Danny Krivits

Condensed Interview Version
Source
http://bangtheparty.wordpress.com/category/danny-krivit/

How did you get into the editing?

My first mix was ‘Chill Pill’ on Sleeping Bag. Will Socolov I’d grown up with. We did this and during the session, I knew what I wanted but the engineer kept saying, ‘oh we’ll fix that in the editing’. And towards the end he started to do an edit, but he couldn’t do it. I had a reel-to-reel at home, but I’d never done any editing. I was getting frustrated with this guy, literally half the session was this guy trying to do this edit. We salvaged it. I walked out of there thinking I know how to edit, just from seeing what he did wrong. Same thing happened next time; oh we’ll fix it in the editing. A good friend of mine Jonathan Fearing, who was into editing and working at WBLS, I was telling him about it and he finally just gave me a quick pep talk and said it’s really just about the ear. I went home and I edited ‘Funky Drummer’ and it ended up being ‘Feeling James’. I gave it to this guy who bootlegged it.

What the thing on Tommy Boy by Fresh Gordon?
No, it was a bootleg. That may have sampled it. Anyway, there was this guy Tim Rogers at Polygram, he was hanging around the Garage, instead of being a big record exec, he was actually into all this editing and bootlegs and stuff. He found out that it was me from David Steel and he said I’m working on all this stuff and I want to put out ‘Funky Drummer’. Do you wanna do a mix? Whenever I’d do an edit it would turn into a legitimate job. Like I did one of ‘Touch And Go’ and Claudia Cuseta was working at Sunnyview at the time, gave me a job to remix the song.
T

he second edit was ‘Rock The House’, which wound up becoming ‘Put The Needle On The Record’. I knew Arthur [Baker]. I’m just a DJ and I’m doing something that just ends up being a bootleg, so I can’t call anyone a thief. But basically, he took ‘Rock The House’ and he had Gail King play it over this drum beat. That’s all it was. When I saw him in a club, I came over to him and said: ‘Oh is that your record?’. He says, ‘Yeah’. ‘I did ‘Rock The House’. He got so defensive. ‘You did ‘Rock The House’? You’re a thief anyway, who you calling a thief?’ I said, ‘I’m not calling anyone a thief, I’m just letting you know that I did ‘Rock The House’. After that I got a few jobs with him.

You did the MFSB bootleg as well didn’t you?

Well there are two and they both sample Gli Scot-Heron. I did the white one that has ‘My First Mistake’ on the other side. It’s on T.D. Records. It’s just basically ‘Love Is The Message’ and ‘Love Break’ put together. The other guy that did the other one, this guy who worked at Vinylmania. Speak to Charlie about him. I’ve done a lot edits for that guy, though. By then those were the two main ones. Mine was after the other one, but they were close: early Eighties.

When David was playing MFSB was he playing the ordinary version?

Right from the beginning he was probably playing the quad mix on the album. The original album also came in quad. I collect quad and usually since quad wasn’t a big hit, they had to make things a little different so that even if you played it on your regular stereo you knew it sounded different. Sometimes it was a different version of the song. ‘Rocksteady’ Aretha Franklin, instead of ending at a different version of the song. ‘Rocksteady’ Aretha Franklin, instead of ending at the fade out, it goes on for another two minutes and slows down to a complete stop. It’s got a completely different horn part in it. Apparently in ‘Love Is The message’ there were a lot of loose keyboard parts that they edited out of the final mix because it was sloppy. In the quad mix, they put them in to make it sound different. Played that till the Tom Moulton Philly Classics mix came out, then played that.

Which other edits have you done? (If you wanna do this off-the-record that’s fine by me.)

I’m not in the bootlegging business. I did edits; I got paid for that. And I also stuck to things that were either long gone. As far as other ones: ‘Just Us’ by Two Tons of Fun, ‘Sugar Pie Guy’, ‘Bra’, ‘You Got Me Running’ Lenny Williams, ‘Let’s Start The Dance’, I had a version that never came out.

Is that ‘Let’s Start The Dance III’?

I think it was II. The one with the rapper over it. I did a version without the rapper on. ‘My First Mistake’. I was really proud of that.

