Session Transcript:
Dennis Coffey
Red Bull Music Academy, Barcelona 2008

The video stream for this lecture can be watched here.

Dennis Coffey’s is the guitar behind hundreds of records that don’t even bear his name. He was the man Norman Whitfield recruited to bring Motown tripping and screaming into the psychedelic era, injecting some wah-wah and other effects into The Temptations classics. But he had to step outside Hitsville to get his name up front, scoring a national hit with Scorpio, an instrumental that funkafied the wall of sound. The redoubtable guitarist went onto make waves in disco, and is still playing weekly back home in Detroit. He talks to us about the good times, the hard times, the riots and the records.

RBMA: »Our guest this afternoon has made music you’re all familiar with in one capacity or another, whether you realise it or not. He’s a session player on countless recordings and was a key player on a little record label called Motown back in the day. He also has done a number of solo recordings, which you may have heard sampled by some of your favourite hip hop artists and he’s done numerous productions that were popular in certain clubs during the disco era. So please, lets give a warm welcome for Dennis Coffey.«

(applause)

Dennis Coffey: »How you doing? Nice crowd here.«

RBMA: »So before we get going, we’ve heard a bit of the background about the stuff you’ve done recently, but I just want to give a very quick introduction to something you did back in the day, which goes a little something like this.«

(music: Dennis Coffey – Getting It On / applause)

»So that’s one of your solo recordings, but before you were a soloist you were doing session work. You actually started at quite a young age, is that correct?«

Dennis Coffey: »Yes, also Chuck D was here last week and he sampled that Getting It On record you just heard, without my knowledge, of course (laughter). So I’m sitting in the studio, saying: “Let me hear what’s going on.” I hear this track and say: “I don’t remember getting paid for this session.” I talked to him at the R&B Foundation gala in Philadelphia about four weeks ago, because that was the first time I had a chance to talk to him, and he said: “We didn’t get paid either. I thought you might sue the company and get us some money too.” So that’s the story for the first time I remember myself being sampled.«

RBMA: »Your roots obviously pre-date that. If we can go back, tell us how you started playing guitar. You’re from Detroit.«

Dennis Coffey: »From Detroit, and I had a couple of cousins in the upper peninsula of Michigan, and they showed me some chords on the guitar. I was fascinated with the guitar and my mum told me I could name every song on the radio when I was three. Somehow I had a real affinity with music and I started practising, practised eight hours a day when I wasn’t going to school in the summer. I ended up contracting and playing on my first session when I was 15, got some friends from high school and had to get one guy who could drive, because we weren’t old enough to drive to the session (laughs). It was great, I heard myself on the radio when I was 15, took a couple of solos and I was hooked from then on, so I just kept practising. I still consider myself a student of music, it’s still out there and every day I try to do something different. I still love it.«

RBMA: »So you started in the ‘50s when you were a teenager, the birth of the rock ‘n’ roll era.«

Dennis Coffey: »I was in the middle of it, so as things were evolving, the crowd I hung around with in Detroit, we were playng teen clubs. We were 16, 17-years old and we were getting paid and doing gigs already.«

RBMA: »Describe that scene, because before you were old enough to get into bars and start doing gigs, you left to join the military, is that correct?«

Dennis Coffey: »I wasn’t old enough to go from the teen clubs to the bars, so I volunteered for the draft, spent a couple of years in the paratroopers jumping out of airplanes, which seemed like a good idea a the time, but I’m not so sure it was. I was doing gigs at night, and I almost got court martialed, because they were all lined up for doing manoeuvres one day and I pulled up in a cab with my guitar. So I had to join another unit where I could play at night while still being in the service. So I recorded with Maurice Williams down in South Carolina while I was still in the service.«

RBMA: »So once you got out of the service you went back to Detroit to the clubs. Set the scene for us, what was the environment like? Detroit being the city where the motor industry is based, a working class blue collar city, where people would cut loose after working in the plants all day.«

Dennis Coffey: »Detroit still is a music town. I still play one night a month at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, which is a jazz club which has been in existence for 74 years. We never rehearse, we never plan, I count off a couple of chords and we run with it. Which means every time we play stuff it’s different, which is a good thing for me. But when I got out of the service, I was out two weeks, auditioned for a band gig, got the gig, and I was working six nights a week from that point on. Detroit at that time had a lot of bars, a lot of music and a lot of people supporting the music. Right now, the city is going through some economic woes but you can still hear live music all over the city. It’s always been a great place to learn how to play, get your chops together and the people like it. You can still go out in Detroit and hear live music all the time.«

