Interview: Keith LeBlanc

A legendary funk drummer dips into the blues

Keith LeBlanc in the studio. (I have those same headphones.)

I’ve been a fan of drummer Keith LeBlanc for well over 30 years. I first heard his 1987 album Major Malfunction in high school, along with the 1988 album Tackhead Tape Time, which compiled and remixed some of that proto-industrial hip-hop crew’s classic early singles (“What’s My Mission Now?”, “Mind at the End of the Tether”) with new vocals from ranter Gary Clail. This music sounded like nothing I’d ever heard; it still doesn’t. A couple of years later, I picked up LeBlanc’s second solo record, Stranger Than Fiction, which was just as weird and wild, and even more elaborate in its everything-into-the-pot sampledelic style. The members of Tackhead — LeBlanc, guitarist Skip McDonald, bassist Doug Wimbish, and producer Adrian Sherwood — made a bunch of other records, too, with Clail, with Mark Stewart, and with others. Some were great, some weren’t. Eventually, Tackhead became a full-on band, releasing two albums of dubby alternative funk-rock with vocalist Bernard Fowler, and that wasn’t really what I liked about them, so I drifted away. The last thing they did that I really loved was the single “Ticking Time Bomb”.

LeBlanc has a new project, New Moves, credited to The Chess Project and featuring Fowler, McDonald, and guest appearances from guitarist Eric Gales and bassists MonoNeon and Mohini Dey, plus a few other bassists and horn players. They’re reworking old songs from the Chess Records catalog like “Smokestack Lightning,” “Moanin’ at Midnight,” “Nine Below Zero,” “Boom Boom (Out Go the Lights)” and the like as dubbed-out blues-funk jams. It’s an outgrowth of or sequel to a 2008 release, Chess Moves (Future Blues), on which LeBlanc chopped up and sampled the classic Chess recordings and added guitar and bass from McDonald — who has his own dubby industrial blues project, Little Axe — and Wimbish.

“We had the original vocalists, their voices on it,” he explained to me. “I would cut it up and, you know, retune it — basically just jockey it around to where I got it in kind of a rap format. And, you know, we got a release on Universal, but it didn’t really do anything. Never got promoted. And it was formative stages. So…a few years went by and I decided to put some live drums on one of the tracks. Just to see what it sounded like, and it sounded really good. So I got Bernard Fowler to try a vocal on it. It sounded even better. So that’s how we ended up doing the New Moves album.”

The executive producer of New Moves was Marshall Chess, son of one of the founders of Chess Records and the man behind numerous attempts to modernize blues over the years, including producing Electric Mud and After the Rain for Muddy Waters and The Howlin’ Wolf Album for Howlin’ Wolf (the one with the stark white cover that reads “This is Howlin’ Wolf’s new album. He doesn’t like it. He didn’t like his electric guitar at first either.”). He and LeBlanc first met in the late early ’80s and have drifted in and out of each other’s orbits ever since. Chess was the executive producer of LeBlanc’s first single, 1983’s “Malcolm X — No Sell Out,” which laid samples of Malcolm’s voice over electronic beats.

Anyway, New Moves is interesting and worth your time (it’s on streaming services; check it out), but I mostly wanted to talk to Keith LeBlanc about his early work. Because before they even started Tackhead, he, McDonald, and Wimbish were the house band at Sugar Hill Records, playing on hit records by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, the Sugar Hill Gang, and Funky Four +1, as well as jazz acts like organist Jack McDuff and various R&B vocalists. So that was the bulk of our conversation, which is below, “edited for clarity,” as they say.

You, Skip and Doug have worked together for over 40 years, starting with Sugar Hill and then through all the different Adrian Sherwood projects and with Mark Stewart. But then also, like, playing on records by Tina Turner and Annie Lennox in the nineties. So how did the three of you initially come together?

