Arthur Baker knows everyone. If he hasn’t produced them he’s remixed them, or written songs with them, or got drunk with them, or hoovered blow with them.
He was the beat scientist behind Afrika Bambaataa’s hip-hop foundation text Planet Rock. He remixed Springsteen for the clubs. He co-produced the Artists United Against Apartheid Sun City album.
He chaperoned Bob Dylan through his most fallow creative period, in the mid-1980s.
Throughout it all he exhibited uncanny hitmaker instincts, the ability to turn musical motifs into money.
“I grew up listening to Philly and Motown,” he says from Miami. “You’d lead with the hook. You want to get to the punchline before people get turned off.”
Blame it on artistic ADD. The early 1980s were all about collaging, sampling, pop art as postmodernism. The two main white rap entrepreneurs came at it from different angles: Rick Rubin was a long-haired hardcore kid; Baker loved R&B, disco and funk.
New York at the time was a perfect storm of postpunk and seminal rap: The Clash, Talking Heads, Bambaataa, Run-DMC – a cultural boom time recounted in detail in Baker’s new autobiography, Looking for the Perfect Beat.
“Planet Rock felt like we had done what Talking Heads were trying to do,” he says. “That’s the vibe I got when we had the beat and the bassline, no vocals, some of the keyboards. Call it Afrofuturist – although that word didn’t exist back then.
“In the beginning people were playing the instrumental; the rap caught on after the fact. It was a dance record; they were playing it in all the clubs – Paradise Garage and the Fun House and Danceteria.”
Back then there were no debates about cultural appropriation: Planet Rock wilfully spliced breakbeats with Kraftwerk interpolations.
“The one thing I could say about Bambaataa is he was colourblind. As far as music went, he didn’t go, like, ‘Is that a white group?’ ‘Is that a black group?’ He just thought it was a funky group. There’s no colour to funk.
“When Nile Rodgers produced Bowie, a lot of the musicians – Carlos Alomar, Tony Thompson – were people of colour. Was Fame or Young Americans a white record or a black record? It was a record, you know. Unless you’re making a record with the Ku Klux Klan band – that’s a white record.
“Musicians are usually the least racist people you’ll ever meet, because they’re just about the music.”
Baker’s book serves as a testimonial to a period when New York was a perfect musical ecosystem dependent on the holy trinity of studios, clubs and record shops.
He and his crew blew the woofers on Shirley Bechor’s sound system at the Rock and Soul record store when they road-tested the Planet Rock master. Jellybean Benitez even had a reel-to-reel at his club.
And there was significant transatlantic traffic. Baker not only produced New Order’s Confusion, he also starred in the video – which encapsulates the period so perfectly it should be preserved in the Smithsonian.
“It’s the only thing that was filmed in that way, at that time, in a club like that. I’m going through Times Square. It really captures New York like not much else did. It’s crazy that they talked me into doing it. Actually, it was all Tony Wilson – to give him his props, he convinced me.”
Two years later Baker was hired to remix the flagship singles from Bruce Springsteen’s album Born in the USA: Dancing in the Dark, Cover Me and the title track. It was controversial enough. Springsteen was the quintessential blue-collar heartland rocker. The remixes were radical dancefloor makeovers.
“For me the whole concept of doing a remix is to reinterpret it the way I hear it and then let the artist come in and make feedback,” Baker says. “Remixes are all about the groove, and how much vocal you use, and whose vocal you use on it.
“With Bruce, he came in on the first one and it was fine, because I had my crew there. He was pretty chilled out, had a few beers and then left. The thing is, [the remixes] wouldn’t have come out if he didn’t like them.”
Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, “told me that the Dancing in the Dark mix helped it break in the UK. They ended up using it as the single at one point.”
Baker’s work rate throughout this era was insane, largely fuelled by cocaine, alcohol and workaholism. In 1985 he and Springsteen’s lieutenant Steve Van Zandt produced the Sun City single and album, featuring a huge cast of rock and hip-hop musicians. It was a revolutionary statement, both politically and sonically. Even today the track sounds bracingly militant, Public Enemy before the fact.
“Probably too ... Well, no, I wouldn’t say it was too militant, but it was sort of at the peak of my partaking in drugs ... My chapter on it and Steven’s chapter” – from Van Zandt’s memoir, Unrequited Infatuations – “are way different, because he would go home at nine o’clock and I’d be there all night.
“It was definitely a wall of sound, trying to fit in all the musicians and all the vocalists and making it danceable, and rockable. To me it’s the most important record I made. I’d have people coming in all night: I turn around and I’m in the studio with Miles Davis and Peter Gabriel and George Clinton and Eddie Kendrick and David Ruffin.”
It was also crucial in inspiring the departure of Bono and U2 from European postpunk into widescreen Americana.
“I’m not saying [Bono] disliked blues, but it wasn’t on his radar at all. And then he got Peter Wolf and Keith Richards giving him a f**king crash course. He called me up and said, ‘Arthur, can you get me a guitar? I want to write a song.’ And he wrote Silver and Gold, and the thing grew at that point.
“We had never planned an album, but there was so much great information being laid down that we said, ‘Well, we got to.’ When I think about how short of a time we actually had making it, and how hard we worked, I don’t think we ever got a chance to appreciate it. Before you know it, it was over. And then obviously Mandela got out, and it was, like, the job was done.”
That same year Baker got the call to produce Bob Dylan’s Empire Burlesque album. He wasn’t surprised to learn that the singer’s recording process was as idiosyncratic as everything else about him.
“He was always rewriting. I’m not going to say every song, but a lot of the songs he would be rewriting as he would record. He’d sit down and scratch it out and rewrite it. I was always trying to get one of those pieces of paper. Dylan would just gather everything up at the end of the session. Man, I got nothing from those sessions!”
The album’s closer, Dark Eyes, written after Baker suggested that the record needed an old-fashioned acoustic track, is widely regarded as Dylan’s greatest song from a period of lean. Until he read Chronicles, Dylan’s memoir, the producer had no clue that he’d effectively commissioned a new song from his boss.
“Dylan had cassettes full of f**king demos, so I thought he just went back to the hotel and listened to a few things and came back with that. When Chronicles came out I was, like, ‘Holy shit. Dylan is saying I was right.’ I wonder how many times he said someone is right on in print.
“That is one moment I will never forget, when he played that song, where we were, the little booth.
“Empire Burlesque: there’s some really good songs. There were some duds, there were some bad overdubs, 1980s shit. Looking back, I would have done it differently, but, you know, at least we got Dark Eyes out of it. That song’s unbelievable.”
Baker has since produced and worked with artists of the calibre of Tina Turner, Mick Jagger, Diana Ross, Al Green and Quincy Jones. Is there a strategy for dealing with megastars’ egos and insecurities?
“I’m a bad producer, dude. You know, I’m more of an artist. The best stuff I do is when I collaborate with the artists, like when I did records with New Order I joined the band.
“I love making music, I love writing songs, I love doing remixes, but the idea of going in with a band, having to be their shrink, doesn’t appeal to me. I’m like a bull in a china shop, you know. I’m a tourist; I’m not Rick Rubin. I’m not that guy who has all his f**king theories and shit. I could have used someone like that to produce me, and then I probably would have a lot more hits.”
Looking for the Perfect Beat: Remixing & Reshaping Hip-Hop, Rock & Rhythms, by Arthur Baker, is published by Faber & Faber
