They invented the remix

Born out of the sound system culture in Jamaica, ‘versions’ and ‘dubs’ became the lingua franca of the best systems vying for attention (and beer sales). The first were Lloyd Coxsone and Duke Reid, whose versions – instrumental tracks – were perfect for local toasters to rap over. The luxurious space provided by dub, which is more about what’s left out than in, took the version into a new territory and would provide inspiration for the early 80s disco remixers in New York.

But the trajectory of the remix in New York started on a completely different path. Unlike the Jamaican version, the early remixes in New York were extended versions of the original song, using the same constituent parts, lengthened for greater dancefloor impact. Today’s remixers owe little to this style: with a few notable exceptions like Dimitri From Paris, Joey Negro or The Reflex, most usually take a vocal snippet or bassline and effectively completely re-produce the track.

The godfather of the remix is Tom Moulton. The handsome Moulton, who’d worked as a male model, was out in the gay enclave at a Fire Island tea dance one weekend in 1971. “Firstly, the DJ was terrible,” says Moulton. “I was watching people dance and, at that time, it was mostly 45s that were three minutes long. They’d really start to get off on it and all of a sudden another song would come in on top of it and the people would lose the rhythm. It was a shame that the records weren’t longer so people could really start getting off.” Moulton returned to Manhattan and resolved to make a tape that lengthened the songs and spliced them together. It took him 80 hours to produce the 45-minute tape.

A few weeks later, he get a call-back: “They’re going crazy over your tape! So he calls me the next day and says, ‘Can you make me a tape every week? I’ll give you $500 if you can make a tape.’ ‘It has nothing to do with the money,’ I say, ’It’s the amount of hours.’ ‘OK but can you give us one for Memorial Day? An hour and a half. Then can you give us one for fourth of July? And Labor Day?’ So I said OK.”

Moulton started scrambling round the record companies for more records for his disco-mixes. At one of the labels, Scepter Records, they asked Moulton if he’d be interested in doing the same to one of their records and delivering a disco-mix. Although the band hated it, it handed them their first hit. “I lengthened it to 5.35, that magic number, from three minutes. We had a station here called WBLS and they played the long version, not the short version.” What Moulton started, others soon began to emulate.

Crucial to the development of the remix was arrival of the 12” single, which happened quite by accident. “The twelve-inch? Jose Rodriguez, my mastering engineer, ran out of seven-inch blanks,” says Moulton. “So he had to give me a twelve-inch. I said, ‘That’s ridiculous.’ So he said, ‘I know what we’ll do: we’ll spread the grooves and make it louder.’ And of course, when I heard it I almost died. At that time there were several disc jockeys around and I used to see them on Fridays and give them these acetates: Richie Kaczor, David Rodriguez, Steve D’Acquisto, Bobby DJ, Walter Gibbons.”

They were an instant hits. The grooves deeper, louder, crisper. Within months in 1975, promotional 12”s began to appear on the New York disco scene, while the first commercially available 12” came the following year: Double Exposure’s ’Ten Percent’. It was remixed by one of the early stars of disco, Walter Gibbons. He’d originally made his name as a DJ at a club in downtown Manhattan called Galaxy 21.

“Everyone else knew how to mix, but Walter, he could remix a record live and you wouldn’t know he was remixing it,” recalls fellow DJ and close friend Tony Smith. “I never saw anyone do that. Most of the time you can hear when someone’s remixing it and I couldn’t believe he was doing it. First of all I couldn’t believe it was a white guy that was doing it! But Walter was really a bastard. He was really stuck up. He drove everyone crazy, but somehow I became friends with him and I was let through his barrier. Most people didn’t really know what a nice person he was. He didn’t trust nobody. We discovered later that he was right not to, because everyone stole his stuff!”

Having been responsible for ‘Ten Percent’, the first commercial release for Salsoul, Gibbons went on to work on many of Salsoul’s catalogue (reissue label Suss’d released a triple CD of his Salsoul remixes in 2004). Gibbons worked extensively in Blank Tapes Studios, which was owned by Bob Blank. “The ways he came up with to make the record better were very inspiring,” says Blank. “He would say, ‘Let’s take that string part and solo it’. It was great because instead of changing the context of the record he’d be saying, ‘This is the spotlight in a great record; I’d like everyone to focus in on this’. I thought it was really smart.”

