Better Days

I recently had the distinct pleasure of compiling an oral history of the seminal underground New York club Better Days, a ’70s and ’80s contemporary of spots like the Paradise Garage—though Better Days was much smaller and, possibly because of that, less lauded. (You can read that piece in full here, on the Red Bull Music Academy website.) One of the main interviewees for the article was Bruce Forest, an iconic DJ (and later, prolific producer) who was on the Better Days decks throughout most of the ’80s. (In the ’70s, the late, great Tee Scott ran the show.) Forest has a great memory and is a fantastic teller of tales—but, for reasons of space and clarity, some of his best stories had to be omitted from the history. So we figured, why not share a couple of his best ones here?

Loleatta Holloway
This story concerns how the inimitable disco diva Loleatta Holloway’s between-song patter became one of the most ubiquitous samples in dance music history. It was all Forest’s (accidental) fault.

Bruce Forest: “It was not easy to have live performances there. It was a very, very hard room to do live sound in; it was a round room with tons of bass. But we would do it sometimes anyway. Jocelyn Brown probably performed there seven or

Loleatta Holloway

eight times. And there was Lolleata Holloway. She was one nasty woman when she wanted to be. And she was big; she could have easily kicked the shit out of me. Anyway, when she performs, she does five or six songs, but in between the songs, she does these long chats with the audience—you know, the ‘Oh, honey, one monkey don’t stop no show’ stuff. Of course, I’m recording the whole thing, and the music was okay—but the stuff in between is amazing. Everyone was going nuts. So I took that tape, edited out the music, and I would play the talking over songs, stuff like ‘Love is the Message.’ Kids would vogue whenever I put it on. This went on for years. Loleatta was there one night and heard me doing it, and she said, ‘You gotta promise me you’re never gonna give this to anybody

Unfortunately, Shep Pettibone was playing one night, borrowed the tape, copied it and gave it to Junior Vasquez. And then, of course, Junior Vasquez released ‘My Loleatta.’ I was livid! I was like, ‘Shep, how the hell could you do that—Loleatta’s gonna kill me!’ Shep just goes, ‘You can outrun her.’ You can still hear those samples on lots of tracks.

Anyway, I was in London, visiting Norman Jay’s party, High on Hope, at Dingwalls. She was performing that night. I’m standing outside with Norman and Paul Simpson comes up: ‘Ooh, Loleatta saw you in the crowd—you better get out of here!’ I asked why, and he said, ‘There’s that motherfucker Bruce Forest, and I’m gonna kill him!’ Loleatta bursts through the door and goes, ‘I’m gonna fuck you up!’ and starts running after me. I’m running through the streets of Camden Town, yelling, ‘It was wasn’t me! I didn’t give it away!’ She’s after me, going ‘Get back here you pussy! I’m gonna kick your ass!’ And that was the last that I ever saw her.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LGaZ81eTRA

Testing out Trevor Horn’s music
Horn, a.k.a. “The Producer Who Invented the ’80s,” pays a visit to Better Days.

Bruce Forest:“The record-company people would come in and want to test stuff there. I would tell them flat-out, ‘I can’t play this’ or ‘This won’t work.’ But Chris Blackwell—who actually gave me my first mix to do in ’82, so I’ve always beenfriends with him—walked in one days with this short guy wearing big glasses. Chris goes, ‘I want you to meet my friend

Trevor Horn

Trevor Horn. Trevor goes, ‘I’ve got a record that I think your crowd might like. I look at Chris and he just nods and says, ‘It’ll work.’ So he hands me this acetate—and what it actually was, was what ended up becoming the Sex Mix of ‘Relax.’ It’s like 16 minutes long, and has almost nothing but a kick drum for like three minutes. At first, everyone in the club was kind of looking at me—I’m like, okay, what’s gonna happen with this record? I’m starting to sweat, but of course, something does happen, and the crowd loved it. Trevor was blown away. He had never seen anything like that.

After that, Trevor would come back with rough mixes of all sorts of things. Eventually, he brought in the Annihilation mix of ‘Two Tribes,’ and said, ‘This is something I through together for you and Larry [Levan].’ I played it, the crowd went nuts, and I told him that he had to put it out. And he did.”