A wonderful drummer named Harold Sargent put us together. He's probably the most sampled drummer besides Clyde Stubblefield ever. He passed away a few years ago, and Harold saw me at a club playing — sittin’ in, I think — and he came up to me and said, “I got just the guys for you to play with.” And so he introduced me to Skip, and I auditioned for their band. They had a band at the time called Wood, Brass and Steel, and Harold had to leave the band, so he was looking for a replacement. And I showed up at the audition with a bass drum and snare drum and hi-hat and one cymbal. And we hit it off. So, um, that was the beginning of meeting those guys. And I loved it because, you know, I played with records most of my life. That’s how I learned as a kid. And, you know, I loved fusion music and funk music and everybody I played it with, it just didn’t feel right. And these guys, it immediately felt perfect. And them being such wonderful musicians, you know, like Doug was my vision of the perfect bass player. And Skip was just phenomenal on guitar. So over the years, you know, we became like family and we’d all do the hired gun thing at certain times, but it was always that connection, because we had been through so much together over the years, I mean, we basically learned how to produce records working at Sugar Hill, you know, watching that process happen every day for years. And then, we got on our own and met Adrian, and all of a sudden we had access to try anything we wanted in the studio. So we just — all the ideas we had been saving up, we got a chance to do it. And Adrian, wonderful to work with because, you know, he was like a facilitator. You know, he’d have some great ideas and he knew when to let it happen. And I loved him because he was willing to try anything, which is exactly what I wanted to be doing. So I went over to England first, I think, and did some tracks with Adrian, and I said, “Ah, man, we need Skip and Doug, these two friends of mine.” So I introduced Adrian and them and we did some things, and it was magic — we just started using the studio like a new instrument. Some really great times. I’m really glad — I’m fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time for most of my career.

When you were playing on those early Sugar Hill hip-hop records… it’s really interesting to me because everybody knows the singles, but when you listen to the actual albums, there are songs on there that are basically covers of current hits with rapping on top. And so, like, what was the process? What was the studio environment like, and how fast were you guys cranking out material? Was it just like being in a Motown studio band? Just go, go, go?

Pretty much. Of course, I was the new guy so it was all brand new to me. I think the first album, we came up with some tracks and Sylvia [Robinson, Sugar Hill owner] called in other producers and we worked for them. That first album was really, you know, I wasn’t very proud of it, but no one else had a rap album out at the time. So I knew it was going to sell. And then they got more of a system in place. Sylvia saw that… no one was going to give up anything. So she hired this producer/arranger named Jiggs Chase, a brilliant keyboardist and arranger. And he came in with this guy, Ed Fletcher, and they had a band. They came to Sugar Hill, they planned on replacing us. But when they heard us play, they forgot about their band [laughs] and tried to get in there themselves. So once we were set up and and going, Sylvia would see what the DJs were cutting in the clubs, that people were rapping over, and Jiggs would write an arrangement of that and we’d usually try and do a better cut of it than the original. And you know, add certain things to it and he’d have charts for us and of course he’d let us add our ideas. The process was basically, Skip and Doug would plug up in the control room and play the track with me, and I’d be in the live room on the drums and to a click and they’d pick a drum take. I’d usually do no more than two and they’d pick a drum take they liked, and then Skip and Doug would record again, over it, because the first time through they would just play with me so I had something to play with, really. And then maybe the Chops horn section — Jiggs would have parts for them, and then, you know, handclaps, a party track, and then the rappers would go down, whoever it was that was doing that designated track. And this went on constantly for about three years straight. And in between — there were two studios. They had one that they rented called H & L Studios in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. And then they had built a new studio in their complex in Englewood, New Jersey. So, you know, all the tracks and artists that weren’t a priority would cut down there. And so when we were recording at H & L Studios, [those] were the records that [we] were pretty much sure they were going to come out, [and] we’d be at their other studio recording for heaven knows who, you know, like Jack McDuff…So we were constantly recording. It was like a job, and I was getting paid for doing something I love. So, you know, I didn’t really concentrate on anything but doing the best job I could do. I always felt like if I messed up once, I’d be replaced in a heartbeat. [laughs] That’s kind of the vibe I picked up. So I made sure I was the best I could be for that period of time. And in the process, you just watch how these recordings were done. I mean, I think that time in hip hop, if I had to put it in a category, I’d call it the golden age of hip hop, really…It was all live bands, you know, maybe a DJ on top, [and] progressed from there. Drum machines came in, so I had to learn how to work with those. But, you know, we’d drive down to New Jersey on a Monday and record all week and then drive back to Connecticut on a Friday night and then do the same thing the next week. Unless we were on tour, which might last a month or two months.

So you were the live band as well, for shows?

Yeah, we were the live band for most of them at the beginning — everybody but Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, because Grandmaster Flash was so ridiculously good on the turntables, you know, and he had a little drum machine that he had made. You didn’t even miss a band. We saw the changes coming before a lot of people. I mean, when we first went out on the road, all the other bands hated us, you know, they despised us, all except for Parliament-Funkadelic. They liked us. I think George Clinton knew what rap was going to do long before we did, because to me, it was just a progression of funk music. It didn’t seem like anything really new to me. But yeah, it was a constant barrage of recordings. I’m still finding out things I played on to this day, actually.

