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“Everything I’ve done in this industry has been completely self-taught. I’ve picked everything up I know from watching people and just having the desire to do it.” A die-hard practitioner of the do-it-yourself philosophy, John Morales used his passion for music as the impetus to leapfrog from DJing Bronx bars to ever-escalating positions behind the mixing board, along the way learning from an impressive procession of musical auteurs.  At his peak in the mid-’80s, he and his studio partner Sergio Munzibai were, as M+M, the hottest remixers around and a guaranteed direct line to club-play for the biggest acts who needed dance-floor credibility.  A pro’s pro, Morales has been behind the board for some of the most beloved New York City underground classics as well as for high-profile celebrity artists like the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, Rod Stewart, and Tina Turner.  After a self-imposed break from the business, Morales has returned over the past couple years with three massive collections of his remix work and a vibrant DJ schedule that has taken him from Sydney to Stuttgart.

I sat down with John at his home studio to listen to some of his classic mixes and discuss his lengthy time in the dance-music trenches.

John Morales: I was always into music, from the earliest time. I didn’t know what it would be, but I wanted to do something in music. My first passion was guitar. I had a rock band and we played at high schools, but nothing ever came of it.

Then my father opened a bar with his brother in Jersey City. They pulled the jukebox out because it wasn’t making money, and my father said, “Bring your record player down and play some music.” It was one of those little box record players that you opened up with a built-in speaker in the front, and I would play 45s just to make a little noise in the place. I had amassed a pretty good collection because I’d been working in a record shop, Stan’s, in the Bronx. I played whatever I liked—it could’ve been R&B, jazz, funk, rock—if I liked the song, I liked it. Sam & Dave or Booker T., Gary Puckett and the Union Gap “Young Girl,” the Grassroots “Sha La La [Let’s Live for Today],” the Turtles “Happy Together,” the Box Tops “The Letter.” I had them all. The big advantage was working at the record shop. I got ten records a week for sitting in the store and making sure nobody stole. Every Tuesday, all the new 45s would come in, and I’d play every one, pulling the ones that I wanted. By the end of the week, I’d have my little stack.

By the mid-’70s, I was starting to play the bars in the Bronx. I would just walk in and ask if they needed a DJ. I didn’t care about the money; I wanted to do it because I enjoyed it! I was playing all the early disco—Philly stuff like Harold Melvin and Loleatta Holloway. 

A pivotal record for me was “Date with the Rain,” Eddie Kendricks. That was the one that made me want to learn to edit and do something creative with music. I just loved that record, but it was too short. So I figured a way to use the pause button on a cassette to extend the song: I’d take a pencil and wind [the tape] back a little bit, just to where the record head stopped, then I’d punch in the next part. I just had a desire to [make an extended mix], so I figured out how to do it! After graduating from cassettes, I saved my money and got a Sony TC-730 reel-to-reel. That’s what I used when I started to learn to edit. It had a built-in echo effect, which I tended to overuse. From there, I bought a Teac 3300, then an Otari. I had a lot of different gear, but the philosophy was the same: you still had to cut the tape. And I became really good at it.

Doing the [extended mixes of] medleys was time-consuming. It was a lot of work finding the records that had the right breaks and the right combinations. It could take hours to just put together a little snare hit stuck in the middle of something. My early edits were my education—they didn’t really work for dancers. I was more concerned about being creative. After that, I started to make medleys I could play in clubs, medleys that would flow almost like a mix. I did a Village People medley, a John Davis and the Monster Orchestra medley, a Love & Kisses medley, a Prince medley. I didn’t have a reel-to-reel in any of the places I was DJing, so I needed to find somewhere to cut them to acetate. I looked in the phone book and found this place at 1650 Broadway that was reasonable, Sunshine Sound. 

There were a lot of record companies that were housed in that building, a lot of producers who worked there, and a lot of labels: Greg Carmichael, Patrick Adams, Randy Muller, Midsong International, Red Greg. They would cut their demos at Sunshine and were Sunshine’s primary business. It cost you ten, fifteen dollars to put eight minutes on a little mono, 10-inch plate. DJs like myself, Jay Negron, François [Kevorkian], Keith Dumpson, and other guys who were experimenting with editing started going there and cutting stuff, and the owner realized this could be a new way to make money. He would sell the mixes we were doing to other DJs. The deal was he would give you a dollar for each one of yours he sold, plus you would get your copy cut for free. I was all in!

