Mixed with Love, five Walter Gibbons mixes

Walter Gibbons was born in Brooklyn on 2 April 1954, stood five foot five and said very little.

He played at Galaxy 21, an after-hours room on Twenty-third Street, and did something almost nobody was doing in 1975: he bought two copies of the same record so he could move from one break to the next without ever letting the song come back.

When the breaks were too short to hold up live, he went home and edited them onto reel-to-reel. Everybody who was there agrees on this one: he got there with the scissors first.

He died in 1994, in near anonymity. These five mixes are in date order, and behind each one there is somebody who got angry.

Double Exposure, “Ten Percent” (1976)

Ken Cayre, who had just set up Salsoul, had heard him work the track at Galaxy using two copies of a promotional test pressing.

The song was four minutes long. In the studio, at Blank Tapes, Gibbons and engineer Bob Blank had three hours: one to put up the mix and route the sound, one to break the session down, one to cut tape with a razor blade.

What came out ran nine minutes and forty-five seconds. The fee was a hundred and eighty-five dollars: eighty-five to cover the night at Galaxy he was missing, a hundred for the blend.

The twelve-inch came out in May, and it is the first twelve-inch single ever sold to the public.

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The man who did not take it well was the song’s writer, Allan Felder: “The mixer cut up the lyrics and changed the music. It was as if the writers and producers were nothing.”

The Salsoul Orchestra, “Salsoul 3001” (1976)

The track he started from was called Salsoul 2001. Gibbons renamed it and opened it with jet engines, animal whoops, congas and timbales before letting the strings in.

Vince Aletti, in his Disco File column in Record World: “This has got to be one of the year’s most extraordinary products and although it may be too overwhelming and bizarre for some clubs, others, like New York’s Loft, turn to pandemonium when the record comes on.”

Tom Moulton, who had written the grammar of the remix, could not follow him: “Walter did this weird, off-the-wall stuff with ‘3001’. I said, ‘Walter, what was going through that brain of yours for 3001?’ It was nothing like ‘2001’.”

Loleatta Holloway, “Hit and Run” (1976)

Here the nature of the job changes, and Cayre says it plainly: this is the first time a studio handed a DJ the multitrack tape.

On Ten Percent Gibbons had only been able to cut and splice a mixed master. Now he could choose track by track, and the choice he made is drastic.

He sliced out most of the strings and horns to bring up the Baker, Harris and Young rhythm section. Then he cut the first two minutes and all of the verses of the vocal, keeping only the second, improvised half.

The result runs eleven minutes and seven seconds.

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The producer, Norman Harris, sent the reel to Moulton with a note on it asking whether the thing had any musical merit at all.

The twelve-inch went on to sell some three hundred thousand copies, more than the Ten Percent twelve-inch and more than the Hit and Run seven-inch. That closed the question of musical merit.

Strafe, “Set It Off” (1984)

Eight years later, with the scene having lost sight of him, Gibbons turned up at the Funhouse and put two white test pressings of a new record into Tony Smith’s hands. It came out on Jus Born, a label he co-owned.

The first night went badly. Smith kept it on for ten minutes and the floor emptied: that crowd wanted something else.

Then he started playing it once a night. After a month people were asking for the title of a record they did not know, calling it by the words they could hear in it.

The label read “Mixed with Love by Walter Gibbons”. According to Smith, he had got eighteen minutes out of a four-minute song; the vocal version you can hear today runs nine forty-five.

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We queued it straight after Ten Percent to hear the eight years in between, and the thing that jumps out is not the instrumentation: it is that by 1984 the space between the hits had become the main part of the record.

Arts and Crafts, “Searchin’”

The second Jus Born release goes back to the shape of his 1970s mixes, and Lawrence rates it as his most beautiful: a bongo pattern, then a bass, then the voices, then a sax, each with its own room.

It is not on Spotify, and we are not swapping in something else. Anyone who wants to hear it has to look for the vinyl or the reissues.

Gibbons mixed less and less after that, and made his last records with the cellist Arthur Russell. The trade he had invented, by then, was being shared out among everybody.