Wax Poetics

Issue 59
 Wax Poetics
Issue 59

Wax Poetics, Inc. Audio Index 10

info@waxpoetics.com
Editor’s Letter 13
Advertise
advertise@waxpoetics.com Kaytranada 15
718.644.2244
Com Truise 16
Subscribe
waxpoetics.com/subscribe BadBadNotGood 20
subscribe@waxpoetics.com
818-701-0721 Chromeo 24
Retail/Distribution Doug Shorts 28
NEWSSTAND Blu 30
Melanie Raucci
Disticor Magazine Distribution Services Edwin Birdsong 34
mraucci@disticor.com
631.587.1160 Kelela 42
RECORD STORE/BOUTIQUE Aaliyah 50
Tyler McWilliams
Fat Beats Distribution Rinder & Lewis 64
tyler@fatbeats.com
818-701-0721 Terry Reid 74
Contribute Continental Baths 80
editorial@waxpoetics.com
Jimmy Jam 86
PUBLISHED BY
Wax Poetics, Inc. Outro 96
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© 2014 WAX POETICS, INC.

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DUPLICATION WITHOUT PRIOR CONSENT
IS PROHIBITED.

SUMMER 2014

ISSN 1537-8241
Aaliyah Kelela
by Jonathan Mannion by Yev Kazannik

07
08
AUDIO INDEX EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Andre Torres

A Wax Poetics guide to music featured in this issue. EDITOR

Brian DiGenti

MARKETING DIRECTOR
Dennis Coxen

CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Freddy Anzures

ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Tom McClure
Kaytranada Com Truise BadBadNotGood
“At All”/ “Hilarity Duff” Wave 1 III
(HW&W) (Ghostly International) (Innovative Leisure) ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE
Paul Alexander

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
T. P. Carter
Michael A. Gonzales
Andrew Mason
Ronnie Reese

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
T. P. Carter David Ma
Chromeo Doug Shorts Blu Eddie Fleisher Jeff D. Min
White Women “Don’t Sleep On My Love” Good to Be Home
(Atlantic) (Cherries) (Nature Sounds) Warren Fu Ronnie Reese
Dan Gentile Andy Thomas
John M. Gómez Dan Ubick
Michael A. Gonzales Rico Washington
Chris Williams

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS
Freddy Anzures
Gustav Images
Yev Kazannik
Jonathan Mannion
Edwin Birdsong Kelela Aaliyah Connor Olthuis
Edwin Birdsong Cut 4 Me Age Ain’t Nothing
(Philadelphia International) (Fade to Mind) But a Number (Jive) Martin Pariseau
Timothy Saccenti
Danny Scales

Rinder & Lewis Terry Reid Janet Jackson

Seven Deadly Sins Seed of Memory Janet
(AVI) (ABC) (Virgin)

10
12

After some of the crazy reactions to the last
letter, I feel like I still have some explaining
to do. From crazy props to cries of our
demise, the fans spoke loud and clear. While
“real talk” was exactly what some needed, it
was too much for others. My apologies to
anyone offended; we really do hate peeling
back the curtain of the industry to reveal its
seedy underbelly. But it’s important for us
to give a clear perspective on why we do
what we do, even though it may leave some
scratching their heads.
Take our cover stories, for instance. If
you had asked us a decade ago, even we
couldn’t have predicted Aaliyah on the cover.
It was too soon at that point, but the time
is now and it feels so right. From day one,
we wanted to tell the stories of our culture’s
musical heroes. Some were funk bands who
only put out a few local 45s, others were
icons who sold millions of records and
profoundly influenced popular culture.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise to see
Aaliyah on the cover. Though she may have
come from another era, to a generation of
young people like our other cover artist
Kelela, Aaliyah was their Aretha, their Billie
Holiday. Her groundbreaking work with
Timbaland and Missy signaled a new future
for R&B, a future we’re living in right now.
Looking at the current state of music, one
could argue that it’s Aaliyah’s influence that’s
reverberating the most. From Beyoncé to
Rihanna, there’s no escaping the singer’s
lasting cultural impact at the twentieth
anniversary of her debut.
But there will be those who argue
otherwise. Aaliyah was a pop star, and to
some, they’re not to be taken seriously. They
think pop is easy, that there’s more artistic
integrity in other forms like jazz. But it’s
not so simple, because anything can become
popular. At one point, jazz was all the rage,
and the musicians were selling gold. But they
lost that connection to popular culture once
they started playing above their audience
instead of for them. It’s where hip-hop
may have gone had we stayed so focused
on keeping it real rather than keeping
it moving.
One of the most unfortunate
phenomena of the last few years has been
golden-era cats shutting themselves off
from anything new. It happens to every
generation, so it’s our mission to keep
pushing ourselves and our fans out of our
respective comfort zones. Digging for beats
was always about discovery, exploration, and
openness—finding the surprise gem on an
otherwise unsurprising record. Whether it
was Christian rock or Andean flute music,
everything was up for grabs. It’s the spirit
that Bambaataa embedded in our culture’s
DNA. Over the years, the game became
about scarcity instead of quality, about the
records instead of the music. But it’s always
been music first for us. Many of the records
we were talking about when we started
weren’t even available on CD, much less
iTunes. Today, most of them are just a click
away on Spotify. For music lovers, that
should be a good thing.Yet, we still hear old
heads whining about streaming music. We
love records too, but we love the music more.
We want to keep knocking down the
walls we all build around ourselves over
time, shutting ourselves off from new music
and experiences we may otherwise love if
we only gave them a chance. I had to learn
it firsthand from someone almost twice my
age. It was the legendary founder of Sire
Records, Seymour Stein, who unknowingly
helped me see the error of my ways. Here’s a
man responsible for the careers of everyone
from Madonna and the Ramones to the
Talking Heads and the Smiths, and he
shows up to one of our SXSW events, cane
in hand and decades older than everyone
there. But Seymour was just doing what
he’s always done—stay on the hunt for
fresh new sounds. While we broke bread a
few months later—and he regaled us with
tales of his first gig at King Records and
discovering multitudes of bands in NYC’s
downtown glory days—I saw my future.
Not as a bitter old-timer who longed for the
“good old days,” but one who appreciated
them while staying a step ahead and
always knowing where the tide is turning.
Which is why Kelela’s on the back cover.
Because when I look at the young sistas in
the R&B game, it’s clear that Kelela is in her
own lane. Hearing her futuristic new-school
approach to the music makes me think back
to Aaliyah, Janet, and the long line of female
vocalists whose footsteps she’s following
in. Looking for the perfect complement to
Aaliyah, it wasn’t long before Kelela rose
to the top of our list. Still, some will argue
that it’s all hype. Their misguided view of
the media has them still thinking hype sells
records. But it’s the artists’ fans that do that;
we just tell their story.
And we want to keep telling them, but
doing it the same way we did a decade ago
no longer works. The biggest magazine
distributor in the U.S. just went out of
business.They delivered everyone from Time
and Vanity Fair to Wax Poetics and countless
other indie mags.Their demise isn’t simply a
WP problem, but a print magazine problem.
At the rate the game is going, we’re looking
at complete fallout within the next five years.
If we’re still printing at all, it’ll be in very
limited numbers sold directly to a dedicated
fan base. By then, all of the newsstand
distributors and physical retailers will be out
of business, and the cost of manufacturing
and distributing print magazines really won’t
make sense. It already doesn’t.
So like it or not, it’s all about digital. And
as much as we love holding this magazine,
we love telling stories even more. But we
can’t make that move to digital alone; we
need your help. The web game ain’t like
the print game; online is all about numbers.
Advertisers don’t care how smart and cool
your readers are; they just want lots of
them. It’s going to take your support to get
us where we need to be, so be sure to hit
waxpoetics.com and get your daily click
on. While we play the game, we’ve got to
do it our way. So we’ll continue to provide
compelling content that challenges us and
keeps you guessing, in print and online.
Because it’s a natural part of our growth, as
individuals, as well as a brand. It’s what this
journey has always been about—growth,
openness, and an undying hunger for fresh
sounds, both old and new.
Expect the unexpected,
Andre Torres
13
KAYTRANADA
Montreal beat producer perked ears
with his reworking of famous tracks,
but now sets his sights beyond the remix.
by Rico Washington
photography by Martin Pariseau
“Damn! I said I wasn’t going to buy
records!” Twenty-one-year-old wunderkind
producer Kaytranada ponders the bins of
New York City’s premier crate-digging spot
A-1 Records with a mixture of excitement
and hesitation. “I don’t have space in my
bags,” he frets. But the gleam in his eyes
says it’s obvious he’s not leaving without
at least a few pieces of vinyl to satiate his
digger’s appetite. On the heels of an
international whirlwind tour over the past
year, including three sets at this year’s SXSW
festival, Haitian-born, Montreal-raised Kevin
Celestin has been operating at breakneck
speed. And after a late set at 88 Palace,
an NYC dim sum dancerie, Kaytranada
(formerly known as Kaytradamus) deserves
at least a few dusty treats.
With a sparse production style that
synthesizes a mélange of funk, house, hip-
hop, and electronica, Kaytranada has deftly
tapped into the DNA of the groove. Nile
Rodgers calls it “Deep Hidden Meaning.”
Whatever it is, Kaytranada’s unique layering
of syncopated drum rhythms and rump-
shaking synth bass lines has hypnotized
revelers on dance floors from Paris to Los
Angeles.Yet, at one time, his biggest goal was
simply occupying a slot in Canadian beat-
scene collective Artbeat Montreal’s quarterly
live showcase. With this goal in mind, he
went from a novice eighth grader crafting
beats on Virtual DJ to one of Canada’s most
in-demand beatsmiths.
While he’s been releasing original
material in the form of beat tapes and EPs
since 2010, recognition would come two
years later when a slew of his SoundCloud
remixes began echoing throughout the
Internet. Following a tidal wave of posts, likes,
tweets, and retweets of his reworks of Janet
Jackson’s 1993 hit “If ” and Teedra Moses’s
2004 single “Be Your Girl,” Kaytranada
quickly became the vaunted prince of the
international beat scene. Praise from the
likes of beat-scene high priest Flying Lotus
and offers to spin his brand-new funk at
various festivals and sold-out club dates
in the U.S. came pouring in. Before long,
London was calling. Last August, influential
tastemaker and BBC Radio 1 host Benji B
even invited him to sit in as a guest on his
weekly radio show.
The newfound attention has definitely
yielded some preliminary rewards. In
addition to producing tracks for buzzworthy
Chicago MC Vic Mensa and the Mobb
Deep reunion album, he’s also working on
his new EP for XL Recordings. The EP’s
focus? Traversing the curse of the remix. “I
do the remixes for fun, but people think I’m
just a remixer,” he says. “So the EP will have
guest features and instrumentals.”
Though Kaytranada has amassed an
impressive following seemingly overnight,
he’s well aware that he’s only just begun.
And he’s more than willing to go the
distance and jump every hurdle in his path.
But at present, his only hurdle is trying to
convince his manager, William Robillard
Cole, of his latest purchase. “Yo, Kay! Are
you buying all that?” asks Cole, looking
disapprovingly at the pile of salvaged vinyl
on the counter. Kaytranada grins and shrugs.
“I might as well. It’s going to be a struggle,
but I don’t care.”.
15
16
T O P GEAR
A long way from his humble beginnings
of department-store keyboards, Com Truise
now packs an arsenal of vintage synths.

by Eddie Fleisher
photography by Danny Scales

Seth Haley is known for crafting rich, multi-textured soundscapes as Com Truise. His
’80s-inspired songs ooze with the warm sounds of vintage synths. But, it didn’t start with an
expensive piece of analog gear. “Oh, man, I don’t know, a department-store keyboard,” Haley
says when asked what he used to make his first tunes. He laughs, adding: “ I can’t remember
the name of it. Some crappy Casio keyboard and a computer.”
Before Haley started making his own tracks, he spun drum and bass. He got hooked on
the genre when he first heard AK1200 on a digital music channel on his cousin’s TV. “I was
just baffled. I’d never heard anything like it,” he recalls. “I went home and did some research
and found he had put out a bunch of mix CDs. That’s where I started to learn about mixes
and mixing.” That Christmas, Seth got a pair of turntables and some records, and became a
DJ. Eventually, he outgrew it, yearning to create his own productions.This stemmed from the
simple fact that there were things he wanted to hear that he wasn’t hearing anyone else doing.
“I guess it was like, ‘I can’t really find it, I’m gonna do it myself,’ ” he says.
Ironically, he hated ’80s music when he was growing up.“I wanted nothing to do with the
music,” he says. “But, I had this buddy I used to DJ drum and bass with. He was a big ’80s guy.
He’d always be like,‘You gotta check this out’ or ‘Listen to this,’ and I was like,‘Blah, blah, blah.’
But, then one day I did, and I was like,‘Wow, I totally missed out on all this wonderful music.’ ”
These days, his main studio setup consists of Eurorack synths (“the modular stuff ”), a
Rhodes Chroma, the Akai AX80, Elektron Machinedrum, the Roland Juno-106, and the
Sequential Circuits Six-Trak. “I’m really trying to limit myself at the moment,” he says. In all,
Haley has over twenty pieces of classic gear, and he’s still on the hunt for more (particularly
an Elka Synthex). However, he’s currently taking a break from obsessive eBay searches, joking
that the process is “somewhat of a money pit.”
When I asked him which piece was his most treasured, he took a long pause. “That’s
a tough one,” he replied. He settled on the Crumar Bit One, which he got refurbished
from online synth retailer Tone Tweakers. “It looked like it had just rolled off a conveyor
belt out of the factory. I was blown away when I unpackaged it. I plugged it in and started
scrolling through the patches and was like, ‘Holy shit, nothing else sounds like this.’ I can’t
even replicate this with analog or virtual stuff,” he says. “It’s a crazy synthesizer.”
Speaking of virtual stuff, Haley admits that contrary to popular belief, he’s not completely
a hardware guy. “I like both,” he says, noting that he’s especially fond of software when
it comes to “stabby bass sounds.” “With hardware, I can’t control it the way I want. Or,
maybe I haven’t figured it out,” he says. “Depends on the day. Sometimes, I don’t wanna
goof around too much. I just want to sit there and work.” In the heated debate on software
versus hardware, Haley doesn’t take sides. “I skate in the middle. Who cares what you
use? If you’re comfortable with it, if it makes you happy, if you get what you want, use it.
Whatever you want.”

17
 Understandably, Haley is weary of taking
his pricey vintage hardware out on the road.
“I don’t know, it makes me nervous,” he says.
“It’s kind of a cautionary measure to use the
newer stuff, because you never know. If one
of those breaks, you can pretty much get one
fairly easy, shipped to wherever you want.”
The newer stuff he’s referencing includes
the Akai APC20 and MPD32 controllers, a
Livid Base, a basic Mopho and a Mopho x4.
As he talked about his live setup, the
conversation turned to Moogfest, the annual
five-day Asheville, North Carolina, festival
that Haley played in April. Even though he
describes festivals as “hot, dirty, crazy, and
stressful,” he was excited to be on the bill.
“They draw a huge crowd; that’s the trade-
off,” he says. “I like the venue kind of shows.
They’re a bit more intimate. You can hang
out.”
Another trade-off, though, is getting
to be a part of an event presented by a
company that’s very dear to his heart. “I’m a
18
big fan of Moog,” he says with enthusiasm.
“The first real synthesizer I ever bought
was the Voyager Rack Mount Edition. Then
I used the Slim Phatty. I’ve always wanted
to get to the pedals and stuff, but I haven’t
really pulled the trigger on it,” he explains.“I
hope they come out with polyphonic stuff
some day!”
Haley comes from a background in
advertising, where he was an art director. In
fact, he still applies the principles from that
position to his job as a working musician. “I
have multiple projects, and I kind of think
of them as companies and I’m branding
them. I’m the brand manager, so to speak,”
he says. “I do my own artwork and all that.
Who knows what the sound looks like
better than I do? I’m a very visual person.”
To him, art and music go hand in hand, each
helping to fuel more creativity. “Sometimes,
I’ll just open up [Adobe] Illustrator and I’ll
just design shapes, whatever. Just some weird
stuff. And that will inspire me to write a
song. I’ll design the artwork to the music. It
can work both ways.”
His knack for connecting visuals with
music will definitely come in handy as he
explores new territory: film scoring. “I’m
trying to dabble in that world. It looks good.
Stuff is happening,” he reveals. “We’ll see
where it goes.”With the cinematic feel of his
songs and the impressive success his career
has had so far, it’s pretty likely you’ll soon be
seeing his name when the credits roll.
For now, the Ghostly International star
is wrapping up a tour—he spoke to me from
the road in Louisiana—and planning a move
to New York City. It’s then, he jokes, that the
convenience of virtual instruments looks a
lot more enticing. “I’m trying to figure out
studio space,” he says, in reference to storing
his sizable synth collection. “Or do I keep
them in my apartment? What the hell do I
do, you know?” he says, laughing. Either way,
there’s definitely no room left for any cheap
department-store keyboards. .
“Transports you to the non-stop cosmic beach party in Harvey’s head”
(Uncut Magazine)

“Music for your road and acid trip”

(Mojo Magazine)

www.smalltownsupersound.com
20
DIABOLICAL BEATS
Canadian jazz-prodigy trio BadBadNotGood brings
a fresh new-school hip-hop sensibility to the classic artform.
by Ronnie Reese
photography by Connor Olthuis
There’s a lot more good than bad when it
comes to writing about BadBadNotGood
(BBNG). The only “bad,” actually, is the
Canadian trio’s relative professional music
inexperience. From their 2010 meeting in
jazz college to the present day is a scant four
years in which they’ve accomplished a lot,
but hardly provides enough for a thousand-
plus words of prose.
The good—the really good, in fact—is
that each member of the group is extremely
bright, energetic, and loves to talk about
music. That is, until, I ask them what they
like to do when they aren’t playing music.
“I don’t know,” says bassist Chester
Hansen, twenty-two. Hansen seems to be
the quietest of the three, much like George
Harrison was the “quiet” Beatle, which is
stellar company for Hansen. Drummer Alex
Sowinski, twenty-two, who at one point
during our four-man Skype session flat-
out admits, “I talk a lot,” unexpectedly goes
dead silent.
Keyboardist Matt Tavares, twenty-
three, son of two accountants, finally offers
a response to the “What do you like to
do when not playing music?” question, an
answer that is fundamentally the BBNG
motto:
“Play more music.”
Not a surprise. They’re musicians, and
music fans, but most important, they’re fans
of each other as musicians. All are prodigies,
and all are multi-instrumentalists. In addition
to keys, Tavares plays saxophone—and he
claims Hansen plays piano better than he
does. Hansen also plays guitar. In addition
to drums, Sowinski plays piano and guitar;
but in comparison to his bandmates, he
says, “I play the least amount of instruments
competently besides drums.”
The three met at Toronto’s Humber
College School of Creative and Performing
Arts, jazz students who bonded over their
love of hip-hop. “The music that we were
listening to at the time was a bit different
than a lot of people in jazz school,” Sowinski
says of their classmates, who were more in
tune to modern jazz and the New York club
scene. Their teachers, many of whom were
folk musicians and session players from the
1980s and ’90s, cared even less about hip-
hop, or at best, knew very little of the genre
past Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.
“Which is a shame,” Tavares says,
“because [hip-hop] is an incredible genre of
music, and I feel like especially in this weird
academic bubble that jazz education lives in,
it just totally gets neglected.”
The disconnect didn’t stop BBNG
from reworking Odd Future’s “Bastard,”
“Orange Juice” (which is the beat to Gucci
Mane’s “Lemonade”), and “AssMilk” into a
medley for an end-of-year performance at
Humber, which was grossly misunderstood
by the school’s music cognoscenti. The
claim was the piece had “no musical value,”
Tavares says. The group says this happened
for two reasons: unfamiliarity with the
source material, and the simplicity of what
they were playing. Lost in transmission was
the realization that the minimalism of the
BBNG approach was influenced by the
same basic, modal jazz—“serious” jazz—that
their instructors and classmates revered.
“A hip-hop song that’s one or two
chords is really no different than a lot of
traditional jazz,” Sowinski says. “It’s the same
idea of trying to be expressive on a smaller,
harmonic medium.”
The love that BBNG didn’t get from
their instructors they eventually found on
YouTube after posting “The Odd Future
Sessions Part 1.” This three-year-old video
of the medley performed for their Humber
assignment has earned close to 550,000
views to date, and comments ranging from
lavish praise (“This is brilliant”) to freak-
outs (“pulling buckies to this song. oh
fuck”) to favorable snark (“This shit sucks...
says the person who has never played an
instrument”). Disappointment became
elation as the trio collectively decided to
leave school and embark on a career in
professional music, which meant rehearsing
and practicing daily, learning and recording
new music, and playing as many live shows
as possible.
“Everything has been super enjoyable,”
Tavares says. “There’s definitely been a large
grind, but it’s the best job in the world,
because we’re three friends who get to
express ourselves with our instruments.”
Much of the initial BBNG allure came
though their use of cover songs, a staple of
jazz tradition and to the group, akin to 1960s
rock artists covering the blues and Bob
Dylan. Their first two albums, BBNG and
BBNGLIVE, both released on Bandcamp
in 2011, feature overlapping live and studio
versions of tracks from Odd Future, Nas,
Slum Village, A Tribe Called Quest, and
Waka Flocka Flame. On their third LP,
2012’s BBNG2, the group mixes genre-
blurring original pieces with reworkings of
songs by Kanye West, Feist, James Blake, and
My Bloody Valentine.
21
 For their latest, 2014’s III—“the first
real record,” Tavares says—producer Frank
Dukes was enlisted to help craft an odyssey
of all-original material that presents BBNG
as more than just a cover band, and definitely
more than just jazz. The album is the
expression of a personal and honestly crafted
language the group has developed in just
four years, and one that will only grow richer
in vocabulary. If cover songs are what built
their following, the original compositions
on III make them not a novelty but a force.
At twenty-two and twenty-three, they’re
already influencing younger musicians. And
they’re only going to get better.
“You could tell their level of
musicianship was something special,” says
Innovative Leisure (IL) cofounder Jamie
Strong of first hearing the BBNG demos.
The group signed to IL in 2013 after
Strong and label partner Nate Nelson
22
flew to Toronto and saw just their second
live performance, but one “which had all
of these young kids—eighteen to twenty-
one—moshing to essentially jazz music.”
There are times to mosh to BBNG, but
there are also times where the group will
ask itself, “What if we played this quietly?”
just for the exercise.They’ve been praised by
RZA for their contributions to The Man with
the Iron Fists soundtrack, performed behind
Frank Ocean at Coachella, and played in
front of an audience of one for Bootsy
Collins, but they’re not swayed by anything
but music. As the YouTube commenter said
of their work, “This is brilliant.” BBNG is
brilliant, and constantly striving for some
combination of perfection and imperfect
excellence. If they were a basketball team,
they’d be the one that always made the
extra pass.
“Some of our songs, we honestly have,
like, fifty iPhone versions of the basic
structure of the song and fifty different ways
of jamming on it,” Tavares says. “Because
you never know if this one little change will
make something way cooler.”
Sowinski says that what BBNG is doing
right now is cool, but based on the amount
they’ve learned in the past two years, they
have no idea what the future holds. When
asked what they’d still like to accomplish,
Hansen says, “Everything.” They don’t
consider themselves a jazz band, but they
have a jazz ethic and understand that it takes
a lifetime to develop a craft. It’s not about
solos but working as a unit and functioning
as one band moving forward. Keep the ideas
fresh and make sure the sound in twenty
years is nothing like the sound today.
Either that or be awesome all the time.
“Mingus never really changed,” Tavares
says. “He was just always amazing.” .
24
D O U B L E D O W N
After a decade of fine-tuning their craft, electro-pop duo Chromeo open up their
process to collaborators and double down on their commitment to ’80s R&B.