I was doing so many of these medleys and edits and was getting so popular that one day, Frank [Trimarco], the guy who ran Sunshine Sound, told Greg and Patrick, “There’s this guy here who’s doing all this stuff for the DJs; you should probably check him out.” The next time I went in, Frank said, “Go down and see Greg and Patrick; they may have you do a real mix!” So I went down to whatever floor they were on, and sure enough, they said, “Come to the studio Saturday at four in the morning.” So I went.

I’ve never forgotten the moment I walked in. Patrick’s there with his engineer, and Jocelyn Brown is on the other side of the glass, singing, “Caught up…in a one night love affair…” I’ll never forget it. The session ended and Patrick said, “It’s on you now; you gotta put all this together!” We were all listening to the playback of the vocal, and there’s this one part where Jocelyn’s voice just breaks—cracks—as she’s singing the chorus. Before she left for the night, she looked at me and said, “John Morales, make sure you don’t use that!” I told her I wouldn’t...but I did. For me it created this special moment in the song; it was a precursor to the break. She never let me forget that. Every time I’d see her, she’d say, “I told you not to use that!” I told her, “Jocelyn, it made the record what it was.”

When we did “Caught Up” [Inner Life in 1979], Greg lived in the Bronx on Spaulding Avenue. We would drive out to the pressing plant in New Jersey to pick up boxes of the 12-inch, put them in the back of Greg’s car and take them to all the record shops in the city. Five here, ten there, and when they sold, we’d go back to Jersey to get another box. The breaking point was when Frankie [Crocker] picked up the record at WBLS and started playing it. That’s when things changed. I’ll never forget the time I was home in the Bronx, and somebody called and said, “Put on ’BLS!” And there it was: “Caught up…in a one night love affair!” We were on the radio! This is happening! 

There was a lot of controversy with the record. I found out later that Greg had never gotten permission from Patrick to actually press it up. He had told Patrick that he wanted to demo Jocelyn, to hear how her voice sounded on something, and Patrick let him use the backing track. The song had already been cut with Terri Gonzalez singing lead—she also wrote a couple of ad-libbed lines in the middle of the tune, which was why she eventually got a writing credit on it. By the time Patrick found out what Greg had done, there was a bidding war for the rights to the song between RCA and Prelude. Prelude offered $17,500—a lot of money for a single at that time—and so it went to them. The group was originally called Life but was renamed Inner Life. Although Terri Gonzalez got her writing credit, Jocelyn’s vocal was kept and went on to…become legendary.

From that moment, I never looked back. Wherever Greg and Patrick were, that’s where I was. Even if I wasn’t invited, I was there. All those sessions were the same musicians. All those acts—Universal Robot Band, Musique, Inner Life, Conversion, Wish—were the same crew of people: Leroy Burgess, Sonny Davenport, Jocelyn, Cindy Mizelle, Luther Vandross. It was mainly driven by Patrick, because he was writing most of the material, along with Leroy and a guy named Stan Lucas, who was the guitar player. I just showed up every day and slowly became part of the production crew. I sat next to Leroy when he was playing, maybe giving a suggestion—“How about doing this?”—and getting my two cents in. I was mixing, I was producing, I was recording, I was doing stuff I didn’t know how to do! Some nights, it was just me and Jocelyn in the studio, Jocelyn at the piano, me hitting record. I didn’t know shit, but I knew what it meant when the red light went on. I always knew what I wanted to hear, so I would work to make that happen. 

I was getting credits on most of the stuff I did, but not always the right credits, since I was doing so many things. I was involved in every facet of making all those early records. If the session started at ten in the morning, I was there at nine. If the session ended at six, I was leaving at 8:30. I wanted to do music and learn every part of how to do it, so I made sure I was there for every aspect. I needed to learn and I couldn’t afford to go to a school—and this was really better than any school. There’s no better training than being in a studio doing it. I was paying for it with my time, if you look at it that way. 

Back in ’79 or ’80, WBLS started Friday Night Dance Party [an on-air DJ mix segment]. This was right after “Caught Up,” so I had that as my calling card. I went up to ’BLS to introduce myself and met Sergio [Munzibai], Frankie’s assistant. He asked if I wanted to do a mix for the show, so I went home and put together an hour-long tape. After that, I did mixes for ’BLS as often as possible. We also had a syndication thing for Westwood with Frankie. City Rhythms, 1984. They would press these up and send them to radio stations, and that was the show. We did these at Blank Tapes, where I was back working with Bob Blank.