RBMA: »And still a lot of young musicians, too, coming up.«

Dennis Coffey: »Absolutely, I have some young cats in my band; they’re in their twenties and thirties, and we have fun.«

RBMA: »So who were some of the musicians you would see around in the ‘60s, performing in bars?«

Dennis Coffey: »There was one guy who performed with me in the Funk Brothers was Bob Babbitt, the bass player, and he and I used to do all the early ‘60s stuff, the Motown stuff. We played in clubs together too. There were different musicians, Bob Seger came up through the ranks playing clubs at a young age, plus you had the whole soul thing going on there too.«

RBMA: »Before we jump ahead too much, explain the whole soul scene in Detroit at the time. On one of your early sessions you met someone who had a little something to do with Motown. So just explain what that whole scene was like.«

Dennis Coffey: »Well, I was 16 and had this partner who was 16, and we were doing rockabilly, he wrote the Elvis-type song called Crazy Little Satellite, and we did a demo at Fortune Records. Somehow, Jackie Wilson’s manager Nat Tarnopol heard that demo, so I found myself in the studio at 16, trying to be an artist with my partner. Berry Gordy was the arranger, this was even before Motown. We cut the song, it didn’t come out and after six months we got impatient and demanded our contract back. I don’t know what happened to that record.«

RBMA: »But in the wake of Motown starting, Berry Gordy being its founder, I guess in addition to Motown doing its thing there were a lot of labels and studios popping up in Detroit trying to ride that wave of popularity.«

Dennis Coffey: »There were studios popping up on every corner, in the back of record shops, all over the place; we were doing sessions one after another, getting paid cash. Life was good, we were working all the time just making records.«

RBMA: »What was your ambition at that point? Did you want to be a performer on your own, a soloist, or in a group, or were you happy just going night to night and seeing what was coming to you?«

Dennis Coffey: »I always liked to practice and write songs, and one night I woke up and thought, ‘People are actually paying me to play music’. Because I used to play for free before. The lights went on and I thought, ‘This is great, I actually get paid for this’. I never got up one day and thought I want to make a living as a musician, because I just never thought it would happen. So as it started happening I just got busier and busier. In Detroit a recording session is usually three hours, and we had to walk in at Motown or Golden World or wherever and put up some sheet music. You had to play that song in that hour, read the chart, come up with some ideas and make it a hit. There were three hours a session, I was doing 18 sessions a week, so figure it out – I was involved in about 50 songs a week for a long period of time. I could look on the Billboard charts and for one year solid I was on at least 10 songs in the top 100 and at least three in the top 10, for one year straight. We were very busy.«

RBMA: »Explain what Golden World was.«

Dennis Coffey: »That was a studio on Davidson started by Ed Wingate. We were never quite sure where he got the money, but I think he had a numbers business under the table. Whenever he had distribution problems he would send out a couple of his guys and they always got paid. He seemed to have a lot of money. That was the Golden World era, we’d record there all the time with JJ Barnes and Edwin Starr and all the different acts there, all soul singers.«

RBMA: »And that was before you got down with Motown that you were doing stuff with Golden World?«

Dennis Coffey: »Golden World and a lot of different labels. We did a thing with The Parliaments, with George Clinton on I Wanna Testify, that kind of stuff, Open The Door To Your Heart with Darrell Banks, Betty Lavette, all kinds of things were happening even before Golden World and Motown, there were always different sessions going on.«

RBMA: »These were all ’60s soul records made in Detroit with a Motown-type of feel. Later on, you found a lot of these obscure records had found a whole new audience with the Northern Soul scene.«

Dennis Coffey: »The Northern Soul scene; I put out a book over in Europe called Guitars, Bars And Motown Superstars, I went over there for nine days. There were people coming up to me who knew more details about the records I’d done than I did. They were coming up to me with mint copies of records I’d done that I didn’t even had copies of. They were avid collectors, they knew their stuff and they loved their music.«

RBMA: »Does everyone know what Northern Soul is? Not everybody. Northern Soul is basically records that sound like Motown records, made at the same time, but that weren’t commercial successes, so they faded into obscurity. But in the early ‘70s in the North of England soul collectors and DJs found these records and championed them at all-nighters, which are parties that went on all night, as you might guess. It kind of pre-dates all the rave culture in a funny that came out later. But you played on a bunch of them and were surprised to find they were actually very popular, even though they were nobodies in terms of their success.«

Dennis Coffey: »I played on some of the records and then I did a weekend at a resort called Cleethorpes. I rehearsed with a band in London, I was opening act for The Velvelettes. I was at one of these things and they’re like maniacs – they party all night and dance to this music. It was great.«

RBMA: »So at this time, for a session player in Detroit, getting down with Motown was something what everyone wanted to do, right?«