by Jeff D. Min
photography by Timothy Saccenti

It’s Cinco de Mayo, and Chromeo is gearing up for their set at Lincoln Hall. It’s
uncharacteristically cool for May, but business as usual for a place like Chicago.The
sun is playing hide-and-seek, periodically jutting through clouds in unpredictable
spurts—the wind vicious and ripe. Chromeo is in town for the Come Alive Tour
promoting their newest album, White Women.
Their set is exactly what you’d expect from the Canadian electro-funk, synth-
pop duo: large, opulent sounds, a disco inferno of lights, and a thick lacquer of Soul
Glo covering everything within earshot. They are bold and charismatic, and drive
forward doggedly like a dry-slab avalanche.
At one juncture, guitarist and vocalist Dave 1 pauses and says something to
the effect of how intimate a show this is and how they haven’t performed like this
since they were rocking the stage with guys like Flosstradamus and the Cool Kids.
But before nostalgia could settle in and anchor the experience, he and synth man
P-Thugg exploded back into their set like a supersonic jet at takeoff.
For as fantastic as Chromeo is onstage, their formula is actually pretty
simple: commitment, a commitment to friendship, a commitment to craft, and
a commitment to artistic integrity. It’s a marriage that goes beyond the allure of
fame and into the past when Dave 1 and P-Thugg were just David Macklovitch
and Patrick Gemayel. Friendship and an obsessive love for music formed their
cornerstone, and for ten years, it’s given them a stable foundation to build upon.
Musicians like Hall & Oates, Rick James, and Phil Collins inspired them every step
of the way.
“Our friendship is the bedrock of this band,” explains Macklovitch. “We
became friends by discovering funk music together when we were fifteen. Twenty
years later, the bond is still intact: total trust, devotion to one another, and solidarity.
And a shared admiration for this kind of music.”
Chromeo is something of a family affair—by blood and by proxy. David’s
brother A-Trak (Fool’s Gold), along with early supporter Tiga (Turbo Recordings),
offered trusted counsel, steeped in credibility and experience. Their guidance
helped Chromeo coagulate their sound and build something that could be
translated onstage.
When asked about those early shows, Gemayel offers a telling response, “Years
of empty rooms and uncomfortable sound checks full of microphone feedbacks.
But [those] early years had the merit of letting us build a solid fan base and cred.
They probably even forced us to get our presentation tightened up and extremely
aware of how we could be viewed and interpreted.”
The easy thing to do would have been to label them a throwback, and when
you’re wrangling with such an iconic sound, it’s bound to happen. But it’s clear that
it’s much more than that. It’s a profound respect and admiration for what came before.
“The Black ’80s were completely overlooked in the 2000s’ electro revival of artists
like New Order, Joy Division, and the Smiths,” says Gemayel. “They were regarded
as high-brow music, but Mtume, Cameo, Midnight Star, and Rick James were
ridiculed and considered a farce, which to us was shocking. It was borderline racist.”

25

“It is racist. The same way the ‘Disco
Sucks’ movement was racist,” Macklovitch
quickly adds.
Understanding the nuances of such a
misunderstood genre tunes Chromeo in to
a more hushed narrative, a conversation that
allows them to use yesterday’s tools for today’s
sensibilities. But to saddle them with the title
of ambassadors would be to undermine other
notable things they do, specifically the way
they balance influence and initiative, humor
and integrity, the obscure and the universal.
With their compass fine-tuned, they’ve
been able to make well-calculated steps—
from greenhorns to emerging superstars.
“Let’s be honest: we didn’t really know
what we were doing on the first album,”
explains Macklovitch. “They were our first
attempts at songwriting—my first attempts
at singing, certainly.” Released in 2004, She’s
in Control was a litmus test for Chromeo, the
all-important first draft that would lay the
groundwork for future endeavors.
26
“The main reason why She’s in Control
and [its follow-up] Fancy Footwork sound so
different is because we started to understand
a bit more what our sound was going to
be and what we were doing musically and
technically,” adds Gemayel. “We were also
just starting to grasp what this new world
of analog synths and ’80s drum machines
could offer to us and how to incorporate
them into our ideas and songs.”
Album two brought about big changes,
one-half facilitated by engineering guru
Philippe Zdar and the other by an influence
from a motley crew of like-minded artists
including MSTRKRFT, Cut Copy, and
the Ed Banger collective. The bigger sound
fit their ambition, and they ran with it,
landing gigs at powerhouse festivals like
Lollapalooza, SXSW, and Pitchfork. Those
festivals are a breeding ground for hybrid
sounds, and while ambiguity is half the fun,
Chromeo stuck to their guns believing that
if they stayed committed, everything would
fall into place. And it has, but only because
they were willing to put in the work.
Chromeo is always bending and
stretching, looking for ways to improve
and build. They understand that treading
in stagnant, tepid water is the quickest way
to dilute your potential. At this point—four
albums deep—the ’80s-era novelty factor
has worn off, and their vision is as clear and
lucid as ever.
“Our whole thing from the onset was
to do electronic music,” says Dave, “but
from a traditional songwriting standpoint:
verse, chorus, bridge, solo. We love solos.
We talked about the leap on Fancy Footwork.
Business Casual was a leap too: we went for
sophistication, darker textures, and different
ambiances. But we really wanted to take it
up a notch on White Women.”
Their newest album is a roller coaster
with “key changes, major/minor shifts, [and]
lifts in choruses,” according to Dave. They
were finally together in one place for the
making of it, “both in New York, in the
same room, on a daily basis,” says Gemayel,
and tweaked things down to the very last
minute as to deliver it as fresh as possible.
They break out of the restricting three-
minute format and into a place where they
can stretch their legs and get comfortable.
Collaborations with Solange, former LCD
Soundsystem drummer Pat Mahoney,Toro y
Moi, Mtume singer Tawatha Agee (“Juicy”),
and Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koening add to
the bombast.
“It’s the first time we opened the doors
to the studio and let people give their
opinions on our music at the very early
stages of demos and ideas,” says Gemayel.
“We had rarely taken any outside suggestions
in the past.”
Chromeo’s hospitality has only enhanced
their sound. It’s made White Women—a
title inspired by the work of photographer
Helmut Newton—something of a crown
jewel, a culmination that combines all the
elements in their periodic table. Now, after
nearly a decade of chromatic jams, they’re
ready to take off again, pushing further and
further into the far reaches of outer space
where their emblem can shine brightest.
“Personally, I’m driven by this obsession,
and our sense of humor is what smooths out
the long hours of practice, crafting, learning,
trying, failing, succeeding, dissecting,
composing,” says Gemayel. “All you need is
one idea—stick to it.” .
Subscribe
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 SECOND ACT
Storied Chicago funk and soul singer
Doug Shorts finds a new home at
boogie-inspired Cherries Records.
by Ronnie Reese
photography by Freddy Anzures
28
“I feel like Doug’s story is the story of a
whole lot of people,” says producer Andrew
Brearley by phone from his Queens home.
Brearley and his wife, Sheila Hernando, run
Cherries Records. The “story” he speaks of
is the life of their flagship artist, Frederick
Douglass Shorts.
“Creating new music with him showed
us the potential and possibility of our dream
becoming a reality,” Hernando says. It’s a new
partnership for an old dog.Visiting the house
Shorts shares with his mother on Chicago’s
South Side reveals a timber-wolf-gray ’39
Buick with a ’67 Bonneville engine sitting
in the middle of the backyard. Next to the
car is a jagged, twelve-foot stump, all that’s
left of a hundred-year-old tree that recently
toppled and nearly crushed everything in its
shadow—including the Buick.
Inside of Shorts’s five-by-nine-foot
brick and wood-paneled basement studio,
Funkland, are various pieces of recording
gear that are functional, if past their prime—
Korg X3, Roland 880 Workstation, Axiom
25 MIDI controller, Boss Dr. Groove.
The walls are lined with pictures of “the
originators,” which is how he refers to Bird,
Dizzy, Billie, and Count Basie. Interspersed
among those pics are promo shots of Shorts
solo or with his most well-known band,
Master Plan Inc. The “Inc.” was added in
the mid-’70s when an astrologist read the
charts of the Zodiac signs for Shorts and
some of his bandmates and said they were
in a “business phase” and should capitalize
while the stars were aligned.There may have
been marijuana involved. They ended up at
a free business-management school, earning
degrees in less than a year.
Doug is “just a cool-ass dude,” Brearley
says. “Not everybody is as cool as him, and
that’s a huge part of it…just him being good
energy, having an open mind about working
with younger folks, and doing things.”
Bearley is right on all accounts. Shorts,
sixty-three, is indeed a cool dude, with a
story not that unlike many other performers
of his generation. He was born into a
musical family near Cabrini–Green, raised
in the shadows of his swiftly changing
neighborhood and the stars performing
at Chicago’s original Regal Theater. He
attended singer Jerry Butler’s songwriters’
workshop, joined groups with names like
the Visitors and the Mannequins, but his
biggest success came with Master Plan
Inc., a funk collective with all the talent
to make it big. But as these stories go, they
didn’t make it at all. Shorts once had to pass
on a tour because a member converted to
Jehovah’s Witnesses. “I have many stories like
that, where we were right at the cusp,” he
says. “Almost there.”
Master Plan Inc. slowly stabilized and, in
1975, recorded at Sound80 in Minneapolis
with producer David “Z” Rivkin before
landing a deal with Brunswick Records.
Brunswick, sadly, was mired in scandal and
on the decline. In-house producers were
meddling with the group’s music so much
that Shorts had enough. He knew business
because his management training “put us on
alert for nonsense,” he says. This situation,
however, was headed to the street. It never
came to blows, but Shorts realized that, at
times, just knowing the business wouldn’t be
enough. He enrolled in martial arts classes
shortly thereafter and is now a fifth-degree
black belt.
Shorts chased his music dreams to Los
Angeles in 1986, but ended up taking a
series of odd jobs, including minor roles
in television and film, while continuing to
record and produce. He returned to Chicago
to care for his mother in 2003 and was later
working as a doorman when he befriended
rapper Brian “Robust” Kuptzin, who was
a labelmate of Brearley’s at indie imprint
Galapagos4. Kuptzin and Brearley were
hanging out one day when Kuptzin said,
“You have to meet my boy Doug Shorts.”
When he mentioned Shorts’s name, Bearley
remembered the Doug Shorts and the Master
Plan Band “How Slick Is Slick” 7-inch he
had just bought. “You mean this dude right
here?” he asked Kuptzin, pointing to the
record. Both of their minds were blown.
Brearley and Shorts linked and the
Cherries seed was sown. Soon after, Master
Plan Inc. recordings began to surface—
some submastered by fabled engineer Ed
Cody—and found homes at Jazzman and
Numero Group. Through Brearley and late
DJ Tony Janda, some of Shorts’s music got to
Daptone/Dunham Records. Upon hearing
it, Dap-Kings drummer Homer Steinweiss
flew Shorts into Brooklyn in 2012 to record
vocals on the modern-soul collaboration
he’d been working on with producer Frank
Dukes, an album that is awaiting release as
Silver & Gold Featuring Doug Shorts. Also
awaiting release are a steppers album and a
12-inch “Doug and Ro” project from Shorts
and Kuptzin that’s reminiscent of Blueprint-
era soul-sample chops. Except the samples
aren’t samples. It’s the old dog Shorts.
“I got my tentacles out there,” he says,
still hungry after all these years. .

29
30
CAN’T STOP,
WON’T STOP
For most rappers—even ones whose careers
are in a rapidly decaying orbit—talk of
retirement is mostly met with disbelief,
perhaps even indifference. Like an aging
boxer who can’t hang up his gloves, the tail
end of many rap catalogs can be ugly.
Meet Johnson Barnes, who goes by
Blu, and whose career is in the ascendant—
perhaps even at its peak. Not long ago,
Barnes began toying with the notion of
walking away from music by age thirty,
citing industry woes, an emerging interest
in film, and a sense that he reached his
creative threshold. You can’t blame him for
wanting to leave on a high note. Barnes
was a breakout presence in the West Coast’s
indie rap scene, with his 2007 debut,
Below the Heavens, getting numerous nods
on “best of ” lists, as well as landing on
L.A. Weekly’s “Top 20 Greatest L.A. Rap
Albums of All Time.” Independently
released on Sound in Color and produced
by Exile, the album’s beat palette was heavy
on classic soul, mostly sliced into new
yet recognizable bits. The familiarity, the
touches of jazz, and its mid-tempo pace had
both washes of melancholy and joie de vivre.
It paird perfectly with Blu’s contemplative,
sometimes very personal rhymes.
“It was a huge blessing to get Exile
to produce the entire record,” Blu says. “I
had others in mind when we first started,
but after Exile and I did one song together,
I knew he was the perfect person.” The
pair’s output would later combine for two
more efforts, Maybe One Day, an EP out
in 2012, and Give Me My Flowers While I
Can Smell Them, released the same year.
Los Angeles storyteller Blu’s enormous
drive has yielded an equally immense
amount of work for the young rapper who
once considered early retirement.
“He had the jewels for me to create and
get out everything I needed to express on
that debut.” Exile, whose career started
with Aloe Blacc as part of Emanon, has
built an immensely thick résumé, helming
tracks for everyone from Mobb Deep to
Snoop Dogg.
Blu’s work ethic took shape when
he started as a hype man for local crews
after relocating to L.A. from San Pedro,
California, where he spent his high school
years. Blu was the stepson of a pastor whose
household only listened to gospel, and rap
was tersely restricted. Blu explains, “It wasn’t
until I moved in with my [biological] father
in L.A. that I began to buy hip-hop music.”
He continues, “For years, I was a freestyle
MC. My good friend convinced me to start
actually writing and recording songs...instead
of battling every MC just for recognition.
I remember he always said, ‘Ain’t no money
in freestyling, bro; it’s free.’ And then he also
hipped me to OutKast’s Aquemini. I thank
him to this day.”
After his aforementioned debut with
Exile, he hit a stride, an enormous prolific
spurt releasing two mixtapes, seven full-
lengths, and eleven EPs, casting a wide
net for producers as well as beat aesthetics.
“Alchemist, man, ha ha, I can’t get out of his
studio! His work ethic is actually crazier than
mine, not to mention his clientele is one of
the best in the game,” he explains. Having
internalized healthy doses West Coast
rappers like Ice Cube and Tha Alkaholiks as
a youth, Blu recently worked with a revered
East Coaster, Pete Rock himself. “I just got
a beat from Pete, yo! We did a 12-inch. I just
by David Ma
photography by Gustav Images
ask the best, man.That’s a dream come true.”
Blu’s also sought and received production
from Flying Lotus, Nottz, Daedelus, and
Madlib through the years.
In 2009—in addition to an already
rapidly growing oeuvre—he released two
instrumental beat tapes, which were his first
foray behind the boards. Also, And If You See
the E Drop ’Em was released in 2011, his first
all-instrumental full-length. He also made
beats for three of his albums on the Nature
Sounds imprint the same year.
This year, he extends his prolific streak
with an eighth full-length LP, a very fitting
but unsurprising double album, Good to
Be Home—an uncomplicated celebration
of L.A. music culture. “Cruising down
Weston with them colorful hats / Gold and
that black, such a lovable match / The rap
Huxstable, comfy like bubbles in baths,”
raps Blu on “The West,” the lead single. It’s
a homecoming of sorts for the 2009 XXL
“Freshmen” alum who blew up, toured
incessantly, and was dropped by Warner
Brothers over an album titled NoYork! “The
album is basically a love story between a kid
and his city,” he says.
That talk of retirement at age thirty
never materialized; he recently turned thirty-
one. The rapid rate at which his catalog has
grown is equaled only by his staggering
drive. On the subject of retirement, the
young workhorse says, “These last few years,
I have gotten so much love and invites to
work and create that I can’t stop. [One of the
songs] on the new record is coincidentally
called ‘Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop.’ We just
getting started.” .
31
COSMIC REVERB
Producer, songwriter, and organist Edwin Birdsong is the anonymous genius behind some of jazz-
funk’s most cosmic moments. The Los Angeles native reconnected with high school acquaintance
Roy Ayers in New York, and the two began work on a series of records that would change the course
of jazz and popular music at large. The relationship would give birth to a funky jazz with commercial
leanings that worked both live and on the dance floor. Birdsong remained committed to a solo career,
releasing a string of records, including two highly influential albums—one on Gamble and Huff’s
Philadelphia International and one on Salsoul—whose effects are still reverberating. Influenced by
Larry Levan and the New York club scene, Birdsong’s left-field boogie anthem “Cola Bottle Baby” would
become fodder for both Daft Punk and Kanye West, and his bare funk breakbeat track “Rapper Dapper
Snapper” would nod hip-hop heads for years, bringing Birdsong’s grooves to a new global audience.

by Andy Thomas

34
35
W
hen I first saw the credits on those mid-’70s Roy Ayers Ubiquity
LPs like Vibrations and Lifeline, I wondered who Edwin Birdsong
was. Here was a left-field keyboardist and songwriter who not only
worked as coproducer on those pivotal Ubiquity LPs but also had
writing credits on classics like “Running Away” and “Red, Black &
Green.” Deeper digging revealed a series of his own experimental
cosmic-soul LPs that began in 1971 with the Polydor debut
What It Is and ended with his Salsoul outing, Funtaztik, in 1981. Despite his prescient and
unique music being heavily sampled (De La Soul, Gang Starr, Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers,
et al.), Edwin Birdsong remains a cultish figure whose genius is shrouded by anonymity.
Born in Los Angeles in 1951, Edwin Birdsong was raised in a religious household where
his pastor father, who sang in a church quartet, instilled a love of the spirituals. “I started
playing piano in Sunday school when I was about eight or nine, playing simple things like
‘Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross,’ ” he tells me over the phone from L.A. “So that’s really
where I got started at the Solid Rock Baptist Church, although I didn’t realize at the time
how influential it was going to be.” Following his father’s path, he also started singing at the
church and as a teenager joined the Los Angeles Community Choir, meeting such luminaries
as Merry Clayton and Billy Preston.
An equally important formative experience for Birdsong came from outside of the
church. “I started studying classical music when I was about six years of age through a piano
teacher who lived a few doors away,” he recalls. At the same time as he was developing his
classical piano techniques, he was also beginning his first attempts at composition: “I would
improvise and make things up while I was playing at the church. I always had that urge to
try different things on the piano around the songs I was learning.” While the church would
provide his foundation, young Edwin’s ears were opened further to secular music through
local radio: “I would hear boogie-woogie tunes, and I noticed that they all had that left-hand
movement. And because I was left-handed, it was never really difficult for me to play.” At
junior high school, he formed his first small band playing piano with a group of friends. “It
was a very rough thing,” he says, “just a group of kids getting together and trying to imitate
other people.” But through one of those kids, he was soon to discover a new instrument that
would change his creative path: “A friend had taught me how to play a twelve-bar blues in
the Jimmy Smith style, on an old Hammond. So from there, I learned to play jazz organ.”
Birdsong earned his spurs on the organ when he moved to Germany as an army
serviceman in his late teens during the Vietnam War. “When I got there, I was already playing
the blues, so I would sit in with the band and play the popular songs. And the bartenders,
who were the guys in those days who would hire the musicians, would ask me if I had a band.
So I put together a group, and that group was called Birdsong and the Sounds.” Stationed in
Baltimore for his last six months of service, he put together various bands in the clubs down
the famous jazz hub of Pennsylvania Avenue. “Most clubs there at the time had a Hammond
organ, which was perfect for me,” he says.
With his horizons opened by his trips abroad, Edwin moved to New York after he left the
army in the late ’60s. “I was going to a music store called Manny’s where I could get hold of
the ‘fake books’ that had all the popular jazz classics. So it was through going to Manny’s that
I really started to want to learn more about serious jazz. I would go to the clubs up in Harlem
and say to the guys, ‘Hey, how do you play over these changes?’ ” He was soon sitting in on
jam sessions around the city and started to make some influential contacts: “George Benson
was playing in one of the clubs uptown, so I sat in with that session. There was always a jam
session like that in the week, and I would learn a lot from that.”
His serious musical intentions were furthered when he attended both Manhattan School
of Music and Juilliard.“People at Manhattan School of Music were more hippy-like, but those
at Juilliard were much too serious for me, because I was running around smoking marijuana
and having fun with all these different musicians,” he says.“But when I left Manhattan School
of Music to study at Juilliard, I did become much more serious in my own studies, because
they really challenged you. All the students there studied really hard. I didn’t want to be Bach
though, and I certainly didn’t want my music to be so stuffy that it couldn’t be commercial
at the same time.”