I assume that you were doing them to make them better for DJs to play?

Yeah. I’d do something that I knew Larry was into, like ‘Family Tree’ [by Family Tree]. I have the original here, it’s one of the most rare records. It’s one of the first 12-inches. Something Larry played and it was such a rare record that even if you owned it you didn’t want to play it in case you scratched it up. When I brought him that he was happy. Also it was a really good edit.

What do you think was the first 12-inch?

It was ‘Dance Dance Dance’ by (I think) Calhoun. Definitely. Warner Spectrum. It was a terrible record. It was a bad way to try and get into the market. I remember immediately after that, the second 12-inch I got, because the Ninth Cirlce, I was getting a lot of stuff in the mail. And at that time I was getting a lot of 7-inch 33s, before the 2-inches. Seven minutes version on a 7-inch. All of a sudden I started getting these 12-inches in the mail. And I started hearing that this was the new thing. The next song was Floyd Smith on Salsoul, very Barry White sounding, but it wasn’t a big hit. This was a better example of something sounding good. Then there were a few 12-inches. Motown, 20th Century.

Tom Moulton says he did one that he thinks is the first? Al Downing.
‘Dreamworld’? If he did that and that was the first 12-inch, then I’ve never even saw that to this day. The thing about Tom Moulton is, for instance ‘Free Man’, he made a couple of 12-inches himself. Because they weren’t going to. I’ve a feeling that if he did a 12-inch of Al Downing, I don’t know, it could’ve been something that 20 copies were made. If it was the first, it was kind of unheard of. These things were promos, but you’re still talking about 100 copies at least. They got around the US. I’m an avid record collector and I’ve never seen Al Downing. Atlantic’s first one was ‘Mellow Blow’ by Barrabas. People weren’t impressed to start because they really weren’t putting the best stuff on them. Everyone was well, there are a lot of hits out there, why are putting these songs on there?


It was a marketing ploy, basically.

Definitely. This was the age of promotion and this was how to promote these records. Soon after it was almost like 12-inches were going to be laughed at, so they started putting some good songs on there. ‘Ten Percent’ etc.

You know when Junior started Bassline, what was the reaction to him. Was he seen as a Larry copyist?

Definitely that, but kind of like the way I was describing David at the Garage. Junior was taking it a step further. He had nothing to do with the Garage and yet he was just playing this hit parade. Junior was playing some great music, but it was rehashed in a time when people really weren’t rehashing music. It was not about retro then. When you heard retro then, it was like what’s wrong with this picture? It was only because the Garage had closed and people were still hanging on to that that it seemed okay. They were good songs and he was mixing. I thought it was fad, and it would fade away, but it kept getting bigger. But then it slowly changed. He was always friendly with me, but he was out of the loop; I crossed a lot of circles and he wasn’t in any of them.

What do you think the legacy of these DJs is?

There’s a lot of marks that they made that might go unnoticed but are just there. Certainly, I think that Mancuso is one of the main ones. The thing that David expressed, and came out in Larry, Nicky was playing a positive vibe in the club. When I went to other places I was always amazed at how negative the vibe was. Weaving a message, rather than wandering all over. David made people realise the DJ was important. Before that most people thought a band or DJ: what’s the difference?

Do you think they turned records into musical instruments?

Totally. And also broke ground. They didn’t take the new hot record and break it (when it would have been broken anyway). They broke a record that would not have been otherwise. They educated people.

Can you think of any examples?

With David there was such a long line of them. Things like ‘City Country City’ or ‘Woman’. Those were Loft records. Without the Loft, they were just records. People would scream when they heard a record for the first time, not the tenth. One of the legacies they left is that fever for hunting down the records and finding them. These are records that were rare the moment they came out. There was this guy Tony Smith, from Barefoot Boy, there was a record store on 8th Street, Daytons. I met him because we’d always be looking for those kind of records. A lot of jazz-funk. They’d play something, and if I liked it, it always seemed that Tony would want it too. It was underground even then. Forget about now, back then some of these records were hard to track down too.

Has your version of MFSB ever come out legitimately?

No. But MFSB is probably the quintessential bootleg mix.

Biography
http://www.dannykrivit.net/biography.html