Jon Baker, founder of Gee Street Records and former president of Island Jamaica, recalls how a teenage producer’s unlikely record collection, a Spandau Ballet sample and a new approach to songwriting helped change the music industry.
In 1988, when Jon Baker first met Prince Be of PM Dawn, the young musician was about 16, living in a modest house in Jersey City and making music with two cassette decks.
What caught Baker’s attention was not simply the music. It was the records.
“Most of the young black kids were influenced by their parents’ vinyl collections,” Baker recalls. “They were generally in the mode of classic soul, R&B and so forth.”
Prince Be’s collection was different. His uncle Tim worked in waste disposal, collecting records that households had discarded as compact discs replaced vinyl during the 1980s.
“He wouldn’t throw it in the back of the garbage car. He collected it.”
The result was an unusually broad musical education. Prince Be absorbed electronic music, rock and British pop, including Spandau Ballet and Jethro Tull. Those influences would become central to PM Dawn’s sound and, eventually, to one of the defining crossover records of the early 1990s.
When Baker visited the house, Prince Be played him a rudimentary sample he had constructed from Spandau Ballet’s True, using two cassette decks.
The connection was extraordinary. Spandau Ballet had been the first band Baker worked with as a teenager in London.
“By pure coincidence, it was the first band I ever worked with when I was 19,” he says. “I made clothes for them, so I knew them very well.”
Baker also knew their manager, Steve Dagger, whom he describes as a mentor during his transition from fashion into clubs and the record business.
“I rang him up. I played it to him. He said, ‘Hell yeah.’ And they cleared it.”
The agreement was straightforward: a 50-50 publishing split.
“That set a precedent for sample clearances,” Baker says.
The resulting record, Set Adrift on Memory Bliss, became a breakthrough for PM Dawn and Gee Street Records. More significantly, Baker argues, it helped change how the established music industry regarded hip-hop.
“You’ve got to remember, in 1991 there was a lot of prejudice towards hip-hop as an art form, as a musical form,” he says.
“The traditional songwriters were very down on it, and plus you’ve also got the natural sort of racism, white privilege, that exists in all of those conventional societies.”
Sampling was still widely dismissed as an inferior form of musicianship.
“They didn’t see two turntables and the art of sampling as a thing. It was still really played down.”
PM Dawn challenged that assumption. Their records were not simply familiar songs with rap vocals added.
“The way PM Dawn basically composed their music wasn’t that they just rapped over an existing memorable hit,” Baker says.
“They really composed. They did new basslines. They took other basslines, they merged them together. They put layered harmonies of their own music in, and melodies to enhance the original sample.”
Baker saw Prince Be not merely as a rapper or producer but as a songwriter working with a new set of instruments.
The industry’s response soon changed.
“After that happened, we did ‘Patient Eyes’, and we sampled ‘Father Figure’, and George Michael called them, got the clearance. The phone rang. The Bee Gees wanted to write with PM Dawn down in Miami. They went down, then Elton John rang. And they did a song with Elton John on his duets album.”
For Baker, the significance lay in the acceptance of a group whose musical methods had previously been treated with suspicion.
“If you can see the importance of this group, and how it emerged, it set the tone.”
The commercial breakthrough came at a pivotal moment for the American record business.
In 1991, Billboard began using Nielsen SoundScan data to measure retail sales electronically, reducing the industry’s dependence on charts compiled from retailer reports.
“The charts were bought, basically, before that, through favours, through radio play, all these different things,” Baker says. “But SoundScan was your actual sales.”
He remembers watching Set Adrift on Memory Bliss climb the charts against some of the biggest names in popular music.
“There was Bryan Adams. There was Michael Jackson and Michael Bolton. They were the top five records, and every week we were scooting up the charts.”
Then came the breakthrough.
“It just burst, and we jumped over Jackson and everyone, and the rest is history.”
On November 30, 1991, PM Dawn’s Set Adrift on Memory Bliss reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, overtaking Michael Bolton’s When a Man Loves a Woman, which slipped to No. 2.
It became the first chart-topper under the new SoundScan-era methodology. Michael Jackson’s Black or White was at No. 3, Boyz II Men’s It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday at No. 4 and Prince’s Cream at No. 5. The top 10 also included Paula Abdul, Color Me Badd, Naughty by Nature, Natural Selection and Bryan Adams.
The hip hop single, released through Jon Baker’s Gee Street and Island Records partnership, reached the summit in its seventh week on the chart.
For Baker, the achievement was also a vindication of the independent label he had built in London.
Gee Street had entered a joint venture with Island Records that year, with Baker selling a 50 per cent stake in the label.
Chris Blackwell had sold Island to PolyGram in 1989 but remained involved in rebuilding the company. Baker joined in early 1991, bringing PM Dawn through the Gee Street arrangement.
“He asked me to go to America and become part of the Island A&R team, as well as have my own joint venture with him.”
The operation established itself at Fourth and Broadway in New York. Blackwell subsequently invited Baker to become president of Island Jamaica.
The strategy was to preserve the flexibility of independent A&R rather than rely entirely on PolyGram’s larger distribution structure.
“He felt going through the independent route, with an A&R team, would be much better than trying to put it through the mass distribution of PolyGram, which was really big rock records, big pop records.”
Baker believes PM Dawn’s contribution remains insufficiently recognised.
“They were so important to hip-hop,” he says.
He has since been in discussions with people involved in the Universal Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx about recognising Gee Street and PM Dawn’s place in the genre’s history.