When M+M productions launched in 1982, t overlapped with what I was doing with Greg and Patrick. Back then, it was real political. Record companies wanted their stuff on the radio. And if you were tied into the radio in any way, you had an advantage. So during that period, Salsoul came to Sergio and asked if he wanted to do a mix for them. Sergio in turn called me, because he had no mixing experience. I set him up with Bob at Blank Tapes, because Salsoul already worked there, and told him I’d come down and help him out. By the end of the night, we had decided “Munzibai/Morales…M+M Mix.” It sounded good. From there we started working together. I broke with Greg and Patrick shortly after, mainly due to business issues—I wasn’t getting paid! Sergio unfortunately passed away in the early ’90s, but I still use the M+M name in his memory.

Sessions heavily involving Leroy’s band, were “Barely Breaking Even” [by the Universal Robot Band] and Conversion. The band consisted of Leroy, Sonny [T. Davenport], and James [Calloway: keyboard, drums, and bass, respectively]. That was the core of the group, the same way [Ronald] Baker, [Norman] Harris, and [Earl] Young were in Philly. Leroy would layer all the keyboard work, which is very intricate. If you look into any of those songs by Inner Life, or the Aleems, anything associated with Leroy, it’s drums, bass, percussion, and heavy keyboard. We could record five, six, seven tracks in one day. Then we would build on them. [Inner Life’s] “Moment of My Life,” “(Knock Out) Let’s Go Another Round,” and “Make It Last Forever,” those were all done on the same day. A lot of times, it’d be a matter of Leroy, Sonny, and James coming up with some kind of groove and [deciding], all right, that’s a song! They would start with just those three guys, then Leroy would layer the keyboard work over it and put a rough vocal on it.

For [Ronnie Dyson’s “All Over Your Face”] session, Ronnie and Butch Ingram, the producer, were there. I have a picture of that session: It was me, Sergio, Ronnie, Butch Ingram, and Butch Jones, who was the engineer. That was a great night. We walked away the next morning knowing it was a good record, saying, “This is gonna be a hit!” When I started DJing again a couple years ago, I played it in a couple places in the U.K., and I was shocked at how many people knew the song. Everybody was singing it. And I thought, we were right, these were really good records!

Originally done [in 1978], “Weekend” [by Class Action] was by Patrick’s band, Phreek, with Christine [Whiltshire], who Patrick was going out with at the time. A couple years later, Sleeping Bag Records boss Will Socolov had the idea to update the song. Here’s where it gets complicated: Tom Moulton claims that he produced a track for West End that was never used, and that became the backing track of the new “Weekend”—Bob Blank took it to make up for West End’s non-payment of studio fees. Bob, on the other hand, denies this. He says he recorded the track at Will’s request with Fred Zarr on keys at Fred’s studio in Brooklyn.

In any case, me and Sergio were at Blank Tapes doing something different while Bob was mixing “Weekend” in another room. We saw him in the hall, and he said, “I’m doing this mix for Sleeping Bag; do you guys want to do the 12-inch?” We were like, “Fuck yeah!” So we went in and did our multiple versions like we usually do. Some people liked Larry Levan’s mix, some liked ours, but everybody loved our a cappella dub because you can use it. It got sampled like crazy.

Someone asked me, “Do you listen to the original before you start on your mix?” The answer is no. I put up the stems [individual tracks] on a blank canvas, no templates or presets. I always start from scratch. I do have a certain workflow that I use, where I do the drums first, and I build the track a certain way, but even back in the day, it was the same: it was a process. Put up tracks, listen to it, and just feel where the track wants to take you—or where you want it to go. Do you want to do a break intro? A lot of stuff, especially 12-inches, you’re gearing towards the club and the DJ. You want to make sure that it’s easy for them to play. So that’s part of the consideration. A lot of our records back then started with drum breaks, or bass breaks—stuff that aided transitions. If a record’s too hard to get into, a lot of guys aren’t going to play it.

One thing about my style is that it’s very conducive to being ripped off. Because of all the a cappella parts and drum breaks that I leave in, it’s easy for someone to take them and use them for something else. For a while, I felt like I should try to avoid using open parts like that. But, ultimately, I came to the realization that if I adopted that position, I would compromise what I do. It would eliminate a big part of what’s a trademark in my work: massive breakdowns, very sparse breaks, the buildup, and all the layering that I do with vocals and keys. I realized that if I leave something out because I don’t want anybody to use it, it’s going to make the mix less than what it could be. So I’m just going to go ahead and do the best mix that I can, and if people want to use sections, I’ll look at it as flattery.