The Clarke/Duke Project 2

(1983)

Oh my God!! Stanley and I found the drum machine. Well, too late to do anything about it now. It was a well produced record overall, but failed to capture that true Clarke/Duke essence because there was no live drummer bashin' and crashin' on most of the tunes. We were sort of a product of the time. A lot of music sounded like this during that period. We made the mistake of not depending on ourselves, like we did on the first record. Now that doesn't mean there were no good moments.

The best thing about this LP was the video. It was cool!! The song "Heroes" became the single for this LP. It had moderate success. Some of the music on this record sounds like the Flash Dance Soundtrack without Mike Sembello singing.

Actually, I think I actually started singing pretty well by this time. I still had some range (which I've lost now) and began to sing like a singer instead of a musician singing notes.

Actually, the entire record is not drum machine, fortunately. John Robinson, Narada, and Billy Cobham played on a few tracks; and Jeffrey Osborne (who I had just produced a top ten single for) and Howard Hewett from Shalimar contributed some vocals.

I had begun to use another young engineer named Erik Zobler around this time (who is still my engineer today). He started with me as a second engineer and worked his way up to big chief, head honcho engineer. Erik recorded some overdubs, but at that time, Tommy was still my main man and mixed the record. Actually, Stanley began using Erik to record his solo records for awhile.

Although there were some special moments on this LP, overall it didn't make a statement and as a result was a failure as far as I'm concerned. The year was 1983. I was exerting so much energy producing Deniece Williams, Jeffrey Osborne and others, that in terms of focus, I let this one slip away.

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