Dennis Coffey: »The Funk Brothers was the epitome of the best band in the world. My opinion of it was I wouldn’t have a chance of getting on there, so I didn’t bother trying. But I got a call one day from James Jamerson, the bass player, he introduced me to Hank Crosby, who was Stevie Wonder’s producer. They said they were doing this producers workshop upstairs at Golden World, because by then Motown had purchased it, and they wanted me to be part of the rhythm section. We were going to provide somewhere for the producers to get some of their ideas and have more time, as opposed to the studio time.«

RBMA: »Because they were so rushed in the studio?«

Dennis Coffey: »Maybe for them, not for us, we were used to it. But for someone who didn’t have a hit, maybe they’re saying: “Why don’t you have a hit?” So we started two-and-a-half hours a night, four nights a week, and within a few weeks Norman Whitfield came in with this song Cloud Nine, and by that time I was playing funk in the clubs and had wah-wah pedals and distortion and all the effects. I pulled out the wah-wah pedal and played it on Cloud Nine and within two weeks I was in the studio recording it. All that effects stuff on all The Temptations records, that’s me doing all that.«

RBMA: »So that was your first session at Motown, let’s hear a bit of that.«

(music: The Temptations – Cloud Nine / applause)

Dennis Coffey: »Thank you. That was the Funk Brothers, you don’t get any better than that. I can’t even count how many millions of records we sold over at that place. They were the cats; over in that room we all did that at the same time; that whole rhythm section was all of us playing together. That was about as good as it gets, at least to my mind.«

RBMA: »And that session, too, was a change of pace in a lot of ways, not only for the style of music, which was funkier than what Motown was normally doing, but also the drummers. Can you explain what was going on there?«

Dennis Coffey: »That was one of the first sessions. At the workshop we had a drummer called Spider Webb, he came up with that cymbal figure. The first drummer at Motown was Benny Benjamin, but by the time I got there it was Uriel Jones and Pistol. So on that first session it was Spider Webb doing the cymbal part, and I’m not sure if it was Uriel or Pistol doing the backbeat and the foot. From then on, most of the sessions I was doing with The Temptations, one drummer would play the fancy hi-hat and another would do the kickdrum and the snare. That’s how you got that powerhouse. Then you had Eddie Bongo Brown on congas, that’s how you got that polyrhythm thing, and Jack Ashford doing the hi and tambourine. Then you had James Jamerson doing the funky bottom, and Earl Van Dyke laying those big fat chords and the organ player Johnny Griffiths. Then there was myself and usually Eddie Willis from Mississippi playing those funky things while I’m doing something psychedelic. Then we had Robert White on guitar and Joe Messina doing the backbeat - he had a Fender. But those rhythm sections were all cut at the same time, so we played off each other and the track itself was better than any one of us because it was us collectively us jamming together, it was great.«

RBMA: »But what about the wah-wah on there? Talk a bit about that, because before this The Temptations had been doing pretty straight Motown stuff, the classic Motown sound. But this was more influenced by Sly Stone and a lot of funky stuff.«

Dennis Coffey: »The producer Norman Whitfield was listening to the psychedelic sound, Sly & The Family Stone and other groups, including the English groups. He wanted to take it in a different direction, this was protest time and in Detroit we’d had the riots. Someone came in the studio and said someone had just firebombed the drugstore down the street, and it was in flames. We had one person watching the flames while we tired to finish the record: finished up, took the tapes and left. But it was very tense in those days and Norman brought that to the music, because Motown was love songs. He brought the protest element to it and he saw me as someone to make it happen; the distortion pedals and the funk and the wah-wah stuff and the echoplex and all that texture could add to what he was trying to achieve.«

RBMA: »Do you want to give us a little demo of that stuff, because Norman didn’t have the idea of adding the wah-wah element to the song, he just had you do your thing, right?«

Dennis Coffey: »We made up stuff as we went along.«

(music: Dennis Coffey – guitar demo / applause)

»That’s the wah-wah pedal, now I’ll show a bit of distortion.«

(music: Dennis Coffey – guitar demo)

»And you can add effects to it like in Ball Of Confusion.«

(music: Dennis Coffey – guitar demo)

»I combined all this with other devices, so Norman would say: “Let me see your bag of toys, let’s see what you’ve got.” So I’d pull out all these pedals and he’d say: “I like that one.” And we’re off and running.«

(applause)

RBMA: »So I’m curious to know for you as a session player, how much of it was an assembly line, a type of tunnel vision mentality and how much were you aware of the songs you were playing and the impact they might have?«

