Arthur Baker

Anyone who’s spent an hour or two in a dance club over the past 40-odd years has probably heard an Arthur Baker-produced, mixed or influenced track. From his early deejay gigs at suburban supper clubs like the Chateau de Ville in the disco-crazed mid-‘70s to the musical revolution he ignited by introducing remixes to mainstream pop in the synth-soaked mid-’80s, Baker’s creative shadow towers above virtually everything that’s happened in electronic-dance music and hip hop since the advent of CDs in 1982. And his singular, sweeping role in redefining the meaning of “dance music” makes even the laughably oxymoronic term “new and improved” start to make sense. 

MUSICAL BEGINNINGS, INFLUENCES

An oft-imitated, highly visible figure who’s collaborated with artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Afrika Bambaataa, The Rolling Stones and New Order, Baker was born in Brookline, Massachusetts on April 22, 1955. His family lived in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood until he was in third grade, when they relocated to nearby Needham; he graduated from Needham High School, where he played JV basketball and English and writing were his favorite subjects. 

While nobody in his family played any instruments, his mother loved singing and had something of a musical lineage: Her cousin, Sid Ramin, arranged “West Side Story” and wrote the theme song to Candid Camera and other TV shows. Baker says his first exposure to music was his parents’ sizeable collection of Broadway, Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole albums and hearing the cantor and the choir at temple. While he’s never had any formal training – “tried clarinet and sax and failed,” he says – he’s played bass and keyboards on a number of the umpteen recordings he’s produced, mixed or remixed. 

Baker cites a major part of his musical education as listening to Boston radio stations WBCN and WILD as a teen. “WBCN was really important because it was a rock station, but they’d play everything,” he says. “They’d play Al Green, Gamble and Huff stuff, The O’Jays, Joe Simon along with all the new rock stuff. And WILD was a great soul station. Basically, I got my education through radio.” Among his favorite blues/rock acts as an adolescent were The J. Geils Band, The Who, The James Montgomery Blues Band, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, Orpheus, The Rolling Stones, The Allman Brothers and Jimi Hendrix. 

RECORD SHOP JOBS, DISCOVERING PHILLY SOUL, EARLY DEEJAY GIGS

Baker fed his radio-fueled musical hunger by hanging out at record shops, which became a well-paying pastime – not in a financial sense initially – when he worked at a friend’s parents’ record store and was paid in promo LPs, then took a cash-paying job at Soundscope on Boylston Street in Brookline when it opened in 1971. His favorite genre became Philly soul, originated by Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff (founders of Philadelphia International Records) and personified by songs like The O’Jays #1 hit “Love Train” in 1973, the year Baker enrolled at Hampshire College in Western Massachusetts. 

Soon after arriving at Hampshire, he began deejaying “There was nothing else I wanted to do other than play and make music except playing for the Celtics, which wasn’t going to happen,” he says. Using a few turntables and a GLI deejay mixer – called “the poor man’s Bozak,” after the first commercially available deejay mixer (invented by Rudy Bozak in 1971) – he spun wax at parties and other events. On weekends, he was a regular at Downstairs Records in New York City’s Times Square, which opened in 1973 and Baker refers to as “probably the first dance-music shop anywhere.” 

After dropping out of Hampshire in 1976, Baker returned to Boston and began deejaying mostly at what he calls “the worst, shitty mafia clubs.” He became both famous and infamous for his profoundly punk approach, smashing records and throwing the pieces across the dance floor when people stayed seated. When not working, he often went to watch and hear the era’s “big five” Boston deejays – Danae Jacovidis, Jim Stuard, John Luongo, Cosmo Wyatt and Joey Carvello – at nightclubs including Rhinoceros, Chaps, Celebration, Mirage, Future, K-K-K-Katy’s and Cache. 

EARLY PRODUCTION PROJECTS, FIRST ARRANGER, SONGWRITER CREDITS

Baker’s foray into production began in 1977, when he convinced then Intermedia Sound Studios owner Dan Cole (former guitarist/trombonist with Quill ) to give him free studio time at night. The two had first met in 1976 during an audio-engineering seminar (Baker’s only formal training in the field) and, after hiring an arranger and a band, the result was the Baker-produced and mixed (with John Luongo) “Losing You,” which Montreal-based indie label owner Pat Deserio released as a 12” single. After that, he began recording a full album of his own Gamble-and Huff-style songs with a group of 13 musicians (including the late deejay-drummer Russell Presto and then Berklee College of Music student [now professor] Tony Carbone on keyboards), but he ran out of money after starting 10 tracks.   

Serendipitously, however, it was during those sessions that Baker met Boston native Tom Moulton, who’s been known as “the father of the disco mix” ever since he mixed Gloria Gaynor’s 1975 album Never Can Say Goodbye. Moulton listened to Baker’s four most completed Intermedia tracks, made a deal with him to acquire the tapes and – completely unannounced to Baker – brought them to Casablanca Records, which released them as the EP T.J.M. (short for Thomas Jerome Mouton) with Baker listed only as arranger and songwriter, not producer. Though he felt simultaneously ripped off and pissed off at the time, Baker saw bright side later in his career. “I got a bit screwed on that one,” he said in 2007. “But at least it came out and my name was on it.” 

