Keith LeBlanc on On-U Sound

 

When I spoke to drummer and producer Keith LeBlanc in January 2023, the year before his death, he was looking for a publisher for his autobiography, which he promised would tell some of the never-before-heard inside stories of the early days of hip-hop in New York.

My interview with Keith didn’t focus on his work for scene-defining hip-hop labels Sugar Hill and Tommy Boy, or on the pioneering track he made that used vocal samples instead of lyrics to drive the narrative, ‘No Sell Out’, which featured the voice of Malcolm X. As my book is about electronic music in the UK, we talked about his collaborations with Adrian Sherwood, the On-U Sound Records crew, Mark Stewart and the Maffia and the mighty Tackhead – explaining what made their sound so good, and why, after they secured a major record deal, it went wrong.

You, [guitarist] Skip [McDonald] and [bassist] Doug [Wimbish] had a great career in the US – you provided the rhythms for important New York labels like Sugar Hill and Tommy Boy Records, you were getting great session work. Why did you decide to come to London to work with Adrian Sherwood?

That's a good question. Well, let's see. The first time I met Adrian, I threw him out of the studio. Because he was trying to ask me questions and I was in the middle of a job, and I didn't know who he was. And I was pretty full of myself back then. I said, “Get this motherfucker out of here!”

The next time he came to the US and was at the same studio, I guess Mark Stewart had heard Malcolm X ‘No Sell Out’ and he wanted Adrian to get in touch with me because he really wanted to work with me. But I didn't know this at the time. And so the second trip Adrian made over, because he had done a few things with Tommy Boy Records, we were both in this studio called Unique Recordings.

So I walked by the tape editing room and there's Adrian sat at this half-inch machine and everyone’s crowded around, every engineer in the place was there. And so I made my way through all the engineers and I looked, and all the needles were just pinned in the red but the sound that was coming out was unbelievably good. And that was something I had been trying to do for a couple years.

So I went and had breakfast with them and he looked at me and said, “Oh, I see you’re losing your hair, you should shave it off.” And we hit it off right away. And so I went over to England to work with them and we did like three or four tracks. I loved what he was doing with the mixing desk. I'd never seen anybody do that.

So what was he like when he was mixing?

He was like a person playing an instrument, and he was using frequencies that no one would even touch here in the US – shit felt like it was coming out of the floor, coming out of the ceiling. And what really caught my ear was that he made chords with the bass drums. And the dub shit that he was doing was off the chain. The man could dance through frequencies like most people eat soup, you know?

So I said to him, you know, this is great, but we need more - let me get my two pals in. So I think Doug came over with me the next time but not Skip. We ended up doing some Mark Stewart gigs which was a fucking shock really, because we've worked with singers, but never a screamer before, and it was way out of our realm. But you know, we liked Adrian.

So the third trip we made over there we brought Skip and we kind of used the studio as an experiment, as its own instrument. It was really Mark Stewart's fault because with ‘No Sell Out’, Mark was the one that picked that out, so it was really that record that kind of spawned the whole thing. I loved Adrian because he was always trying to do something that no one had done before. And that's what we were into, because we had been producing for years but with handcuffs on, so this was the first time that we could go in and just do anything we wanted to. That’s the reason we ended up working with Adrian - every day we were breaking ground. 

I mean we used to take turns locking someone in the studio overnight to see what they came up - that's no lie. And the whole independent record industry vibe of the UK at the time was refreshing  because in the United States the independent industry was all gangster. It was totally different. So that's how we ended up working with him - our motivation wasn't money really.

We had done a bunch of tracks and all the stuff that we thought was real commercial we called it Fats Comet and it didn't sell at all, and all the shit that we thought was nowhere near commercial we named Tackhead, and that's what people seem to like. But it was just that Adrian was open to experimentation, and a very different take on recording. And I think that's why we all clicked. And of course Mark Stewart is out there like Pluto, so add that to the mix.

It was great times, because when we left Sugar Hill, drum machines and samplers had just started coming out. So when we were in England, there was a new piece of gear coming out every week. So we would get it and just try it out. So basically, we lived and worked through that period where all the digital equipment was in its infancy. So I had a thick book with the opening instructions to almost every machine on the planet, because every time I went to the UK to do a job for someone like ABC , they always wanted me to use their shit.

It was a great time, that period. But the stuff I can do now easily was really difficult then. I mean, I remember Future Sound of London to visit me at my studio, and they wanted to use some samples. And I guess their favourite record that I had done was Major Malfunction [album in 1986] And that was all done with an AMS digital delay and Adrian was really quick on the thing. You couldn't save anything so we would capture stuff and literally either trigger it or punch it in with a little button. And we all took turns with the buttons and stuff. And of course I had a DMX [Oberheim drum machine] that I could trigger it off of, but the AMS, the quality was incredible. And nobody knew how we were doing those records but that's how we were doing them really.

