driven wild by the “tribal pounding that went on and on,” as Cheren described it, “perfect for dancing yourself into a trance.” It wasn’t long before Moulton got the chance to rework another Scepter artist. “The band was called Brothers Truckin’,” Moulton recalls. “They were from Brooklyn. I told [Cheren] I thought it was a lousy name. He asked what I thought it should be. I said, well, if they’re from New York, how about a subway or something? They took that idea and renamed the group B.T. Express.” Working with the master tapes of “Do It (’Til You’re Satisfied,” Moulton performed his magic, extending the three-and-a-half-minute original to almost six minutes long. The band was not pleased. “They didn’t like what I did with it, because I cut the vocal off to bring the organ in,” Moulton remembers. It was only a few months later that the song was an unqualified smash hit and the band appeared on Soul Train . “Don Cornelius asked them how it felt to hear their song, at almost six minutes long, getting played on stations that usually won’t play anything over three minutes long. ‘That’s the way we recorded it!’ they said.” He laughs at the memory. “They hated it, and yet when it became a big hit, all of a sudden, ‘That’s the way we recorded it.’ ” By this time, Moulton was already a recognized name in the nascent disco community. His mixes for the Sandpiper were legendary, and thanks to another quirk of fate, in October 1974, he inaugurated a new column in Billboard magazine dedicated to disco. “That came about because I was doing Mel Cheren a favor,” Moulton explains. Cheren had promised his boss at Scepter, Florence Greenberg, that he would take her visiting boyfriend around the hot clubs in New York. The boyfriend from out of town was none other than Bill Wardlow, who ran Billboard ’s charts out of his Los Angeles office—obviously a very influential person. But Cheren had to attend a cousin’s wedding in Boston and couldn’t do it. So, Cheren writes, “I hooked Bill up with the one person who knew as much as I did.” Moulton set out a menu for the evening that would take in a wide spectrum of the New York City club scene. “I thought I’d take him to the Limelight to see David Rodriguez, because he was a real good DJ who plays what he wants and the hell with everybody else. And I’d take him to Hollywood to see Richie Kaczor, who played what people wanted to hear.” When they got to the Limelight, Moulton laughs, “David was in one of his moods.” “People wanted to hear [Eddie Kendricks’s] ‘A Date with the Rain,’ and he didn’t want to play it,” Moulton continues. “He wanted to play [Gladys Knight’s] ‘Make Yours a Happy Home,’ and kept getting on the microphone saying, ‘Until y’all get up and dance to this, I’m going to play it all night. I don’t care if you go somewhere else. Go!’ Of course, the owner was furious, but that was David. Finally, people reluctantly got up and danced to the record, and he says, ‘Okay, one more time with more enthusiasm!’ I thought, ‘Wow, you’re really pushing it!’ I didn’t know what to tell Bill Wardlow; he was just looking
at David like he was nuts. Suddenly, you heard boom! The sound of thunder, rain. It went on for twenty minutes. That’s all you heard! Then, after all that, there was Eddie Kendricks’s voice: ‘rain, rain, rain.’ And he played ‘Date with the Rain.’ Everybody started screaming. Until then, Bill Wardlow never realized the power that DJs had.” At Wardlow’s urging, Tom Moulton became Billboard ’s official chronicler of the disco scene, with his first column appearing in the October 26, 1974, issue of the magazine. “I decided I wouldn’t write about any of the stuff that I did. I thought it would be a conflict of interest.” When some of the biggest records were ones he had a direct hand in, this would prove to be impossible, and at Wardlow’s insistence he soon began dropping hints about the projects he was working on. “I would try to be objective and just write about it as if it was someone else’s record. Even on that first Gloria Gaynor, I got the gold record for it, but my name isn’t on the record. MGM thought it would be payola all over again since I wrote this Billboard column.” Gloria Gaynor’s first album, 1975’s Never Can Say Goodbye , was produced by Meco Monardo, Tony Bongiovi, and Jay Ellis, the same team that did Downing’s “Dream World.” They asked Moulton to mix the record, hoping that he would simply take Gaynor’s three successful singles that had previously been released and extend them for the LP. He did much more than that. Working on the same concept that drove his Sandpiper tapes, Moulton decided to mix the songs into a sidelong continuous medley. “This was something unheard of in album production,” Cheren recalled, “and the producers thought it was idiotic.” But Tom had his reasons. “On every mix I’ve done, I can always tell you why I’ve done something,” Moulton says. “I wanted DJs to be able to go to the bathroom!” He laughs, “It may be used in another way, but that’s really true.” Whatever the motivation, the effect was undeniable. As Vince Aletti reported in his January 4, 1975, column in Record World , it received “a knockout response, especially when the pressing is played straight through.” Aletti goes on to quote David Rodriguez, who validated Moulton’s inspiration, saying, “It gives me a chance to take a break, too.” It was around this time that Moulton began what would be a long-standing relationship with Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia. Moulton had mixed his very first record in Philadelphia—the Carstairs’ “It Really Hurts Me Girl” in 1973—and found he enjoyed the tempo of the city. “Their idea of rushing is my idea of working at a relaxed pace,” he explains. “In New York, where everything moves so quickly, you’re bound to miss some things.” Indeed, in a 1978 Billboard ad for the studio, Moulton is quoted as enthusing, “I’m never rushed.” Though demand was high for his services (“Stuff was flying at me,” he remembers), he initially had to wait to get time booked at Sigma. “I loved the sound of that studio, but I didn’t
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