(previous spread) From the front cover of Edwin Birdsong’s Super Natural (Polydor; 1973). Original photo by Tack Kojima.
36 (opposite) From the back cover of Edwin Birdsong’s Funtaztik (Salsoul; 1981). Original photo by Benno Friedman.
PEOPLE AT JUILLIARD WERE
MUCH TOO SERIOUS
FOR ME. ALL THE STUDENTS
THERE STUDIED REALLY HARD.
I DIDN’T WANT TO BE BACH
THOUGH, AND I CERTAINLY
DIDN’T WANT MY MUSIC TO
BE SO STUFFY THAT IT
COULDN’T BE COMMERCIAL
AT THE SAME TIME.

37
 Through his wife, Michelle, who was
working as a stewardess on American
Airlines, Birdsong was introduced to Wes
Farrell, cowriter of the hit song “Hang
on Sloopy.” “Wes had his own publishing
company, and I let him hear some of the
songs I had written,” he recalls. “I didn’t
know until then I could just get paid as a
writer for other people, but that’s what I
started to do. I was also playing at a club
in the East Village called Pee Wee’s, and
Wes came to hear me and invited Jerry
Schoenbaum, the President of Polydor. So
Jerry heard me play, and it went from there.”
Edwin Birdsong’s debut LP, What It Is,
was released on Polydor in 1971. The album
was recorded at the Fame Recording Studio
in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with executive
producer Ted Cooper and engineers like
Jerry Masters. It would prove to be an LP of
great depth and maturity for a young man
who had just turned twenty. “It was nothing
for me to write those songs, really; it came
very easy to me,” he says. “Ted Cooper really
knew his way around the studio, and I also
became very interested in that. I had studied
technical illustration in college, so I always
embraced that kind of stuff, because I was
something of a nerd. I was very technical in
my approach to music.”
Drawing heavily on the social and
political issues of the time, it sat comfortably
next to LPs like Sly and the Family Stone’s
There’s a Riot Goin’ On and Gil Scott-
Heron’s Pieces of a Man. “This was just after
the ’60s at the time of the protest songs
and stuff like that, and so I came up with
numbers like ‘It Ain’t No Fun Being a
Welfare Recipient’ and ‘Mr. Money Man.’ ”
These were just two of the songs written
with his wife, with whom he’d set up the
Michelle-Bird publishing company, and who
went on to write songs with both Edwin
and Roy Ayers.
38
Alongside other socially conscious
numbers like “Pretty Brown Skin”
(cowritten with Michelle Birdsong and
Roy Ayers, who also recorded the track the
same year) and “The Uncle Tom Game” was
the gospel-influenced “My Father Preaches
That God Is the Father.” Despite his new
connections with the hip jazz world of New
York, this dedication showed the respect
Edwin would always have for the church.
“Coming from a religious background, I
didn’t want to go back to California and be
playing in the clubs because of my father
being a pastor,” he says. “So that prompted
me even more to stay in New York.” Perhaps
the standout track on the LP and certainly
the most progressive was “The Spirit of
Do…Do,” which was later slowed down
into a woozy jazz-funk cut on the Roy
Ayers Ubiquity LP Mystic Voyage.
Edwin’s relationship with Roy Ayers
went right back to their high school days
in Los Angeles: “Roy went to Jefferson
High School, and I went to Freeman High,
which were rival schools. At the time, I
was a member of this group of guys called
the Continental Gents. We would put on
parties and stuff, and Roy was in one of
the groups that we had hired to play for
us out at the beach.” The pair’s friendship
would be rekindled when both relocated
to New York: “I lived on Eighteenth Street,
and he moved just around the corner on
Seventh Avenue between Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Streets. So he and I became
friends.This would have been around 1969.”
Roy Ayers was already making his name in
the city’s jazz scene as Edwin recalls: “He
was playing with Herbie Mann at the time.”
Ayers and Mann’s relationship had been
cemented on the 1969 heavyweight LP
Memphis Underground. “I really liked Herbie’s
music but hadn’t realized Roy played in the
band. Anyway, I was introduced to him by
Roy, and I actually did my first recording
session for Herbie at Atlantic Studios.”
Birdsong and Ayers soon entered the
studio together, beginning a long creative
partnership. “I think my main influence on
Roy at that time was getting him to move
from being a purely jazz musician to become
more bluesy and commercial,” he says. “I
also took him from just playing jazz into
singing more.”
Roy Ayers’s 1970 LP, Ubiquity, would
be a milestone recording both for Ayers
and Birdsong. “That was the start of our
publishing company, Ayer-Bird Music,” says
Edwin. The exploratory sound of “Pretty
Brown Skin” and “Hummin’ ” (most
recently sampled by Kendrick Lamar on
“Celebration”) worked like a template for
the pair’s future explorations into cosmic
jazz-funk. It was a sound founded as much
on Birdsong’s complex organ arrangements
as the elegant, shifting vibraphone work
of Ayers.
In 1973, Birdsong furthered his musical
partnership with Ayers, penning the classic
title track of the Red, Black & Green album.
The same year, Edwin returned with his
second LP, Super Natural. “How that [album]
differed from What It Is was that I wanted
to do a more rock-influenced album,”
he says. “I had used Eddie Kramer on the
first album to mix the LP, and on Super
Natural, I brought him in as a producer
and engineer. I had a young guitarist by the
name of Ronnie Drayton. He was such a
great guitarist in that Hendrix tradition that
it blew Eddie’s mind.” The LP was recorded
at Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studio in New
York. “When we were there, Jimi’s stuff was
in the hallway—his amps and stuff were
scattered about—so his spirit was really all
over that album,” says Birdsong.
However, Polydor’s lack of promotion
for the LP left Birdsong frustrated. “I had
met these two DJs from WDAS Radio in
Philadelphia, Sonny Hopson and Perry
Johnson, and we set up our own label, Bam-
Boo,” he says. Free from the constraints of
the majors, Birdsong went deep: “Whereas
with a major label, you had to get approval
for this and get approval for that, now I
could just do my own thing. And that’s
what I did.” Released on Bam-Boo in
1975, Dance of Survival found Birdsong at
his most individual on an LP that became
a cornerstone of astral soul. “We were never
following in the trail of other things that
were out there,” he says. “That was the jazz
thing in me; you know, just doing your own
thing without copying someone’s style or
concept.” There was one figure whose ideas
particularly inspired him though. “Sun Ra
was playing at a club called Slug’s [Saloon]
on the Lower East Side, and Michelle and I
would go there and listen to him a lot. He
was very exploratory, and his approach led
me down a tunnel of freedom.” This new
freedom can be heard on the tripped-out
soul of “Your Smile Gave Birth to My Idea,”
perhaps the LP’s masterpiece. “I recorded
the LP in a studio where Kool and the Gang
had been, and they had left their Mellotron.
So I used that to produce the sound,” he says.
Another killer track on the LP is “Night of
the Full Moon,” one of Birdsong’s most
unearthly productions. “From studying
music, I always liked secondo harmony, using
seconds and minor seconds; so that’s how I
created that strange feeling,” he explains.
The 1976 Roy Ayers Ubiquity LP
Vibrations would see Birdsong join Ayers as
co-arranger and producer as well as writer
of “The Memory” on what was Birdsong’s
biggest involvement on a Ubiquity LP.
“I would take Roy’s songs that were
instrumentals and I would give it lyrical
and melodic content. So when you hear
things like ‘The Memory,’ those were all
my vocal arrangements.” While disco was
about to transcend its underground roots,
Birdsong and Ayers had been working on a
more upbeat dance-floor sound that would
reach its zenith on the 1977 LP Lifeline. The
LP included “Running Away,” Roy Ayers’s
most famous song apart from “Everybody
Loves the Sunshine.” Not only cowritten by
Birdsong, the track also featured his vocals
up front in the mix. “You can actually hear
my voice on ‘Running Away’ more than
Roy’s,” he says. “Running Away” would
become an anthem at clubs from the Loft in
New York to Crackers in London. Another
Ayers and Birdsong collaboration that tore
up dance floors worldwide was “Freaky
Deaky,” which would appear on Ayers’s Let’s
Do It LP.
Discovered by Roy Ayers at a showcase
in 1976, Cincinnati group Saturday Night
Special were propelled into rare-groove
folklore when they were renamed RAMP
(after Roy Ayers’s production company)
and invited into the studio with Ayers and
Birdsong. “We couldn’t believe what was
happening. It was like a dream come true,”
the band’s John Manuel told Wax Poetics
back in 2007. Come into Knowledge was
one of Birdsong and Ayers’s most serious
collaborations as writers and producers. If
there was one track that captured the space-
soul sound that would inspire so many for
years to come, it was “Daylight,” sampled
most famously by A Tribe Called Quest on
“Bonita Applebum.” “We were told that that
sound was what impressed A Tribe Called
Quest,” recalled John Manuel. It was a sound
built around Birdsong’s vocal arrangements
of the band’s two singers, Sharon Matthews
and Sibel Thrasher. “He was marvelous with
the vocals,” Matthews explained. “He had
us doing things we didn’t even know we
could do.” The LP also included the biting
soul-jazz of “The American Promise” (later
reworked by Erykah Badu as “Amerykahn
Promise” with Edwin on coproduction
duties with Roy Ayers).
While the RAMP LP was avidly
devoured by beat seekers in the years to
come, Birdsong’s most heavily sampled
LP was his self-titled 1979 solo return and
his only LP on Philadelphia International.
“I had already recorded the LP and played
it for Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, and
they offered me a deal,” he says. “So as a
result, that was different to what people
like Teddy Pendergrass and other artists
were doing with Philadelphia. I was one
of the first to come in with my own songs
and own production; I didn’t use Kenny or
Leon to write anything. So they just let me
do my own thing, which I loved.” The LP
was recorded at the New York branch of
the legendary Sigma Sound Studio. Around
this time, Edwin was a regular at the city’s
underground clubs: “I went to Paradise
Garage all the time, and Larry Levan and I
became friends; and of course before that,
there was Tee Scott at Better Days.That was a
very free place, and I always observed closely
what was going on.” Those nights inspired
the hazy, cosmic boogie of “Cola Bottle
Baby,” a wonderfully left-field track that still
sounds progressive today. Sampled by Daft
Punk on “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”
in 2001, it most recently provided the hook
for Kanye West’s “Stronger.” Birdsong also
includes the electro-funk of “Goldmine”
and the out-there disco of “Phiss Phizz.”
Referring to the 12-inch promo-only flip
to “Goldmine,” Birdsong says, “Tee and I did
a mix of ‘Phiss Phizz,’ and we gave it to Larry
[Levan], and he loved it,” says Birdsong.
39

In 1980, Birdsong and Ayers collaborated
once more on another future cult classic,
Ladies of the Eighties by Eighties Ladies. “I
found most of the girls that sang on that,
and named the group,” says Edwin. An
underground club hit that reached new ears
when it opened the influential compilation
Classic Rare Groove Mastercuts, Volume 1,
“Turned On to You” is another example of
Birdsong’s beautiful vocal arrangements on
an LP packed with soulful gems.
40
A year later, he was to return on another
legendary label. Released on Salsoul in
1981, the LP Funtaztik saw Birdsong in the
studio with the great engineer Bob Blank
and a band that included bassist Marcus
Miller.With touches of François Kevorkian’s
mix of Dinosaur L’s “Go Bang,” the opener,
“Win Tonight,” is a gloriously off-key slab
of mutant disco. But it was “Rapper Snapper
Dapper” that made the biggest mark on
the underground clubs of New York. “I
took that to Larry at the Garage, and he
loved it. He played the shit out of it, and
that crowd loved it.” Later sampled most
famously by De La Soul for “Me Myself and
I,” the track was actually inspired by visits
to another pivotal New York club. “I went
to the [Disco] Fever in the Bronx a lot and
listened to DJs like Grandmaster Flash. I’ve
always been a student of music and would
take notes of what was going [on].The Fever
was like the spot at the time. It was a very
special place like the Paradise Garage.”
Nights at Disco Fever inspired Edwin’s
next commercial venture with the label
Singh Records. His 1984 production of
“Break ’N Spin” was the first in a series
of electro classics tailor-made for the street
crowd at clubs like Disco Fever and the
Funhouse. The label saw him work with
an old friend he had first met in the 1970s.
“Marley Marl was spinning at a club in
Queensbridge, and I just happened to come
by there and had a copy of ‘Rapper Dapper
Snapper’ and was trying to get it out there. I
gave him a copy, and he was about the first
one to play it. He was only about fifteen
or sixteen at the time. So it was great to
work with him on [the 1987 12-inch ‘On
a Mission’ from hip-hop duo] Too Nice for
Singh.” As well as mixing other tracks for
Too Nice’s 1989 LP, Cold Facts, on Arista
(an album that Birdsong coproduced with
the Aleem Brothers), Marley Marl also
coproduced Birdsong’s “Too Good to Go
(When You Get It Right)” alongside Patrick
Adams.
It’s a partnership that continues to this
day. “Marley Marl had a great influence on
what I did with my music later on,” Edwin
says. “In fact, he and I just cut something in
the studio about two months ago when I was
in New York.” Whether cutting tracks with
Marley Marl, being sampled by Daft Punk,
or mentoring cats like Funkghost, Edwin
Birdsong continues to exert his influence in
his own unassuming way: “I have been truly
blessed to have met and been with all these
different people,” he concludes modestly. .
I TOOK “RAPPER SNAPPER
DAPPER” TO LARRY
AT THE GARAGE, AND HE
LOVED IT. HE PLAYED THE
SHIT OUT OF IT, AND THAT
CROWD LOVED IT.
Your ad here.
advertise@waxpoetics.com
42
P E R F E C T S PA C E
When young vocalist Kelela left her native D.C. for Los Angeles five years ago, like so many others
before and after, she had one thing on her mind. Fame and fortune were distant dreams as she
couch-surfed her way through the L.A. electro-bass scene, trying to find her voice while performing
early-morning warehouse shows. Kelela’s particular sonic tastes were finally met when she met
underground producer Total Freedom and his Fade to Mind crew. Their subsequent mixtape
announced the arrival of a new force on the left-field R&B scene—her cool confidence anchored
a cosmic blend of electro bangers and ballads. As she prepares her debut album, keenly aware of
her place in a long line of modern-R&B female vocalists going back to Janet and Aaliyah, Kelela
continues the search for her true self while exploring femininity through her revealing songwriting.

by T. P. Carter
photography by Yev Kazannik

43
44
B
ehind Kelela’s intoxicating locks and soft-spoken nature lies
a fierceness, a simmering urgency, which serves as the true
source of her power. Rest assured, the singer-songwriter is
using that power to create the life she wants. I know this
because when we met years ago at an R Street café in her
native Washington, D.C., her life was very different than it is
now. I remember asking why she was moving to Los Angeles
and getting a simple yet honest answer. “I’m moving to L.A. to
blow the fuck up.” Oh. Right.
That was five years ago and far more difficult than she thought. Back then, I witnessed the
ruthlessness of Kelela’s journey firsthand. Crashing on couches and floor mattresses, hitching rides,
performing countless late-night shows, the singer’s fiery hustle attacked the sonic landscape of L.A.’s
electro-bass scene with double-fisted machetes (or in her case, a microphone that she never left home
without). In warehouses, abandoned churches, alleys, and parking lots, the parties would often roll till
six in the morning. Often starting her performances at 4:00 AM, Kelela would be tired but determined
to give all that she had left to whoever was still in the building.
During those days, she’d dream up producers for an album that no one we knew had the money
to make. Finding producers she could vibe with was always a…“thing.” Most of them were in London,
Germany, or an obscure wilderness reserve making weirdo Björky shit with a Plutonian twist. Kelela’s
tastes were…specific. As far as collaborators went, no one seemed to know what she was looking for
but her.
One night, while recording in a Burbank studio, L.A. underground art and music conceptualist/
curator Total Freedom (aka Ashland Mines) found himself captivated by Kelela’s voice and offered to
introduce her to his friends—bass music labelmates Kingdom, Nguzunguzu, and then Dallas-based DJ
Prince William. By now, Kelela had a million cats getting at her about “doing vocals over a track,” but
that wasn’t enough. She wanted to record songs—her voice at the front of the track, an equal partner
in a sonic marriage, not hovering meekly beneath a swath of Atari samples.Total Freedom’s L.A.-based
Fade to Mind crew came through with tracks Kelela fell in love with, and CUT 4 ME, a thirteen-track
critically acclaimed mixtape, was born. A mutual friend hit me up, like, “Hey, K’s opening up for a
major recording artist.” I thought, “Opening? She should be headlining that shit.”
Fast-forward to spring 2014 at the Echo in Los Angeles, where she headlines a sold-out
doubleheader. Onstage are pulsating visuals: two halos of fire rotating intensely, urgently, simultaneously,
and counterclockwise—the way a Gemini’s mind works, the way Kelela’s mind works—occupying our
visual space without gravity. In front of us all, Kelela strips down emotionally, as if she were alone in
the room—interpreting mood in real time, translating the language of a beating heart to a room full
of fans who’ve all long ago predicted we’d be here doing this with her right now. She thanks us for
riding with her, and it becomes clear that Kelela’s found her own space in a cosmic mash-up of electro
bangers and ballads—rhythmic space sex music. At the Echo, we bear witness to her creative process, as
she channels the complexity of her own needs in a way that puts us in touch with the kinetic energy
of feminine icons who’ve arrived before her. But let’s not go overboard. She’s no Janet or Aaliyah. And
that’s a very good thing, because as we witness Kelela peel back layers of her inner self while creating
and re-creating all that she is right before our eyes, we’ll define and redefine her for ourselves—if
defining Kelela is even a plausible ambition.

45
You went from doing shows at four in
the morning at warehouse parties in L.A.
to Björk shouting you out on Instagram.
How do you feel about the sudden rush
of attention?
The first feeling is obviously grateful. I’m
really happy that this happened. That I can
make my living—support myself with my
art. I thought that was way farther away than
when it arrived. Back then, I was trying to
find my voice, my crowd, find whatever my
“thing” was. There was nothing glamorous
or cool about singing at four in the
morning—I mean, it was cool, but there was
no immediate payoff. Just a bunch of trying.
I didn’t know what I was doing. I just knew
I wanted to use every opportunity that I
had to be in front of people and perform
music that I relate to for people who will
appreciate it.
People think you blew up after the
Solange tour, but, truth is, you’ve been
touring Europe for a few years already.
What’s the adjustment been like?
Performing regularly is something that I’ve
had to adjust to. I’m also adjusting to the
demand. Before, nobody gave a fuck about
what Kelela was doing, because nobody’d
heard of Kelela. Back then, singing was
always supplementary. It was always for
fun. I could say [then] that I didn’t want
to sing; I just wanted to get drunk. Now,
I can only drink and party after the show.
[laughs] But I get more enjoyment out of my
performances now. Like, I can more reliably
hit notes. That wasn’t the case before. After
the mixtape blew up, I had to incorporate
different habits and new ways of doing
things. Like vocal exercises. I never did them
until a month and a half, two months ago. I
wrote “Bank Head” out of range, so I was
like, “Fuck. How am I going to sing this
song live?” I was scared of singing it. Now?
I can’t suck. People pay to see me. There has
to be a standard. So that’s what I’ve been
trying to create and maintain.
46
How did you get hooked up with
Kingdom and Fade to Mind for CUT 4 ME?
I was recording a song with a duo called
Teengirl Fantasy. This was a year and a half
or so after moving to L.A. I was in the studio
recording a song called “EFX” and Total
Freedom aka Ashland Mines came through,
and he was basically like, “You should be
working with my friends.” So he introduced
me to the Fade to Mind folks, and I met
Prince William and Kingdom at the same
time.Then, like, a month or two later, Prince
William came to my house and said they
wanted to do a vocal project—that they
didn’t know exactly how they were going
to go about it, but as a starting point, they
could send me some tracks.They asked me if
I would listen to them, see if there were any
I could freak. Then Prince Will came by and
delivered all of these tracks, and I remember
I only had a mattress on my floor at the
time and nothing else in my apartment. I
remember sitting there listening to the
music and being like, “What the fuck! Like,
what is this? I don’t even know what this is.”
It was just too right for me. That feeling, the
feeling of—
Finding that synergy?
Yes! Yes. Immediately, I remember just going
for what I could. None of the tracks were
easy to sing on, but I told the guys that
the sounds—the sounds were just so right,
so please keep sending them. I listened to a
folder of thirty or forty tracks, and out of
all of them, only one sounded promising.
That was “Keep It Cool,” which became the
first song I ever did as a Night Slugs–Kelela
collaboration. After doing that one track,
Ezra [Rubin aka Kingdom] called and said
he had a song that was coming out as an
instrumental on a compilation that he’d sent
to Ciara’s people but hadn’t heard anything
back from them and that I should try to get
on it.
What track was that?
“Bank Head.” When I first heard the track,
the first melody that came to me was sooo
Janet [Jackson] to me. Like, I felt Janet could
do that type of phrasing, but I felt a little
weird about singing “duh duh duh duhhhh
duhhhhh,” [sings chorus to “Bank Head”] but I
did it anyway. And then they sent me more
tracks. The tracks on CUT 4 ME, a lot of
them were in response to what I did on the
“Bank Head” track.
I WAS TRYING
TO FIND MY VOICE,
MY CROWD, FIND WHATEVER
MY “THING” WAS.
THERE WAS NOTHING
GLAMOROUS
OR COOL ABOUT SINGING
AT FOUR IN THE
MORNING.

