Lee Garrett - Heat For The Feets

Lee Garrett – Heat For The Feets

DJ Paul Gambaccini once told of how, back in 1974, singer Gwen McRae was late for a recording date in Miami.  Her husband George was already at the studio; he took the opportunity to record a song that had been otherwise earmarked for his wife.  George McRae – not yet a professional singer - recorded his master take of Rock Your Baby on a reel of tape that had been salvaged from the studio dustbin.

The finished record made number one all over the world, it was largely credited with kick-starting the disco boom of the 1970s. For the next 12 years at least, the music heard in discotheques would for the most part be both black and American.

Rock Your Baby relied on contemporary American soul/R&B production, with a Miami twist courtesy of Richard Finch and Harry Wayne Casey of KC and the Sunshine Band.  The rhythm of the track was propelled by clever interplay between drums, bass, percussion, guitars, plus an intro performed on an early-type drum machine.  However, it was not long before disco and soul music would come to be dominated by a thumping and relentless 4/4 disco beat, a style that emanated from European studios.  It was perhaps first heard in 1975 in Giorgio Moroder’s production of Donna Summer’s 16-minute epic Love To Love You Baby.

But Love To Love You and Rock Your Baby had one major thing in common – that the LP versions of the hit singles were extended for the sake of the dancefloor, partly by studio trickery.  In particular, the album version of Rock Your Baby was a simple (read: clumsy) edit together of the vocal and instrumental mixes of the same track.  Three minutes became six.  Love To Love You was a far more intricate series of edits and re-recordings that effectively repeated and expanded upon the themes heard in the three minute single version.  It occupied all of side one of Donna’s debut LP.  Dancefloor music was more than ever becoming a producer’s art.   

  
In 1976, American soul music was still king of the dancefloor and had taken hold of daytime radio.   TV-advertised compilations of hit soul singles were all over the charts.  Al Green, The Fatback Band and The Ohio Players were selling albums by the truckload.  Stevie Wonder’s Songs In The Key Of Life made number 1 in the album charts on both sides of the Atlantic and spawned four top ten singles.  In that year, one particular record that seemed inescapable was by ex-Motown songwriter Lee Garrett – You’re My Everything was a joyous and uplifting three minutes of sunshine that permeated the airwaves and reverberated from discotheques and nightclubs.

Lee Garrett is a one-time song writing partner of Stevie Wonder.  He sings in a similar style to Stevie – and like Stevie, he’s blind.  The pair of them wrote Signed, Sealed, Delivered (for Stevie himself), It’s A Shame (Detroit Spinners) and Let’s Get Serious (Jermaine Jackson).  They later fell out over the writing credits to I Just Called To Say I Love You – Lee Garret claimed to have written the song years previous to Stevie having the hit.  His Wikipedia page reports that the pair have since mended their relationship. 

 

The LP released to complement the hit single You’re My Everything was recorded for the Chrysalis label; all nine songs were written or co-written by Lee.  The record company had spared little expense in hiring a crack team of players, including Ernie Watts, Lee Ritenour, Dave Grusin, Ian Underwood, Tom Scott and Harvey Mason.  And it shows in the recording and the performances.  Unlike many soul/R&B albums of the era, it did not feature an extended version of the hit tune – three minutes and 14 seconds was more than enough of this perfect slice of contemporary soul.  Neither was the LP stuffed with filler material – Heat For The Feets is one solid groove, from beginning to end.  Two more singles were released, but only You’re My Everything hit the charts.  Lee Garrett was, unfortunately, destined for one-hit wonderland.

What did not help his career was the launch of a manufactured teen idol the following year with the name of Leif Garrett.  I may be reaching here, but it is highly possible that the comparatively high profile (and bouffant hairdo) of Leif Garrett wiped out any hope of Lee selling that many more records under his own name - regardless of the fact that neither man looked or sounded in any way similar.  The fickle nature of the music business (and the plain truth) is that there is seldom room for two performers of any sort with such similar sounding names.

