, Jody Watley, Leo Kottke, Billy Idol, and many others. The Recording Academy lists a Record of the Year nomination for "She Drives Me Crazy" and a Grammy win for producing James's Blues to the Bone. He moved back to Los Angeles in 2011 and kept working until his retirement in 2025.

Bobby Z described his brother as a studio experimenter who linked instruments and used the mixing board in unconventional ways. The machines, however, were never the point. The point was the sound David Z could coax from them: Prince's career-making demo, the live voltage preserved on Purple Rain, the skeletal pulse of "Kiss," and the ruler-made snap of "She Drives Me Crazy." Those recordings still carry his habit of hearing possibility in whatever happened to be within reach.