Dennis Coffey: »Motown would have a master rhythm chart: three different lines, the piano part, the bass part and maybe the third part in there. The rhythm section would all get the same chart, and we’d play the chart. But my job was also, say, [to provide] the intro on Just My Imagination – that was mine, I made that up. Also at the end you might get a solo or a figure which I’d made up. We also got good at playing fill-in’s, which we played on the offbeat so we wouldn’t interfere with the singer, because we had no idea what the singer would be singing. We got very good at doing little fill-in parts that wouldn’t overpower anyone, so that’s how we did.«

RBMA: »So you had no idea of what track you were doing for what singer?«

Dennis Coffey: »Sometimes they had the name of the track on there, sometimes they had the artists, sometimes they didn’t. But we never heard it until they came in. I remember when we did Still Waters Run Deep with The Four Tops, to me it sounded backwards when we played it, but once it was finished it sounded great and ended up being a hit. We didn’t know that at the time.«

RBMA: »Is there something else from this Temptations era you want to throw on?«

Dennis Coffey: »This is the intro with the echoplex and the fuzz, Ball Of Confusion, The Temptations.«

(music: The Temptations - Ball Of Confusion / applause)

RBMA: »So you weren’t exclusive to Motown but others were, right?«

Dennis Coffey: »Most of the Funk Brothers were signed exclusively to Motown and they couldn’t work anywhere else. I remember doing a session with them, 4 AM on a Sunday at United Sound and it’s raining and cold and dark out, and there was a knock on the door. We opened it up expecting it to be a musician and it was Ralph Seltzer, Berry Gordy’s hatchet man, and he runs in, points at Willis and Jamerson and said: “I see you,” and runs back out the door. They got fined over that, but they couldn’t do anything to me.«

RBMA: »So the Funk Brothers, who were under contract to Motown, if they got caught they got fined for doing outside sessions?«

Dennis Coffey: »Yes, and on rare occasions they got fired for a short time.«

RBMA: »But you avoided all that.«

Dennis Coffey: »I considered myself a free agent. I almost signed to them as an artist, I did a record called It’s Your Thing and gave a copy to Clarence Avant at Sussex Records, a copy to Hank Cosby to give to Berry. Within a month I had a contract to Sussex Records as an artist; then Hank comes up to me and says: “Berry loves that record, he wants to sign it.” Too late, that’s the deal.«

RBMA: »So at that point you’re signed to Sussex. Were you working with Mike Theodore at that time?«

Dennis Coffey: »He was my partner playing in a jazz club three nights a week after doing all the sessions with the Lyman Woodard group. Mike and I ran into each other at Golden World: he was an arranger, I was an arranger. The way he learnt to produce was a friend of ours owned Tera-Shirma Studio, and he gave us the keys to the studio, because Mike Theodore was engineering and I was doing the production and arranging. We’d bring in these bands from the clubs we knew, about 3 AM, when the studio wasn’t busy. That’s how we learnt how to produce. One of the first groups we did was Rare Earth, we did an album with them on MGM and that was the beginning. When I first met Mike, Steve Manscher had this session with Scepter and he wanted Mike to do the charts. Mike had this big budget to do horns and strings and I’d had my first string day with The Holidays the week before, so he said: “I notice you can do violins, I can do horn and rhythm, but I’ve never done strings before so let’s partner up on this arrangement.” I said to myself, ‘I’ve done them once, that makes me an expert.’ So away we went.«

RBMA: »How did you go from doing the productions for other people with Mike to doing your own solo recordings?«

Dennis Coffey: »We signed up as house producers for Sussex. I took the Lyman Woodard Trio and did an album with them for MGM, because Clarence OKed it once he’d heard the demo. That album was the first I did, but they didn’t promote the album because the label Clarence had went under. So he came back with this new label Sussex and gave me the money to cut the Scorpio album, the Evolution album.«

RBMA: »So what happened?«

Dennis Coffey: »For the first year, nothing. I thought, ‘This is great. I’m trying to get something going and nothing’s happening’. I did another album with a guitar band, I used the Funk Brothers, and then I wrote out horn parts for guitarists and I brought in Ray Monette from Rare Earth, myself and Joe Podorsek and we had nine guitarists playing the melody to Scorpio. In the year nothing happened I did another album called Going For Myself and used horns and strings instead. Before that album could be released, Ron Moseley, the national promotions guy, called me on the phone and said: “Man, I’m going to all the clubs and they’re going crazy over Scorpio. It’s tearing the roof off, so we’re going to stop this album and re-service Scorpio.” I remember I was sitting in a bar in Detroit with Mike, the record was number 13 and the next week we’re listening, they’re going up the charts, nothing - I thought it had fallen off, but it went from 13 to number one in one week.«