You’re My Everything belonged firmly in the contemporary soul camp.  However, within two years, music of this type would be overtaken by the pulsating four-to-the-floor European productions such as Silver Convention’s Get Up & Boogie or the swooping strings, clicking guitar/bass and zipping hi-hats of records such as Chic’s Le Freak.  Dancefloor music gorged on 4/4 bass drums, hand claps and Linn drum machines.  European productions went one step further with programmed synth bass lines, cheesy backing vocals and corny sub-erotic themes (Boney M, anybody?) The exuberant soulful funk typified by record labels such as Philadelphia International and (post-Detroit) Motown was wiped out by the 4/4 wallop of labels such as Casablanca and Salsoul.  Before the 1970s were out, it was not unusual to hear out-and-out pop records such as Dan Hartman’s Instant Replay on dedicated soul radio programmes and stations.  Compare and contrast, if you please, the gritty street-funk of Kool & The Gang’s Funky Stuff (1973) with the silky smooth saccharine gloss of their worldwide hit, Ladies Night (1979).  The homogenisation and faux-sophistication of the post Saturday Night Fever scene effectively squeezed out the honesty and urgency associated with 70s soul music.

Despite all this, I am rather fond of many records of the discotheque era.  But there is no getting away from the effect that the genre had on contemporary music.  And once the disco boom wound down, American soul music became dependent on the likes of Luther Vandross, late-period Pointer Sisters and Shalamar.  Programmed drum machines, sampling and (dear God, no…) The House Sound of Chicago were just around the corner.

Lee Garrett’s Heat For The Feets is perhaps a premature farewell to a music that was – and should have remained – in rude health.   Whilst it is not in the same league as albums such as Stevie’s Songs In The Key Of Life (released the same year) it deserves significantly more recognition than it was afforded at the time.  And it has never been released on compact disc.

For maximum effect, we recommend that this record is transferred to compact cassette and played through a vintage in-car stereo system.  Turn up the volume far enough and you may even feel the warm breeze of the summer of ’76 blowing through your hair. 

Track listing

Better Than Walkin' Out

Heart Be Still

You're My Everything

How Can I Be A Man

Broken Down D.J.

Sad, Sad Story

Stop That Wrong

Love Enough For Two

Don't Let It Get You Down

Chrysalis ‎– CHR 1109 (1976)

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A short note on the evolution of the extended album & 12” mix.

As early as 1972, producer Norman Whitfield created a mammoth version of The Temptations’ Papa Was A Rolling Stone.  The already-lengthy (seven minute) single version of the track was extended to nearly 12 minutes for the LP All Direction by simply tagging an instrumental version of the track in front of the vocal version.  Many of The Temptations 1970s hits were extended for the accompanying album versions by clever re-editing – Masterpiece, Runaway Child, Running Wild and Smiling Faces Sometimes all ended up around and beyond the ten-minute mark in the album mixes.

Giorgio Moroder employed the side-long disco version format again and again, not least on Donna Summer’s 1976 album, A Love Trilogy and on his own album, From Here To Eternity.  The results were more than impressive.  Meanwhile, in 1978, the album version of I Feel Love was extended from six minutes to an eight-minute 12” single by simply repeating one of the choruses.   Two years later, Donna Summer recorded a 17-minute disco version of Jimmy Webb’s MacArthur Park.  Which was not so good.

In 1978, Swiss pop singer Patrick Juvet issued an unnecessarily tedious 20-minute disco mix of the somewhat frightful hit single, I Love America.

In 1982 DJ/producer Patrick Cowley remixed Donna Summer’s I Feel Love to a wholly unnecessary 16-minute 12” single by plonking a meandering synth solo and other tedious effects over a loop of the song’s electronic beat.

And so it goes on to this day – remixers let loose with master tapes create monstrous (and more recently, barely recognisable) versions of hit singles as monuments to their own egos.  Don’t believe me?  Try working your way through the remixes of Prince’s post-Batman output.

I’ll have a blood transfusion at the ready. 

 

Swearin' To God - Frankie Valli 

Be in no doubt that for every glorious and heaven-sent extended mix (The Trammps’ Disco Inferno, McFadden & Whitehead’s Ain’t No Stopping Us Now, Frankie Valli’s Swearing To God) there is a box of 12” remixes, each one that succeeds in outstaying its welcome.  Less is quite often more.