St. James Wants to Make You Feel Like Dancing

Jon St. James, pop music technocrat, sits in a dimly lit cockpit of buttons, levers and knobs. There is a serious commercial stake in the task at hand, but St. James, wearing a golf hat and shades in a recording studio as safe from sunlight as a bomb shelter, is behaving like a kid in a video arcade. Or, more accurately, an audio arcade.

St. James, whose productions have cracked the Top Ten on the national charts, is trying to manufacture another dance-club hit for Stacey Q, the urchin of a singer seated next to him with her legs dangling and an orange ball hanging from her left ear like a Christmas tree ornament. Together, singer and record producer are remixing “Good Girl,” a song from Stacey Q’s new album, “Hard Machine.” The idea is to punch up the album version with added rhythm parts and percussive effects--anything that will make people more inclined to dance to it.

St. James whirls his tall frame away from the massive control board in front of him and bends to grab a black box resembling a TV channel changer. He taps it three times, and three echoey, computer-generated bursts of sound, electronically permuted from Stacey Q’s own voice, punctuate the song’s percolating rhythm.

No need to do it by hand, really, St. James says--he could have programmed the gadget to work automatically in perfect time to the music. But tapping is more fun.

Fun is a catchword with St. James. At 35, he operates with a sense of youthful enthusiasm that makes an anomaly of the strands of gray mixed in the long, unkempt cascade of hair pouring out from under his hat. It is a modulated enthusiasm, animated but not overbearing--a steady, upbeat simmer rather than a boil.

St. James’ next move is a twist, not a tap--a wiggle of a console button that produces a fast, rolling explosion of beats as shattering as trash cans crashing in the middle of the night.

Stacey Q (whose real surname is Swain) makes slits of her large, almond eyes, nods to the beat, and says “yeah.” That should get ‘em on their feet--and maybe help create more of a buzz for “Hard Machine,” which so far has been slow to match the commercial expectations raised by “Better Than Heaven,” her previous, hot-selling collaboration with St. James.

(The new album’s first single, “Don’t Make a Fool of Yourself,” hit No. 1 this week on Billboard’s list of dance singles but has dropped down the commercially crucial pop singles chart after peaking at No. 66.)

Two years ago, St. James and Swain convened in the same dark room in the same nondescript La Habra office park and recorded a little tune called “Two of Hearts” that sent out big ripples. The Orange County team recorded the song with the tastes of East L.A. dance-club crowds in mind, and it rose to No. 3 on the Billboard singles chart, helping to re-establish the discredited disco sound as a commercially significant force in pop music.

For St. James, it was success in an unlikely form. He grew up loving the elaborately orchestrated, defiantly undanceable British progressive rock of bands like Genesis, Yes and Pink Floyd. During disco’s first flowering in the 1970s, St. James was part of the rockers’ backlash--even writing a song called “No Disco.”

While his incarnation as a craftsman of dance hits might seem unlikely, it is not surprising that St. James has broken through to success as a record producer and songwriter. Underlying the crisp, technologically punchy sound of Stacey Q and Bardeux--a new female duo that St. James has guided to dance-chart hits--is a studio savvy developed through years of dissection and replication of the rock classics.

Actually, St. James is more than a producer and songwriter these days: He is a music entrepreneur with his own recording studio and his own record label, and he manages or markets the performers he records. That role too is founded upon hands-on experience acquired through the music industry’s schools of frustration and hard knocks.

St. James’ early musical schooling came from his parents, first-generation rock fans who were still in their teens when he was born in Hamilton, Ontario. His father, a truck driver named Lester (Lefty) St. James, played in a rockabilly band. St. James remembers his mother, Jan, joining in to harmonize on Everly Brothers songs at family gatherings.

The family moved to California when Jon was 9, and before he was in his teens his father had taught him to play the guitar. St. James also learned to play drums in stints with high school garage bands in Norwalk. The garage was his alone: His parents had soundproofed it to give him and his friends a place to practice.

Parental support for his musical ambitions ended abruptly, though, when St. James showed signs of wanting to make a career of it.

