In partnership with Terry Lewis, Jimmy Jam became synonymous with the drum machine during the ‘80s, particularly through their work with Janet Jackson. In a new interview with Elmo Lovano, though, the producer suggests that things could have been very different if he’d listened to some of the negative voices around him rather than take inspiration from one in particular: Prince.
Jam, you see, began life as a drummer, and as drum machines started to rise to prominence in the early ‘80s, many drummers saw them as a threat rather than an opportunity. Jam, though, saw things differently.
“The leadership or the influence we had was very much from Prince, because Prince was always very forward thinking about things,” he says. “He never took a piece of equipment and used it the way that was supposed to be used. He would come up with his own way of doing it. So we were always open to the idea of drum machines.”
Rather than being scared of this new technology, then, Jam chose to embrace it, believing (rightly, as it turned out) that his musical background would put him at an advantage. “I thought drum machines were great, and I felt like ‘I know how to do this, because I'm a drummer.’”
There were definitely some who saw it differently, though. Jam recalls going to LA in the summer of 1982, and discovering that a number of his peers were openly hostile to the idea of using any kind of new tech.
“I remember there were drummers that would refuse to play with a click, and they would refuse to play with a drum machine, or even if you put a drum machine on a track, they didn't want to replace [it]. We said, ‘just replace the drums’, and they wouldn't do it.”
Prince might have been one of those who was open to the idea of using a drum machine - notably the Linn LM-1 - but Jam says that he was also protective of his methods, which actually ended up influencing his choice of beatmaking gear in the early days.
“In Minneapolis, under the Prince regime, we used, it was the LinnDrum, the LM-1. And Prince always, was always scared that we were going to give The Time’s sound away,” says Jam.
Things came to a head in 1983 when Prince fired Jam and Lewis from his sideband The Time when they failed to make it back for a show due to a blizzard in Atlanta that grounded their flight. Prince was also unaware that Jimmy and Terry had been in Atlanta producing for the SOS Band, and he wasn’t best pleased when he found out - not least because one of the songs - Just Be Good To Me - became a hit.
But what Jam and Lewis weren’t doing was stealing The Time’s sound. In fact, they’d made a conscious effort not to by putting the LM-1 to one side and firing up another beatbox: the Roland TR-808.
“We were like, ‘no, no, we're going to do something totally different, you know,’ says Jam. “And so that started for us with the drum machine. Let's start with a whole different sonic and then build from there. So that was the reason we went with that with the SOS band.”
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