When I first heard this, I thought it was a Flyte Tyme Production. -

Very much a ripoff of the J & L/S.O.S. Band sound.

Great song and it still holds up today!!

Full Story Below:

Carl McIntosh: »Yeah, a club perspective. And there had been some producers at the time, that were from a band called The Time. Their names were Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. So what happened was, this producer Nick Martinelli, had taken this song, and he had told us to program a beat just like Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis – S.O.S. [Band]. So in case you might have had it mixed up, it was S.O.S. first, and then we came after. And we literally copied the beat.«

RBMA: »From S.O.S. Band programming.«

Carl McIntosh: »They used a drummachine called an 808. And the 808 is a Roland drummachine and fairly standard, but it does breathe differently to most machines. It doesn’t count like most machines. It’s got its own type of breathing pulse. And it ticks over differently, the way it goes to the end of the bar and starts again, it’s totally different. It sort of bubbles along rather than clicks like a normal metronome. So we basically programmed the song, and then we put the 808 underneath it. So it came last. It was like a marketing tool if you like. Because I’d never seen anything like that before. Before that we just wrote a song, and we put the song out as it was. Someone would maybe remix it, but remixing would be like, add some tops, add some bongos in them days. Totally different to now. That was probably the first time when we actually saw, or I actually saw, someone change the form of the song, by just changing the beat.«

RBMA: »By applying this beat underneath what you were doing, yeah?«

Carl McIntosh: »A new beat. Needless to say, it caused a lot of friction between Loose Ends and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Who did not like us for doing that.«

The Video - (bad sound quality)

[Edited 5/5/11 9:16am]

This came out first -

I became addicted to this joint ever since Wiz Khalifa used it for "Frankie Da Kid" on his "Kush and Orange Juice" Mixtape

Choon !!

Session Transcript:
Carl McIntosh
Red Bull Music Academy, Melbourne 2006

Full Transcrpt Here:

http://www.redbullmusicac...transcript

Excerpt: Talks about Jam & Lewis

Carl McIntosh: »Well, first of all, I was in a group in the '80s called Loose Ends, as you probably know. And it was quite a treacherous group, we sometimes didn’t work out the road ahead how we were going to do things. It would just happen organically. Like, for instance, I may have written a song in a songwriting situation with my group and when I got to the studio, they’d already decided not to use the instrument that I played. Like, for instance, we wrote a song called Hangin’ On A String. And I was a bass player, and I wrote the song Hangin’ On A String, all the top lines and everything. But my actual instrument when I turned up to the studio, was being replaced by a bass synth. And it wasn’t something that was worked out. It was something that, when I got there, it had already been decided. So from there, I guess you could say that I wasn’t a leader at that point. I joined the band after it was already running and live and worked my way up. And what happened was, from being a bass player that was faced with this situation, I had to then adlib. So while the session went on and they were playing the bass – my part someone else was playing - I would play the piano in the corner and they would hear bits ‘n pieces of the piano I was playing and say: “We need that on the record.” And then when they did that, I would play the guitar in the corner and they would say: “Hey, we need some of that on the record.” And that’s how I became a multi-instrumentalist. I was not going to go down (laughs).«

RBMA: »So, Hangin On A String, this was one of your first big hits, your first big smash?«

Carl McIntosh: »Uh, huh.«

RBMA: »Tell me a little bit about the sound of this song, and what you guys were shooting for, and in addition, what sort of static it might have caused with certain parties?«

Carl McIntosh: »Alright, this song, it was around about 1983. How many people were born then (laughs)? Oh, really? OK! We were in a studio and we came up with this song, and it was very different songwriting to what had been there before.«

RBMA: »Before with your group or…?«

Carl McIntosh: »I mean, in black music, in dance music in general. Songwriting, and the way we wrote the song, the subject matter, as a duet. As a guy and a girl singing on the same record. Normally, it’s a ballad type format but here we have a format that was a club record, even though it’s quite slow. Well, what happened was, the form of the record had been totally different. It had different drums, but the song part of it was the same. We worked with a gentleman called Nick Martinelli, who was a producer from Philadephia. And he was a part of the new generation of what we called – you probably still call them - remixers. But that’s where it all really started, in the early to mid-'80s, where he was a producer second to being a DJ. And he used some of the DJ knowledge to, how shall I put it, drive home the urban type of flavour that he wanted in the songs that he was making: remixing and producing. Before then it was musicians. A producer would be a musician. He was someone who could read music, you know, he’d done songs before, that was all based off of reading music. But here we had a new generation of producers which are DJs.«

RBMA: »So he was coming from a club background?«

Carl McIntosh: »Yeah, a club perspective. And there had been some producers at the time, that were from a band called The Time. Their names were Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. So what happened was, this producer Nick Martinelli, had taken this song, and he had told us to program a beat just like Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis – S.O.S. [Band]. So in case you might have had it mixed up, it was S.O.S. first, and then we came after. And we literally copied the beat.«