RBMA: »So this was a year after you put the album out, and you thought it was dead in the water.«

Dennis Coffey: »It sat there and did nothing for a year.«

RBMA: »So this is what revived that album.«

(music: Dennis Coffey – Scorpio / applause)

Dennis Coffey: »Thank you. If you hear all the guys yelling in the background, that’s Jack Ashford and Bongo Eddie, they always went crazy. I left the mics on and Theodore said: “We’ve got to keep that.” So we left it in.«

RBMA: »So you wrote the guitar parts as horn parts, basically?«

Dennis Coffey: »Yeah, Mike and I were doing a lot of horn and string arranging with the rhythm section and we’d get so jaded, we’d look in the union book and find some instrument and if someone knew how to play it, we’d bring them down and use it.«

RBMA: »So that’s basically nine guitars doing the melody?«

Dennis Coffey: »Yes, then I did a baritone sax part through my bass to add another piece to it, so it’s like a guitar orchestra.«

RBMA: »So you get that wall of sound with the melody. But you couldn’t recreate that live when you went and toured to support the album.«

Dennis Coffey: »Too expensive. To fly all those guys around the country, no one’s going to pay you to do that unless you’re one of the big superstars.«

RBMA: »But that song was still pretty huge for you.«

Dennis Coffey: »Over a million sold, and people still wanna hear it today. We still do it, but we don’t do it like it is on the record, we change it every time and just get wild with it.«

RBMA: »I guess the breakdowns in a lot of these tracks from that period are what has sustained them for a whole new audience. Obviously, they were sampled in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, but they were also played in the hip hop park jams in the Bronx by DJs just spinning back the breakdowns.«

Dennis Coffey: »I think that’s what broke Scorpio, and a lot of my records. I had the guitar parts out in the open – they could grab it, sample it and then loop it, make other records around it. The first time I went to New York, in this big hotel in Brooklyn, I’m not saying it was rough but we went in this place and I asked the manager: “Where do we park, where’s your parking lot guy?” He said: “To tell the truth, our parking guy was shot last night so we don’t have one. Drive around to the parking lot, back up against the wall, take your distributor cap off and chain down your steering wheel and you’ll be OK.” Anyway, we’re playing to 2.000 people in this big ballroom, it’s jammed, and we’re doing Scorpio and I look up during the percussion break and there are 2.000 people in a conga line coming towards the bandstand. It freaked me out, it was wild.«

RBMA: »So you’re doing the solo records, you’re on Sussex. You’re not doing the Motown stuff at this point, or are you?«

Dennis Coffey: »I was working out at Mo West. Why not? They were paying me scale-and-a-half, and I still did the Motown stuff, worked with Ringo Starr, Quincy Jones, Tom Jones, everyone in the S.W.A.T. TV show and, in concert, everything that anyone else had to offer.«

RBMA: »Let’s back up a bit. You’ve moved out to L.A.; what was the motivation for that?«

Dennis Coffey: »Things were getting slow in Detroit and I wanted to move somewhere that had more action. The Motown thing was slowing down and there weren’t a lot of labels in Detroit like there used to be, so I moved to L.A. to see what opportunities there were out there. And I wanted to do a film, I thought that was a big deal. When I got there I told Clarence Avant to see if he could find me a deal to do a film. I’m sitting out there for two months, didn’t hear anything, so I thought, ‘OK, we’re falling off a cliff here, we’re done’. So I get a call from Motown and I went into the studio at Mo West at ten o’clock in the morning and they kept bouncing me upstairs, downstairs. By the time I’d finished recording everything they needed doing it was 4 AM the following day, that was my first session at Mo West.«

RBMA: »That was Motown’s West Coast studios, but Motown actually left Detroit altogether around that time.«

Dennis Coffey: »They had their other studio ready. One day the Funk Brothers turned up for a session. They’ve spent the major part of their careers doing sessions for Motown, and there’s a sign on the door saying: “There will never be any sessions here again. We’re closed.” That’s how they got the word to the Funk Brothers. They turned up expecting a session, and to get paid, and there’s a sign on the door saying Motown is closed in Detroit.«

RBMA: »That’s pretty crazy. What was the reaction of the guys who you stayed in touch with?«

