“IT TOOK US 14 HOURS TO DO WHAT HURLEY DID IN AN HOUR”
a Roland JX-8P on that, instead of my cousin, Billy Dickens, who we used elsewhere.
“Even the horns are funky on that! That’s the Grand Staff’s horns – that’s Orbert Davis’ group. [Hums horns]. Yeah, those funky ass Grand Staff horns. And the thing is, they weren’t the tightest horns. But, I sampled them, and locked them into the pocket, right? So, it’s like the whole song is tight as hell and funky. And, you know, it sounds natural. I used a Casio FZ-1 for that. Made it real tight.”
You Must Be The One
“There are some ‘stun sounds’ and stopping FX on this record – like a record deck might sound when you power it off real quick. Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley did all that. I didn’t like that, either [laughs].
“I’m not a fan of it. But, Steve Hurley is a bad motherfucker, man. He’s bad as hell, man.
“He could chop tape up real quick, and make about 30 edits in an hour and a half.
“And when we tried to redo Steve’s edits, it took us 14 and a half hours to do what he did in an hour and a half [laughs]. That’s how cool he was…
“Man, he was literally cutting, physically cutting tape. Yeah, that’s not this digital editing shit. He was cutting tape.
“And, you know, them sounds on this track? That was all just Steve. I didn’t like it, you know? I just didn’t like… the tricks. I wanted our stuff to sound natural.”
For You
“This was Byron Stingily, I believe. And Byron Burke. They went off and worked on that. And that one was pretty slamming, I thought.
“I wasn’t working on too much at the same time. But, we pretty much did the whole Ten City album thing in about two weeks.
“So, I didn’t have too many distractions. And the whole project pretty much came in way under budget. CRC studios were pretty cheap. We got that whole album done in like a couple of weeks.
“This track, For You, was recorded and mixed at The Sound Lab in Chicago. The engineer on it was Chris Cuben.”
Close And Slow
“This one was put together by me and Byron. It was just your basic slow record, I guess. We just wanted a ‘booty grabber’, you know? Like an ‘end of the night song’. That’s the thing in Chicago, there’s a whole history behind that kind of thing.
“In the clubs, you’d have dance music, and then the last half hour you’d have all the slow records, and we would call them ‘booty grabbers’ because you’d be grinding and then wind up going back to the hotel. “As a matter of fact, you had these hotels in Chicago – a whole bunch of them – where you could rent out a room for four hours. Amazing, right?
“And there would be a queue of cars all waiting to get into these hotels. All because of these slow records that they played at the end of the night that had got everyone horny.
“And I’ve never seen that phenomenon in Europe. It probably happened, but I’ve never seen it.”
Devotion (Edited Version)
“This was our very first single. And, well, man, that song... OK. Here we go. We were on a double date – me and Byron Stingily – with these girls, Gigi and Cynthia. And, well, you know, I was pretty successful... and Byron wasn’t.
“But, you know, Byron started singing and stuff to win his girl over, and I said, ‘That’s a great groove!’.
“So, when I went home I just threw the music under it, and some more words, and then boom – we had made Devotion.
“And, it was actually like a week after we’d met with Atlantic records, and Atlantic had wanted to give
Byron the record deal without even hearing his voice!
“So, we had to do a song for Atlantic and did Devotion. We did the song and everybody flipped over it, and Merlin Bobb played it on WBLS in New York. Everybody flipped over. Crazy times.”