RBMA: »From S.O.S. Band programming.«

Carl McIntosh: »They used a drummachine called an 808. And the 808 is a Roland drummachine and fairly standard, but it does breathe differently to most machines. It doesn’t count like most machines. It’s got its own type of breathing pulse. And it ticks over differently, the way it goes to the end of the bar and starts again, it’s totally different. It sort of bubbles along rather than clicks like a normal metronome. So we basically programmed the song, and then we put the 808 underneath it. So it came last. It was like a marketing tool if you like. Because I’d never seen anything like that before. Before that we just wrote a song, and we put the song out as it was. Someone would maybe remix it, but remixing would be like, add some tops, add some bongos in them days. Totally different to now. That was probably the first time when we actually saw, or I actually saw, someone change the form of the song, by just changing the beat.«

RBMA: »By applying this beat underneath what you were doing, yeah?«

Carl McIntosh: »A new beat. Needless to say, it caused a lot of friction between Loose Ends and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Who did not like us for doing that.«

RBMA: »Everybody know who Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis is? It’s OK if you don’t.«

Carl McIntosh: »Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis produced Janet Jackson.«

RBMA: »S.O.S. Band, Cherelle…«

Carl McIntosh: »Old bands.«

Participant: » Alexander O’Neal.«

Carl McIntosh: »Alexander O’Neal, Cherelle - no, you said that. Human League.«

RBMA: »A lot of big hits.«

Participant: »What were the songs of these artists? «

RBMA: »S.O.S. Band - Just Be Good To Me, Saturday Love - Alexander O’Neal and Cherelle, I Didn’t Mean To Turn You On, right?«

Carl McIntosh: »You're The Finest, right. He knows his stuff (laughs).«

RBMA: »But the 808 sound was something that was…?«

Participant: »What Human League song did they do?«

RBMA: »Well, actually we’re going to get that, we’re going to get to that. Slow down (laughter).«

RBMA: »So the 808 was a trademark sound for Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis; these were guys who were in The Time and came up under Prince. And then had a dispute with Prince, over finances, and thus quite The Time, and went off and became big time producers on their own.«

Carl McIntosh: »That’s right.«

RBMA: »So what happened then? What are some of the details of the friction between Jam & Lewis and you guys? Because you guys did it in a way in homage to them, so maybe explain a little bit about that.«

Carl McIntosh: »Right. I mean, we loved what they were doing, but, see, the thing is it was the beginning of a new era. And it was the sample machine, it was the drummachine, it was whatever you had at the time that you can add to your game and there is no copyright for that. Even though you can do the same beat. Right now, you can play the same beat or you can get a drummachine to play it, a beat is a beat. It doesn’t really matter who does it or how it came about. So the fact that we used the same beat, you couldn’t really say that we had stolen anything from them even though it sounded like it because what was the real creativity was what we put on top and I think it’s the same now. So if you use someone’s sample, I think what’s really important is what you do with it. If you just take their beat and you put it out, and you just say something silly and you turn it down – and it’s more about their beat – then fine, that’s them. You’ve really bitten them and you haven’t added nothing to it. But when you bring something to it, when you bring some creativity that has got its own form, I think that that’s different. And I think it was hard for them to see that. Because I think that they felt bad about what we had done. So there was this friction. We was always under their shadow. We were looking up at them, like these are guys that we want to work with. And when we did things like that, it was just us being like: “Please, work with us, recognise us!"«

(...)

»The next tune I’m going to play was recorded with a Fairlight synthesizer. And it was the beginning, I think, of multi-timbre synthesizers. I don’t know if anyone has ever heard of a Fairlight. Anyone ever heard of a Fairlight? Yeah? OK, it was like a… (smiles) Has anyone ever seen a Fairlight? It’s like a great big machine. You almost need a room for it. It’s like a coffin and a screen, an amazing thing. And we had to come up with an intro. I had an idea to have an Indian type intro for the song and the song and the intro got nothing to do with each other but just flavour. There was no way I was going to be up to creating this without doing something special with synthesizers. I didn’t operate the Fairlight because at the time I was about, I think, 19 or 20 and I didn’t know nothing about synthesizers like that, so we had two programmers come in and we spent like maybe a week programming the intro.«

RBMA: »A week?«

Carl McIntosh: »Yeah, a week.«

RBMA: »And how long was the intro?«

Carl McIntosh: »About five seconds (laughs).«

RBMA: »OK.«

Carl McIntosh: »And we spend a day doing the song (laughs). You want to play this here?«

RBMA: »Alright, so this is Stay A Little While Child by Loose Ends.«

Carl McIntosh: »Yeah.«

(music: Loose Ends - Stay A Little While Child / applause)

RBMA: »You got a question on this side of the room?«

Participant: »Somebody sampled that “whoop”.«

(laughter)

»Do you know who sampled that?«

Carl McIntosh: »Yeah.«

Participant: »Who was it? I can’t remember.«

Carl McIntosh: »Well, I know a few people sampled it.«

Participant: »Did you guys get paid for it?«

Carl McIntosh: »Yeah.«

Participant: »High five.«

Carl McIntosh: »I got paid for the Mariah [Carey] [sample]. I don’t know about anybody else. I know Mariah sampled it recently.«