So like you were saying, the transition to drum machines came along. So were you playing live drums at all on those early Tackhead singles like “Mind at the End of the Tether” and “What’s My Mission Now?” and stuff, or were those all programmed, and what kind of equipment were you using in those days?

Well, you know, a lot of the first ones were programmed because I got — Marshall Chess had bought me a drum machine after I did “No Sell Out.” I had borrowed one to do that. But I guess he looked at me and he went, Wow, this guy needs one of these things, you know? So he got me one, and I had access to this thing and at the time, it was like having a 24-track studio for drums. So being a drummer, I naturally did things with it that weren’t in the instruction book and things that a drummer could never do. So that’s what I was trying to do on some of those first Tackhead [records]. And then we had to figure out how to do that live, so that’s where the live drums came in again, I started triggering the drum sounds and actually playing the parts. And then as Tackhead progressed, it was a combination of live drums and drum machine, but that kind of developed out of necessity. I mean, we had done a bunch of records and Prince was copying stuff of ours and we were kind of like the press darlings in New York at the time. And we were talking to Vernon Reid, and Living Colour hadn’t taken off yet, and he was reading the press and at a loft me and Skip had, he looked at me and Doug and he said, “Hey, could Tackhead do a gig?” And we kind of went, Hmm, that’s a real good question, Vernon. So me and Doug and Skip started trying to figure out how to do live gigs, and that spawned a whole nother thing entirely. We’ve always — that rhythm section has always been like the first to try stuff and then everybody else does their version of it afterwards and makes loads of money.

OK, so Major Malfunction is, like, one of my favorite records. I used to listen to that album so much in high school, and I read that it was done incredibly fast, like just over the course of a couple of days. Is that right?

Well, it really took more like a week. And once again, that’s one album I’m proud of, because I was in the perfect situation with the perfect guys. But yet I had control over it, you know, which a lot of times in a democracy, you don’t get — you might not agree with some things, so you kind of have to roll with it. And this, this I had complete control over, because Adrian said “Keith, what do you think about doing a drum album?” I said, “Yeah, sounds good.” So I think we were in the middle of a Tackhead album at the time. And so we just started taking my beats and Adrian would mix them and slam [it] down to a quarter-inch tape. And I’d get the stuff from him and I then I’d edit it all up in really strange ways, and then we’d fly it back into the multitrack, do some overdubs on it and then he’d record it to me again. So I was doing all kinds of wild tape manipulation stuff, you know, with Adrian’s wild mixes and Skip and Doug right there to play anything that I wanted them to play. Couldn’t go wrong, really. So I remember I was sitting at the editing machine. It was in the same room as they were mixing the Tackhead album. So no one was paying me any attention. And I knew it was really — I really loved it, you know? And I’d get back to the hotel and I still had my headphones on, you know, and I’d be checking it, thinking about edits I was going to do the next day, and no one really heard it till we went to master the Tackhead album. And then they said, “Oh, let’s master Keith’s little album.” So I put it on and everyone went, Whoa! Because, uh, it was just one of those things. I think there’s three things I’ve done that I’ve really had artistic control over and I’ve had the right situation to do it. The first one was “No Sell Out,” the second one was Major Malfunction, and the third one is this album that’s coming out now. I’ve done lots of albums in between that, but those were the three really magical ones I knew while I was doing it. Oh gee, I really love this. You know, I don’t care who doesn’t like it. I love it, you know? So I can still listen to Major Malfunction and like it. It’s one of those things — I remember Future Sound of London came to a studio I had in London. They wanted to pick my brain and license a few samples from me and stuff, and they were so disappointed, looking at my studio, you know, because they expected it to be filled with computers and everything. And they said, “How did you do Major Malfunction?” And I said, “Well, you know, I had Adrian, Skip and Doug and a lot of tape manipulation,” and they were so disappointed. You know, they were telling me that album was like their template for all the stuff they were doing. Of course, they used whole different technology, really.

In the ’90s, you did a lot of studio work, playing on Annie Lennox’s Diva and Tina Turner’s Wildest Dreams and Seal’s first album — was there ever a chance for meaningful collaboration in those days, or was it here’s the song, here’s your check, like back at Sugar Hill?

