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 Pickett, Percy Sledge, and Dinah Washington on weekends. He eventually formed his own bands, the Seeds of Time and Brick Wall, and the experience of performing rock music marked a turning point in his career. He admits that rock “seemed a lot more fun than taking the classical route, because I could improvise. Plus, I could make money on weekends, and that pretty much sealed it.” Michael’s future collaborator Laurin Rinder was born in Los Angeles in 1943 and grew up in Hollywood. His father was a bookie from Chicago who took bets on horses from all the great actors of the time and encouraged Laurin’s musical education at every opportunity. When Laurin was a teenager, his father would drop him off at Shelley Manne’s nightclub, the Manne-Hole, before picking up his mother from her shift at a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard. Laurin was underage, so he would sit in the alley and listen to the jazz filtering through the walls. He remembers being drawn to “the language the musicians were using” when they walked out of the club. “It was very cool,” he says, “and it changed the way I thought about everything, and about what I wanted to do.” Laurin became involved with players like Louie Bellson, Buddy Rich, and Joe Morello, but soon realized that jazz was not the quickest route for meeting girls: “Jazz was always a big part of what I was doing, but rock and
roll was the romance. It was the way in.” Laurin quit school and became a session musician. He moved to different cities several times, spending stints in New York and Detroit, where he cemented his reputation as a beat drummer along with contemporaries Bernard Purdie and Earl Palmer. Over a fifteen-year period, Laurin played with everyone from Chuck Berry and Little Richard to Fontella Bass and James Brown. He estimates that he must have played on no less than two thousand records. A few years after Amoeba Records opened in Los Angeles, Laurin and his daughter hunted for records he’d played on in the store. “We stopped at four hundred,” he recalls. “There were so many I couldn’t remember, because in those days—especially with Motown—you didn’t know who the artist was. You’d just go into the studio and lay the track down.” The nameless studio space encouraged a weightless sense of non-responsibility in Laurin. “I lived on airplanes,” he recalls, “traveling to another group to play with, another girl to sleep with, another drug to take.” This revelation hints at the corrosive power of becoming accustomed to a life of constantly crossed paths, where identity was subsumed into the anonymous life of the studio, disrupting any sense of clear positioning in relation to an ever-increasing landscape of unidentified recordings. Laurin returned to California in the late
’60s and befriended Deke Richards, who was part of the Corporation, a collective of songwriters at Motown that penned the Jackson Five’s earliest hits. Together they formed the Four Sounds, a grinding R&B outfit that released—on the suitably named Ran-Dee label—the scuzzy “Mama Ubangi Bangi,” an exotica-tinged titty- shaker complete with ethnic stereotyping, animal cries, and pounding tribal drums. If the session-musician life meant a degree of submissiveness to company rules, the Four Sounds allowed Laurin to explore the sleazy and playful sound that would later become a central component of his disco aesthetic. In 1969, Mike also moved to California, but found himself broke and alone when his band, the Devil’s Brigade, separated. He met Dick Dodd from the recently disbanded garage outfit the Standells, who offered Mike the opportunity to join his new group, Joshua. Dodd, who knew Laurin from the Four Sounds, asked him to play drums, bringing him together with Mike for the first time. Joshua dispersed after playing the L.A. club circuit for a few years, but, in 1974, Mike called up Laurin to work on the rock opera Amrakus: The Chronicle of the Starship Trinity , which he was producing for AVI Records. For six months, they rehearsed until the project lost steam, but they still had contractual obligations to AVI, and the label’s Ray Harris presented them with a novel collaborative opportunity: disco.
( above ) W. Michael Lewis (center, with guitar) in his band the Seeds of Time, 1966.
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