Web Exclusive: Q&A With Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis
Sep 25, 2008 12:28 PM, By Sarah Jones
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This Month in Mix
Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis
In the October issue of Mix, producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis chat with editor Sarah Jones about settling into their Santa Monica studios, gigging with The Time, and the state of the music industry. Check out our exclusive Web interview, and read the entire article in the October issue of Mix.
It’s been more than 35 years since Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis first connected as high school students. Although their roots were in performing—the two founded Minneapolis funk band Flyte Tyme, which evolved into The Time—their work on the S.O.S. Band’s hit single “Just Be Good to Me” put them on the production map, and after their collaborating with Janet Jackson on her 1986 smash Control, their careers skyrocketed. Jam and Lewis became one of the most successful and influential songwriting/production teams of the ’80s and ’90s, shaping the pop sounds of those decades and laying the groundwork for pop and R&B music being made today. The sheer number of hits they’ve produced is staggering: 100 Gold, Platinum and multi-Platinum albums, 16 Number One pop singles, 26 Number One R&B singles. Just as far-reaching is the diversity of talent they’ve fostered, from Mariah Carey to Sting, from Mary J. Blige to Bryan Adams. Mix caught up with the duo at Flyte Tyme, their Santa Monica, Calif., facility, to hear about their latest projects, and get their views on the state of the industry.
Terry, I read an old interview where you said that without the business there wouldn’t be music. How does that ring true today?
Lewis: I think there will always be music. Music is the soundtrack of life. If you go outside, there’s music in the air—you hear the birds tweeting, the cars, the rumble of just the air itself. That’s all musical; it’s all melody, it’s all rhythmic. But when you take it and put it in a format that you try to sell—you make it an industry—there has to be business. There have to be dynamics and rules and things that make it acceptable or palatable, and knowable, by all, so everybody can work the commerce. So I think the two go hand in hand. But we made music when it wasn’t business, it was just a hobby, it was just something that we love to do. We’d pay to do it if it didn’t pay us. I always say if you love music, it will love you back.
Jam: I’ve heard Terry say that, and a lot of times, when he does say it, it’s to record company people who somehow rather than listening to what the actual record is or what the music is, they’re too busy trying to think about the marketing; and it’s like, listen, if the music isn’t there, then all the rest of the stuff doesn’t matter.
In the recording industry, the guys who were great music guys, who had great ears and had great passion, a lot of those people either aren’t around or they’re working independently, but they’re not really working under the major structure anymore; and those jobs have been replaced, it seems, with a lot of lawyers and accountants and people that think about, “How much is this going to sell?” rather than, “Wow, what a great song.” And that’s the problem.
Lewis: You just took the entrepreneurs out of it. The music business was built by entrepreneurs. It was a guy who had an affinity for music, who had an affinity for a particular artist. That guy would go find that artist, pay for everything out of his own pocket, and would know the process through and through, from the production, from financials, from an artistic, actually know that artist. And when it came time when that product was done, they would go to market with it, there would be a marketing plan because you lived with it the whole way. When the music business took over, it changed that format. Now it’s very impersonal. You can turn your record in at the last minute, and in two days somebody says, “I like it,” “I don’t like it.” Nobody’s involved anymore. And it totally changed the whole fabric of the industry.
How does that concept trickle down to your role as producers?
Lewis: It affects us, absolutely. Because it affects the talent base. It affects the attitude of the very companies that we try to do commerce with. We will always do music, whether the business is the same or not. I love music, I’m gonna always love music. For my kids, I want my kids to take piano, I want my kids to love bands, I want my kids to know songs, I want other kids to know that same thing. But it’s a generational thing. We grew up at a great time for music. So we learned great things from music, whether it be musically, whether it be socially, whether it be philanthropically. Music had stories, it was like the soundtrack of life, like I said. I’d know a girl by a song, by how she smelled, where I was…I don’t think our kids have that same spirit. It’s because everything in our world has become so disposable: You know, you drink the water, you throw the bottle away. It wasn’t like that when we were growing up.
It seems like there are more opportunities to hear music than ever before, but at the same time people seem to be listening a lot more passively.
Lewis: I don’t think so. Music is not engaging. If music is not saying anything, then it’s just a beat. Then it’s hypnotic. But if music is actually speaking to you, melodically, when you listen to an emotional song, it touches your heart. You choke up, tear up, cry, whatever—because it’s speaking to your soul, your very being. You don’t listen to that music as a casual thing. But I think that we’ve gotten so into the impersonal, casual thing, that the other stuff is not valid anymore. So, you don’t get to hear those songs very often.
Jam: When we were kids coming up, we had a thirst to hear music, and you had to work to hear it. You’d wait all day to hear the song you liked on the radio, and then if you couldn’t hear that enough, you’d actually go to the store and you’d buy it so you could play it as much as you like. And a lot of what Terry said; it’s just society, everything is instant.
What we try to do is, make sure that that moment that you’re going to hear the music, that it’s certainly saying something. So try to have some substance to it, or as we like to say, put some seasoning on it. Don’t just give me the burger with no seasoning on it; at least, you know, let it marinate a little bit. That’s just kind of the way we came up. So we still try to put that in the work that we do.
So with all that as context, let’s talk about your move to LA. What made you finally say, we’re moving west?
Lewis: L.A. was a good idea because we were heavily into making records. And our main client started to want to work out here; that was Janet. And that was a small percentage of it, but there were all kinds of opportunities for film and television and commercials that we never could take advantage of in Minneapolis. So we thought if we were out here in the middle of it, maybe things would be a lot simpler. It was just time for a move. You’re at a place for so long that you can become so comfortable that your inspiration level drops. And you just can go through the motions. It was just time to do something different.
Jam: I think a lot of it was timing. Being in Minnesota, before September 11, people were very willing to hop on a plane and fly anywhere on a whim. If there was an artist that wanted to work with us, they’d hop on a plane and come to Minneapolis, and that was part of the fun of working with us. Matter of fact, there’s artists that we would work with and we’d say, “We’ll come to L.A. to work,” and they’d be, “No, I gotta come to Minneapolis, and get the full Flyte Tyme experience.” After September 11, a lot of that changed. People feared for safety; obviously, the price of traveling went way up, and with budgets shrinking, record companies discovering that downloading was becoming very prevalent, it was a big economic shift. And it was a shift in people’s willingness to fly and the record companies wanting to foot the bill. And so we thought, why not just be here? Because you could just run into somebody at a party or whatever and say, “Come on by the studio and let’s try something out, see how it works.” So the idea was to be able to have more spontaneity, in who we worked with, and just more efficiency as far as getting people into the studio. There’s a lot of that people like to work here, people like Jermaine Dupri when he’s in town, Rodney Jerkins. I remember we went through a period of time when we were at The Village, when I was still in Minneapolis and Terry was out in L.A. And Terry would be working on two or three projects at the same time, and I’d be working on one. And Terry would go, “Jam, you need to come to L.A., man; it’s jumping out here!”
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