NORTHEND, FIRST PRODUCTION CREDITS, OTHER EARLY PROJECTS, HITS

With that bitter lesson behind him, Baker’s career started its upward trajectory in 1979, when he, Presto and Carbone formed the garage-house trio Northend and their single “Kind of Live (Kind of Love)” – Baker’s first producer credit – was a major hit at New York City’s top dance clubs. Later that year, Baker worked with Latin soul-style innovator Joe Bataan on his classic novelty-rap hit “Rap-O Clap-O.” 

In 1980, Northend recorded “Happy Days” (featuring vocalist Michelle Wallace), which went to #9 in Billboard’s Club Play Singles chart and has been cited as the inspiration for Madonna’s 1983 #1 US/UK hit “Holiday.” Baker relocated to New York City in ‘81 and joined Tommy Boy Records; his first project was as producer (and co-mixer, with deejay Shep Pettibone) of Afrika Bambaataa’s seminal single “Jazzy Sensation” and his second was as producer and co-writer of Bambaataa’s 1982 iconic “Planet Rock,“ which won Billboard‘s Trend Setter Award and is considered a hip-hop milestone. 

ROCKERS REVENGE, NEW EDITION, NEW ORDER, NOTABLE ‘80S REMIXES

In 1982, Baker produced “Walking on Sunshine” by Rockers Revenge, a group he formed with reggae singer Donnie Calvin, which hit to #1 in the Billboard Dance chart, and he signed New Edition to his newly founded Streetwise label, producing and mixing their debut single “Candy Girl,” which soared to #1 in the Billboard R&B and the UK Singles charts in May 1983. Also in ‘82, Baker signed deejay and former break dancer T La Rock to the Streetwise sublabel Partytime – his first single on the label, “It’s Yours” (the first to feature a Def Jam Recordings logo), is considered one of hip-hop’s most defining tracks – while producing Freeez’s UK dance hit “I.O.U.” and New Order’s “Confusion,” the latter being a dance club staple to this day. 

Baker is widely credited with spearheading a musical revolution in the mid-’80s by propelling remixes into mainstream pop/rock with his housed-up electro-urban versions of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and three songs from Bruce Springsteen’s iconic Born in the USA album. He went on to produce remixes for an eclectic range of others including Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Jeff Beck, Hall & Oates, Fleetwood Mac, The Rolling Stones, Face to Face and Pet Shop Boys. In 1984, he produced what became his own break-dance classic, “Breaker’s Revenge,” for the film Beat Street and co-wrote and produced New Order’s follow-up single “Thieves Like Us.” 

BOB DYLAN, “SUN CITY,” DEBUT ALBUM, FILM PROJECTS, LONDON YEARS

In 1985, Baker mixed and helped arrange Bob Dylan’s Empire Burlesque album and co-produced (with Steven Van Zandt) the anti-apartheid track “Sun City,” which featured several dozen major artists including Lou Reed, Bonnie Raitt and Peter Wolf. He recorded his own debut album, Merge, in 1989 (followed by his second LP, Give in to the Rhythm, in 1991, the same year he wrote and produced Al Green’s “The Message is Love” (followed by Green’s “Leave the Guns at Home” in 1991). In 1991, he worked as music supervisor for the films Fried Green Tomatoes and Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones; he’s also supervised and produced material for Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Flintstones, Something Wild and A Life Less Ordinary. 

Baker moved to London in 1995, co-founding a chain of billiards bars called The Elbow Room, taking an ownership stake in several restaurants and becoming a regular at several of the city’s dance clubs. In 1996, his remix of then-unknown Babylon Zoo’s “Spaceman” hit #1 in the UK after being used in a Levi Strauss ad campaign. While living in the UK, Baker hosted a radio show, Baker’s Dozen, on London’s XFM and produced/mixed Brit-pop acts including Ash, including their song “Life Less Ordinary,” which hit #2 in the UK Indie chart. In 1998, he began recording an album with members of New Order, Ash and others that “will see the light of day in 2023, its 25th year in the making,” he says. 

“RETURN TO NEW YORK” PARTIES, MOVE TO MIAMI, RECENT PROJECTS, MEMOIR

In 2002, Baker created and fronted promotional efforts for “Return to New York” parties in London, now-legendary events that introduced up-and-coming groups as well as era-defining acts such as Tom Tom Club and Blondie. The events went global and have been held in Toronto, Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Ibiza, Miami and even New York itself. He returned to the United States in 2015 and settled down in Miami, immersing himself in the city’s Latin rhythms while collaborating with local legends including Murk and Laz Casanova. Between 2018 and 2020, he produced and re-released multiple tracks on his own label, Baked Recordings, plus Rockers Revenge’s “What About the People,” which hit #1 on the Trax Source chart. 

In 2021, the year that Baker remixed his third New Order single, “Be A Rebel,” Edsel Records issued Arthur Baker Presents Dance Masters: The Shep Pettibone Master-Mixes. The series’ second release will be of Baker’s own material, and the third will be of John Luongo’s. A documentary about Rockers Revenge, On A Mission, was released in 2024 to celebrate the group’s 40th anniversary, and Faber & Faber published Baker’s memoir, Looking for the Perfect Beat: Remixing and Reshaping Hip-Hop, Rock and Rhythms, in May 2025. 

Asked about the secret to making killer dance mixes, Baker cites boots-on-the-ground club experience over technological wizardry. “You have more control now in the studio, that’s the whole new thing,” he said. “But I’ve never made a great dance record that wasn’t the direct result of being in a club the night before. Never. And when you make a dance record, the objective is clear: to make people dance and have a good time. You really can’t take it too seriously.” 

(by D.S. Monahan with thanks to Lennie Petze)