Let The Music Play On
John Morales Feature Interview
“I’d rather have ya holdin’ on, holdin’ on/Aww than pushing me away… Waaah, Ooh wee Baybehh!”
Ad-libs sung by the late, great, soul legend David Ruffin - a vamp re-imagined as a dynamic accapella intro. Ruffin’s vocal separated, in complete isolation, from the original recording of the lush ‘70s classic Walk Away From Love by expert remixer John Morales.
The sounds that then follow, first recorded by production maestro Van McCoy – congas, keys, bass, guitar, vibes, horns and strings, along with backing vocals – begin to fall in one by one, with Morales letting the groove build in a way the million selling 1976 hit, at a duration of only 3 minutes and 16 seconds, never could. There’s a moment too, highlighting Ruffin’s genius, when Morales again drops out the backing track, mid-song, this time just as the former lead singer of the Temptations is about to stretch to a falsetto register, exposing the vulnerability in his vocal; every nuance of his delivery laid bare.
Included on the promo of the remix project John Morales Presents The M+M Mixes Volume IV, the Ruffin track provoked an emotional response from at least one of the DJ recipients it was sent to, bringing the prominent UK tastemaker to tears.
“Y’know it’s funny,” says John Morales, his Bronx born native New-Yawker accent immediately apparent over the phone. “That’s one of my favourite records on the compilation. I was doing a show with MiSoul Radio DJ Melvo Baptiste and afterwards I sent him some of the new stuff including Walk Away From Love and he told me ‘Dude, you put (David Ruffin’s) voice in a place, with the breakdown and the way it kicks back in with the girls and well, your mix made me cry!’” Morales says with a laugh. “He can’t deny it - I have the texts! But I was like ‘Wow’.”
The original intention was to use Walk Away From Love on a 2014 compilation entitled John Morales Presents Club Motown which ultimately focused more on out n’ out dancers, providing Morales with the perfect excuse to use the mix for the fourth in his series of M+M mix collections for UK independent label BBE Records, a series and association that had developed through three previous comps over a nine year period.
“Volume three was three cd’s but for some sick reason in my head I always wanted volume four to be four cd’s,” says Morales. “I didn’t want to make it like a disco or a dance record, I really wanted to mix up the genres but be real careful to stay within the soulful community of r&b, soul and dance. So, you’ve got Barry White on there, you’ve got Frankie Beverly & Maze, Eddie Kendricks, the Jones Girls, Lenny Williams & Diana Ross. Everything isn’t all 120 beats per minute, so I tried to sequence everything in my head so that the listener wouldn’t get bored. You’d go from an Atlantic Starr to an obscure Keith Barrow track or Stay by the Controllers, which wasn’t really a big known act but for me was a big tune. The thing was to have some diversity and have a track like David Ruffin so that there are lots of twists and turns.”
To put together a project of this size & prestige - 32 tracks in all, largely compiled from the catalogues of major labels Universal & Sony, with access to all of the original masters - can be a daunting task, even for a music industry figure as revered as John Morales. As a part of the legendary mix/production duo M+M - along with the sadly deceased Sergio Munzibai who passed away in 1991 - Morales practically defined an era. An ever present on the charts in the ‘80s (and throughout the ‘90s via his own solo work), he worked on records by everyone from Aretha Franklin, Candi Staton, Tina Turner, the Rolling Stones, Spandau Ballet, Shalamar, Hall & Oates, The Commodores, Melba Moore & Rose Royce to of course Jocelyn Brown - providing the epic remix for Somebody Else’s Guy. Even with that pedigree it still took several years to clear everything that was needed for Volume IV.
“It was not an easy process; I must have submitted a list of about maybe 30 things that I wanted to remix out of which only one of the masters might be available.” Morales explains, “Then I would find out what they did have and whittle it down to what I really wanted to do. Once you’ve done the mix you then need to gain approval, not just from the label but also from the artist. I had to constantly phone & harass Donna Summer’s widower for approval, along with his attorney and Circles by Atlantic Starr literally took four years to clear as there’s only two of them left and were talking 25 years since they first recorded it so in that time they must have gone through half a dozen managers; it was a constant battle to locate the right person. Circles almost didn’t make it but thankfully it came together right at the end, because I didn’t really want to compromise and felt if I gotta wait, then I gotta wait.”
When the package of cd’s finally arrived from the label Morales almost couldn’t believe it.
“I gotta call from home saying, ‘There’s a box here for you’ and I was like ‘Great, must be a pair of trainers I’ve been waiting for…’ So, when I got it into my studio and opened the box, I was so excited, I couldn’t believe it, to finally have the compilation after four years, tangible, in my hand and done. It was amazing.”
Like his recent remixes on Marvin Gaye’s work – the brilliant Funky Space Reincarnation from Here, My Dear & the Funk Me release from the In Our Lifetime? project – Morales approached the source material like a purist, reluctant to retouch the mixes with unnecessary overdubs.
“What I try to do is find the hidden magic in the original masters,” Morales explains. “Utilise my expertise as an engineer to try to make them sound better. I always had this analogy where I’d say, ‘What I want to do is take the car and put it through a car wash and just polish it up not try and change the engine’.” I want new people to like it but those that already know it to say ‘Yeah, he didn’t do much but maybe what he did was enough’.”
Not only does Morales rediscover the virtuoso magic of the session players endeavours – often obscured in amongst the orchestral grandeur of the chart-obsessed three minute pocket-symphonies that the era demanded – but his arrangements also consistently astound with their freshness and imagination, like seeing a version of a well-worn classic album cover in a brand new sleeve with alternative shots from the photoshoot.