Dennis Coffey: »Has anyone seen the film Standing In The Shadows Of Motown documentary? That pretty much sums it up. The guy who made it, Allan Slutsky, wanted me to do more in the film. He said: “Let me see your guitar, I want to show you how I want you to play it.” I was, “OK (laughs).” So when it came to the show I said: “Alan, why don’t you play it yourself?” - and I didn’t go (laughs). But the guys felt bad about what happened – he just rubbed me the wrong way – but all the guys felt let down and about four weeks later I was at the R&B Foundation in Philly and Chaka Khan and Aretha and Jerry Butler, everyone was there, Bonnie Raitt, and they gave myself, Uriel Jones, Eddie Willis and Bob Babbitt pioneer Funk Brother awards, it was really nice. Dionne Warwick was there, everyone was performing. So it was a great wrap-up to the whole career of working with the Funk Brothers.«

RBMA: »So you went to L.A. to try and get some TV and soundtrack work. As regards Scorpio you did the whole guitar orchestra thing, but when you had a chance to do film work, you experimented with that as well.«

Dennis Coffey: »I always try to do different things, it’s the heart of creativity. I always try to play new songs, try new licks, always something new. If you don’t, it can get boring, you’ve got to challenge yourself all the time. So I went to see Fred Weintraub, who was doing this movie Black Belt Jones, and he had everything except a main theme and a love theme. So I sat down and decided I’ve got to do something different. I watched it and came up with the main theme and the love theme. The singers in L.A. could sight-read, they could read pretty much anything, so I wrote out vocal parts for the melody, ran them through my wah-wah pedal and the amp. Then in the middle I did this breakdown, wrote out this counterpoint piece of four voice parts working against each other in harmony, almost like a Bach kind of invention and I put that in the middle, which is what you hear in Theme From Black Belt Jones.«

RBMA: »OK, this is Theme From Black Belt Jones.«

(music: Dennis Coffey - Theme From Black Belt Jones)

Dennis Coffey: »Thank you, the horn and string parts were written by my partner Mike Theodore. You can see we had all the L.A. cats; it’s fun, you can hear it in the intensity of the players, that’s what it’s all about for me.«

RBMA: »Besides the Black Belt Jones tracks, you never really tried that again with the voices and the wah-wah?«

Dennis Coffey: »I went to the screening and the sound effects were louder than my music, so I got ticked off and didn’t do any more movies (laughs). I get stubborn sometimes.«

RBMA: »So how did you like L.A.?«

Dennis Coffey: »I was out there for three years, I did the film, did all the TV shows and played with everyone I wanted to play with. After a while I decided it was too hectic and I wanted some peace and quiet, so I went back to Detroit.«

RBMA: »And what happened back in Detroit, what was the game plan at that point?«

Dennis Coffey: »Sussex was having financial difficulties so I switched companies and got a deal with Westbound, with Armen Boladian for myself and my partner Mike Theodore, so we moved our operations there. In 1975 we recorded an album for Westbound, part of it was done in L.A., part in Detroit. Then we moved operations to Detroit to support Westbound.«

RBMA: »At this point you’re working with Westbound out of Detroit. You said you were studying what was happening with disco: what did you do to study what was going on and how it was put together?«

Dennis Coffey: »We were getting pressure from Armen, who was getting pressure from Atlantic, you know, we’ve got to get some hits. Disco was out there. Mike and I had been to some of the Billboard conventions, so I knew what was going on with the disco market. I went and bought a bunch of disco records and pulled them apart, piece by piece, figured out what made them tick and used that as a foundation. That’s how we created this record Devil’s Gun, and to make it happen we got the disco mixmaster Tom Moulton, a fantastic guy, and had him do the mix down on it.«

RBMA: »Who was Tom Moulton?«

Dennis Coffey: »Back then he was a DJ, very successful in the clubs of New York. He did the mix downs at Sigma Sound in Philadelphia and we knew that to make this thing happen we needed him to do the mixes for us.«

RBMA: »Now, we don’t have Devil’s Gun, which is the single. But we can play another one from CJ & Company. This is by CJ & Company, so this is you and Mike Theodore writing and producing?«

Dennis Coffey: »Not writing, arranging.«

(music: CJ & Company – We Got Our Own Thing / applause)

»Thank you.«

RBMA: »You don’t hear that much about your work in this area - everyone talks about Scorpio and all that stuff. But your records from then, a lot of them were embraced by people like David Mancuso at The Loft and other big underground DJs in New York. Nobod talks about this era, though.«

Dennis Coffey: »At first it was like the stepchild of the funk era, they didn’t want to understand it in Detroit. But we were using the funk players to do it, the Bee Gees were using the funk players to do it, it was just a different form of music. My partner Mike Theodore got very good at doing horns and strings and the records still hold up. When I work at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, the first few times I did upright bass, traditional jazz and the people gave me blank stares. So I had to bring back the funksters and we get crazy and funky - that’s what people want from me, so that’s what I do.«