47
 THE PHRASING
COMES TO ME
FROM, LIKE,
NOWHERE.
IT’S THE ONE THING
THAT MAKES ME
THINK THERE’S A
GOD.

48
Janet. Tracy Chapman. Amel Larrieux.
Aaliyah. How much are you influenced
by those artists?
[thinks] Tracy Chapman made me feel
okay with ambiguity, gender-wise. Amel
is extremely beautiful but really personal.
When you listen to her, when you see her
live—her live presentation is like, “Hey,
I’m just like you.” The feeling that you
are her friend… She’s more committed to
connecting than the image. I want people
to walk away from my shows feeling that.
I don’t want to be distant. I want people
to have the feeling when they see me live
that they met me. From Janet, it’s definitely
the need and the want to feel ever sexy.
Like sexy from the beginning to the end.
A commitment to sexy. With Aaliyah, there’s
beauty, then there’s this…gracefulness. Ease.
Making something extremely difficult look
extremely easy. Not doing a lot—or the
most. Like not doing the dance all the way.
Like, give me the choreographer that’s going
to teach me the dance, but I’m going to do
it like this… [dances easily] That feeling of at
any time she could go there. She could go
there, but she chooses not to.
You could do those things.
You might catch me doing them. [laughs]
I’ve been trying to thread and weave the
disruption that type of ambiguity can cause
in the way we see femininity. I want to be
onstage and hear people say, “Why is she
wearing so much clothing? Oh, wait.Why is
she naked now?” I haven’t done that. But one
day I might. I want to create an expression
of womanhood that’s multifaceted—more
complex. One that says there’s more than
one way to be a woman. I think I’ve always
wanted to complicate that.
“Cherry Coffee” has some pretty
introspective lyrics. But then I’ve heard
you say you don’t write lyrics. What’s that
about?
I meant write the phrasing. The phrasing
comes to me from, like, nowhere. It’s the
one thing that makes me think there’s a
God. After I’ve got the phrasing, I’ll sing
something that’s in the vibe. [sings] “Catch
me, I’ll feel better, say it’s over, baby…” At that
point, it’s the just melody that I’m going off
of—the one I’ve created—and I’m literally
conjuring up words out of my ass to fit lyrics
for the song—for a phrasing that I feel like
I didn’t compose. I hear the bits. Fill in the
bits with melody.The melody with phrasing.
The phrasing with lyrics.
Do you write the best from pain or love?
Extreme sadness and pain. Hurt. The songs
on the mixtape came at the time I was
breaking up with my ex. Specifically, the
idea of not letting go of something you don’t
want anymore, but letting go of something
you actually do want and can’t stop wanting.
I like new love too. Basically, I’m a sucker.
What are we going to hear on the new
album? All new material or cuts from
the mixtape?
All new. There’s still some residual stuff
with my ex. But there’s a hopeful, new-
experience kind of energy. There’s so much
reason for me to reflect. Like, “Wow, this is
really happening. It’s crazy. It’s real.” And also
talking about how I can accomplish other
things. I really try to express that sentiment,
like, you can really do this. You just have to
not do anything else. You have to act like
whether you get paid, or not, whether you
have girls or don’t have girls, guys—whether
you have friends or not—you cannot do
anything but your passion. You cannot stop.
This album is about me constantly thinking
of other ways to break down barriers. I feel
like the universe really does listen.
What are the most important traits for
an artist to have?
Humility. And drive. Confidence. I feel like
the intersection of confidence and humility.
An artist who’s situated between the two,
that’s the ticket for me. Feeling like you
know everything but you also don’t know
anything. That humility—I want it to always
be there, but I also want to have confidence
that’s rooted within. Confidence that isn’t
dependent on anything external. And when
it’s not there, it’s because I didn’t place it
there, not because something didn’t happen
on the outside. I’m learning that..
49
50
E T E R N A L
S O U L
On the heels of her best-selling debut, Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number,
fifteen-year-old Aaliyah was rocked by a sex scandal that would have
crushed a lesser talent. But breaking ties with her label and former
producer and lover R. Kelly afforded the teenage singer to create
a new musical life for herself. She joined forces with production/
songwriting duo Timbaland and Missy Elliott, who crafted a set of funky
and futuristic soul tracks that took audiences and stale R&B radio by
storm. Aaliyah showed strength and resilience—and effortless cool—
and went on to garner multiplatinum sales, becoming a huge star.
But her comeback was short-lived. At twenty-two, just as she released
her third album and started an acting career, Aaliyah lost her life in a
plane crash. However, icons never die, and her musical legacy endures.

by Michael A. Gonzales
photography by Jonathan Mannion

51
I
t was the last weekend before Labor Day 2001, and the sidewalks of New York City were brimming with Saturday-night
folks looking for fun.While a decade before the Meatpacking District was literally just that—with refrigerated trucks parked
in front of dingy warehouses and the cobblestone streets sticky with animal blood—by the new millennium, those same
blocks had transformed into a chic section of town overflowing with boutiques, restaurants, and clubs blasting the songs of
summer that included P. Diddy’s Black-rock single “Bad Boy for Life” and Destiny’s Child’s pop-tart anthem “Bootylicious.”
As I was passing one trendy spot, pop sensation Aaliyah’s latest single, “We Need a Resolution,” blared from the
speakers.With a voice that was shy and sexy, the mesmerizing track was the first from her self-titled third album, released
a month before. Produced by frequent collaborator Timbaland—whose signature cyberfunk explorations into sound
put an electrifying mojo on Black radio in the mid-’90s beginning with Aaliyah’s sophomore album, 1996’s One in a
Million—her cool, broken-hearted soprano blended perfectly with the heat generated from his funky, futurist machine
dreams.
Like Rachael, the emotional android in Blade Runner, Aaliyah became a cyborg chanteuse, a digital diva for a new
generation of soul children. With the music being stuck in a rut of stylistic nostalgia and neo-soul mania, One in a
Million made R&B’s potential feel limitless again, as it pulled listeners into the future.

52
53

Coming a year before Björk’s equally
brilliant 1995 album Post, Aaliyah’s debut,
Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number, came from
a teenage girl from the D who brought the
rhythmic weirdness first.
In 1995, Aaliyah Dana Haughton met
Timbaland when she was sixteen after
leaving her first label, Jive Records, amid
much controversy of an illicit marriage to
her then twenty-seven-year-old producer
R. Kelly, who’d written most of the material
on Age. Although both sides denied the
allegations, a marriage license was later
published in Vibe magazine.
While the “pied piper of R&B”—as
Kelly proclaimed himself—had gained
much fame since the release of his
multiplatinum  12 Play  album in late 1993,
and was given a pass by the press and his
fans, Aaliyah was portrayed as a Lolita
seductress. When her picture was shown at
the 1995  Soul Train Awards (she wasn’t in
attendance), audience members booed.
Years later, allegations of Kelly’s alleged
sexual misconduct continue to overshadow
his music, including an infamous golden-
shower sex tape, a housekeeper who sued
him for sexual harassment, and rumors of
millions doled out to settle “dozens” of
“harrowing lawsuits” brought by scores
of underage girls the musician reportedly
sexually abused.
Although Age was a platinum-seller for
Jive, the label allowed Aaliyah to be released
from her contract. Her management
company, Blackground, owned and operated
by her mother’s brother, Barry Hankerson,
who also managed R. Kelly, signed her with
Atlantic Records. At the urging of Atlantic
vice-president of A&R Craig Kallman (who
in 2014 is the label’s chairman), Tim (aka
Timbaland) flew to Aaliyah’s hometown of
Detroit, Michigan, with fellow producer,
songwriter, arranger, and rapper Missy Elliott.
Initially, Aaliyah’s second album was
supposed to be helmed by the jiggy prince
54
of production Puff Daddy (P. Diddy) and his
trademarked, sample-heavy touch with the
Hitmen team (Chucky Thompson, Deric
Angelettie, Ron Lawrence, Stevie J., and
others), but it never happened.
“I went to Puff ’s studio in Trinidad for
a week,” Aaliyah said in 1996. “We started
working together, but we couldn’t finish the
songs on time. I had to leave, because I had to
go to Atlanta to record with Jermaine Dupri.”
Setting up shop in Detroit at Vanguard
Studios, which was owned and operated by
producer/guitarist Michael J. Powell, who’d
overseen Aaliyah’s demo material when she
was twelve, Tim and Missy went to work.
“The first song we recorded was the title
track [‘One in a Million’],” Timbaland told
me in 1999. “From our first session, I was
blown away by how talented she was.”While
Missy later claimed that “If Your Girl Only
Knew” was the song recorded during their
first session, what remains undisputed was
the closeness the trio felt during that time.
The Black noise duo christened the
beautiful Brooklyn-born, Detroit-reared
singer “Baby Girl,” and they became
inseparable. Staying at Vanguard for a week,
the three of them later flew, according to
Missy Elliot, on “a little, little plane,” to
Pyramid Studios in Ithaca, New York, to
finish their work. The end results were the
six groundbreaking tracks and two interludes
from her second disc, One in a Million.
Legendary engineer Jimmy Douglass
(who worked on countless Atlantic R&B
classics) connected with them in Ithaca.
“Aaliyah was coming off such a big debut,”
he says, “so it would’ve been all right for her
to be bratty, but she wasn’t. She was such a
nice human being. Aaliyah was very quiet,
but when she sang, she sounded great. I was
impressed.”
In July 1996, a month before One in a
Million was released, I interviewed Aaliyah
at the Sea Grill, a restaurant at Rockefeller
Plaza in New York City. Having first met
her two years before, I realized that Aaliyah
was always a sweetheart, yet very guarded.
After a sex scandal that might’ve squashed a
lesser talent, she was obviously resilient. She
answered questions thoroughly but tried not
to disclose too much about R. Kelly or the
alleged marriage.
“I faced the adversity,” Aaliyah said. “I
could’ve broken down, I could’ve gone and
hid in the closet and said,‘I’m not going to do
this anymore.’ But I love singing, and I wasn’t
going to let that mess stop me. I got a lot of
support from my fans and that inspired me
to put that behind me, be a stronger person,
and put my all into making One in a Million.”
Sitting next to her equally beautiful
mother, Aaliyah was radiant, coy, and
confident as she talked about Tim and Missy’s
production skills. “At first, Tim and Missy
were skeptical if I would like their work, but
I thought it was tight, just ridiculous,” she
said. “Their sound was different and unique,
and that’s what appealed to me.
“Before we got together, I talked to
them on the phone and told them what
I wanted. I said, ‘You guys know I have a
street image, but there is a sexiness to it, and
I want my songs to complement that’; I told
them that before I even met them. Once I
said that, I didn’t have to say anything else.
Everything they brought me was the bomb.”
Besides Tim and Missy, she also worked
with producers Kay Gee (Naughty by
Nature), Daryl Simmons (L.A. Reid and
Babyface), and Vincent Herbert (Toni
Braxton), who laced her dope remake of
Marvin Gaye’s classic “Got to Give It Up,”
which featured a smooth Slick Rick rap.
Aaliyah explained how the remake came
about: “I wanted some real party songs, so
when my uncle played me that [original
track], I thought of how I could make it
different. Slick Rick [who’d been in jail] was
on work release at the time, so Vincent got
him on the song.
“I don’t know how Marvin Gaye
fans will react, but I hope they like it,”
she continued. “I always think it’s a great
compliment when people remake songs. I
hope one day after I’m not here that people
will cover my songs.” Aaliyah’s uncle and
manager Barry Hankerson was the person
most responsible for making his niece a star.
“Barry was bringing Aaliyah to the studio
to record when she was twelve years old,”
remembers producer and Vanguard owner
Michael J. Powell via telephone from his
home in Detroit. “At the time, Barry was
trying to get Aaliyah a deal with MCA, and
he came to me to make her demos.”
Powell was a Chicago native whose
studio, Vanguard, was a place that made
sophisticated soul. Best known for the lush
retro-nuevo production on Anita Baker’s
incredible Rapture album in 1986, Powell
has also worked with Aretha Franklin, Patti
LaBelle, and Gladys Knight, who was married
to Barry Hankerson from 1974 to 1978.
“As a producer, Michael is a very patient
person with great ears,” says Bill Banfield,
composer and professor at the Berklee
College of Music. A friend of Powell’s, he
has also recorded with him. “Vanguard was
the second generation of Motown with
a live band, polished arrangements, and
Detroit soul.”
Powell, who is still working in Detroit,
recalls working with the singer back before
her debut:“That was the time before Aaliyah
went to work with R. Kelly, and she sang in
a full, powerful voice that was like Whitney
Houston’s. We recorded a few covers—
‘The Greatest Love of All,’ ‘Over the
Rainbow,’ and ‘My Funny Valentine,’ which
she had sung on Star Search. She could
handle big ballads, and she had great range.
I have heard her do things the public have
never heard. She was a natural.”
One of Aaliyah’s first professional gigs
was singing with her aunt Gladys Knight
in Las Vegas. “We performed at Bally’s five
nights a week with a little break in between,”
Aaliyah said in 1994. “Singer David Peaston
[whom Hankerson also managed] opened
the show, and then Gladys would bring me
out to sing ‘Home’ with her, and then we
did ‘Believe in Yourself.’ I loved it; for me, it
was like being on tour.”
In 1996, while Aaliyah cited “One in a
Million” as her favorite song, the label chose
to release “If Your Girl Only Knew” as the
first single. However, having debuted in
1994 with the more traditional soul stylings
of R. Kelly writing and producing Age Ain’t
Nothing But a Number, not everyone was
pleased with the singer’s new direction.
“Me and Tim were so excited, because
this was the first production we were
doing outside of DeVante’s camp,” Missy
explained. In addition to Jodeci and their
famed producer DeVante Swing, the
aforementioned camp of young upstarts
included Sista (Missy’s rap quartet),
Ginuwine, Magoo, Playa, and Tweet. “We
were only supposed to do one record, but
Craig [Kallman] kept asking us for one
more; but, when they played [the singles]
‘If Your Girl Only Knew’ and ‘One in a
Million’ for radio programmers, they were
afraid to embrace it. They said the beats
were too different and it wouldn’t fit in with
their playlist. They wanted something that
sounded like Puffy.”
Still, when a few braver souls started
playing the record, it just took off. “That
album broke ground with its experimental
tempos and drum programming and
hip-hop soul songwriting,” says Jason
King, cultural critic, musician, and the
director of the Clive Davis Institute of
Recorded Music.

55

By 2001, Aaliyah released a handful of
Timbaland-produced, soundtrack-supported
singles that pushed the experimental sound
even further—including the Grammy-
nominated scorchers “Are You That
Somebody?” from 1998’s Dr. Dolittle and
“Try Again” from her costarring vehicle
Romeo Must Die in 2000. As pop critic Kelefa
Sanneh wrote in 2001 in the New York Times,
“ ‘Try Again’ helped smuggle the innovative
techniques of electronic dance music onto
the pop charts, establishing Aaliyah as pop’s
most futuristic star.”
The lyrics of both songs were penned
by former Playa member Static Major, who
also wrote “We Need a Resolution.” Like
Missy and Timbaland, the songwriter was
once a protégé of Jodeci producer DeVante
Swing. Engineer Jimmy Douglass, who has
worked side by side with Timbaland on
every production since the early days, says of
the late songwriter, who died in 2008 from
myasthenia gravis: “Static was like a brother
to Tim, and he knew exactly how to write
to Tim’s music. The first record they did
together was Ginuwine’s ‘Pony,’ and that led
to their [musical] history.
“We recorded ‘AreYou That Somebody?’
at Capitol Records’ studio in Los Angeles,”
Douglass recalls, “and it was a soup-to-nuts
session, which means we did the entire
song in one session. Wrote it, tracked it, and
mixed it from 11:00 p.m. to 9:00 a.m.; the
next to last thing we added was the sound
of the baby, and the very last time was Tim
saying, ‘Dirty South.’ It was a union studio,
so they weren’t used to working overnight;
we were trying to finish that song as quick
as possible.”
Douglass also engineered the “Try
Again” sessions, which began with Static
writing a song that was inspirational.
Recorded in New York City at Sound on
Sound Studios, “Try Again,” as Douglass
recalls, “was originally written to inspire
young people, but Barry [Hankerson] heard
it and told them, ‘It’s got to be about love.’
The melody and hook were the same, so
56
Static changed the lyrics and it became a
love song.”
In addition, Aaliyah had begun an acting
career that was taking off. Cast in the Joel
Silver–produced kung-fu crime flick Romeo
Must Die as well as the Anne Rice vampire
thriller Queen of the Damned and the Matrix
sequels, Aaliyah hadn’t released a full-length
album in the five years. “I wanted to take
a break after One in a Million to just relax,
think about how I wanted to approach
the next album,” she told journalist Elon
Johnson that April. “Then, when I was ready
to start back up, Romeo happened, and so I
had to take another break and do that film
and then do the soundtrack, then promote
it.The break turned into a longer break than
I anticipated.”
Back in the Meatpacking District that
August night in 2001, I gathered with
friends at the then-popular club APT where
DJ Chairman Mao spun old-school hip-
hop and soul as high-heeled girls sipped
crimson-colored cosmopolitans.
Two hours later, a strange vibe could
be felt in the wood-paneled room as folks
began looking strangely at their Blackberries,
pagers, and cell phones. Standing beside
me, a female friend suddenly blurted, “Oh
my God, it says here that Aaliyah died in a
plane crash.” Seconds later, along with other
women in the room, she began to weep.
The accident occurred when she and
her team were returning to Miami, Florida,
from the Bahamas, where she shot the video
for “Rock the Boat,” the third single from
Aaliyah, her third album finally released in
2001. Their small twin-engine Cessna plane
was several hundred pounds overweight and
crashed after takeoff, exploding on impact.
The pilot was found to have had cocaine
and alcohol in his system and had falsified
data in order to receive his FAA license.
At the age of twenty-two, Aaliyah Dana
Haughton became the latest pop star to
enter that rock-and-soul heaven that the
Righteous Brothers sang about so many
years before. Glancing around at the crying
females, most no older than Aaliyah herself,
it became obvious to me that she was much
more than a star—she was one of them.
Harlem resident and former Jive Records
executive Jeff Sledge, who had known the
songstress since she was a fifteen-year-old
schoolgirl, had returned from the movies
with his fiancée when he heard the news. “It
was supposed to be hip-hop night on Hot
97, but they were playing a mix of Aaliyah
songs instead,” he recalls thirteen years later.
“And then [DJ] Red Alert announced that
she had died. I was stunned.”
Of course, he wasn’t the only one. For
days, the world mourned the young star
with television specials, radio interviews
with her contemporaries and friends, and a
candlelight vigil in front of her alma mater,
the Detroit High School for the Fine and
Performing Arts. Furthermore, her stunning
movie-star features were plastered on the
covers of newspapers and magazines.
Although she had the looks of a femme
fatale, she was a sweet girl who’d been
forced to grow up much too fast and died
too young. However, as we all know, icons
never die, because the images are forever.
In her short lifetime, Aaliyah must’ve had
her picture taken a million times, made
countless videos, and created music that
is still relevant to fans as well as to fellow
pop idols Beyoncé, Drake, Chris Brown,
Rihanna, and others.
“There are so many artists trying to
re-create the Aaliyah vibe in their music,”
says singer Courtney Noelle, who was
in seventh grade when the Black pop
princess died. Growing up on the East
Side of Pittsburgh, Noelle made up dances
to “One in a Million” while watching the
video constantly. “Aaliyah was so relatable
and cool; she wasn’t over-sexualized, so we
didn’t worry about Mom disapproving,”
Noelle continues. “She sang, danced, and
acted, but she did it all so effortlessly. She
was just so beautiful and graceful.”
While One in a Million was a landmark,
the adolescent wonderfulness of Age Ain’t
Nothing But a Number is often overlooked
when Aaliyah’s small canon of work
is examined. Of course, as Jason King
points out, “Age has been marred by their
troubling marriage and the [statutory] rape/
pedophilia allegations that would come
later. I don’t think we can now hear Age,
particularly given the title, without taking
the issue of teenage rape into account. So
when I’m listening to Age, I’m struggling to
try to listen to it out of context, but mostly
I’m hearing R. Kelly as an alleged predator
presenting to us his sonic and musical vision
of how he wanted Aaliyah to exist in the
commercial marketplace.”
Still, for me, Age Ain’t Nothing But a
Number connects with many memories
of the ’90s soul years that gave us debuts
from Mary J. Blige, Jodeci, D’Angelo, Faith
Evans, Maxwell, Erykah Badu, and the era’s
most successful singer, writer, and producer,
Robert Sylvester Kelly.
57

