want to come down until I could get a chunk of time blocked out.” Once his turn came, he didn’t hesitate. “I had Studio A at Sigma booked a year at a time, four nights a week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I’d work through the night on Thursday, and come back to New York on Friday. Then I’d go to Media Sound and I’d cut ref discs of what I mixed, to play them for the different clients.” Reference, or “ref,” discs were one-off acetates cut to the exact specifications of the finished record. They were used to check levels and EQ, and to get the go-ahead to cut a master from the company who would be putting the record out. One evening in late 1974 at Media Sound, Moulton and mastering engineer José Rodriguez chanced across a discovery that would send reverberations—literally—throughout the industry. “The accident?” Moulton begins an oft-told tale. “José ran out of seven-inch blanks. I needed to take the song in question, ‘I’ll Be Holding On,’ [coincidentally by Al Downing, Don’s brother] to Chess Records, so I asked him to cut it on a 12-inch blank.” Rodriguez cut it in spec, and ended up with a 12-inch-wide record with a gulf of blank vinyl surrounding a little circle of grooves in the center. Moulton repeats what he told Rodriguez: “This looks ridiculous, I can’t give this to anybody. Can you start it at the beginning and just spread the grooves out?” No problem, the engineer replied, but we’ll have to raise the levels. “So he cut it at plus-8 [decibels]. I took it home and the sound was just incredible.” That night, Moulton took the acetate out and passed it to DJ Tony Gioe at the Copacabana, who put it on. “Tom, this is not going to work!” Moulton recalls Gioe saying. “You’re going to blow my speakers! I have to turn the damn thing down, it’s so loud!” Thirty-five years later, Moulton beams at the memory. “I said, ‘I know! Isn’t it great!’ ” Fortunately, Mel Cheren immediately grasped the implications of Moulton and Rodriguez’s inadvertent breakthrough, and consequently Scepter was one of the very first companies to begin pressing single cuts on twelve-inch pieces of vinyl, although they limited these to DJ promotional copies only. Vince Aletti’s Record World column of June 14, 1975, mentions that that Bobby Moore’s “(Call Me Your) Anything Man” “will be shipped to DJs on special 12-inch records… something that other record companies have been talking about doing for the disco market, but that Scepter is the first to carry out.” Almost a year later, Ken Cayre at Salsoul took the leap and issued the first commercially available twelve-inch single, “Ten Percent” by Double Exposure, and the floodgates were officially opened. All the while, four nights a week, Tom Moulton was hard at work behind the boards at Sigma Sound, cranking out his trademark extended mixes. As Aletti put it in July of 1975, “Tom Moulton seems to have singlehandedly invented the profession of the disco mixer.” It was perhaps inevitable that he would collaborate with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, Sigma’s
first and most consistent clients. “One day, Harry Chipetz, the manager at Sigma, asked me why I didn’t do something with Gamble and Huff. I told him I thought they were doing fine without me, but he kept on it,” Moulton remembers. “We’d like to keep it in the family,” Chipetz told him, and Moulton had become part of the Philadelphia family. “I got some acetates of some unreleased stuff, and I liked this one particular song,” Moulton says. It was called “Do It Any Way You Wanna,” by People’s Choice. “When he first heard my mix, Gamble didn’t like it. He didn’t like what I did to the intro, that big snare hit,” Moulton recalls. “I said, ‘Kenny, when they hear that slap, they’ll know this is a serious record. Because nobody’s going to slap me across the face and not follow it through with something.” The record was released with Moulton’s mix and took a mere six weeks to hit number one on Billboard ’s Hot Soul Singles chart. “Still to me one of the most funky, funky records ever,” Moulton declares. There was one small problem, however. “My name was left off the record. And I didn’t even get paid for it,” Moulton relates. “I just said, ‘Make sure my name’s on it.’ ” Chipetz apologetically suggested that Tom come up with an album- length project that he could do with Gamble and Huff material. “Why don’t we do an album called the Philadelphia Classics,” Moulton recalls proposing, “and have an old Rolls-Royce on the cover or something, real classy looking,” with remixes of his favorites from the Gamble and Huff catalog. “They liked the idea and were cool with all of my song choices except one: ‘Love Is the Message.’ They didn’t want me to do that one, because it was the only song that hadn’t been a hit, but I insisted.” Moulton’s reworking of MFSB’s “Love Is the Message” became the breakout tune from 1977’s Philadelphia Classics album and a bona fide timeless disco anthem is a testament to Moulton’s ear and ingenuity—and a new electric piano solo that seemed to set the clubs on fire. “I wanted to do a piano overdub, but I had to trick Huff into doing it.” Moulton was after a particular loose feel for the solo and was worried that the perfectionist Huff would overthink his part. “I got the engineer I was working with to set up the Rhodes and get me a ladder.” Moulton climbed up and unscrewed the “record” light that lets musicians in the live room see when the tape is rolling. When Huff, who was taking a break while recording the Jacksons at Sigma, came in, Moulton said they would “just run it down. Just play what you feel.” “I made sure the organ, bass, and the drums were up in his earphone mix. Nothing else. The rhythm was so loud in his ear that he had to go with it. He was just playing over that part, unaware that we were recording. I kept signaling for him to keep going. After he got out of the change, he stopped and said, ‘I don’t think it’s going to work,’ and left. It was one take. It became very popular, that piano part.” A bit of an understatement. As Dimitri states, “The classic
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