RBMA: »This wasn’t a good experience for you at Westbound?«

Dennis Coffey: »I think their deal just ran out. We came in to talk to Armen and Atlantic had cut them loose, so within two weeks we’re out of work, boom!«

RBMA: »And then you moved to New York at this point?«

Dennis Coffey: »Yes, we had a couple of independent deals but the record business was so bad they would give you $50.000, Columbia did, and they didn’t even put it out. The record companies were going through… it started as a small business, then it got huge, but at that point there was a lot of competition for the entertainment dollar and this was the first of the cracks starting to appear in the record business, and this was back in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s. It was suddenly not a young business anymore, it was starting to age. We had three deals already paid for with different acts and the companies refused to put them out. Once we got to New York the labels changed up. They said: “OK, Mr Producer, you spend your money and you go cut a master and if we like it we will put it out; if we don’t, you eat the cost.” So that’s when I stopped being Mr Producer. “You’ve gotta be kidding me, man, we’re not playing that game.”«

RBMA: »What about session work? Was there any in New York?«

Dennis Coffey: »There were a few things, but New York was jammed up. I was there for a few years but it just wasn’t working out, so I came back to Detroit and went to work for one of the car companies.«

RBMA: »In your book you make a very profound point about how the thrill of life is your livelihood and once that’s taken away from you, it can leave you very depressed.«

Dennis Coffey: »If there’s one thing that I can state to everybody it’s self-reliance and flexibility. No one’s going to cover you. No one’s going to cover you or give you money the rest of your life. You have to take care of your own skill and talent and have to be flexible. I went back to school, got two masters degrees and I was sent all over the country by one of the car companies. And all my buddies in the music business were literally dying because things fell apart, some of them couldn’t cope. I mean dying, dead. It was really tragic. But you have to keep your skills going and be aware, because no one can be creative when they’re starving.«

RBMA: »But when you got back to Detroit, you had to find a way to pay the bills because things had dried up.«

Dennis Coffey: »Yeah, I went to work on an assembly line. They’re playing my records on the radio while I’m building cars. You’ve got to be flexible, if you take it too seriously, it’ll kill you. So you just say: “OK, I’ve gotta find another way to make money now,” and you just do it.«

RBMA: »So you were on the assembly line. What was the environment like and your mentality?«

Dennis Coffey: »Well, it kind of sucked. I was putting in transmissions, putting in torque converters, building transmissions, it was 120º in the summer. Then they said they needed someone to be an instructor, and I had taught guitar. So I applied for that job, running a thing called instructional design. So I did that, then I went back and got a masters degree in instructional technology and for the last 10 years, I was a consultant for the Ford company, they were sending me all over the place. That was my last job in the regular business, now I’m just back doing music again.«

RBMA: »During that time was music absent from your life? Did you play at all, any regular gigs?«

Dennis Coffey: »The only time in my entire life that I didn’t have my hands on a guitar on a regular basis was in boot camp in the army, because they wouldn’t let me bring my guitar there. But after that, and after jump school, I had my guitar the entire time in the army, then every day of my life. I play two hours a day, I’m on it, that’s just what I like to do.«

RBMA: »So you were working at Ford, then you got back into the music thing and realised you could make a living doing gigs around town.«

Dennis Coffey: »It worked out good, the first time I did a gig at Baker’s Keyboard, I talked to the owner, figured after three weeks trying to get a rehearsal, it wasn’t going to happen. So I showed up the day of the job with musicians I hadn’t met before. I gave the piano player and the bass player a chord sheet and said: “OK, we’re doing this song.” I counted it off and away we went. I’ve never rehearsed with anybody since for the Baker’s gig. I’ve been through many musicians, but one thing about Detroit, if you get good players, it will work out, and it always has.«

RBMA: »What is it about Detroit as a city that has produced so many great musicians, producers, DJs, etc.?«

Dennis Coffey: »It’s part of the culture. I can only figure out that you can go all over the place and still hear live music. Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops just passed away, and the reason I think that shows you something about the culture is because a few years ago he had a stroke. We played a show for him at the Opera House in Detroit; all the major stars showed up, and half way through the show they brought him out in a wheelchair. He was singing two verses of a song with Aretha Franklin, and the Four Tops were singing behind him and Dennis Edwards and The Temp[tation]s were singing on the side, and it just brought the house down. But he was our friend and we were all going to do this, and that’s also part of the culture of the city.«

RBMA: »Speaking of Rodriguez and that whole era - and even the Temptations material that Norman Whitfield did - it was very topical, incorporating that protest sensibility in the late ‘60s. There were famous riots in Detroit in the late ‘60s, what was it like at the time?«

