having a voice, because if you’re doing bumblebees, you don’t have to be that great. That’s how I did ‘Love Bug’ and [other tracks as] Bumble Bee Unlimited.” He continued to experiment at P&P, while taking on work producing and arranging for major labels, such as Atlantic Records. “On P&P Records, I would never do the same things I would do on Atlantic. That’s one of the reasons why I established separate identities,” he says. “P&P became this place where artists could be free, as opposed to an Atlantic Records or a Columbia Records, where everything is high spit and polished.” Adams appreciates the attention his independent work at P&P has garnered and is pleased by the acclaim it has brought him. He is especially fond of one review of “Atmosphere Strut” that compared his synthesizer innovations to Miles Davis’s trumpet work. But in today’s world of Internet snark, even Adams can’t escape an occasional critic. “I was reading somewhere on the Internet,” says Adams, “where somebody was saying that Patrick Adams’s synthesizer work was wonderful, and this and that, and then somebody leaves a comment, ‘Patrick Adams isn’t all that great; I hear a lot of mistakes in his playing.’ My response to that would be, ‘Yeah, that’s true, I’m not trying to be perfect on Cloud One records or Universal Robot records; I’m just having fun.’” Making experimental disco music was fun, but participating in the disco scene was less appealing to Adams, who wasn’t interested in the clubbing. “I’ve never had a peacock mentality of ‘Hey, everybody look at me, I’m dancing,’” Adams says. “Mentally, I’m dancing all day long.” Throughout the late ’70s, the disco in Adams’s mind made its way onto the dance floors and across radio waves. But his biggest disco hit, “In the Bush” by Musique, would prove too risqué for some radio stations. Prelude Records had hired Adams to produce the female disco group, and, to his and the label’s surprise, the album cut—never intended to be a single, with its chorus chant of “push, push in the bush”—became a hit. The song was subsequently banned on six hundred radio stations across America for its suggestive lyrics. “I guess, in some small way, I’m guilty for pushing the linguistic line of censorship,” says Adams. “Here in the twenty- first century, I’m not even sure there are any dirty words anymore.” Another, less controversial hit Adams had was with Inner Life’s 1979 single, “I’m Caught Up (In a One Night Love Affair)” on Salsoul Records. “I will always think of ‘Caught Up’ as a high point in production for me,” says Adams of the disco anthem. “There are moments when everything just comes together right.” As the ’80s came and disco died out, Adams looked to stay busy and on top of new sounds and recording technology. He took a job engineering sessions at Power Play Studios, where
he worked with countless hip-hop legends including Eric B. & Rakim, Salt-N-Pepa, Marley Marl, Mister Magic, KRS-One, and Nice & Smooth. In the studio, Adams played the role of mentor, teaching his recording techniques and encouraging the young artists to produce themselves. Adams is especially proud of his engineering work on Paid in Full , which he considers one of the greatest rap albums of all time. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, Adams continued writing, arranging, and producing his own music. In 1991, a remake of “Touch Me (All Night Long),” a song he wrote with longtime friend and musical partner Greg Carmichael, became a number one hit single. Today, Adams’s music is still being covered and sampled. He received a platinum plaque when Nas sampled Black Ivory’s “We Made It” for the song “Revolutionary Warfare” on the 2002 album God’s Son . A recent remake of Musique’s “Keep on Jumpin’” that has a video featuring scantily dressed female soccer players has become a YouTube sensation. With over forty years in the music business, Adams is not humble about his achievements, nor should he be. He has had hundreds of his songs recorded, and worked on hundreds of records more. With his music now being reissued and appreciated by fans beyond the disco fanatics, Adams is beginning to receive the recognition he knows he deserves. “Very few people on this earth can do what I can do,” Adams says. “I will never claim to be the best, but I know that I am among the best.” .
This article originally appeared in Wax Poetics Issue 31, 2008.
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