First of all, apologies for this very long write up. I didn’t know the back story to this song. I just assumed that it was a consummate musical performer being ahead of his game. Then I heard it again and started reading about it.

Across our lifetime, few records can truly be called ahead of their time. This particular one was way ahead of its time. And there was a lot of luck involved.

In 1982, Herbie’s career prospects were not looking good. His foray into disco/pop was not commercially successful — The album ‘Lite Me Up’, produced by Heatwave’s Rod Temperton (from Cleethorpes), responsible for writing some of Michael Jackson’s biggest hits like ‘Thriller’ and ‘Off The Wall’ had limped along, with only ‘Gettin’ To The Good Part’ being the song off the album to get frequent airplay.

In fact, Herbie had not had a hit since his classic 1973 album, Headhunters, which had spawned standards like “Chameleon” and “Watermelon Man.” With only one record left in his deal with Columbia, he was heavily in debt to the label. He was a leading jazz man in a very changing world, a former pioneer who was stumbling and fading.

Then kismet happened and he was helped - and in turn, propelled the underground into the mainstream, in particular with one performance at the 1984 Grammys, which to all intents and purpose, was a wall to wall ‘Thriller’ promo event.

From elsewhere, written far less clunkier than me:

Luckily, he had a new kid managing him. Tony Meilandt, 25, had successfully promoted student concerts while at UC Berkeley, had a passion for music, and a nose for what was new and exciting. While sniffing around the avant-garde, ‘no-wave’ scene that was happening in downtown New York, he was introduced to a band called Material, whose core included bassist Bill Laswell and Michael Beinhorn on synthesizer. Along with sound engineer Martin Bisi, this trio also constituted a production team, who at the time were making a lot of underground records for the French-owned label Celluloid.

“Tony was like, ‘This is kinda like Herbie’s last shot, would you be interested?’” recalls Beinhorn, of this chance opportunity to work with a faded legend.

“So he went back to L.A.,” says Laswell, picking up the story, “met with Herbie, and a very short time after that they came to New York, and that’s when the Roxy was blazing.” The converted roller disco at 515 W. 18th Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea district was where the Bronx came downtown, throwing the first hip-hop parties outside the borough.

“He had Herbie in the VIP room, which had these glass windows so you could watch whoever’s DJing,” Laswell continues. “And that night it was Bambaataa, D.ST, Jazzy Jay, Afrika Islam, Red Alert — that was the line-up — and I said, ‘Well, this is what’s happenin’ now.’ Herbie was like, ‘It looks like there’s a riot goin’ on.’ He didn’t get it.”

Regardless, Meilandt convinced Herbie to work with Laswell and Material, making a deal for them to deliver two tracks on spec. Before his death in 2004, Meilandt told me, “It did not take a whole lot of convincing because Herbie was very much ready to do something else.”

Laswell wanted to use scratching as an element, so he called his friend Afrika Bambaataa and asked, “‘Who’s the guy I should use for the turntable?’ And Bam said, ‘Whiz Kid.’”

Whiz Kid & MC Globe, of Soul Sonic Force, had a popular record at the time, “Play That Beat Mr. DJ,” (Tommy Boy, 1983), which was one of the first records with scratching. “So I called Whiz Kid and he had just joined the army or some shit like that — he wasn’t available — so he told me to call his protégé, DJ Cheese,” recalls Laswell. Laswell wasn’t sure he wanted to bring a guy named Cheese to L.A., so he decided to use someone he already knew; D.ST.

D.ST. showed up at BC studio one night and there was a pile of records sitting on the floor, including a 12-inch called “Change The Beat” by Fab Five Freddy, which had been recorded by Material in that very same studio.

At the very end of the record, there is a snippet of a guy saying, “Ahhh! This stuff is really fresh” through a vocoder. While one would naturally assume it was Freddy, who had been rapping all over the record in both English and French, according to Laswell, it was really the voice of one of his associates — a guy by the name of Roger Trilling, who happened to be in the studio during that session.

“I took the ‘Change The Beat’ record and I took “fresh”, and I did that rhythm — if you see the end of Wild Style, that’s what I was doing, though I changed it a little — I did my ‘Good Times’ scratch with fresh,” says D, referring to the Chic hit “Good Times,” whose groove was also used as the basis for rap’s first-ever hit, “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979.

“Everybody was like, ‘Yo! That’s it,’” recalls D, who recorded his contribution in just one take. Because there was little else on the track besides the rhythm, D, a former drummer, had plenty of room to let loose and show off his skills.“

That’s the first record with a musical style of scratching,” he says. “That’s the first time a turntable was used as a soloist instrument in an ensemble, you know what I’m sayin’?” Due to his choice of scratching that one word, “fresh” (into that ‘zigga-zigga’ noise), “Change The Beat” also went on to become one of the most sampled songs in history.

Laswell and Beinhorn went to L.A. to deliver the track to Herbie at his home at 1260 North Wetherly Drive, just off Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood — a residence formerly owned by the renowned composer Igor Stravinsky.

When they played it for him, in the converted guesthouse-turned-studio behind the main house, Beinhorn says, “He didn’t know what the fuck was going on.” He adds, “So no one has a melody, right, so what happens is me, Bill, and Herbie are standing outside of Herbie’s studio for about 15 minutes, humming, and we basically composed the melody that way.”

Herbie actually used three different synthesizers for his parts, but he had to overdub each one of them — again because there was no midi on any of them. Then he wanted to add some scat phrasing through a vocoder, and Laswell and Beinhorn suggested some phrases culled directly from the lyrics to the 1982 monster hit by Afrika Bambaataa & The Soulsonic Force, “Planet Rock,” such as “Rock it, don’t stop it.” The song finally had a melodic hook and title.

As soon as the song was mixed, they left for the airport with a reference copy on cassette. “We had some time to kill,” Laswell recalls, “So I said let’s stop at this speaker store. And we went inside and wanted to hear some different speakers. The guy in the store was going to play some bullshit rock stuff, so I said, ‘Here, play this. I want to hear how this sounds.’ And it was ‘Rockit.’”

Laswell cranked up the volume. “When we played it,” he says, “there were all these kids from the neighborhood, and they gathered around us, and they’re like, ‘What the fuck is this?!’ I looked at D.ST., and I was like, ‘That’s a hit record.’”

I’m not going to link the award-winning video here, as I feel that it detracts from the musicality of the song, but I’ll link the audio to the song, so that you can remind yourself of the complexity of the track (back then).

Below the audio track is a clip from the 1984 Grammys, where Herbie won his first award for the Best R&B Instrumental Performance. This show was watched by nearly 44 Million people (their biggest audience ever).

Kids all across America watching body-popping and a DJ scratching, in a 'serious' music broadcast must have been truly mind blowing.

https://archive.ph/xfFTZ