I called my daughters to talk about Michael Jackson, because I know how important he was to them when they were teenagers. Young people all over the world were saying, “Now I know how my parents felt when John Lennon died.” I told them I was shocked by Jackson’s death rather than saddened by it: I was fascinated by him as an artist but not emotionally involved with his music as I was with both Elvis’s and John Lennon’s.
My daughter Julia mentioned going to see the Jacksons’ Victory Tour in 1984 with me. I didn’t remember it at all. She told me in detail how I had taken her to see the show at the Forum in LA when she was in fourth grade, and how I asked the person in front of her to please sit down so she could see the stage. And she told me about the time when I was doing something at Westlake Sound with Twisted Sister while Michael was making Thriller. Julia and Nina came over to the studio for dinner, and apparently I took them in to meet him. They were over the moon about this, and Julia said they were “queens of the school” the next day because they had met Michael Jackson. It was nice to hear that.
Speaking of Twisted Sister, they were all New York natives, so they had no problem working in the New York area. I agreed to come east to do both the rehearsals and the basic tracks for their third album, Stay Hungry, and they agreed to come west for overdubs and mixing. We rehearsed out in Long Island for a few days, and in January of ‘84 we set up at the New York Record Plant. Normally, load-in and setup took about a day, and we usually needed one more day to mike everything and dial it in so we’d be ready to roll tape. The first day went fine, but on the second day we weren’t able to arrive at a satisfactory rhythm-guitar sound for J.J. French, even though that’s all we worked on all day long.
By the third day we’d been through half the rental amps in Manhattan and weren’t too much closer to a good rhythm-guitar sound. It took us three days of experimentation and trial and error before we were able to attempt any recording. On the morning of the third day I woke up in my room at the Warwick Hotel, and I remember wanting to just stay in bed and cry — I was desperate to get a guitar sound. I was used to spending about an hour on this particular task, and now I just couldn’t see our frustration ever coming to an end. Eventually, of course, we overcame the problem somehow and managed to record the tracks, but I’ll always remember that project as the most difficult one of all in terms of establishing a basic sound for a band.
We have our first-ever request at Bottom Feeders. A few weeks ago it was requested in the comments that I include Kon Kan’s “Puss ‘n Boots” in a future post — so here it is! Of course, that’s just the way the ball bounces, since you could pick up the Billboard Hot 100 book and predict every post of the rest of the series and write them up far better than I ever could, way before I do. Hey, don’t get any ideas now. Look me in the eyes. Mine. Mine. Got it?
Kool & the Gang have to rank as the second-greatest R&B act of the ’80s, right behind Michael Jackson, and they’re not even that far behind. Over their career they’ve had 32 songs hit the Hot 100, with another ten for good measure if you count the R&B chart. The greatest thing about Kool & the Gang is that they didn’t really drop off like most R&B/funk artists did by the mid- to late ’80s. Cameo and the Gap Band really started creating crap and almost remaking their own tunes by the close of the decade while Kool & the Gang remained fresh throughout. Of these three “Steppin’ Out” is certainly the most recognizable of the group, though even “Holiday” and “Special Way” are well known. I could listen to Kool & the Gang all day, every day and never get tired of them. They are quite a high point for me in the ’80s.