In 1991, R. Kelly and Public Announcement
signed to Jive Records a few years before
Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys took
them mainstream. Better known for being
the home of top-tier hip-hop acts A Tribe
Called Quest, Boogie Down Productions,
Schoolly D, and E-40, the Jive label was put
into the business of soul by the success of
Kelly’s post–New Jack Swing sound on Born
into the 90’s and 12 Play.
“Barry Hankerson had been talking
about his niece Aaliyah since she was twelve,
but [label owner Clive Calder] thought she
was too young,” says A&R man Jeff Sledge,
who began working at the label in 1992.
“When she turned fourteen, Clive agreed,
but only under the condition that R. Kelly
produced the whole album. Musically, it just
made sense.”
For Robert Kelly, 1993 was a hell of
a year. A bittersweet twelve months that
included a substantial development in his
R&B sound, the death of his beloved mother,
Joanne, and the success of his album 12 Play,
which was praised by critics and fans alike. It
was also the year he began working on the
material that would eventually become Age
Ain’t Nothing But a Number.
Although R. Kelly attempted to uphold
his Chi-Town swagger after the death of his
mother, the man was a mental mess. There
were bizarre reports of the singer locking
himself in hotel bathrooms during press days,
blowing off Rolling Stone photo shoots, and
sleeping in the closet. “His mother was the
sweetest lady,” Jeff Sledge says. “When she
died, he had a nervous breakdown. During
that time, he was also making Age, so Aaliyah
was always around to comfort him. After his
mother’s passing, all he felt he had left in life
was his music and working with Aaliyah.”
58
R. Kelly’s love for music began when he
was a fifteen-year-old student at Chicago’s
Kenwood Academy where he encountered
famed music instructor Lena McLin. The
niece of gospel innovator Thomas A. Dorsey,
she taught her students opera, gospel, jazz,
and soul. As a child growing up during the
Depression, she lived with Reverend Dorsey
and played in church. While other girls
wanted dolls,Lena McLin wanted sheet music.
McLin taught R. Kelly everything she
knew about the keyboards, pushing him
by anointing her student “the next Stevie
Wonder.” Encouraging the poor lanky
boy from the South Side to put down his
basketball and sit at the piano, she started
him writing songs as well as teaching him
discipline. “He didn’t have much,” McLin
explained to me in 1995 in a Chinese
restaurant in the Hyde Park section of
Chicago. “He came from a terrible ghetto
and sometimes wouldn’t have the clothes the
other kids had, but I had a vision of what he
was going to be. The Lord told me he was a
genius, and I wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
So, what exactly is a genius? “A genius
lives in the present day, has studied the past,
and preconceived the future,” explained
McLin. “Robert’s mission is to bring back
the real essence, the real creativity, the
real soul to the music.” Although Robert
dropped out of Kenwood when he was
seventeen, he already had five hundred
completed songs in his portfolio, according
to McLin. “Well, I don’t think it was five
hundred, but it was a lot,” R. Kelly told me
in 1995 while mastering his third album at
the Chicago Recording Company (CRC).
Founded in 1975, it is billed as the largest
studio in the Midwest.The studio became R.
Kelly’s main sound factory in the early years.
For R. Kelly, the state-of-the-art room
became the rhythmic cathedral where he
would expand on the musical legacy of
Windy City soul—his city where the Chi-
Lites once doo-wopped on street corners,
Leroy Hutson made gangster-lean tracks
for Curtom, and a young rapper named
Common was recording his Resurrection
album somewhere across town.
“Miss McLin started me writing every
day,” Kelly said.“I’d write a song and she’d tell
me it was the most beautiful song she’d ever
heard. She also started me messin’ around
with the piano. I just wanted to make her
happy.” Growing up in the notorious Ida B.
Wells Homes, Kelly found those streets a lot
more dangerous than the days of Cooley High.
“I had a lot of ups and downs, lots of
lessons, and trials and tribulations,” Kelly
said. Avoiding the gangs, he spent much time
at a neighbor Willie Pearl’s house playing her
keyboards. One of the first songs he wrote,
“Orphanage,” was inspired by a television
program. Singing in L stations throughout
the city, he waited for strangers to drop
change in his chitlin bucket.
Kelly was discovered by house-
music pioneer and former Trax Records
employee DJ Wayne Williams. After seeing
him perform original material at a friend’s
barbecue, Williams had to convince his new
bosses at Jive Records to sign him: “I was
constantly telling them that R. Kelly was the
shit, but it took Barry Weiss, the president
of the label, coming to Chicago, before they
finally said yes. Jive had full confidence in
him and gave R. Kelly creative freedom.”
While Kelly’s debut, Born into the 90’s,
sounded as though it was jacked wholesale
from the Teddy Riley/Aaron Hall school of
Harlem boogie, by the time 12 Play came
out in 1993, the brother had perfected
a baby-makin’ style on tracks “Bump N’
Grind,” “Your Body’s Callin’,” and the epic
erotica of “It Seems Like You’re Ready.”
Additionally, the album’s more danceable
tracks, “Summer Bunnies” and “I Like the
Crotch on You,” showed his dance-floor
diversity. Still, whether the tempo, Kelly’s
lyrics were often sexually explicit, filled
with lustful references and obvious double
entendres. “He grabbed the brass ring by
stepping fully into the role of hypersexual
super-stud,” Jason King says. “That’s an
archetype in Black music that stretches very
far back and that Isaac Hayes took to new
heights in the early 1970s. Songs on 12
Play  were very much musical analogues of
the celebration of Black, freaky, and carnal
culture in the 1990s.”
Soon afterwards, Kelly began applying
his newly developed, smoothed-out,
seductive sounds to singles for Hi-Five
(“Quality Time”) and Changing Faces
(“G.H.E.T.T.O.U.T.”), and was more than
ready to tackle a full-album project for his
manager’s niece. “With the flair and energy
he puts into his music, we can feel it,” McLin
said. “Even when working on songs for
others, he touches all the talent he comes
in contact with; Robert’s mission is to bring
soul music back.” Inspired by an extensive
list of vocalists, musicians, and producers
including Quincy Jones, Donny Hathaway,
Curtis Mayfield, and Tyrone Davis, he
turned himself into an R&B auteur on
the Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number project.
 R. Kelly was determined to become a
one-man Holland-Dozier-Holland with
a splash of Phil Spector eccentricity to
keep things interesting. “Age was solely an
R. Kelly production intended to not only
introduce us to Aaliyah, but to show off R.
Kelly’s polymath awesomeness,” says King.
“It’s hip-hop soul in the way that Mary J.
Blige, Xscape, and SWV fused those genres.
But, Aaliyah embodied the hip-hop soul
merger in a different way. She had the sweet,
soothing, and slightly reserved soprano
more associated with Diana Ross, Minnie
Riperton, or Janet Jackson. I don’t think any
producer understood what contemporary
R&B audiences wanted to hear and pushed
them further in the 1990s more than R. Kelly.”
In the summer of 1993, with Aaliyah
on break from the Detroit High School for
the Fine and Performing Arts, she spent her
entire vacation holed up inside the CRC.
“The first song we recorded was ‘Old
School,’ which I loved, because it had an
Isley Brothers flair,” Aaliyah said. “That song
didn’t take long to do, maybe two days. At
first, I had to get comfortable, but I had been
around Robert, so it was cool. Both Robert
and I are perfectionists, and if you listen to
the music, there is a lot of passion in it.”
Like Batman, one of his favorite
comic book characters, R. Kelly worked
best at night. “Most people are asleep, so
it’s just the moon, the stars, the quiet, and
the music.” Subsequently, the nights spent
with the underage singer led to Kelly’s
first accusations of statutory rape when an
alleged affair began between them. Although
there was a twelve-year age difference, the
affair supposedly led to marriage, which
paved the way for scandal and an annulment.
While R. Kelly and Aaliyah always denied
these accusations, the man who wrote the
title track to Age tellingly said, “I write from
everyday experiences and what moves me;
that, to me, is a true writer. I love all forms of
music. Everything that comes into my mind
and hits my heart, I write it and record it. I
love songs that mean something, and have
some kind of truthfulness to them.”
Photographer Terrence A. Reese (aka
Tar), who shot the album covers for 12
Play and Age, recalls that during the shoot
“Aaliyah relied on Robert to teach her.
He was like Berry Gordy to her Diana
Ross. The following day was her fifteenth
birthday, and she was also going to film the
‘Back & Forth’ video, so they were working
on the dances and styling.You could see the
attraction between R. Kelly and her.”

59
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T
urning back the hands
of time to Good Friday,
1994, I was on a flight
from New York City
to Detroit to interview
Aaliyah. Hired by
Jive Records publicist
Lesley Pitts, who was
also my girlfriend, I was
assigned to write the
budding singer’s bio.
Having worked with TLC and Toni Braxton
on their debuts, Lesley was excited about the
teenager’s pop potential.
Aaliyah’s first single, “Back & Forth,”
was already being played on the radio and
video channels. Unlike the broken-glass
balladry of Mary J. Blige, which was hard as
the Yonkers ghetto she hailed from, Aaliyah’s
voice had a soft strength that reminded me
of the Black pop women (Dionne Warwick,
Marilyn McCoo, and Barbara McNair) I’d
grown up listening to in the ’70s.
For weeks, Lesley had been bragging
that this new kid was going to be large; after
hearing a few tracks, including “At Your
Best (You Are Love),” her lovely cover of
the Isley Brothers’ ballad, I was hooked. “I
like to groove to artists like Parliament or
the Isley Brothers, because that was when
music was really real,” Aaliyah said later
that day. “I just think the Isley Brothers are
so unique.”
After my jet landed in the Motor City, I
took a short cab ride to the Sheraton Hotel
and within minutes was sitting in the dining
room with Aaliyah, her mother Diane, and
Lesley. Dressed casually in jeans and sneakers,
Aaliyah wore her shades, but soon took
them off as she became more comfortable
with me. “When I was younger, I used to go
around the house singing with my mother,”
Aaliyah said, her voice poised and proper.
Coming from a middle-class family, she
was a product of nice schools and an artistic
yearning that was encouraged with classes.
“I’m a big fan of Johnny Mathis, so I used
to sing ‘Chances Are’ with my mom. Luther
Vandross was another favorite. I was so
drawn to singing, because I could get away
from everything, and I just loved it.”
Uncle Barry first introduced Aaliyah to
R. Kelly when she was twelve. “He was just
completing Born into the 90’s, and I sang for
him,” she smiled, her voice lightening. “I
sang for him, and he liked what he heard.
Still, we didn’t start working on the album
until a few years later.”
Arriving first in January of ’93,
when there was snow on the ground,
Aaliyah returned in the summer, and their
relationship clicked in the studio. “We vibed
off of one another, and that’s how the songs
was built,” she said. “He would vibe with me
on what the lyrics should be. He’d tell me
what to sing, and I’d sing it. That’s how the
whole album was done. We put in a lot of
hours; as far as the music, we’d be in there all
night making sure it was perfect.There were
times when I was tired, but I knew I had to
push on if I wanted to come off.”
When the two weren’t recording, they’d
be in the studio watching horror movies.
“Silence of the Lambs was my favorite,” she
said.“The studio can be hectic, so sometimes
we went to McDonald’s.”
While some of the Kelly’s double
entendres could be embarrassing, Aaliyah
defended “Back & Forth,” a song whose
title hints of sex. “It’s not a song about love
or whatever; it’s about going to a party and
having fun. I have songs about love, crushes,
or whatever, but that song is about dancing.
This album is about teens and what they go
through.” One of the more forward crush
records was the sensually upbeat “No One
Knows How to Love Me Quite Like You
Do.” Aaliyah smiled when I asked about
it and said, “Every girl looks for that one
person who is going to love them right.That
song is saying, when it comes down to it, I
like how you satisfy me.”
Months before Age was released on
May 24, 1994, the stylish Millicent Shelton–
directed clip for “Back & Forth” was shot
at Aaliyah’s performing arts school in
Detroit, where teens were recruited to be in
various scenes. “That was my first video, but
Millicent made me comfortable.” Between
takes, she listened to the music of Tupac,
Wu-Tang, and Gang Starr. “They all rap on
an intellectual level.”
In the studio, she was a sponge who later
spoke about her aspirations to produce and
write: “When we were recording ‘Down
With the Clique,’ I watched how Robert
[Kelly] laid the drums and everything.
He taught me to play the piano a bit, and
I’m also trying to learn the mixing board,
though it looks complicated. The studio is
my first love.”
After wrapping the interview, Lesley
and I went upstairs to our hotel room. Once
inside, I turned to her and bluntly stated, “I
know this sounds crazy, but I get the feeling
R. Kelly is sleeping with that girl.”
Looking at me as though I was losing
my mind, Lesley was appalled. “Why would
you say something like that?”
“It’s just a feeling I get.”
“Well, it’s not true, so don’t say that,”
she scolded, more protective publicist than
loving girlfriend. Of course, a few months
later, the entire sordid story became yet
another tale in the Babylon that is the music
industry that eats its young.
In 2013, journalist Jim DeRogatis, who
broke the R. Kelly sex scandal in 2002, told
the Village Voice, “I had Aaliyah’s mother cry
on my shoulder and say her daughter’s life
was ruined. Aaliyah’s life was never the same
after that.”
61
62
S
ix days after the disaster that ended Aaliyah’s life as well as the lives of the pilot and
seven members of her team, I sat in my Brooklyn apartment watching footage from
Aaliyah’s funeral on Entertainment Tonight. There were images of the white horse-
drawn carriage that carried her casket from Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel to
St. Ignatius Loyola Church on East Eighty-Third Street in Manhattan.
After the funeral, in front of thousands of fans, twenty-two doves representing
the years of her life were released in front of the church as her mother Diane, father
Michael, older brother Rashad, Uncle Barry, and fiancé Damon Dash cried. The
only person missing, for obvious reasons, was R. Kelly.
Six years before—just a year removed from his notorious split with Aaliyah—R. Kelly sat inside
his studio at CRC telling me about producing for other artists, including Michael Jackson (“You Are
Not Alone”) and Kelly Price (“Friend of Mine”). “I have many styles,” he said. “I’m more than just the
12 Play guy. I don’t write one kind of thing.”
Looking at him closely, I asked, “If there was just one person you could work with right now,
who would it be?” Without hesitation, he held his head high and shamelessly answered, “Aaliyah.” .

63
SOUL SEARCHING
Disco was too easy for Rinder and Lewis. Drummer Laurin Rinder and keyboardist W. Michael Lewis
had individually earned their chops in the ’60s as professional session musicians, backing artists like
Wilson Pickett and James Brown, and gigging in their own bands. After meeting at AVI Records in 1974—
and with some coaxing by label boss Ray Harris—the newly formed duo found they had a knack for
creating commercial, crossover disco. Embarrassed by some of what they created, they hid behind
various monikers like El Coco and Le Pamplemousse but continued to pump out successful records at
an alarming rate. They had an excess of money, girls, and drugs, but Rinder and Lewis were in search of
something greater. So they chose to reveal their true identities on a string of records that would allow
them to realize a more artistic vision of disco that played to their strengths.Their stripped-down drum-and-
synthesizer tracks pioneered the cosmic dance aesthetic and cemented a legacy they could be proud of.

by John M. Gómez

64
65
66
67
 R
inder and Lewis—the musical partnership formed by drummer Laurin Rinder and
keyboardist W. Michael Lewis—was one of disco’s most versatile, innovative, and successful
production outfits. Beginning in 1975, they released a slew of records using the monikers
Le Pamplemousse, El Coco, Saint Tropez, and Tuxedo Junction that put their stamp on Los
Angeles disco. Under their own names, they released a series of groundbreaking conceptual
albums, starting with 1977’s Seven Deadly Sins. Despite their extensive recorded catalog,
Rinder and Lewis remains an elusive collaboration. Laurin and Michael had the itinerant
sensibility of session musicians: of professional instrumentalists who each day took on several new identities.
They embodied the many faces of disco, and yet disco does not tell the whole story. If anything, it provides
a convenient veil that even now conceals the motions of a close friendship that would eventually succumb
to its intensity. In the wake of disco, their own identity remains a mystery. Who are Rinder and Lewis?

68 Drummer Laurin Rinder (top right) with the Four Sounds, 1965. Photo courtesy of Laurin Rinder.
 Michael and Laurin are both native
Californians. William Michael Lewis was
born in San Diego in 1948, but grew up
in the South, moving every couple of
years as his civil engineer father moved
between projects. It was in Alabama
that Michael (or Mike) first turned his
attention to music. He suffered from bad
asthma and was recommended by his
doctor that he take up a wind instrument
to strengthen his lungs. He learned the
clarinet and enrolled at the University of
Alabama, majoring in music theory with
a view to becoming a classical clarinetist.
While still at high school, Mike had
begun doing session work as a keyboardist at
studios in the small Alabama town of Muscle
Shoals. For a short period in the mid-’60s,
this town became one of the most important
centers in popular music, recording many
of the era’s defining artists. Against the
backdrop of one of America’s most racially
troubled states, it provided a unique
opportunity for Black and White musicians
to mix. Mike soaked up the Muscle Shoals
atmosphere, playing on demos by Wilson roll was the romance. It was the way in.” ’60s and befriended Deke Richards, who
Pickett, Percy Sledge, and Dinah Washington Laurin quit school and became a was part of the Corporation, a collective
on weekends. He eventually formed his own session musician. He moved to different of songwriters at Motown that penned
bands, the Seeds of Time and Brick Wall, cities several times, spending stints in New the Jackson Five’s earliest hits. Together
and the experience of performing rock York and Detroit, where he cemented his they formed the Four Sounds, a grinding
music marked a turning point in his career. reputation as a beat drummer along with R&B outfit that released—on the suitably
He admits that rock “seemed a lot more contemporaries Bernard Purdie and Earl named Ran-Dee label—the scuzzy “Mama
fun than taking the classical route, because I Palmer. Over a fifteen-year period, Laurin Ubangi Bangi,” an exotica-tinged titty-
could improvise. Plus, I could make money played with everyone from Chuck Berry shaker complete with ethnic stereotyping,
on weekends, and that pretty much sealed it.” and Little Richard to Fontella Bass and animal cries, and pounding tribal drums. If
Michael’s future collaborator Laurin James Brown. He estimates that he must the session-musician life meant a degree of
Rinder was born in Los Angeles in 1943 have played on no less than two thousand submissiveness to company rules, the Four
and grew up in Hollywood. His father was records. A few years after Amoeba Records Sounds allowed Laurin to explore the sleazy
a bookie from Chicago who took bets on opened in Los Angeles, Laurin and his and playful sound that would later become
horses from all the great actors of the time daughter hunted for records he’d played a central component of his disco aesthetic.
and encouraged Laurin’s musical education on in the store. “We stopped at four In 1969, Mike also moved to California,
at every opportunity. When Laurin was a hundred,” he recalls. “There were so many but found himself broke and alone when
teenager, his father would drop him off at I couldn’t remember, because in those his band, the Devil’s Brigade, separated. He
Shelley Manne’s nightclub, the Manne-Hole, days—especially with Motown—you met Dick Dodd from the recently disbanded
before picking up his mother from her shift didn’t know who the artist was. You’d just garage outfit the Standells, who offered
at a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard. go into the studio and lay the track down.” Mike the opportunity to join his new group,
Laurin was underage, so he would sit in The nameless studio space encouraged Joshua. Dodd, who knew Laurin from the
the alley and listen to the jazz filtering a weightless sense of non-responsibility Four Sounds, asked him to play drums,
through the walls. He remembers being in Laurin. “I lived on airplanes,” he recalls, bringing him together with Mike for the
drawn to “the language the musicians were “traveling to another group to play with, first time. Joshua dispersed after playing the
using” when they walked out of the club. another girl to sleep with, another drug to L.A. club circuit for a few years, but, in 1974,
“It was very cool,” he says, “and it changed take.” This revelation hints at the corrosive Mike called up Laurin to work on the rock
the way I thought about everything, and power of becoming accustomed to a life opera Amrakus: The Chronicle of the Starship
about what I wanted to do.” Laurin became of constantly crossed paths, where identity Trinity, which he was producing for AVI
involved with players like Louie Bellson, was subsumed into the anonymous life of Records. For six months, they rehearsed
Buddy Rich, and Joe Morello, but soon the studio, disrupting any sense of clear until the project lost steam, but they still
realized that jazz was not the quickest positioning in relation to an ever-increasing had contractual obligations to AVI, and the
route for meeting girls: “Jazz was always a landscape of unidentified recordings. label’s Ray Harris presented them with a
big part of what I was doing, but rock and Laurin returned to California in the late novel collaborative opportunity: disco.

