Mark Radice “Ain’t Nothing But a Party” (United Artists) 1976
Farm. I remember Patrick Adams was there, Norman Harris, a lot of people, and that’s where I met Ken Cayre [owner of Salsoul]. I was thrilled to meet him, and to my surprise he knew just who I was; in fact, he wanted to meet me since he’d heard the arrangements I’d been doing. I told him I had a new act, and on Monday it was done! I was so happy. “First Time Around” was our first single in 1979. Larry Levan did the mix. One of my favorites “Here’s to You.” I felt the finished song represented exactly what I had set out to get across. Musically, lyrically, it came together perfectly, and the bass line and pocket is so deep. It was the first time that Denise Crawford had sung lead with the band—prior to that she was the backup and Dolores Dunning sang lead. Denise just knocked it out of the park, an amazing performance. After that, I always featured her. “Superlove” was a big West Coast and down-south record. It wasn’t big in New York, but they loved it out there. I saw it on Soul Train one time and was really surprised. “No Music,” unlisted on the album cover, is an uncontested breakbeat classic comprised entirely of handclaps, drums, a chant, and, of all things, kazoos. Muller explains: When I’m finished doing a record, I put the tracks on in sequence to hear it as a listener would, and ask myself, “Would I buy that record?” Listening to Skyyport , I felt something was missing. We’d finished the album, I was in the studio doing edits, and I felt like we needed something really funky. Tommy [the drummer] and Solomon were the only guys there; we were at Blank Tapes [Studio]. I wrote this chant [“We don’t need no music, ’cause all we want to do / is sing and dance and party down and play our Skyyzoos”] and wrote out the beat. I got the secretary, the receptionist, the delivery guy from Sarge’s [thanked on the credits as “the pizza guy”], anyone who was there came in the room. Everybody clapped, we did the chant, Tommy played the beat, and the record was done. Solomon used the kazoos as a gimmick in the live shows—the girls would play them and people liked it, so we went with it.
This was basically a record we did for United Artists with all the Brass Construction guys. Mark Radice was an incredible synth player. He was a Minimoog genius. The concept was that we had this White kid with Brass Construction, which in those days was supposed to be very innovative! They used my shoes for the cover of the album, and they never gave me my shoes back.
Skyy Skyyport (Salsoul) 1980
One of the greatest groups to represent the classic New York club sound, Skyy charted fourteen singles during their tenure on Salsoul and continued to be active even after the label’s demise, scoring a couple of number one hits in 1989–90. Skyyport is their third LP. Solomon Roberts, Skyy’s leader, was a good friend of mine. He was a neighborhood guy. In fact, the Brass Construction demo was recorded on a four-track in his parents’ basement, where we used to go and rehearse. Sol had a group back then too; they were called Fuel and were a little more rock-oriented than us. During one of the Miss Black America Pageants, I saw another act that just blew me away. It was four girls, three sisters and a sister-in-law, who did an interlude at the pageant. I hired them to come and perform with Brass Construction. They would come on during the show and do a few songs, mostly stuff from Main Ingredient’s Afrodisiac album, which they really liked. Unfortunately, when you added the girls to the band, we had so many people performing that at the end of the night we would each end up with something like five dollars! We couldn’t afford it. So I told Solomon that he should get these girls involved with his group, and that’s when Fuel became Skyy. They started developing a different style, and I began recording them. Solomon and I formed a company called Alligator Bit Him. The name came from a line in a song [Jerry Reed’s country chestnut “Amos Moses”] that we took to represent the sound of a snapping electric bass. I put up the money to get the group started, but we still had to get a deal. It was really tough. I had taken a lot of money out of my savings—my wife thought I was crazy—but I really believed in them. Salsoul, Casablanca, and RCA were hot labels at the time, and I wanted to somehow get this group involved with one of them. I didn’t go out much at all, so I didn’t meet up with industry people very often, beyond who I was already working with. One day, though, I ended up at this apartment in midtown. It was a place where all the producers and musicians used to congregate, near a bunch of studios like Opal and the Music
Rafael Cameron Cameron (Salsoul) 1980
Rafael Cameron, another Guyanese-born Brooklynite, had three albums on Salsoul, each produced by Muller. This is his first, and contains the dance-floor gems “Funkdown” and “Let’s Get It Off.” His second LP contained his biggest hit, “Boogie’s Gonna Get Ya.” We had known each other back in the days of the Panharmonics, when he sang with the group. I ran into him by coincidence on Church Avenue in Brooklyn years later, and he mentioned that
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