Several cuts are even improved by Morales skills. He makes the Gamble & Huff produced Teddy Pendergrass classic Life Is A Song Worth Singing march like Norman Whitfield’s in the control room, adopting a bitches-brew funk stance. And in allowing the string arrangement to soar by removing the somewhat jarring keyboard riff on Dan Hartman’s commercial radio staple Vertigo/Relight My Fire, Morales turns the timeworn 1979 standard into a refined disco masterpiece.
“I put a big emphasis on the rhythm section on the Dan Hartman,” explains Morales. “I took out most of the piano out until the end, because I just thought that the guitar was so cool, keeping its own rhythm; so I consciously tried to make it different but not to the point where the purists would say ‘What the fuck did he do to this?’.”
Teddy Pendergrass also features as the lead singer on the Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes classic Don’t Leave Me This Way, a version that like the David Ruffin mix, also begins with an extended accapella intro.
Says Morales: “The journey for me, as much as it was Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes it was only ever really about Teddy’s voice. What I wanted to do was build it up, so it goes from nowhere to somewhere. So I took Teddy’s lead from the end and I laid it over the instrumental bed of strings and just the melody, because in my head I wanted to make the hairs stand on end just from listening to the build-up, stripping it back until the energy of the song kicks in and it goes into the full blown chorus of ‘Aaaah Baby!’.”
Teddy isn’t the only act to get the remix treatment twice over. Clearly holding mid-seventies lurrve man Barry White in high regard, Morales not only opens the comp with a mix of I’m Gonna Love You Just A Little Bit More Baby but also includes a stunning, killer extended version of Let The Music Play. Cleverly cutting and splicing two talking sections to make them sound like they’re part of a conversation and finding a beautiful, counterpoint melody French horn riff that had been lost in amongst the brass arrangement.
“The big thing for me when I stripped back Let The Music Play was (discovering) the bass,” says Morales. “I just loved the bass because it was such a strong groove and once I cut the strings up it all just fell together.”
Morales had begun work on an entire Barry White remix album (a mix of the epic Never, Never Gonna Give You Up appeared on The M+M Mixes Volume III) until the project fell through after it became clear that many of the original master tapes no longer existed.
Says Morales: “Let The Music Play was always one of my favourite Barry songs because it just has this magical energy, especially when it kicks into the chorus. There was just something about his voice, he wasn’t really a singer, but it was the way he delivered his message - there’s this sincerity and the way he worked with Gene Page on the string and horn arrangement. At first I didn’t really use the strings because I didn’t want them to overpower the arrangement so I stripped it back to the real basic elements of the rhythm section - which was challenging because there was a lot of leakage, and lot of the other instruments bleeding through.” To draw attention away from the leakage he would have to strategically insert the cowbell. “I still stripped it back because whereas most of the records showcased the artist/the singer I wanted to profile the music (and the musicians) so I would add and subtract different instruments to highlight them and make the point.”
Separation issues also dogged the master tapes to Cheryl Lynn’s Got To Be Real, forcing Morales to break his rule regarding overdubs.
“Sometimes working with the older tracks there’s a lot of limitations,” Says Morales. “And whilst Got To Be Real was recorded well when they did it they recorded the band together, meaning that anytime you tried to isolate somebody you would be able to hear somebody else and when I tried to isolate the piano I could hear the guitars, bass and drums coming through so being such a purist from the technical side I was like ‘I’m not going to be able to do this.’ Some songs ultimately didn’t make the cut because of those isolation issues but I really wanted that song so bad that finally I called my friend Claudio Passavanti (of Sunlight Squares) who is a great, great keyboard player and said, ‘Listen I want to do this Cheryl Lynn mix but need to do it exactly the way the original was.’.”
Claudio did a fine job replicating the keyboard riffs, repeating the trick on the mix for Frankie Beverly & Maze’s Joy & Pain. The other challenging thing about Got To Be Real was that halfway through it modulates into another key, meaning he couldn’t move the end to the beginning. “Musically it would have been wrong,” says Morales. “That’s why I came up with the intro where she just starts to wail, I had to strip back a lot of the vocals because there were so many counter lines when she was singing "Whatchu say, Whatchu feel" with herself. So, if you listen to the original mix, all I did was simplify it and tried to make it sonically great. If nothing else, what I wanted was for the records to sound better than they originally did.”
When Morales struggled with a mix, as he did initially with Tom Browne’s Funkin’ For Jamaica, he would get out of his home studio and play it on his car stereo, driving around for a few hours. He would also sometimes play it for a peer whose ears he trusted.
“I played the mixes for Kenny Dope who is a friend and doesn’t live too far from me, I also really trust Danny Krivit. Danny is someone who will tell you want he thinks, he’s not someone who will say ‘Yeah, yeah it sounds great’, no he’d be like ‘Hmmm, its ok but I prefer the original’ and for me that was important because whereas in the past you could bounce ideas off people in the studio in today’s world of being a producer or engineer you live isolated and you’re kind of totally relying on your own imagination.”
In applying his own imagination and expertise into remixing classic records, John Morales is preserving the legacy of the artists & musicians he selects. Reinvigorating the music of pioneers such as Diana Ross, Lenny Williams, Frankie Beverly & more, along with those who are no longer with us, such as David Ruffin, Donna Summer, Teena Marie, Teddy Pendergrass & Barry White. Letting their music play on … keeping the music strong.
John Morales Presents The M+M Mixes Volume IV
is out now on BBE Records
Words by Dan Dodds | Art by Paul Pate
Originally Published on Soul Jones Feb 20th, 2020