(above) W. Michael Lewis (center, with guitar) in his band the Seeds of Time, 1966. 69
70
 Rinder and Lewis was the perfect
confluence of age and time and place and
people. Harris had been captivated by disco
at clubs in Europe and was keen to market
this music to American audiences. In 1975,
he called Mike and Laurin into his office
to play them some imports and proposed
they start recording disco tracks. He sent
them to Studio One—a gay nightclub
in L.A.—to get a feel for the scene. Mike
and Laurin found the whole experience
perplexing. They didn’t warm to the music,
whose formulaic excesses affronted their
sense of musical integrity. Moreover, they
couldn’t understand how DJs that were
simply blending old Motown records
could send people into such raptures. Yet
there was something in the hedonistic
energy that emanated from the dance floor
that captured their imagination. Mike
and Laurin understood the commercial
potential in the spirit of inclusion advanced
by disco, and they went into the studio
the next day to start work on El Coco.
It is telling that Mike and Laurin
were introduced to disco as a European
phenomenon. They, like Harris, were
unaware of the disco and proto-disco
movements that had been happening in
the New York underground for several
years already. They came into disco at the
time that it was hitting the mainstream,
and everything about El Coco was geared
towards marketing. The name—although
commonly thought to be a reference to
the ample quantities of cocaine Mike and
Laurin were consuming—was thought
up by Harris, who took it from Harvey
Averne’s Latin music label Coco Records.
Harris wanted to market El Coco as an
overseas product, and so its first release
on AVI, 1975’s Mondo Disco, was adorned
with a concoction of foreign references.
The records themselves were even sent
to Europe and brought back so they
could be sold to DJs as imports, a shrewd
marketing scam that capitalized on the
perceived prestige of foreign commodities.
Harris noticed how another Latin label,
Salsoul Records, had started targeting DJs
by releasing promotional 12-inch records,
cut at 45 rpm with one long track on
each side. He copied this model with the
“Giant 45s,” which promoted their cuts—
in French and Spanish—as special 12-inch
disco versions. The first “Giant 45” was
El Coco’s “Let’s Get It Together,” a 1976
recording that anticipated what would
become the distinctive RinLew sound.
Laurin Rinder and W. Michael Lewis, circa late ’70s. Photos courtesy of Laurin Rinder.
“Let’s Get It Together” drew on Mike’s the masks provided by the studio walls.
and Laurin’s backgrounds to introduce a Masks are almost invariably related to
jazz aesthetic to disco, combining elements ambivalence, and for Mike and Laurin, the
of swing with funk. It feels like a slow- studio provided an avenue for selective
motion fantasy: it is bright, luscious, and personification. Laurin reveals that they were
sensual, and this resonated with an audience “deeply embarrassed by disco.We didn’t want
that looked to the club environment anyone to know what we were doing. We
for a world of glamour and romance. thought of ourselves as really serious guys,
El Coco records sold very well, and, and this music was just so easy for us.” Indeed,
brimming with commercial success, Mike commercial disco was a musical dead end
and Laurin took advantage of the situation that ended up tormenting them with self-
by creating several groups with distinct doubt. They were torn between their desire
identities. If El Coco was sophisticated, for commercial success and their fidelity to
Le Pamplemousse was stripped down and using music as a strategy for rebellion and
dirty. In contrast, Saint Tropez and Tuxedo romance, and they eventually realized that
Junction brought into play the shiny, gay, something needed to change. “We really
and indulgent side of disco. Released on A. had to stop making generic music,” Laurin
J. Cervantes’s new label, Butterfly Records, confesses. “We had more money, girls, and
Saint Tropez was a silky trip into musical cocaine that we knew what to do with. We
erotica, replacing wah-wah pedals and horns had to do something for our soul.” It was at
with an orchestra fronted by three female this point that the masks were removed, and
singers charged with homoerotic intimation. Rinder and Lewis finally came into view.
The records’ cover art pointed to a close
physical intimacy between the women:
their bodies always touching, inviting
you inside the gatefolds, which disclosed
fantasies of embraces and light kisses.
Laurin had come up with the idea
of arranging swing songs from the ’40s
to a disco beat, a concept that Cervantes
instantly bought into. Tuxedo Junction
recorded extremely kitsch disco renditions
of big-band classics—like “Chattanooga
Choo Choo”—which became unlikely
crossover hits. These recordings were similar
in substance to Walter Murphy’s take on
classical masterpieces, and, like Murphy’s
Big Apple Band, none of the groups
actually existed. Mike and Laurin did all
the instrumentation and attributed the
music to fictitious performers. As the need WE WERE DEEPLY
for public performances intensified, they
even put together false ensembles to send EMBARRASSED BY
on the road while they recorded new songs.
Mike and Laurin spent their entire DISCO.
lives in the studio, constantly turning out
cocaine-fuelled material for their bands. WE DIDN’T WANT
“It was like being a character actor casting
for a movie,” recalls Mike. “Between us, ANYONE TO KNOW
we played all the instruments and simply
brought in different singers and specialists WHAT WE WERE DOING.
for solos.” In many ways, Mike and Laurin
continued to be session musicians, churning WE THOUGHT OF OURSELVES
out anonymous music to satisfy the ever-
increasing demands of an industry exploiting AS REALLY SERIOUS
every hour that disco spent in the limelight.
They were the wizards behind the machine GUYS, AND THIS MUSIC
in Oz: masterminds of the popular disco
idiom, hiding their own identities behind WAS JUST SO EASY FOR US.
71
72
 In 1977, Rinder and Lewis released the
conceptual album Seven Deadly Sins under
their own name. It was a bold statement of
unveiling, which the artwork emphasized by
showing their faces for the first time. The
cover’s striking image was produced using
a photographic method called ortho-litho
reversal, which creates an intense image of
deep contrasts by reversing the photograph’s
tones. Like this visual effect, Seven Deadly
Sins turned disco inside out, escaping the
commercial cul-de-sac of late-’70s disco by
sounding wholly different. Paradoxically, the
cover image looked strange and unreal, as if to
confirm that even following their liberation
from convention, Rinder and Lewis’s
identity remained a performative mystery.
Seven Deadly Sins feels like an operatic
search for meaning, locating a small voice of
truth hidden underneath the excess. It lines
up concepts and emotions bluntly, making
it an unusual blend of allegory, symbolist
drama, and musical experimentation. It is an
album that hits home with a force unlike
anything Mike and Laurin had worked
on before. All seven sins contribute to
the larger theme of a humanity gradually
eroded by the desire for fortune, and it is
difficult to resist interpreting this through
an autobiographical lens. Seven Deadly Sins
is a purging of disco from within: a bold and
sincere drama of transformation that absorbs
Rinder and Lewis beyond recognition.
The sound of Seven Deadly Sins is
thoughtful and haunting, supplanting
disco’s polished aesthetic with a bumpy
look to outer space. Its musical gestures are
theatrical and over-the-top, but what really
separates this work is its clarity of expression.
Indeed, the album’s motifs are established
as emotional states that are subjected to
small alterations denoting changes in
mood. The album’s opener, “Lust,” has a
serpentine and hypnotic quality that is
eventually overshadowed by menace, as
the mood becomes almost hallucinogenic.
The percolating rhythmic textures of
“Anger” reverberate with a ferocious chug
that culminates in a reckless hysteria. It
is both decadent and utterly ridiculous,
and this is where the album’s greatness
resides: it oozes atmosphere and poise, but
it is not adverse to spectacle and hilarity.
“We were experimenting with
electronics and just wrote music that we
could have fun with,” Mike recalls about
how their entire attitude to playing changed
with Seven Deadly Sins. This sense of playful
experimentation was taken forward to
their following album, Warriors, released in
1979. Warriors is an album of candy-covered
cyberfunk that abandons all pretensions
of sophistication in favor of pounding
drums and robotic synthesizers. Its view is
firmly turned towards the dance floor, yet
it retains a deftness of touch, achieving a
precarious balance between synthetic and
live instrumentation. “Blue Steel” opens
with restraint, as melancholy electronic
chords slowly lead into the explosion of
Azar Lawrence’s saxophone, as if plugging
into a life-force. Warriors registers an
irreverent and triumphant attitude; it is
an album that transmits a refreshing self-
awareness and confidence that counters
the tired styling of earlier recordings.
The cover of Warriors echoes Seven
Deadly Sins with a photo of Mike’s and
Laurin’s respective fathers. The photo was
taken by Laurin on a deep-sea fishing trip in
Alabama and it is a simple visual cue: it hints
to how the two musicians had come full circle
with Warriors, substantiating the friendship’s
endurance at the same time that it reflects a
projected image of them reaching maturity.
In 1980, Rinder and Lewis released
their third album, Cataclysm. That year
signaled a turning point in American
politics, with Reagan’s election and the
revival of conservatism. In addition, the
disco backlash had triumphed. Cataclysm
dripped with sarcasm, cutting deep into the
psychology of the period with a dystopian
vision of corporate corruption, nuclear
testing, and suicide. Where Seven Deadly Sins
and Warriors had flirted with the nascent
sounds of the synthesizer, Cataclysm stated in
no uncertain terms that the future was now.
It looked to new wave and electro to stage
an otherworldly fantasy of escapism through
a brutally intense exploration of synthetic
sounds, where chords were supplanted
with vamps and sequenced grooves.
Cataclysm didn’t sell well, but—along with
the other Rinder and Lewis albums—it
reverberated beyond disco, taking the genre
in mutant directions. “This was the music
that Mike and I were really proud of,”
Laurin recalls, “the esoteric, instrumental
stuff, like the music we composed for In
Search Of…” The duo scored 126 episodes
of this well-loved paranormal television
show narrated by Leonard Nimoy, and
released a nine-song soundtrack as well.
The In Search of Orchestra provides an
apt frame for Rinder and Lewis’s musical
journey, as the notion of searching is a
prominent aspect of their ride.When viewed
with a sense of historical perspective, it looks
as if the moment they found themselves
coincided with the moment their friendship
started to suffer the effects of fatigue. “There
were no hard feelings; we were just tired,”
Laurin explains when probed about their
drifting apart. “We’d spent seven years living
in a studio with no social life. Mike and I did
everything we could together; it was a really
intense period, and it just got to the point
that I couldn’t work like that anymore.”
Following the release of their fourth album,
1982’s Full Circle, Mike and Laurin took a
break to pursue independent careers—in
music and photography, respectively—
only to never collaborate again.
That Rinder and Lewis should still
remain unacknowledged makes a lot of
sense.They exerted a significant influence on
the evolution of disco, but it is equally true
that their names were of little importance
to the average disco fan. Identifying record
producers was an afterthought on a dance
floor, and this is why they were able to enjoy
their anonymity, even as they expanded the
scope of the genre. Behind their numerous
identities were two high-minded arrangers,
shrewd businessmen, and studio innovators
that controlled every stage of the creative
and commercial process. More than anyone
else, they embody the many sides of disco,
simultaneously carrying the baggage of
mainstream commercialization along with
the celebration of formal experimentation.
At a time when the influence of disco on
contemporary dance music is again being
opportunistically exploited by the likes of Daft
Punk, Rinder and Lewis remain the original
cyber-disco architects behind the masks. .
THIS WAS THE MUSIC THAT
MIKE AND I WERE REALLY
PROUD OF, THE ESOTERIC,
INSTRUMENTAL STUFF, LIKE
THE MUSIC WE COMPOSED
FOR IN SEARCH OF...
73
THE NATURAL
Terry Reid passed on the opportunity to become the front man of Led Zeppelin—
instead introducing Robert Plant to Jimmy Page. His choice to carry on as a
solo act never paid off with the heights of fame and fortune of his musical pals,
yet he recorded two soulful folk-rock masterpieces and has become known
as an artist’s artist, championed by many of the greats as the genuine article.

by Dan Ubick

74
I
n 1968, Aretha Franklin was famously quoted as saying,
“There are only three things happening in England: the
Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Terry Reid.” It is also well
documented that when Terry Reid was asked to join both
the New Yardbirds/Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, he
passed. Instead, he recommended Robert Plant to Jimmy
Page and went on tour opening for Cream and the Rolling
Stones. He then recorded two albums for Epic Records: 1968’s
Bang, Bang You’re Terry Reid and the 1969 self-titled follow-up, both
with producer Mickie Most (who had worked with Donovan, the
Yardbirds, and the Animals).
Terry went on to sing at both Mick Jagger’s wedding to Bianca
in St. Tropez and alongside Lester Chambers at Eric Burdon’s
wedding. He hung out with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and other
Laurel Canyon luminaries. He brought blistering, soulful sets to
the Atlanta Pop Festival, the first Glastonbury Fayre, and the Isle of
Wight.“I had out-of-body experiences playing with Terry at the Isle
of Wight,” says bandmate and guitarist, lap steel player, and violinist
David Lindley. “We got so we could play inside each other’s heads.”
After a brief recording hiatus, Reid then made two masterpieces:
1973’s River (Atlantic) with Yes producer Eddie Offord and Atlantic
genius Tom Dowd, and 1976’s Seed of Memory (ABC-Dunhill) with
his longtime friend and cohort Graham Nash and cream-of-the-
crop session players. “I have known Terry since he was fourteen
years old,” Nash tells me. “He has always been a great musician, and
it was an absolute pleasure to have been asked to produce the Seed
of Memory album with him—it is still one of my favorite records.”
Over the years, many notable musicians have played in Terry’s
band or on record, from John Entwistle (the Who), Mick Taylor
(the Stones), Alan White (Yes), organ guru Brian Auger, percussion
legend Willie Bobo, and funky drummer James Gadson, who played
on Seed of Memory. “We recorded the bass and drums first,” Gadson
recalls. “Terry was sayin’, ‘We gotta get this funky and right. Make
sure this shit is in the pocket.’We learned it right there in the studio,
ran through the song a couple of times, then recorded. The only
thing I regret is I never got to meet Graham Nash.”
Terry is just one of those magnetic people, and others are
drawn—musically and personally—to his generous spirit, easy
manner, and effortless singing. While never becoming as famous as
those he rubbed elbows with, he’s truly a musician’s musician.
Terry’s songs have been covered by everyone from Crosby, Stills
& Nash and Marianne Faithfull to the Raconteurs and Rumer. His
guitar playing and harmony singing have been heard on LPs by
Jackson Browne, Don Henley, and Bonnie Raitt. When Josh Davis
aka DJ Shadow needed “a male voice that was seasoned and capable
of pure beauty” for his song “Listen” on 2012’s Reconstructed: Best
Of, he searched out Terry Reid. “Terry was upbeat, enthusiastic,
charmingly self-conscious,” Shadow says, “and, I think, enthused
that someone of my generation found value in his unique artistry.”
Yes, Terry could have fronted Led Zeppelin or Deep Purple,
but his legacy is so much more than that. “What if ?” doesn’t seem
to have ever crossed his mind. So when I sat down with him over a
bottle of cabernet, we talked about the many things he has done, not
about the things he might have done, because the man is still doing
it today. Terry Reid has lived a life that most would dream of and,
along the way, has garnered the respect of his peers and made many
enduring friendships.

75
A friend in Austin gave me Seed of
Memory, which was produced
Graham Nash. You are quoted in Record
Collector as saying Graham Nash is “my
idol, my mentor.” Can you talk about
how your friendship with Graham came
about and memories of making this
record?
Terry Reid: I was fourteen [when] I was
introduced, and it seemed I had known this
fellow all my life. I was in a local group where
I lived, in Cambridge, [England], called the
Red Beats, for lack of a [better name], and
we got this gig backing up the Hollies.They
were one of my favorite groups. I couldn’t
believe it.
Then things go on a bit further, and I
was with Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers who
started touring a bit, like with the Stones in
’65. I’m going around London one day, and
who do I run into but Graham again: “Hey
Tex!” you know? So we start hanging out
together a lot, ’cause he’s real easy to get on
with, and then we start writing some songs
together.
So then a few years later when he came
to the States, he was rehearsing with Crosby,
Stills, Nash & Young up in Sag Harbor, Long
Island. I get a car and go up there, thinking
it’s like a five-person band; but when I arrive,
there’s this whole entourage of people—you
know, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell. They’re
rehearsing all those songs we all know now,
like “Marrakesh Express” and “Judy Blue
Eyes,” and the harmonies are unbelievable.
I remember they were in the bathroom
working out harmonies a cappella with Joni
and everyone doing “Blackbird.” It was like
six- or seven-part harmony, like some kind
of Gregorian choir or something.
On your first post–Mickie Most LP, River,
you used drummer Conrad Isidore.
Yeah, I’d known him in London, as well as
his younger brother, [Reg,] who’s a hell of
a drummer. [Conrad] played with Stephen
Stills. He’s from Trinidad, and I’d know him
forever. I saw him a few years ago when
we were playing in L.A. at a club called
the Joint. We were there every Monday,
and people would come by I hadn’t seen in
years. It turned into kind of a thing.
76 (previous spread) Promo photo of Terry Reid for 1978’s Rogue Waves (Capitol) by Wayne Wilcox.
I heard about this. Robert Plant and
by Keith Richards sat in, right?
Oh yeah, Keith comes rollin’ up: “So, what
songs are we gonna do?”“I dunno, whaddaya
fancy?” I say. As soon as he gets up, boy, it’s
take no prisoners, ’cause we had Daryl
Johnson on bass and Steve Jordan on drums
jump on too, and suddenly the train left the
station! We went into “Street Fighting Man,”
and the hair on my arms and on the back on
my neck just stood up.
Wow. Am I right that you were on the ’69
Stones tour that ended with the ill-fated
Altamont free concert?
I was, but I didn’t go to Altamont. We
were in Boston, and Keith goes, “Terry,
you coming with us to San Francisco?”
We’d done forty-eight cities in a row, and
everybody is absolutely naggered. I mean,
between partying and God knows what else.
We’d fly out every night to the next city,
so, basically, you’d arrive, party, get up in the
daytime, do sound check, do the gig, and
then fly out again. After forty-eight shows, it
got a little thick.You had to stop everything
for a minute and say, “Where we going?”
We’d get the itinerary and be like, “Wait,
what city were we in last night?” [laughs]
So what did you come away with from
your days touring with the Rolling
Stones? Did they make an impact on
you personally and musically?
Oh hell yeah. See, I left school at fifteen. I’d
tell all my mates, and they wouldn’t believe
me. I’d say, “I’m goin’ on tour with the
Rolling Stones,” and they’d say, “Get out
of here!” Nobody would believe me until
they saw the riot on TV, everybody running
for their lives. Then it started to click, you
know?
What are your main memories of those
shows opening for the Stones?
Oh man, pandemonium! Never heard a
thing. [laughs]
It was just you opening for the Stones or
more of a revue-type thing?
No, no, no. These were the days when you
got value for your money. Me and Peter Jay
[billed as Peter Jay and the New Jaywalkers]
started the show [at the Royal Albert Hall
in 1966]—a little R&B band with horns,
great, lots of fun. Then the Ike and Tina
Turner Revue, [and then] Jimmy Thomas
[played]. Everyone was insanely good. Then
the Yardbirds were on with Jeff Beck and
Jimmy Page. Somebody’d say, “Solo!” and
they both were on forward. [laughs] Me and
Jeff still joke about that.Then, just when you
thought, “Ah, I’m worn out,” [you’d hear,]
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Rolling Stones!”
They just don’t do shows like that anymore.
It was very important to the Stones to do
shows with all different kinds of people. I
mean, they’re R&B based, so they’d just get
all their heroes on.
There was still a lot of shit going on in
the South then, and I hadn’t been in the
United States yet, so it hit me like a ton
of bricks. I thought that [racism] had sort
of gone away, but it was in full flight—
Montgomery, Alabama, and all that. People
were not happy seeing me, not at all.
[In spite of that,] it was great being with
the Rolling Stones—their name precedes
them. They just roll over everything. They
always took care of me. I was really young
and they knew it. By the time I did the
’69 tour with them, we were good friends;
they’d watch over me...Charlie Watts and
Bill Wyman especially—they really care
about people. Keith and Mick do too, they
do.The Stones all care about the people they
work with.
Chuck Berry though, Keith would
always say, “Don’t lend him your amp, Terry!
Chuck is gonna ask to borrow your amp,
watch. He took mine. Don’t lend yours
to him!” So you know, next show, Chuck
comes up to me, and it’s Chuck Berry, you
know? It’s very hard to say no to him, ’cause
he’s Chuck Berry. He’s being really nice:
“Anything I can do for you, man. Let me
know.” So I say, “Oh, all right” [and let him
borrow my amp]. Next gig I get to, I’m
like, “Where’s my Twin?” And I realized
the fucker took it. Chuck Berry stole my
Twin Reverb! Keith came in and gave me
all sorts of shit: “I told you! Have you got
your guitar?” [laughs] Keith went and got me
another Twin though.
So is this when you first met Mick Taylor?
I know he’s played with you a bunch
over the last twenty years or so.
No, no. I knew him from John Mayall, a long
time before. He was living at my house in
L.A. for a while, ’cause he’s my mate. We get
on like peas and carrots. He’s the sweetest
guy. He’s having a ball back in the Stones.
77
Moving forward to making Seed of
Memory. It was recorded two places in
California, right?
Well, yeah, one was Graham’s studio in his
house, up in Buena Vista Heights [in San
Francisco]. We started in this studio right off
of Argyle and [Yucca called Sound Labs in
Hollywood, Los Angeles]. It was this little
studio run by Armin Steiner who, I’m pretty
sure, was responsible for setting up Studer
machines in America. They had Studer
power amps in this beautiful studio, which
was more of like a testing ground than a real
big studio like Ocean Way or something.
It was comfortable though and really well
done.
I had left Atlantic and was writing and
staying up in the mountains on Deer Creek
[Road in Malibu] on this big ranch, which
is where I met Garth Hudson [who was the
keyboardist for the Band]. I wrote all these
EVERYBODY’S
CAPABLE
OF PLAYING
MUSIC,
BUT IT’S THAT
THING OF
WHETHER
THEY’RE
CAPABLE OF
MENTALLY
GETTING ON
THE SAME
TRACK OF
WHAT YOU’RE
THERE TO DO.
78 From the back cover of Terry Reid’s Seed of Memory (ABC; 1976). Original photo by Tom Kelly Studios.
songs up there and thought, “Now what
am I gonna do?” I said, “I know, I’ll call up
Graham and see what he thinks.” I could
always call Graham and ask his opinion. He
might say, “It’s a load of rubbish, start again”
or whatever. But he said, “Come over and
play me the songs.” So I did—and he loved
them. He went, “Tex, you wrote all these?
You wanna make a record?” And I went,“Let
me think about it—absolutely!” [laughs] So
Graham hooked me up with ABC-Dunhill
Records and put the whole thing together,
’cause it was [Nash’s business manager] Jerry
Rubinstein. Next thing I know, voilà, we did
a contract with them. And Graham says, “All
right, we start in two weeks time!” I said,
“Well, what about musicians?” and Graham
says, “No problem, who do you want?” So I
got Lee Miles [bassist from Ike and Tina] and
James Gadson, who I still talk to and who is
the man. I mean, God almighty!
In addition to Lee and James, I had Soko
Richardson [drummer for Ike and Tina],
who I stand in awe of. Soko we lost, he
passed away a few years ago, but, you know,
here we are still talking about him. Half
of my jokes are from him. [laughs] He was
brilliant. He was with Albert Collins as well,
you know? He played with Little Richard
as well. And John Mayall for a bit too. He’s
your quintessential, unorthodox, Louisiana
drummer. He’s from New Iberia—you
know the Tabasco sauce?
Yep.
[Soko] was Creole, so he thought in all those
different terms—how we got rock and roll.
We all came from the way he thinks. [laughs]
While Gadson and Richardson are
listed as drummers on Seed, there is no
percussionist listed on the LP, but there is
percussion. Who played the parts?
Doesn’t it say Milt Holland on there? That’s
who did all the percussion. He fascinated
me. I mean, what a gentleman. “Anything
else? You want more of anything?” he’d say.
He had a box of tricks, some things I’d never
seen in my life before. “Oh, you gotta hear
this, let’s try this!” He was there all day, and
he couldn’t do enough. He has a doctorate
in rhythm.
When I first got the LP, I was looking at
the credits and was blown away by the
cast of players. I mean, everyone from
Ben Keith, who played with Neil Young,
David Lindley, and Al Perkins from Flying
Burrito Brothers to Fred Wesley, Clifford
Solomon of Ray Charles and Johnny
Otis, and trumpeter Blue Mitchell.
Yeah! Fred Wesley! He had his trombone
with electrical tape wrapped around it.
[laughs] “That’s how I get my tone,” he would
say. Graham is the one who got all those guys
in there, but of course, most of those guys
knew each other already. Graham knows
everybody. Graham was the one who talked
Bill Withers into playing piano on his songs.
Seed of Memory came out in ’76. How
did you track this LP? Rhythm section
first?
Most of it was drums and bass first, and I’d
play acoustic. I’d use two Auratones out
of phase on two music stands so it don’t
bleed onto the microphone, that old trick. I
learned a lot on this album, and still to this
day, one of the best engineers that ever was
born is Al Schmidt.
 It’s better to have people that know each
other, and Lee [Miles] and James [Gadson]
knew each other well. Everybody’s capable
of playing music, but it’s that thing of
whether they’re capable of mentally getting
on the same track of what you’re there to
do.You know, you can do it twenty different
ways, but which is the way that’s right for
what you’re doing? It’s a real trick to not
overplay.
You guys had the studio to yourselves?
No, during the day, [producer] Tommy
LiPuma was there with George Benson.
Early one day, I was walking down the hall
and looked in the studio, and there’s this row
of guitars, and I just about broke into tears.
You would have done the same. I was like,
“Who the hell’s in here?” All of a sudden,
someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I
turn around, and it’s George, you know? He
goes, “You’re Terry, right? Come on in here.
Have you ever played one of these?” He’s
got an original [Gibson] L-5, no pickup, in
pristine condition. “You gotta play it.” So I
get up, take my jacket off, took my belt off.
Don’t want to scratch it!
Oh yeah, you know. Dan, it was the loudest
guitar I think I’ve ever played in my life:
1938 to 1940 or so, I think, the original one.
Then he’s like, “Now try this one,” like a
little kid, you know. A real guitar nut, and
his playing is just like butter. Then Graham
comes walking in and goes, “Oh, you’re
here!” And I was like, “Let’s go get a drink or
something before we start, okay!?” [laughs]
I read that you were friendly with
Gilberto Gil?
He stayed with me at the country house up
in Cambridgeshire [England]. He loved it
up there. It’s funny how we met. I obviously
had his records and knew all about him,
[Antonio] Carlos Jobim, and João Gilberto.
And Luiz Bonfá?
Oh yeah, that’s my idol.That’s [who cowrote
the soundtrack to] Black Orpheus, my
favorite album in the whole world. You just
said the magic word.
Well, the way I met Gil is I went to
my attorney’s office, Bernard Sheridan,
who’s a high-court barrister at the Old
Bailey in London, wigs and all. So, I had an
appointment with him, and he takes his wig
off and puts it on a stand and sits down. He
says, “Before we get to this contract, I have a
question, a bit of a political problem. I need
your advice.” He says, “You know all the
musicians, Terry. It’s come to my attention
that this gentleman from Brazil needs some
help—do you know Gilberto Gil?” I says,
“Yes, that’s my whole thing!” He goes,
“Really?” I said, “Yeah, I’ve got records of
his, you wanna hear?” He says, “Yeah, we’ll
get to that, but you know, Brazil, it’s a bit of
a police state.” And Gil’s grown his hair long,
and he’s like richer than the Beatles down
there; he’s the big thing, right? “Anyway,”
Bernard says,“they came into his hotel room
where his kids and wife were and threw him
down on the floor at gunpoint and told
him he has twenty-four hours to get out of
[Brazil]. Now it doesn’t seem like he’s really
done anything, and he seems like a nice guy,
but country after country has turned him
down for political asylum. I feel a bit bad for
him. Tell me a bit more about him.” I said,
“You must have heard ‘Girl from Ipanema’?
Well, his second cousin is João Gilberto who
made that famous recording.” He goes, “Oh!
That’s my wife’s favorite song. We’ve got to
give him political asylum or my wife will
never talk to me again!”
Next thing I know, there’s Bernard on
the cover of the Guardian, and he’s flown
Gilberto and his whole family to England.
Didn’t hear anything about it for a while
until I was out doing the Isle of Wight
Festival. I’m onstage looking out at the
audience, and there are, like, 360,000 people,
a sea of people. So I’m looking out as I play,
and there’s this guy with big hair and he’s
smiling, beaming, and I keep coming back
to him. Everybody’s happy, but he caught
my eye. So I get offstage and I’m hanging
out, and all of a sudden through the mud
comes this guy. He comes running towards
me speaking in [Portuguese]. I’m like,
“Huh?” He grabs me with a tear in his eye
and says, “I Gilberto Gil.” I’m like, “Cha, I’ve
been lookin’ at you for the last half hour!”
I couldn’t believe it. We spent the next few
days together, and he barely spoke a word of
English. His favorite word was “di-o-bolical,”
but he wasn’t clear on what it meant. He’d
say, “Oh, look, that’s di-o-bolical.” I was like,
“No Gil, that’s not what it means!” Within a
year, he spoke fluent English.
So he started coming up to my house.
He’d get on the train from King’s Cross
[in London], come up to Huntingdon, get
a cab, and come over to my house. On his
own. Well, first it was on his own, then it
was with Caetano [Veloso], who’s now the
biggest star in Brazil, and a guy called Julio
who played cuica with car horns on it. Then
he brought some of his family up; the ladies
were cooking in the kitchen. All this farofa
and beans and bananas and chicken, all this
stuff, unbelievable. So I’d end up with ten
people in this little attached four-hundred-
year-old cottage in the middle of this little
village in the countryside, and I’ve got these
raving Brazilians all doing Black Orpheus
in the front room. Congas and all this, and
people are going by my house on their
bicycles going [acts surprised]—I mean, they
know me, but they’re wondering what’s
going on. [laughs]
Anyway, it just grew and grew, and then
one day, it’s pouring rain and I open the
door, and there’s this Brazilian guy standing
there. I’m like, “Another one!” I say, “Yep,
can I help ya?” And he says, “I’m Carlos.” I
say, “Oh, hi Carlos.” It’s pouring rain, but the
fire is dimming, so I say, “Hey Carlos, before
you take off your shoes, would you mind
going to grab a few logs for the fire?” So he
graciously goes and comes back with two
logs, and I’m like, “No, no, get an armful!”
So he says, “Okay, okay,” and goes back for
more, hands them to me. I put them on the
fire, and he takes his boots off and comes in.
We’re all sitting around, Lindley and all
of us, “Cup of tea?” right? And Gil says, “You
know Carlos, right, Terry? You love all his
music; you’re always playing his songs!” So
I’m like, “Carlos?” That’s a pretty common
name, I didn’t know. The man says, “Oh,
really, I am humbled,” and I’m like, “Carlos?”
And he says, “Yes, Carlos Jobim.”
You could have knocked me over. I
had to walk into the kitchen and take a few
breaths. “Sorry about the wood, Carlos!” He
says, “Oh no, do we need more?” I say, “No,
don’t move—just play us a song.” He sat all
night for the two days we were there, him
and Caetano; they were very good friends.
Luiz Bonfá was the mentor of Carlos
Jobim. He worked on [Black Orpheus] with
him. Bonfá told me he was only seventeen
when he did that. Watching these two play
their D-demented chords, I’m going, “Here
we go again! I’m quittin’.” .
Dan Ubick is a guitarist living in Southern California.
He would like to thank Steve Tounsand, Devin Morrison,
Ben Malament, Cree and Buddha Miller, Brad Stewart,
Chris Goldsmith, Eric Lynn, Kelly Constantine and Terry
Reid, James Gadson, Graham Nash, Josh Davis, and
David Lindley for their time and tales.
79
E L E C T R I C
R E LAXA T ION
The story of the notorious NYC bathhouse Continental Baths is the story of disco.
Housed in the basement of a grandiose turn-of-the-century hotel on New York’s Upper
West Side, the Baths were at the epicenter of gay culture and the burgeoning equal
rights movement. The club’s early success in breaking new talent like Bette Midler and
Patti LaBelle soon gave way to DJs moving front and center as the main attraction
for its towel-clad patrons. After the sound system was overhauled on a shoestring
budget, the club recruited well-known Fire Island selector Bobby DJ, who brought over
his own following. In the stimulating nights that followed, the Baths would birth the
careers of dance icons Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles, two young DJs who were
soaking in the nascent disco scene of the early ’70s—and who soon got their own shot
behind the decks. Despite the technical limitations of the club’s equipment, both DJs
honed their skills and moved on to influence the dance scene in immeasurable ways.

