Techno-Obsessions

In 1982, new musical technology was rampant. Programmable polyphonic synths -- a vast improvement over the inflexible string machines and mellotrons of the past decade -- were coming onto the market. The first of them was the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5, followed by Roland’s Jupiter 8, and the first affordable sampler, the Emulator. Electronic drum machines with digitally generated sounds began to appear as well -- among them Roland's simple Dr. Rhythm, followed by the Compu Rhythm, and the Legendary TR-808. These machines used synthesized sounds, not real ones; the TR-808 is all over Depeche Mode's Speak and Spell and Berlin's Pleasure Victim EP. In 1980, Roger Linn came out with the LM-1, one of the first machines that played actual digital drum samples -- changing music across every genre -- but this machine cost close to $5,000 at the time, making the more affordable TR-808 the machine of choice. Like most of us, St. James had an interest in all of these instruments.

As far as I know, St. James has always been a gifted engineer, songwriter, and guitar player. After graduating from high school he went to France to busk with his guitar, presumably to see the world and polish his musicianship. He also fell in love, with a French woman Martine. Incidentally, when John Crawford, Dan Van Patten and Terri Nunn were in the studio recording The Metro, the first single for the new incarnation of Berlin and a precursor to Pleasure Victim , it was St. James who came up with the line "I remember the night we walked along the Seine."

He was the first person I knew who owned a personal computer – it was a Mac 512k, the model with a tiny monochrome monitor. Just for context: the processor ran at 8Mhz, compared to today’s 3Ghz processors. People convert them into little fish tanks now, but one day in 1984, Jon was playing a video game on his, launching pixilated paratroopers from planes and guiding them to safety.

Big Electronic Beat

All of us were swept up in the spirit of the new technology and the music that was happening; Jon was a big fan of synth bands like Kraftwerk and M; when he met Stacey Swain in 1981, he knew right away that this former Ringling Bros. elephant girl and veteran of the Disneyland Main Street parade possessed star qualities perfectly compatible with electronic music, which Stacey also adored. She was enamored with the obscure Japanese band the Plastics and the B-52’s, and simply could not get over David Bowie . She also had (and one assumes she still has) an acute fashion sense, and could literally turn rags into a fashion statement. On one occasion she went to the renaissance fair in Agoura dressed simply in two large pieces of soft leather she bought from a shop in Anaheim.

It wasn't long before Berlin and Fahrenheit drummer/synthesist/producer Dan Van Patten, St. James, Swain and John Van Tongeren were working on the four-song “Q” EP -- a brilliant exercise in minimalism, featuring a heavily effected Dr. Rhythm (on Sushi) along with Van Patten's Roland TR-808 and CSQ-800 sequencer nearly everywhere else. Swain's waifish vocal stylings were the icing on the cake, highlighted by St. James' careful guitar playing. Van Tongeren weighed in with his masterful playing of a Sequential Circuits Prophet 5, while Van Patten's Vocoder, another Roland device, showed up on a track or two as well. (To get a peek at some of these machines and others, check out www.synthmuseum.com.) I put down merely one keyboard track on the EP (using the Prophet 5 at the end of the haunting “Music’s Gone,”) though the Moog Prodigy I lent them showed up on a couple of other tracks as well.

Playback

The resulting EP, printed on transparent red vinyl by M.A.O. Records (owned by Fahrenheit and Berlin manager Perry Watts Russell) did okay on college radio, and generated considerable buzz, providing the impetus for Jon and Stacey to move on with another project. The “Q” name had to be dropped for legal reasons. I seem to remember that Quincy Jones’ lawyer may have initiated a “cease and desist” order due to Jones' established use of the "Q" moniker. The new-wave band SSQ was created, with Stacey at the helm, Jon Van Tongeren on keyboards, Skip Hahn on guitar and keyboards, Karl Moet (aka Karl T. Moe) on electronic drums, and St. James on guitar. The resulting album had my name listed as “synth programmer”, probably because I did give St. James a cassette put out by Roland with hundreds of Jupiter 8 patches on it. The album’s first single, Synthecide got some airplay on KROQ, then a Los Angeles area leader in new wave music. But worldwide stardom was still an album away for Stacey Q.

When SSQ performed Synthecide on KTTV in the mid 80s, it was apparent that Stacey’s star was rising, though no one knew exactly how high it would go until Two of Hearts became a monstrous hit, reaching #3 on two separate Billboard Charts at the same moment in 1987.