what it’s like. I did and was absolutely shocked to see all these White people dancing to Black records. They were dancing to Al Green and Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave.” But there was one problem: the DJ. “He’d try to mix one song into the other and everybody would walk off the floor. You could see that they were trying to get excited, but then the other record would come in and ruin the whole buzz. So I thought there had to be a better way to do this, and I tried to do it.” Moulton decided he would make a tape for Whyte. “I noticed when people were dancing that they always left the floor on the ‘one,’ ” Moulton recalls, referring to the first beat of a measure, “so I made a tape that overlapped the transitions so people couldn’t leave the floor. By the time the one came around, I’d have already brought in the next song, and they would already be dancing to it. It was more scientific than anything. I tried to constantly increase the intensity, to get them to a point where you’d have to peel ’em off the walls.” Moulton estimates it took him eighty hours to put together the forty-five-minute reel-to-reel tape. He gave it to Whyte and eagerly awaited word of its effect. “The following week in the office, I saw John, and he just said, ‘Don’t give up your day job.’ ” Moulton was devastated. “I don’t know if he ever played it at his place or if he just listened to it himself. I was very hurt and went out the following weekend to get the tape back.” In a twist of fate, Gene Smith, a restaurateur who ran the nearby Sandpiper club, heard Moulton’s story and convinced Tom to let him try the mix at his place. “I had nothing to lose, so I gave it to him.” Moulton headed back to New York. Very late Friday night, he got a call from the restaurant, which converted to a dance club in the evenings. “He says, ‘They hate it; nobody likes it.’ So I try to go back to sleep, which I did, eventually. The next night, Saturday night, two o’clock Sunday morning, I get a call, and everybody’s screaming and yelling in the background, and I couldn’t hear him. I kept hanging up. He must’ve called back five or six times. Finally, I just unplugged the phone.” To Moulton’s great surprise, he got a call the next day from Ron Malcolm, Gene Smith’s partner at the Sandpiper, gushing over the mix. Malcolm explained that when people come up for the weekend, on Friday night they want to unwind with things they are familiar with. But Saturday night, they’re ready for new songs and want to party, and Moulton’s progressive tape went over great. Could he get Tom to make a tape every week? “I said, ‘In your dreams! It took me eighty hours to make that one!’ ” Moulton laughs. “So I said I would do the big holidays but that was it. It was too hard to do.” Though Moulton says he was paid well for the nine or so tapes he made, the job wasn’t about the money, but more the buzz of playing “new stuff that nobody knew. I eventually went out there to see it myself, and I was thrilled because I couldn’t believe how people were going nuts over it. They were going nuts over it like I was going nuts over it when I was doing it.”
Moulton underlines a philosophy that would serve him well throughout his subsequent career: “I was really doing it for me. I figured if I got off on it, then everybody else would too.” The mixtapes also served to bring Moulton back into the music industry, and set the stage for the achievements he is best known for. “I was trying to get instrumental versions of things so I could make records longer,” he explains. “How excited could you get in three minutes? Not very.” Moulton had noticed that when a new song came on, especially if it wasn’t mixed right, the buildup of the previous three minutes was gone. “Sometimes you got lucky, the songs connected and took it to a whole other level. It made me wonder, what if you could take a song and really extend it so you’d have this mood going up and up and up? So I had this crazy idea to try that. That was my concept.” He laughs and says, “I didn’t believe that you could get too much of a good thing.” In early 1974, in his quest to take songs beyond the de rigueur three-minute mark, Moulton went to see Mel Cheren at Scepter Records. Cheren, a habitué of both New York City’s hottest clubs and the Fire Island scene, was sympathetic. In his memoir, Cheren recalls playing Tom a previously released Scepter single by a singer named Don Downing called “Dream World.” He had an extra copy of the master tape and let Moulton bring it home to experiment. When Tom brought it back a few days later, Cheren writes, “We were amazed: a so- so record was suddenly snappy, upbeat, and ten times better.” But the biggest surprise, Cheren continues, was something “so radical I could hardly believe my ears.” Moulton had somehow stretched the original track, not even lasting three minutes, to almost double its time, and in the process debuted what would become known as the disco break. In order to extend the short track, Moulton needed to tran- sition back to the beginning of the song, to reprise the intro- duction. But the song modulated up, or rose to a higher key, halfway through. This is a common songwriter’s technique to generate energy, but it meant Moulton was faced with the unfortunate corollary, that modulating down would drain the momentum he was trying to build. Necessity gave birth to in- vention, as Moulton recalls thinking, “I guess I’ll have to start getting rid of everything musical. You see, when you drop that out, you’ve lost the key in your head. So the only thing I had left were the drums and the congas and the tambourine.” He continued to experiment. “I thought, ‘What I’ll do is raise the congas and the tambourines there, and let that go on for a few bars, then I’ll just bring in the bass, and then the piano, and then build it back up that way to extend it so it doesn’t sound bor- ing.’ ” This method for getting around an awkward key change by stripping tracks down to their raw rhythm became one of the breakthrough innovations that changed the sound of dance music. DJs loved the freedom these percussion breaks gave them to mix and even extend songs themselves, and dancers were
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