by Dan Gentile

In the spring of 1968, disco didn’t exist, homosexuality was illegal in New York City, and
the basement of the Ansonia Hotel was covered in forty thousand square feet of dust.1 Over
the course of the next eight years, that dusty space transformed into the world-famous
Continental Baths. It served as the preeminent hub of gay culture and a disco incubator that
helped to birth two of the most famous DJs in history: Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles.
In order to succeed at business, “you can either fulfill a need or create a desire,” wrote
Continental founder Steve Ostrow in his book Live at the Continental. “If a business can create
a desire that fulfills a need, how can you lose?”2 Ostrow aimed to serve New York City’s
burgeoning gay community with a safe place to meet, socialize, and have sex. He stumbled
onto the space that would become the Continental Baths while attending a vocal lesson at a
suite in the towering Ansonia. Although the basement was in severe disrepair, it had formerly
functioned as a spa and had the necessary infrastructure to fulfill Ostrow’s vision.
The building itself was an architectural marvel. Located between West Seventy-Third
and Seventy-Fourth on Broadway, the Upper West Side hotel was constructed in 1899 with
the intent of breaking the world record for tallest building. It fell only slightly short of its
intended grandeur, clocking in at seventeen stories and fifteen hundred rooms. The hotel
also boasted the world’s largest indoor swimming pool, as well as a rooftop that housed five
hundred chickens,3 and would later be covered in hundreds of pounds of sand, beach lounge
chairs, and the sound of proto-disco wired up from the basement DJ booth.
Nicknamed “the Tubs,” the Continental was a unique mix of hedonistic playground
and community center that served up to twenty thousand gay men a week. Unlike other
bathhouses that were mostly seedy and rat infested, the Continental would have a safe and
welcoming atmosphere. The main draw for most visitors were the four hundred private
rooms rented out to be used for casual sex, but these were supplemented with an incredible
range of amenities that included a steam room, swimming pool, dry sauna, cabaret stage, disco
dance floor, licensed bar, café, and STD clinic. There was even a space for religious services.4
The first time that house-music pioneer Frankie Knuckles visited the club with Larry Levan
in 1973, they didn’t leave until two weeks later. I spoke with Knuckles shortly before his
passing, and when I asked him if there was a contemporary comparison to the Baths, he
claimed there’s nothing even close.
Unfortunately, not everyone was so ecstatic about the club’s presence. Homosexuality
was still technically illegal in New York City, and the club was raided on opening day. Despite
buying tickets to the policemen’s ball to try to stave off the vice squad, the Continental Baths
was raided over two hundred times. The invasive tactics led the club to organize a petition to
change NewYork City’s antiquated laws. Over 250,000 signatures were delivered to the mayor’s
office, resulting in the repeal of the laws and a major victory for the gay liberation movement.5

80
81
 The Continental’s scope and influence
was unprecedented, but the main thing
that put it on the map was that it became a
destination for Ostrow’s first passion: music.
In the early days, the sound was supplied by
a jukebox that played everything from rock
and roll to gospel and was within earshot
of the gigantic swimming pool. “You have
to understand, there was no disco music at
the time,” says Nicky Siano, a regular Baths
patron and resident DJ at legendary dance
venue the Gallery. The jukebox was later
upgraded to a rudimentary pair of Thorens
TD-160 turntables helmed by whichever
staff member had the free time. “This was
the unit that had a floating isolated turntable
and tone arm, and was belt driven. There
was hardly any torque, so mixing was near
impossible,” says soundman Bob Casey.
As the popularity of the club and spirit
of liberation grew, the focus began to shift
more to the entertainment. Splitting MC
duties with manager Don Scotti, Ostrow
would introduce the cabaret singers to
serenade the crowd of towel-clad men
taking a break from the back rooms. “Steve
knew how to cater to the entire variety of
customers; everyone had something. And
those people were loyal. The crowd would
follow you to Radio City Music Hall,”
Scotti tells me. “It was the place to play—if
you could get a gig.”
The Continental launched many
successful careers, ranging from Patti LaBelle
to Andy Kaufman, but the most notable of
the crop was Bette Midler. Then known as
Bathhouse Betty and supported on piano
by Barry Manilow, Midler and her bawdy
stage persona was perfectly suited to the
raucous crowd. As word spread, she began
playing more prominent gigs, culminating in
a performance on The Tonight Show Starring
Johnny Carson. Mention of the Tubs on
Carson raised the public profile of the club
and drew attention from New York’s cultural
elite, inspiring visits by everyone from Andy
Warhol to Alfred Hitchcock.
Midler’s final show at the Baths in
1972 was a disaster that led directly to the
increased prominence of the DJs. The club
was packed over capacity with men who’d
come to hear songs off her debut album, The
Divine Miss M. She wore a skintight pantsuit
and heels, delivering classic bits where she
would rip off a man’s towel and make fun of
his manhood, twirling the towel around her
head in impersonation of a beehive hairdo.
The crowd loved it, but, unfortunately,
the venue wasn’t equipped to handle the
82 (previous) Ad for the Continental Baths and the film Saturday Night at the Baths. (right) Ad for the Continental Baths from a January 1974 issue of After Dark. Images courtesy of the author.
show. The air conditioning broke down,
the rented sound system failed, and Midler
became frustrated to the point of no return.
The following day, Bob Casey received a call
to install a proper sound system.
Casey had been used to adapting to
complicated spaces when he installed the
system at the Cherry Grove Hotel’s Ice
Palace, the most popular Fire Island dance
club of the time. Several of his ingenious
adaptations included rigging air-conditioner
hoses into the amplifiers to keep them from
overheating and stabilizing the turntables by
filling the foundation under the DJ booth
with sand. The Baths was a new challenge—
how to outfit a sprawling low-ceiling space
to satisfy the crowd who’d followed the new
resident DJ, Bobby Guttadaro aka Bobby DJ,
in from Fire Island.
Until then, the DJ booth was merely
a bit of space that performers walked past
between the dressing room and the stage.
“As time went on, DJs became an integral
part of the venue,” says Ostrow. The booth
was upgraded to match the DJs’ increasing
prominence at the club.“It was enclosed with
big glass windows and covered in mirrors,”
recalled Frankie Knuckles, who equated it to
the grandiose booth in the 1978 film Thank
God It’s Friday. Along with the booth came a
serious rig of strobe and colored lights, as well
as the soon-stereotypical LED dance floor.
The system was still in many ways a
poor man’s setup. Music played through
a set of sixteen Boss speakers hanging like
birdcages. They delivered an unprecedented
3000 watts of sound but couldn’t create the
same level of bass becoming popular in other
clubs. Instead of a more expensive Bozak
mixer, the Baths used a pair of homemade
equalizer preamps. The heart of the system
was a Phase Linear amplifier, which was
dubbed “the Flame Linear” for its tendency
to over-drive the speakers to the point
that they literally caught on fire, a problem
that was made worse by DJs replacing
the fuses with foil to attempt to pull even
more volume.
The DJ mixer was also a custom creation,
with oversized RCA broadcast knobs, no
crossfader (they weren’t popularized until
the late ’70s), two channels for a pair of high-
torque Lenco turntables, and a middle fader
dubbed “the manager’s knob.” It controlled a
tape deck to be used if the DJ passed out on
the decks, which wasn’t uncommon thanks
to a short Dutch door to the booth through
which partygoers often passed a variety of
“mind enhancers,” says Casey.
Early resident selector Bobby DJ
brought an enthusiastic Fire Island crowd
to the dance floor, causing it to become
more than just a minor diversion from the
rampant sex and drugs. “I always considered
Bobby the best,” says Bob Casey. “He looked
like a nerdy guy, but he was my favorite
DJ because he was a party DJ. He had the
balls that he could break out a Carmen
Miranda record from the 1940s. In other
words, he wasn’t afraid to laugh.” Bobby’s
credited with popularizing records like Carl
Douglas’s “Kung Fu Fighting” and Disco
Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes’ “Get Dancin’.”6
But perhaps Bobby Guttadaro’s most
important contribution was in the field of
record distribution. With the help of Baths
manager Don Scotti, Guttadaro drafted a
letter to the record executives petitioning for
the same access to first pressings as radio DJs.
“Bobby felt DJs in the club circuit should
have the same rights as radio DJs, because
they were just as effective at breaking hits,”
recalls Scotti. Soon thereafter, broadcast-
only 45 singles were making their way into
the hands of club DJs.
After Bobby DJ left the club, the
turntables were taken over by David
Rodriguez in summer 1973. He was
acknowledged for breaking tracks like
“Yes We Can Can” by the Pointer Sisters
and “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination” by
Gladys Knight and the Pips, and was known
for trying to line up lyrics between songs to
tell a story.7 But despite his talents, alcohol
abuse got in the way. “One of the mantras of
the DJ is that too much is never enough, and
that applied to David,” says Casey.
To say that the Baths were conducive
to indulgence is an understatement. In
the recent documentary Continental, Steve
Ostrow remarked that only ten to twenty
percent of the crowd was there for the sex,
while Frankie thought differently, putting the
number of sex-driven clientele somewhere
between ninety-nine and 144 percent.8
When asked for his craziest memory of the
club, Nicky Siano recalls a twenty-four-hour
period in which he had seventeen different
sexual partners (he couldn’t remember who
was DJing). Knuckles recalled an anecdote
where someone dropped LSD into the
aquarium near the dance floor and the fish
started jumping out. When the staff tried
to put the fish back in, they’d jump right
back out.
After David Rodriguez left in spring
1974, the next person behind the decks was
Joey Bonfiglio, a soundman who assisted
83
Casey and had worked the lights for the
previous DJs. Joey was known to lubricate
the turntable platter with actual wax
underneath a primitive, felt slipmat for easier
cueing. Frankie Knuckles called him one of
the unsung DJs of the club’s history, and he’s
credited with being the first to invite Larry
Levan into the booth. “Someone needed
to work the lights to segue with the songs
seamlessly, and Larry was great at that,”
says manager Don Scotti. When Ostrow
wouldn’t give Bonfiglio a raise, he left, and
the gig was open to the first person who
could piece together a record collection.
By now, the young pair of best friends
Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles were
mainstays at the club. “Larry was this crazy,
talented kid, and Frankie was very level-
headed and grown up for his age. Larry
would do a lot of crazy things, like dress in
orange hot pants and dye his hair orange
and dance on top of a car. Frankie would
protect him from all the people who would
want to beat him up,” says Siano. “They
had very different personalities,” says Don
Scotti. “Larry was bigger than life, and
84 Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan at the Continental Baths, from Tim Lawrence’s Love Saves the Day (original photo courtesy of Bob Casey).
Frankie was like a sponge soaking up that
energy from Larry. Frankie was nice in capital
letters. Larry was more caustic, more of a
smash queen. He was spontaneous, where
Frankie Knuckles was more involved and
personable,” says Casey.
Their first taste of DJing was during
the day when there wasn’t a scheduled DJ.
“We spent many hours, days, and nights
playing one-for-one, honing and sharpening
our skills,” said Knuckles. Although they
were still both under twenty-one, the pair
had received a serious education in music
as regulars and informal assistants at Nicky
Siano’s Gallery, where they’d blow up
balloons before the shows and do other odd
jobs around the club.
Eventually, Nicky and Larry became
romantically involved, a relationship Levan
leveraged in order to build the record
collection he’d soon use at the Baths.
Although Levan has claimed in an interview
that he borrowed records from another
friend,9 Siano remembers it differently:
“Larry went behind my back to the record
companies I’d been taking him to for years
and told them he wanted records for me,”
says Siano. “Then [Larry] used those records
at the Baths.”
In those days, DJs kept their collections
at their main club of residence to avoid
transporting heavy crates of records. Soon
the walls of the Continental Baths DJ booth
were lined with Levan’s growing record
collection. While Larry was mixing, Frankie
would work the lights.“Musically, we’d be all
over the place, which could’ve been fun for
our towel-clad listeners, or a nightmare,” said
Frankie. Larry began mimicking other DJs
of the time, playing safe mixes like Harold
Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “Bad Luck”
into MFSB’s “The Sound of Philadelphia.”
According to Siano, Larry took some pages
from Siano’s book of tricks with signature
moves like dropping a blaring 707 jet-
plane sound effect over MFSB’s “Love Is
the Message.” But once Larry gained more
confidence, he began to be the first to break
songs, such as South Shore Commission’s
anthemic “Free Man.”
Manager Don Scotti took notice of
Levan’s talents. “He was a creative genius, he
broke new ground,” Scotti says. “His ability
was knowing exactly what song to play at
what time in the evening. There could be
ten great DJs who all had the same records,
but Larry could change between songs so
that you couldn’t even hear the transitions.
Sometimes, he’d mix back and forth. He was
like a really great entertainer—he knew how
to read the dance floor so that it never went
cold.” Some of the biggest anthems Scotti
recalls from the era were Love Unlimited
Orchestra “Love’s Theme” and Donna
Summer’s “Love to Love You, Baby.”
Despite Larry’s knack at the turntables,
sometimes his spontaneity got the best
of him. “When Larry was a little more
clearheaded, he was the next generation of
DJs,” says Casey. “But without warning, he’d
take a few hits of ethyl chloride and head to
a back room and leave Knuckles alone in the
booth to fend for himself.”
Frankie had begun playing at the era’s
most prominent Black disco club, Better
Days, and was soon taking over for Levan
at the Tubs several nights a week. “It came
easier to Larry, but Frankie was much more
focused,” says Don Scotti. Casey says that
“the talent of Larry Levan was captured by
Frankie Knuckles; he got the idea of how it
works, how to be a good disc jockey.” Some
of Frankie’s favorite songs from the era were
“Koke” by Tribe; “City, Country, City” by
War; “(Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below,
We’re All Gonna Go” by Curtis Mayfield;
“Blood Donors Needed” by David Ruffin;
and “Mighty Love” by the Spinners.
By the end of 1974, Larry Levan had
outgrown the Continental Baths. “Larry
wanted to go further at the Continental, but
the sound system wasn’t designed for where
he wanted to go with music,” says Casey.
Disco’s premier sound engineer Richard
Long opened a loft space called SoHo Place
and invited Levan to be the resident. He
accepted, leaving his regular gig at the Tubs
to Frankie. The SoHo Place was not open
long. Shortly thereafter, Levan played at a
club called Reade Street, and then found
his permanent home at the Paradise Garage.
The Garage would go on to become one
of the most legendary clubs in disco history
thanks to Levan’s otherworldly control of
the crowd.
Frankie continued to play at the
Continental, but the bathhouse was
becoming a shadow of its former self. LARRY WAS
The cleanliness and quality control that
Steve Ostrow once prided himself on BIGGER THAN LIFE,
were things of the past. “I couldn’t help
noticing the paint peeling from the walls, AND FRANKIE
the ceiling pipes leaking, and the dank smell
everywhere,” Ostrow wrote in his book.10 WAS LIKE A SPONGE
Debt was looming, and bills were often
paid by selling off assets like paintings or SOAKING UP THAT
the massive fish tank. A decision to allow
women into the club had polarized much ENERGY FROM LARRY.
of the original gay crowd, who were now
exploring other new bathhouses. And as FRANKIE WAS NICE
more and more discos opened, what once
was a revolutionary sound system was now IN CAPITAL LETTERS.
antiquated. “The sound system at the Baths
[at that time] wouldn’t work in the lobby of LARRY WAS MORE
the Paradise Garage,” says Casey, “let alone
the main room.” CAUSTIC, MORE OF A
In 1976, the Continental Baths closed
its doors for good. Steve Ostrow relocated SMASH QUEEN.
to Montreal and opened the short-lived
Continental Sauna with help from Don - BOB CASEY
Scotti. After its closing, Scotti pursued a
career in film, and Ostrow followed through
on his dreams of singing opera. Bob Casey
continued working as a soundman but
left the world of disco for larger gigs like
running the sound for the pope at Yankee
Stadium. Knuckles would soon move to
Chicago for a residency at the Warehouse, a
club whose name became synonymous with
a new style of disco music simply called
“house.” He would go on to champion the
new style through production work and
worldwide DJ gigs. He died in March at
age fifty-nine from diabetes complications.
Levan played at the Paradise Garage until its
closing in 1987, while branching out into
remixing and production with the group NOTES
1. Steve Ostrow, Live at the Continental: The Inside Story of
NYC Peech Boys. He died of AIDS in 1992.
the World-Famous Continental Baths (Bloomington:
Although today it’s remembered Xlibris, 2007).
mainly as a footnote in New York City’s 2. Ibid.
gay liberation movement, the Continental 3. Steven Gaines, “The Building of the Upper West Side,”
New York, May 16, 2005.
Baths can be seen as an encapsulation of
4. Ibid.
the entire disco era. Musical genres evolved 5. Continental, documentary directed
to suit dancers whose once-taboo concepts by Malcolm Ingram, USA: Blowhard
of sexuality spread to the mainstream, Films, 2013.
6. Peter Shapiro, Turn the Beat Around:
technological adaptations encouraged DJs
The Secret History of Disco (New York: Faber and Faber,
to push their art form further, and just when 2005).
it seemed like the good times would never 7. Tim Lawrence, Love Saves the Day:
end, the venue shuttered. Much like the A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
disco era, the key figures of the Continental
8. Continental, Ingram.
Baths will always be remembered for their 9. Lawrence, Love Saves the Day.
ability to keep the crowd dancing. . 10. Ostrow, Live at the Continental.
85
T H E TAILO R
As one half of production duo Flyte Tyme Productions, Jimmy Jam,
along with partner Terry Lewis, changed the landscape of popular music
and the sound of radio forever. The two befriended fellow Minneapolis
natives Prince and Morris Day, which led to the formation of the Time,
but after infamously being fired by Prince for missing a show due to their
burgeoning production career, the duo went for broke and never looked
back. Roughing it out in L.A. while fine-tuning their chops eventually gave
way to breakthrough productions for the S.O.S. Band, the Human League,
and Janet Jackson. The duo’s attention to their craft and changing times
saw an evolution in their sound through the latest technology, yet their
secret to success was unique, tailor-made productions for each artist.