Walter became a born-again Christian and refused to play records with a negative message (Tony Smith recalls him refusing to play CJ & Co’s ‘Devil’s Gun’, for instance) and it limited his DJing opportunities and lost him a lot of remixing work – though he did make a spectacular comeback in the 1980s when he completely reinvented an obscure record by Strafe called ‘Set It Off’, its stark proto-house/electro sound a huge under-ground hit on both sides of the Atlantic.

There were two artists, in particular, who took Walter’s crown away from him and in doing so began redefining the limits of the remix: Larry Levan and François Kevorkian. Both drew heavily on the dub influences coming from UK dance records at the time (one in particular, TW Funk Master’s ‘Love Money’, provided no little inspiration). The first, Larry Levan, had been around since the beginning of disco. As a teenager, he and his best friend Frankie Knuckles had worked for Nicky Siano, helping him set up his Gallery parties. He’d played at a few places including the Continental Baths and Reade Street, but the opening of Paradise Garage was a quantum leap in the trajectory of his career. His initial remixes coincided with this new residency, the first being a brilliant reworking of ‘C Is For Cookie’ by the Cookie Monster, turning a Sesame Street disco cash-in into a funk monster, that was also beloved by the nascent hip hop DJs operating in the Bronx and beyond.

In the early 1980s he began to change what a remix could be, both via the commercial remixes he undertook for the city’s disco labels, but also in his own productions under two pseudonyms, Peech Boys, whose ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’ was hugely influential, and Man Friday. Arthur Baker, whose Rockers Revenge project was inspired by Levan’s work, says: “I was obviously influenced by the Peech Boys record. Everyone was. When those handclaps started whipping around the place... oh man!” But arguably the pinnacle of Levan’s remix career was what eventually became the ‘Padlock’ EP by Gwen Guthrie. This project was a sprawling set of sessions that stretched over many months.

Danny Krivit became close friends with Levan. “He was like a little kid. Very energetic. He had a thing about lights; anything special and big like that, he loved. Big, bright things. Disneyland. When Star Wars came out he was like, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta go to the opening.’ He liked that sort of thing.”

Krivit was present at many of the Guthrie sessions.“He was a record company’s nightmare,” he recalls. “He’d show up really late and while he was there it was about socialising and drugs. Eventually he’d get to the mix, but he would be distracted very easily. So the mix, instead of taking a day or whatever, would go on for weeks. I remember the Gwen Guthrie project wasn’t really even supposed to happen. He was supposed to mix one song, ‘Should Have Been You’, but he ended up doing all these mixes. It was probably one of the more productive sessions he had. But when he showed it to them, they were so pissed off at the price and how long it took that they just shelved it. For a year or two he was just playing it at the Garage.”

One song, ‘Seventh Heaven’, really helped describe a new direction in dance music that, alongside other mixes like David Joseph’s amazing ‘You Can’t Hide Your Love’ and the aforementioned Peech Boys, mixed electronics with traditional disco instrumentation, acting as a bridge between disco and the imminent arrival of house (and its New York cousin, garage, named after Levan’s club).

François Kevorkian’s work with Prelude Records was also crucial in mapping out new territory. After moving over from France to study under jazz-fusion drummer Tony Williams, François got his first break drumming along to Walter Gibbons at Galaxy 21. His first studio forays were compiling edits of breaks he’d heard DJs like Walter Gibbons play live in clubs, like Rare Earth’s ‘Happy Song And Dance’.

“It was just a copy of what Walter used to do with ‘Happy Song’. I had made all these little dubplates which were like concentrated energy at the time; it was difficult for a DJ to do fancy moves all the time all night, so my dubplates were really a kind of greatest hits formula.”

Within a week of being offered the post of A&R – at the time François didn’t even know what an A&R did – he was in the studio remixing ‘In The Bush’ by Musique. “The record just blew out,” says François. “I mean, it exploded. Anywhere you went in the summer of ’78, they were playing that fucking record. I brought it to the Garage and Larry loved it.” François became the in house remixer at Prelude, subsequently having a hand on many of their releases (often signing them, too), including hits like D-Train’s ‘You’re The One For Me’.

Of course, Moulton, Gibbons, Levan and Kevorkian were not alone. Among the other pioneers of the remix were David Todd & Nick Martinelli, Morales & Munzibai, Tony Humphries and Shep Pettibone, who later worked with Madonna. These remix originators laid the foundation stones for what later became house music, incorporating electronic instrumentation, drum machines and dub techniques into their remixes and productions, so much so that the change from disco to house in New York was a seamless transition. As West End’s Mel Cheren commented, at the end of the day, “House was disco on a budget.”

The compilation ‘Larry Levan: Genius Of Time’ is out on UMG on March 28