Well, in the Sugar Hill days there was quite a lot of collaboration. You never got paid for it, but I was always coming up with ideas for Sylvia, and she liked a lot of them. And you never got paid for that. Got some brownie points [laughs]. That was probably about it, you know? But a lot of the work I did in the UK really came through Trevor Horn. I hooked up with him. He hired me for one record and he really liked what I did, saw that I could program and play drums and everything. So…Tina Turner, Seal, those two were Trevor Horn productions, really. And Trevor, his way of collaborating — you know, late at night, he’d say, “Hey, Keith, come on in the studio, I’m just gonna throw up multitracks, play anything you want.” So he was really fun to work with, actually. And I loved him because I got to see the future before it happened, because he was probably the first guy I’d ever seen punch in drums. You know, I’d never really seen that before or done it. And he had like two 64-channel digital machines or two 32-track. He had 64 tracks in digital, and it was quite expensive back then. And, you know, I did some productions on my own, like, uh, Nine Inch Nails, I did that before I moved over to England. Just before I moved over there. I didn’t even know it was like a massive hit for years, ’cause I had my head down working. I didn’t really think about it. I’d done a lot of production, but they weren’t that collaborative. Like, working with Tackhead or Adrian or Trevor Horn, you know, he let me try a lot of things. He was always experimenting. And Annie Lennox, she was really cool, too. She’s a real singer. A lot of singers have to punch in things and get Auto-Tuned in, but she would go in the studio, just nail it right there, with the musicians. So there was a lot of collaboration there. She left room for that, she was really open and nice, really honest, you know? When it comes right down to it, for something to be really good, it’s got to be really honest. It can’t be fake good. It’s got to be actual good. And Annie left room for that. Tina Turner I never even got to meet. I just did the drum tracks, because I don’t think she was too well at the time. And Trevor had to bring a studio to her house, basically, to record the vocals. I didn’t get a chance to meet her, which I would have liked to, but I got a chance to meet a lot of my heroes, and they never disappointed me, you know, usually.

I’m curious about technology from your perspective — how much of your work these days is drumming versus programing, and how much do you keep up to date? Or do you use older gear, you know, just out of preference?

Oh, I keep up to date, as far as gear goes. I use the latest gear. But I still work the way I worked, you know, 50 years ago. I haven’t changed anything about the way I work. It’s just a lot of things are a lot easier now, and don’t take as much time. But I haven’t changed the way I work. As far as drums go, I play every day, I record every day, and I still, you know, do a whole take that you don’t have to do anything to. And it’s just really to keep my my head straight, keep me humble. And it’s physically and mentally good. I’m still practicing every day. I’ll never learn everything I want to learn, but I’m going to try and learn as much as I can. It’s really — with me, it’s a matter of being curious. I think that’s why I’ve kept up with the gear, because I’m curious what can be done with it. And so it’s a wonderful time because they’ve gotten it to the point where, you know, you can’t tell whether it’s a world-class, million-dollar built studio or someone’s bedroom.

See, and that’s what’s interesting to me, is I feel as a listener sometimes like programming is too good, in a way. Like, there are digital drum kits now that thanks to modern processing power, they can sound identical to physical kits. Whereas when you were starting out, the primitivism of digital beats, of an 808 or like, the cheesy digital handclaps or whatever, was kind of the point. So what’s the aesthetic challenge or the thrill, if there is one, of using a perfect digital emulation of drums?

Well, it’s really what the idea is. That’s what’s important. If your idea is good enough, you could be using almost anything, and it’ll work. But I think there’s such a thing as too perfect, I agree with that. You know, that’s why when I do live drums, I do live drums. So you have all those little imperfections that a machine wouldn’t have. And those imperfections to me make music really live. A lot of the great musical moments in history are accidents. You know, it’s those little accidents that you don’t expect, that spontaneity. So no matter what equipment I’m using, I always try and keep the spontaneity in there, ’cause it’s quite boring to me to have everything absolutely perfect. I think it’s probably challenging for young artists when they can go, okay, I’ll take this bassline and mix it with this drum beat. Oh, I’ve got a chord patch here. I’ll put that — oh, that works good. And I got a vocal patch over here. You know, it’s almost like cut and paste. So a lot of the skill is gone out of it, but there’s still young artists that are breaking new ground on the instruments. So that gives me hope. That the human factor stays in it. But if you’re afraid to embrace change, you stay in the same place. That’s what I loved about Miles Davis. Once he did something, he moved on to the next thing. He never did the same thing ever again. Constant progression, pushing his ideas, which I really loved about all his stuff. I mean, I didn’t love all his music. I think Bitches Brew, I used it for a frisbee when I first bought it as a kid, you know? Now I quite like it, but back then, it was just too much for me.

That’s it for now. See you next week!