by Chris Williams

86
87
88 (previous spread) Promo photo of James Harris III, better known as Jimmy Jam, by Greg Helgeson.
89
 J
ames Harris III and Terry Lewis are regarded as one of the greatest producing
tandems in the history of recorded music. During my phone conversation with
James Harris (better known to the world as Jimmy Jam), the groundbreaking
fifty-five-year-old producer, composer, songwriter, arranger, and mixer fielded
my questions with the same depth and creativity that has propelled him to
achieve earth-shattering success with his legendary partner since the early
1980s.
Hailing from the Southside of Minneapolis, Minnesota, Harris found himself
surrounded by music as a child. His father, James “Cornbread” Harris Sr., a famous local
musician, always had musical instruments lying around his house. His mother constantly
played various types of music there. At the tender age of five, Harris began playing the
drums. A few years later at twelve years old, he was playing drums at regular gigs with his
father’s band in clubs throughout Minneapolis.
The trajectory of his life would change at thirteen years old when he would cross
paths with a young bassist named Terry Lewis at the University of Minnesota through the
Upward Bound program. Over the next few years, they remained friends and played in rival
bands against Prince and Morris Day. By the early 1980s, Lewis finally convinced Harris
to join his band Flyte Tyme, not as their drummer but as their keyboardist. Soon thereafter,
Day and Lewis mutually agreed to form the Time due to a deal Day had struck with Prince
over the usage of a track Day wrote for his Dirty Mind album.
During this juncture, Harris and Lewis decided to go to Los Angeles after the Time’s
first tour was over.They began creating demos with a four-track recorder, Harris’s keyboard,
and Lewis’s bass. Their demos eventually landed in the hands of Dick Griffey at Solar
Records through the assistance of Leon Sylvers and A&R Dina Andrews, who helped them
set up Flyte Tyme Productions. They would get their first work in 1982 on Dynasty’s Right
Back at Cha! and Klymaxx’s Girls Will Be Girls, both on Solar, and the S.O.S. Band’s album
S.O.S. III on Tabu Records.
The following year, while working on the S.O.S. Band’s next album during a short
break from Prince’s 1999 tour (with Prince, the Time, and Vanity 6), Harris and Lewis ended
up missing one of the shows in Texas due to inclement weather and were consequently
terminated from the band by Prince.
Following their removal from the Time, they fortified their union as a songwriting
and production team, charting with the S.O.S Band’s 1983 hit, “Just Be Good to Me”—
the same song they were working on when they got fired. Since then, they’ve produced
sixteen number one hits, and their seamless strokes of genius have reverberated in gold and
platinum throughout popular culture for the past three decades. They’ve produced seminal
hits for some of pop, R&B, and gospel’s music royalty including Janet Jackson, Michael
Jackson, Gladys Knight and the Pips, New Edition, George Michael, the Human League,
Boyz II Men, Chaka Khan, Mariah Carey, Usher, Barry White, Lionel Richie, and Mary J.
Blige. What is still evident is their desire to craft masterful art.

90 (opposite) Promo photo of Flyte Tyme duo Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis for 1992’s Mo’ Money.
91
Who were some of the artists that
influenced you and Terry Lewis when you
were beginning to create your original
musical sound?
There were so many influences when I was
growing up.There were a lot of Ray Charles
and Nat King Cole records playing, because
my mom was a huge fan of theirs. We had
what were called 78s. People don’t even
remember those anymore; 78s were ten-
inch records. They spun around real super
fast. We had records from Bill Doggett and
Stan Getz, and I still have all these records.
When I met Terry, my favorite group was
Chicago. Terry said to me, “No, no, no, you
need to hear this new Earth, Wind & Fire
album.” I really loved the Motown stuff as
well. The first two records I bought were
at this record store next to Jet Barbershop
called Jet Records. So, literally, as you’re
getting your haircut, you’re hearing all these
records. By the time you were done, you had
to go and buy these records.The first records
I bought were 45s by Smokey Robinson
called “Baby, Baby Don’t Cry,” “Think” by
Aretha Franklin, “Ain’t Nothing Like the
Real Thing” by Marvin Gaye and Tammi
Terrell, James Brown’s “I Got the Feelin’,”
and “Do the Choo Choo” by Archie Bell
and the Drells.
Terry’s biggest influence was Funkadelic
and Parliament, and anything that had to do
with funk. But we shared a love of James
Brown and Sly and the Family Stone. When
I was in my late teens, I started DJing at a
bunch of different clubs. I did a teen club
and an older club. I didn’t talk; I just mixed
different records all night long. Then I did a
club in Minneapolis where I mixed and got
the club hyped up. I was a good hype man.
I always had a synthesizer, so I would play
with the record and make my own beats and
melody with the record. If you came to see
me spin, it would be a different experience
than seeing any other DJ. I really enjoyed
DJing. At that point in time, Terry and I
were friends, but we weren’t in the same
band. I quit music for a minute, because I
got fed up with it. I was still writing, but
I wasn’t playing music. Having a chance
to hear records before anyone else did as a
DJ made me figure out how to work them
into a set at a club. That experience was
invaluable to me. I still call upon some of
those experiences now when I’m making
records. Our influences are too numerous to
mention.
92 The Time, 1981. (clockwise from bottom left) Terry Lewis, Jimmy Jam, Jellybean Johnson, Monte Moir, Jesse Johnson, and Morris Day. Photo by Allen Beaulieu.
When did you and Terry Lewis know
that you could make a career out of
producing songs together as a duo?
Probably when we saw our first royalty
check from Janet Jackson’s album Control,
which was pretty mind-boggling. We knew
we could make a living making music.
Making a living is different from getting rich
from it. We weren’t thinking about getting
rich from it. We thought about how much
money we paid to do music over the years.
We paid for studio time, musical equipment,
and lived in the bedroom of some friends’
houses. We would go to Golden Bird
Chicken in L.A. back in the day and order
the four-piece special for $2.99, and that
would be our one meal for the day, and we
would have a shake at night. We didn’t have
a car or any transportation. Luckily, we had
some girlfriends that had cars so we could
get around. The word in Minneapolis was
that we were out in L.A. starving to death,
and that was overblown. But we didn’t have
any money. We weren’t making any money
from the Time. I was taking home $117 each
week from the Time’s first album, and that
got raised to $250 a week. And that was from
a gold album.
So the idea of making a living doing
music was a different perspective for us. It
wasn’t about making millions of dollars; it
was about trying to keep our bills paid and
doing what we loved to do. We felt as if we
were going to make it work one way or the
other. It didn’t matter if we were sleeping
in the same room at Motel 6 or whatever it
needed to be, because that’s what we were
going to do. We used to drive engineers
crazy, because if Leon [Sylvers] or someone
would book the studio for us for a twenty-
four-hour lockout—all a twenty-four-hour
lockout meant was that no one else could
be in the studio, only you could use the
studio—and we took that literally. We could
be in the studio for twenty-four hours, and
the engineer would look at us after twelve
hours and ask, “When do you guys think
we’ll be finished?” We replied, “We got
twenty-four hours, man!” So that was our
mentality. We felt like we were going to
somehow live and make music.
When you and Terry Lewis were
developing music for pop, R&B, and
gospel in the 1980s and then in the
’90s, what was your creative process?
Because music was constantly changing,
what adjustments did you have to make
between those two decades in terms of
sounds?
I think it was important for us to change
and evolve with the music. We never got
into the mentality of one era being better
than the other.We just appreciated what was
out there. The influence that hip-hop began
to have on R&B music and the influence
of rap music were important in the overall
musical landscape. And those components
were very important to us in our musical
landscape as well. The basic thing for us was,
we basically thought of ourselves as tailors.
We were going to make a suit from scratch
for somebody. We were going to pick the
material and the style of suit, but we were
going to make music from scratch. We very
rarely pulled anything from the shelf. We
would always custom-make the sounds for
somebody. Those rules applied whether
we were working with New Edition, Janet
Jackson, or someone else. Producer-wise, it’s
not only about the music itself, but it’s also
about the psychology and getting the best
performance out of the artist.
I remember when we were working
with Mary J. Blige. She was coming off her
My Life album, which is one of my all-time
favorite albums. It’s definitely in my top ten.
When she came to us [for her next album,
1997’s Share My World], we assumed she
already had songs that were reminiscent of
the My Life album. So we played her a bunch
of tracks, and she didn’t really respond to
anything. We kept asking her, “Mary, what
type of songs do you want?” She said, “I
want songs that sound like me.” We were
like, “Okay.Well, let us play you this track we
did.” The track ended up becoming “Love Is
All We Need.” She instantly hopped up and
said, “Now this is what I’m talking about.”
We said, “Mary, don’t you think Puffy and
you are already doing this?” And she said,
“I’m not working with Puffy.” We said,
“Oh, you’re not? Well, let us play you this
other track.” This track became the song
“Everything.” We knew what she had done
with Puffy and Chucky Thompson on My
Life.We knew how to make her sound move
forward. I think it comes down to tailoring
what you do sonically to what the person is.
Mary’s example was perfect when she told
us she wanted her records to sound like her.
93
94
THE BEST COMPLIMENTS
WE’VE GOTTEN OVER
THE YEARS CAME FROM
THE LEGENDS
LIKE BARRY WHITE.
WHEN WE PLAYED
“COME ON” FOR HIM,
HE SAID,“MAN, THAT
SOUNDS
LIKE ME.”
The best compliments we’ve gotten over
the years came from the legends like Barry
White. We produced a record for him called
“Come On.” When we played it for him, he
started laughing when it was done playing.
And he said, “Man, that sounds like me.” We
felt like that was a great compliment. We
did a song for Lionel Richie called “Don’t
Wanna Lose You.” When the song was over,
he began to laugh. I asked him, “What’s so
funny?” He said, “You guys just rewrote [the
Commodores’] ‘Just to Be Close to You,’ but
somehow it works when you did it. I can’t
ever do that. But you guys did it, and it’s
perfect.” And that is what you want singers
to feel like when you work with them.There
are a ton of other examples as well. It’s not
rocket science. It’s a mix of instinct, many
blessings, and the talent from the people
singing our songs, because Terry and I aren’t
going to do that. We can’t sing. [laughs]
Looking back on the many hits that you
and Terry Lewis have been a part of, what
types of music equipment did you used
on those classic songs?
Well, for us, it started early on when we
were in Minneapolis. Back when everyone
was into Moog synthesizers, we were into
a synthesizer called the Oberheim. Once
again, because we’re from Minneapolis,
we thought about things differently. The
Oberheim synthesizer just had a sound that
was different from the other synthesizers. It
caused us to write different types of songs.
I was listening to “Just Be Good to Me” by
S.O.S. Band the other day, and the chords
that were on there, along with the bass and
texture, all came from the Oberheim. So I
think that was an important part of what
we did. The Roland 808 drum machine we
used was big as well. It was a very influential
drum machine. The original LinnDrum,
which was the LM-1, was used on the early
Time records. We did everything on [Janet
Jackson’s] Control album with the LM-1
machine. There was a drum machine called
the [Oberheim] DMX that we used on
Cherelle’s record. There was a synthesizer
called the Mirage. It wasn’t held in high
regard by a lot of people. I remember a
company called Ensoniq made it. The
crazy sounds you hear on Janet’s “Nasty”
record came from the Mirage. That was
also a major influence on us. The recording
techniques we used were important as well.
We started out using twenty-four-track tape
and everybody switched over to digital tape
at one point in time. But we stuck with
analog. There was a product called Dolby
SR that came out that worked really well
for us. We wanted to stick to the analog tape
sound. The Dolby SR allowed us to use half
the amount of tape that we normally used,
but it also gave us a lot of low frequency
range that was important to our records.
Technologically, we just tried to keep up
with everything that was happening. But
these machines were instrumental in our
innovations and served as the basis for what
we created in our records.
As one half of one of the most important
producing tandems over the past thirty
years, did you and Terry Lewis know how
influential your music would become
and that it would change the course and
culture around music?
No.You don’t know what you’re doing when
you’re doing it. We just tried to make the
best records we could. We’ve been involved
with a few things that we recognized early
on that would mean something. When we
were with the Time, we knew that was
going to be different. We could tell by the
way the audiences reacted to us and our
songs at our concerts that it was going to be
special. When people started coming to our
shows dressed like us, we realized that we
were having some kind of impact. When we
did music for the S.O.S. Band, all of a sudden
the 808 drum machine became a part of a
bunch of songs. We figured that there was
some type of influence there that people
liked, and that was kind of cool. When we
did Janet’s Control record, it sounded different
than anything else that was on radio at that
time. The fact that it opened pop radio up
to Black up-tempo songs was a big deal. If
you remember radio at that time, the only
way a Black artist could have a song on the
pop charts was if it was a ballad. If it was an
up-tempo Black record, it was basically only
on the Black charts. When [Janet’s] “What
Have You Done for Me Lately” hit radio
[in 1986], all of a sudden, funk was back on
pop radio, and it opened things up again. In
that moment, we realized that it was kind
of cool that it happened. So, to me, it’s kind
of a series of steps. If you look back overall
at the whole thing—which is something
we don’t do a lot of, honestly, because we’re
still focused on going forward—but we
appreciate everything we’ve been blessed
to do. I don’t think we really ever look at
it like we’ve been involved with so many
movements, but what we’ve been happy
about is that we were involved in things that
changed people’s lives in a positive way. .
Read the expanded interview at waxpoetics.com
95
 OUTRO
The Art of Aaliyah

by Warren Fu

August 25, 2001. I am driving on the Bay

Bridge, on my way to celebrate my birthday,
when I noticed that the radio stations were
playing a lot of her songs. Then came a call
from the A&R at Virgin Records; she was
crying…
Years earlier, when I was a student at UC
Berkeley, I distinctly remember hearing “If
Your Girl Only Knew” when it debuted on
KMEL. I had never heard R&B that sounded
so dark, tough, and catchy. That slithering
bass line…sinister and sexy. A caller came
on the air, tripping over his words with
excitement: “Do I like it??? Man, that joint
is h-h-hot-hotter than f-f-flap-flapjacks on-
on-on a grid-grid—on a griddle!” I’m not
sure what that meant, but the DJs played
the song again anyway. It was as if she and
Timbaland had somehow traveled to the
future and brought a new sound back with
them. I wanted to be a part of that future.
I eventually became part of her team,
and years later I found myself tasked with
creating the cover for her upcoming self- Time races forward. It’s 2014, and her art unintentionally works as a beacon that
titled album. A lot had changed since her energy is still here, from Justin Timberlake draws other artists in. I’m glad I responded to
debut. She performed at the Academy and Beyoncé to cover artist Kelela. The her beacon and rode the wave with her for
Awards, was nominated for a Grammy, Arctic Monkeys name-dropped her as an that brief period of time.Without that initial
starred in her first major motion picture, and influence on their recent record. When push, I would have never been able to create
executive-produced the soundtrack. She had the band Haim asked me to direct a dance with Julian Casablancas, Mark Ronson, Daft
come a long way from the enigmatic “Back video, we watched “Try Again” repeatedly Punk, or any of the other brilliant artists I’ve
& Forth” girl hidden behind baggy jeans and talked about how no one made dancing had the honor of collaborating with.
and sunglasses, and she was on the cusp of look so effortlessly cool. We immediately The current of time continues to move
entering a new chapter. I felt that the album knew we had to get her close friend and us forward. As we journey into this new
cover needed to be an announcement of her choreographer Fatima Robinson on board. era of music with diminishing constraints
arrival as a woman. I had poured through I don’t think she could have ever of genres and race, a world of marriage
hundreds of photos from some of the most predicted the influence she would have on equality, I can’t help but wonder what kind
notable photographers of the day, before our culture years later. I believe the key was of art she would be creating if she was still
finally settling on a photo by Albert Watson her openness. Her mind was open enough to here today.
that just felt like the one. I wasn’t sure be a Trent Reznor fan in the hip-hop world, When I look at this cover image now,
exactly why, but I decided to tint the photo during a time where music and people I see it differently once again. I see it as a
red. Most of my artistic decisions are based were more segregated into genres. She had celebration. She is in the moment, exuding
on instinct over reason, and it just felt like it an openness to create a new sound with confidence and maturity. She no longer feels
needed to be red. Timbaland, introducing futuristic synths trapped in time; she feels alive.The red makes
After her passing, the album cover felt and unusual drum patterns into R&B. She more sense to me now. It feels like love and
strange to me. The album was a commercial had the openness to play an interracial love passion. It’s a color that has reappeared a lot
and critical success, and she suddenly story in her big-screen debut. She was open in my work since then.
became immortalized in that image, a new enough to trust me, an unknown artist, to Time never stops. As we all continue to
icon trapped in time. I remember looking at design her album art and direct her TV make our waves now and into the future, let’s
it closely, and it suddenly felt like something spot. The future is unknown. The future do it with the same openness to embrace the
from a distant past, even though the photo is openness. unknown possibilities as she did...
was taken less than a year before. It made me There are times we put out art for
sad to look at it. others to simply enjoy, but sometimes that AALIYAH. .

96
 Wax Poetics
Issue 59

AALIYAH
JIMMY JAM
EDWIN BIRDSONG
RINDER & LEWIS
TERRY REID
CONTINENTAL BATHS
CHROMEO
BLU
DOUG SHORTS
COM TRUISE
BADBADNOTGOOD
KAYTRANADA