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.
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 theTime. 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.
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The Time, 1981. (clockwise from bottom left) Terry Lewis, Jimmy Jam, Jellybean Johnson, Monte Moir, Jesse Johnson, and Morris Day. Photo by Allen Beaulieu.
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