Dennis Coffey: »The thing that started it was a place, a blind pig, which was supposed to be a licensed place but was serving alcohol. The police went in and busted it and got heavy handed with the people and it was a hot summer night. And the economy wasn’t doing too good and there was a lot of tension, and it just erupted into a riot. It got so bad they brought in the National Guard and they actually brought in my old unit, the 101st Airborne division. Some of them had come back from Vietnam. But you can see how serious it was - you had the 101st Airborne and when they show it on TV, they had a sniper in a building. He’s shooting at the 101st Airborne division guys and they’re in a self-propelled gun. The captain of the unit has a bullhorn and he tells them to stop firing, and you can hear the pings off the self-propelled gun. And the guy says something and you can see the cannon go and it blew off the whole corner of the building with the guy still in it. That’s how bad that was.«

RBMA: »The Motown musicians were black and white. Was there any sort of carry over, or any camaraderie?«

Dennis Coffey: »We were all friends, and I was working in the black clubs anyway. Eddie Willis, the guitar player, told me he came home one night after a session and he got stopped outside of his house by a tank. The tank had a turret pointing at him, and it made him get out of his car. Eddie uses a cane too. They got the tank on him and asked him what he was doing there. “This is my house, I live here.” I was kind of a weird story he told us later on«

RBMA: »Any questions?«

Russ Elevado: »First of all, much respect. So what year was it you put the wah-wah on that song?«

Dennis Coffey: »That was probably ’68.«

Russ Elevado: »So Hendrix was using it?«

Dennis Coffey: »Hendrix, Eric Clapton and a few other folks. The thing I did was, I was the first to put it in an r&b song.«

Russ Elevado: »There’s been a debate about who was the first person to use the wah-wah. Do you know who might have used it first?«

Dennis Coffey: »Boy, I don’t. I can only speak for when I used it. In r&b I was using special effects, like In The Rain by The Dramatics, the echoplex intro, that was me. And Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get, I used something different on that. Also Don’t Knock My Loving, at Muscle Shoals, Wilson Pickett. So I was getting around using sound effects on different things. Smilin’ Faces I put a solo in the middle of that, but that was a Condor Unit, that was a different effect.«

Russ Elevado: »So you had no idea that you were responsible for all the psychedelic Motown stuff that’s really cool.«

Dennis Coffey: »We had fun. Norman Whitfield, who unfortunately passed away three weeks ago, he was the guy who wanted to do that. The BBC were doing a documentary and they came into Baker’s and Spyder Turner, who was a friend of Norman’s, was telling me about his illness and how they were staying together for a while. And Norman was: “Man, I’ve gotta have some fried chicken.” “It’s the fried chicken that’s got you sick, you ain’t getting any more.” That was the story about Norman.«

Russ Elevado: »My last question: do you remember when you started working at Motown how many tracks they had? Was it just four?«

Dennis Coffey: »I would think probably eight by then. When me and Mike Theodore started recording, we used four, and we were recording orchestras. What we’d do is record the rhythm tracks, then bounce them to one track; then the horns and strings, and bounce that to one track; then the lead; then the background singers. With a four-track you’d have an orchestra on one, a full rhythm section on one, a lead singer on one, and background singers on one. I’m telling you, you were limited in the mixing trying to do that. Trying to get a stereo image with four tracks, and you couldn’t re-equalise everything much. Certainly, you couldn’t re-do the individual instruments, you couldn’t re-EQ them because they were all on one track.«

Russ Elevado: »We have limitless tracks now (laughs).«

Dennis Coffey: »It was a big deal when we went from four to eight. Then we went to 16, I thought, ‘This is heaven’. Then 24. Then in L.A. they were linking two 24-tracks together. Then I did a session where they brought in some guys from Motown and I would say they had a 24-track on nothing but background voices. It’s crazy, this is taxing my brain, we need to do simple things.«

Russ Elevado: »How old were you when you did your first Motown session?«

Dennis Coffey: »Probably in my late twenties. I’d already played on hit records with Del Shannon, so it just segued from Golden World into the Motown thing.«

Russ Elevado: »Thanks for being here.«

Dennis Coffey: »You folks are the next generation, you’ve got the future right here. Down the road you may be sitting up talking to some people like I’m doing now. You’ll be having this chair, you’re the people who are going to be doing things down the road. The future belongs to you folks.«

(applause)

RBMA: »Thanks for the spontaneous standing O. Thank you, Mr Dennis Coffey.«

Dennis Coffey: »Thank you, let’s give Jeff a big hand for what he’s done.«

RBMA: »Like I said, Dennis will be around for four more days.«

Dennis Coffey: »I wanna see this live gig, gonna check that out.«