Participant: »No, no, not recently. I’m talking about an old song.«

Carl McIntosh: »OK, no, maybe I didn’t (laughs). But that’s cool, I mean, because that brings a new life to it.«

RBMA: »Yeah, let’s talk a little bit about not only this track and Hangin' On A String but some of the stuff that been sampled. What’s your attitude about that?«

Carl McIntosh: »I think it’s so cool to be sampled. You know what’s funny about this sample thing is that lawyers and publishing companies they take the whole thing and make it business and that’s a shame, really. Because I think it is business but it’s more about music. It’s more about music than they think because you are doing two things. You’re making a new song and you’re bringing life to an old song. And sometimes with the business it gets in the way. And it kind of puts up a gate or like a wall between the old and the new and stops it from being a fun thing. And when lawyers start talking about how many times you have used a sample and we need a certain percentage of your song and they start working out deals and, like the gentleman said - “Did you get paid?” - I mean, there must be about 20, at least 20 times when that song has been sampled and I didn’t get paid. And someone in the club probably heard it and danced to it and didn’t know it was me. But when I do my thing now suddenly they recognise it, which is where I gain then for that. I gain much more mileage, I think, from a sampled record. When my music’s being sampled then, if I had my lawyer get up and say: “Look, we aren’t going to let you use that because we really want to get paid,” or: “We want to get paid a certain amount.” So I have this thing where I just clear everything. My publisher said: “Please don’t call me again,” and asked me if I wanted something to be cleared: “Just go ahead and use it.” I mean, there would be a percentage that they will work out. But I try not to stop people.«

RBMA: »You don’t want it to be prohibitive?«

Carl McIntosh: » Yeah, I wanted to see which one is going to be the good one. If it’s not good, I think, people won’t listen to it more than one or two times. If it’s good, then people are going to hear it. And I think if it’s good and it's heard a lot and people actually recognise it, the new form, well, then that’s the time when I think the lawyer should step forward and say: “Hello, this is me now, this is Loose Ends, we have to talk about this because you’ve started to make some money out of this.” But before that it seems to me like it’s a lot of business and sometimes for me it can go the wrong way.«

RBMA: »Why do you think you have that sort of more progressive attitude than some other musicians have? Is it because you feel like you part of that generation to a degree?«

Carl McIntosh: »I think so, yeah. I could see it coming because the hip hop generation it very much changed music and I think I saw that coming. I could see before hip hop things were getting a little bit stale. I think Loose Ends were part of the ending of organic soul. I think Soul II Soul came and kept it. And I think after that I can count, on maybe one hand, artists that got up and done real music. And we love them, you know: D’Angelo, Erykah Badu and the whole new classic soul thing. And gospel because gospel is beginning to take some roots from new classic soul and I can see where that maybe can be a form in itself. But really and truly since those times I have only really seen maybe one or two people get up and do something organically new. I mean, I think people are fighting now to put music in the song. I hear the Neptunes and I can even hear them fighting to put music in, like they want to put music in but they know the beat is king and they just have to stick with that beat. And maybe at the end of every four bars I hear a piece of music come in and then it’s out again. Before you even get a chance to hear it, like: “What was that?” And I hear Snoop doing that as well and it’s great because they are definitely giving you that flavour. But it’s not in the same context, it’s not a full backdrop. It’s just a little piece.«

[Edited 5/5/11 9:10am]

[Edited 5/5/11 9:12am]

[Edited 5/5/11 9:13am]

Shafty said:

Choon !!

They took the S.O.S. sound and made it work with this one. It put them on the map.

Timmy84 said:

They took the S.O.S. sound and made it work with this one. It put them on the map.

I think it worked out better. If J&L produced it, people would have blasted it, sayin they are a one trick pony and they are just copying themselves to get a hit.

Because Loose Ends copied the sound, it seemed ok IMO. It's the best J&L song they never produced, but recieved some of the credit.

Bulldog said:

Timmy84 said:

They took the S.O.S. sound and made it work with this one. It put them on the map.

I think it worked out better. If J&L produced it, people would have blasted it, sayin they are a one trick pony and they are just copying themselves to get a hit.

Because Loose Ends copied the sound, it seemed ok IMO. It's the best J&L song they never produced, but recieved some of the credit.

True.

I prefer "Don't Be A Fool, "Stay A Little While", "Rescue Me" and "You Can't Stop The Rain" to this song.

NO wonder why I like the song so much

I didn't know that Jam and Lewis didn't produce this song. I got a new appreciation for Loose Ends, considering I didn't know much about them. Props to Bulldog for posting the video and the article.

bashraka said:

I didn't know that Jam and Lewis didn't produce this song. I got a new appreciation for Loose Ends, considering I didn't know much about them. Props to Bulldog for posting the video and the article.

Yeah Eugene McIntosh (the dreadhead in the group) produced it.

Wow, interesting!