“One day when I was in my late teens, they stepped up and completely changed their attitude. ‘It’s time to get a job. Let’s face it, you’re not gonna make it in the music business.’ ”

Instead of going out job hunting, St. James moved to France with his band, French Lick.

“That was my first mistake because France is the worst place to make a living in music,” he said. “There were no clubs. We should have gone to Germany or Scandinavia. It only took about eight months for us to hate each other.”

The group disbanded, and when his money ran out, St. James drifted back to California. He moved in with his parents, who had relocated from Norwalk to Brea. He took a job at a musical instrument store, saved his money and kept playing.

In the late ‘70s, he pooled resources with other musicians and opened the Casbah, a recording studio in Fullerton where St. James launched his producing career. He recorded demo tapes for local groups, worked with bands in the burgeoning Southern California punk rock scene and pursued his own projects, which had taken on a techno-rock slant influenced by European synthesizer bands like Kraftwerk.

Perhaps as significant as developing his own sound, St. James was learning to copy other rock producers’ techniques as assiduously as an apprentice painter tracing masterpieces in a museum.

He began crafting “soundalikes”--exact copies of rock hits by the likes of the Beatles and David Bowie--for use in radio jingles and station identifications. St. James would duplicate a variety of hit songs note for note, with the lyrics changed to hype KMET, then an album-rock station.

“It was all his idea, a very talented guy,” said Jack Snyder, who commissioned St. James’ soundalike work as KMET’s assistant program director. “We’d always get good responses from the listeners.”

There were no complaints from the artists being mimicked, Snyder said: “If there had been any problem, we would have pulled it. But they were very flattered.”

The money St. James earned from soundalikes enabled him to pay for a new recording studio, Formula One, which opened four years ago.

While still at the Casbah, St. James met Stacey Q, whose sylph-like look and girlish voice struck him as the perfect foil for the computer-driven music he was devising. Their first recordings impressed William Hein, head of the small Enigma label.

In 1982, joined by a crew of Casbah musicians in a band called SSQ, St. James and Stacey Q released an album called “Playback” on EMI-America, Enigma’s major label associate at the time. St. James also released an album of his own, “Trans Atlantic.” Both records were lost in the executive turmoil at EMI-America and received little promotional push.

With their first attempt at a national breakthrough “stillborn,” as St. James puts it, he and SSQ went back in the studio and cast about for a new musical direction.

“We started throwing spaghetti at the wall,” he said. “We were doing rock, some that sounded like (Pat) Benatar, some like Olivia Newton-John. We were searching for something that would interest a record label.”

It materialized one day in 1985 when Bill Walker, who sold records at swap meets and at a family shop in Norwalk, arrived at Formula One to record with a Latin funk and rap band he had signed to his own custom record label.

Walker told St. James that there was a burgeoning market for dance music in the Latin community. He played the producer some of his store’s hottest sellers.

“I said, ‘I could record something like that in five minutes,’ ” St. James recalled.

To find out more, he accompanied Walker to a dance party at a rented hall in East L.A. Until then, St. James said: “I (had) never set foot in East L.A. Isn’t that a place you drive through with your doors locked? I didn’t realize there wasn’t that much difference between East L.A. kids and Orange County kids.”

Describing his first encounter with dance music in its own element, St. James relived the experience: “I’m listening to these songs, and they’re like nothing I’ve ever heard before. Really percussive, noisy, very spare. And the kids are going nuts over these songs. Now I’m excited. The light bulb goes on in my head. It says, ‘Big fish in a small pond.’ I’m the soundalike king, I can do that, and make something better.”

Within two weeks, he and Stacey Q had come up with “Shy Girl,” which had some dance-club success. They followed it with St. James’ arrangement of “Two of Hearts,” a funk song that had been sent to Walker by songwriters in North Carolina.

Walker began booking Stacey Q and the SSQ musicians into clubs on the Latin circuit and the song became a local hit. Offers poured in from record companies. St. James, well aware of what happens to records that don’t get the proper promotional support, signed Stacey Q to Atlantic, which he believes had the best dance-music department.

St. James and his crew had their first hit, but the commercial breakthrough wasn’t accompanied by much critical respect. Unabashedly entrepreneurial, St. James says accolades matter less to him than sales.