There's still guys trying to figure out how we got the drum sounds and basically I had reels of drum sounds and we would stack them and we'd have like four bass drums and make them into one. I’d programme a beat and then we'd  put the sound in the AMS delay and trigger it from the DMX and I was doing shit like opening up the DMX and tuning it while we were recording.

I played drums, so the only thing that really interested me with a DMX was doing stuff a drummer could never do. Most people were trying to get a drum track out of it, I was trying to stretch it out of shape, make it do shit like getting a tom-tom to sound like a huge jackhammer drill. We certainly weren’t using the equipment the way people intended it to be used, let’s put it that way. We were technological anarchists. It was just a no-holds-barred time when we were just experimenting with everything, there were no rules really at that point. And we just used what was available.

And I remember when Future Sound of London came over [in the 1990s] and asked me how I did Major Malfunction, they were disappointed because they expected me to tell them I had all this incredible gear. And really, that record was done with tape manipulation. Really, the whole thing. I mean, Adrian would take a drum track that I had and he would record it on six tracks of a multitrack. And then he'd be able to EQ three different stereo pairs, and he would dub that to a half-inch [tape]. And then I would do shit like turn the tape over, run it back, and then have him run it again and take it in and out of record and time and shit like that, and then I would edit it all together. And so it was all tape manipulation, and when I told them that, they were so disappointed. Because if you listen to the album, it's like, “How the fuck did they do that?”

There were a lot of voice samples on ‘Major Malfunction’, from TV and radio and stuff like that. Like the Malcolm X ‘No Sell Out’ track - you always used a lot of spoken-word samples as lead vocals on tracks.

The main connection with me and Adrian was the vocal samples, no one else was doing that. Adrian was doing that and I was doing that. So we were like kindred spirits from opposite sides of the ocean.

How were you adding the voices to the tracks back then? You were flying them in live?

Well, when I did Malcolm X ‘No Sell Out’, I didn't have access to a sampler. I didn't even know they existed at that point. I think the Fairlight had just come out. But I didn't even know it existed. So I basically flew the stuff in off the tape - you know, like a DJ. But by the time I went to England, the Fairlight and the Synclavier had come out. And [Mute Records founder] Daniel Miller had a Synclavier and we used that. But the thing was huge, and it was such a beast to programme.

How did Tackhead work live?

That was interesting, because at that time I had a loft in New York City, and Tackhead was getting a lot of press. And Vernnon Reid from Living Color came over and he was a little pissed off. We were getting all this press and everything, and he goes, “Well, can Tackhead even do a fucking gig?” And me and Doug looked at each other and said, “That's a good question.”

So then we set about trying to figure out how to recreate this shit on stage. And in the beginning, we had one sampling keyboard. And then after that, I got some violin sensors and I figured out a way to trigger the sampler with them. And then the [Akai] S900 [sampler] came out and that changed the whole game, that was like a mini Fairlight. And it had trigger ins on the back of it. So we used that.

My whole drum set was wired with sensors, and I was triggering samples live. Doug got himself a [foot-controlled] MIDI step pedal and he had it hooked up to an S900 sampler and Skip had a keyboard, so basically we would play our instruments and trigger shit live at the same time. I’d have a percussion loop on the DMX so the tempo would be spot-on and Adrian could set the delay speeds and dub it live.

We would do solos and all kinds of shit, you know, but we didn't have a singer, it was all samples - later we found out that what the punters were really into was all the mad shit that happened - they put up with the solos and all that other bullshit just for that really mad shit.

It was groundbreaking. I mean, every night you know, you'd have Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Living Color, Swans, all these bands there taking notes. And our manager said, “You better get a singer because all these people are stealing your shit!” So we got a singer and that kind of ended the band because when we had a singer, we had to try and do songs.

Which makes it a different band, doesn't it?

Yeah. I mean, when we first got [singer] Bernard Fowler in, we had already recorded an album so we just squeezed him in on the tracks. And that one [Friendly as a Hand Grenade, released in 1989] flew pretty good, you know, because it didn't change the whole thing. But then when we got the big budget and everything, we went and did exactly what we weren't supposed to do on the next album [Strange Things, 1990].

Trevor Horn gave me a lot of advice when I worked with him. I actually wanted to get Trevor Horn to produce a little bit of Tackhead, but Adrian wouldn't have it. But Trevor told me, he said, “Keith, bands always make the mistake when they get the big budget, they change everything.” He said, “Don't change a fucking thing. Just keep doing what you're doing, that you've had success with.” So when we got the big budget - oh, everybody's a songwriter now. We used to make those albums for you know, like, a thousand quid and bang them out. And we shouldn't have changed anything. But we did. And that’s where it all went wrong with Tackhead.

Interview by Matthew Collin for ‘Dream Machines’, January 11, 2023.

Photo: On-U Sound Facebook page.