“I don’t feel the need to force my artistic freedom on the world,” he said. “I can do it here (in the studio) for my friends and myself. The masses want commercial music, and I’ll give it to them gladly. We’re making music for a certain marketplace. We happen to be very good at it and enjoy it.”

Still, from the way he wonders aloud why meager-selling alternative rock bands claim such a large share of critics’ attention and fondness, it is clear that St. James would like to be recognized elsewhere than in the marketplace.

He said “Hard Machine” is an attempt “to bring our audience along another step, get a little more musical, maybe a little more complex, a little wider variety.” He added that one of his goals is to write songs that are “less disposable.”

Brian Chin, former dance music columnist for Billboard magazine, thinks that “Better Than Heaven”--which has a tense, almost neurotic emotional undercurrent coursing along with its catchy tunes and straightforward disco beats--was underrated by most critics.

“The mood of ‘Better Than Heaven’ is so intense and vulnerable, that’s what struck me,” Chin said. “It was tiptop craftsmanship. To me it was a progressive album.”

Billboard’s current dance music editor, Bill Coleman, thinks that St. James still has a way to go before he can be considered among the front rank of dance producers, along with such luminaries as Jellybean Benitez and the team of Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis.

“As far as people saying, ‘Oh, this is another Jon St. James production, I should pick it up,’ I don’t think that’s the case yet,” Coleman said. “I don’t think he’s made that much of a dent. I feel he would have to produce a variety of different artists, perhaps varying the form that he’s done. I would have thought after the success of the first Stacey Q album I’d see his name pop up on a lot more things, and I haven’t.”

In fact, St. James says he has had “eight or 10” feelers to produce established acts, all female singers. “I’d rather not name names, but I was contacted by their management. They were (asking) me, ‘Can you do so and so’s albums, and write songs for it?’

“It was a compliment, but they were saying, ‘Can you give it the Stacey Q sound?’

“I thought, ‘That sound is Stacey and me together,’ ” and not strictly his own to exploit.

Instead, St. James decided that the best way to underline the mark he had made with Stacey Q would be to repeat that first out-of-nowhere success with fresh, unknown talents. More than merely making hits, he says, he wants to relive through his new acts the thrill of first fame.

“Now Stacey’s a star, so she’s becoming jaded, like anyone will. I crave that excitement (of newness), I feed on that. Stacey can be a real low-key person, and I like to be excited.”

St. James launched his label, Synthecide, a year ago with Bardeux as its first act. The duo, named after the producer’s favorite actress, sells sultry sex appeal and a light, girl-group sound.

St. James had the concept for the act before it ever existed. He found singer Stacy Smith (now renamed Acacia) working as a waitress in Brea, and he recruited Lisa Tearney (stage name: Jaz) of Glendale after hearing her voice on a demo tape sent to his studio.

St. James’ stable of new, Southern California-based acts also includes Metal MC, a Beastie Boys-style amalgam of rap and heavy metal; funk singers Glen Street and Louie Louie, and Red Flag, a techno-rock duo that he signed on the spot after hearing it by accident in a San Diego club.

Since he is involved in making business decisions for the acts as well as in shaping their musical direction, there is little room left in St. James’ life for anything but music.

“Jon basically has lived in the studio,” said Hein, the Enigma Records chief executive, whose label has a 50% interest in St. James’ Synthecide venture. “Recently he has taken up golf. He actually goes out and has recreation. For eight or 10 years I don’t think he saw the light of day.”

St. James said: “The time to myself is going home at dinner and watching a Lakers game. Days off don’t happen.”

It is a life that St. James doesn’t intend to pursue indefinitely. He talks of getting out of the music business in five years and becoming an author of James Bond-style thrillers.

“I’m thinking of getting away from it all. I want to travel and write. The headaches are growing--the more projects I have, the more problems there are.

“There’s no way I can be as effective as I am now five years from now. I don’t think I’d be interested in running at this speed. I feel good about it now, but I don’t see it happening (indefinitely).

“This is a youth-oriented business. I’d like to go out gracefully.”