There are records you remember buying. And then there are records you remember feeling.
Carol Jianiâs Hit âN Run Lover belongs firmly in the second category.
Let me explain.
I donât remember exactly when I first heard it, although Iâm pretty sure it was at the US Import record store in Antwerp. What I do remember is my reaction: I needed that twelve-inch.
The reason was very simple.
That beat.
It was 1981 and Hit âN Run Lover sounded enormous. It became a major dancefloor record and even crossed into the pop charts here in Belgium, reaching the Top 10. As far as I know, we were the only country where it did that.
And I promise I had nothing to do with it. đ Well, apart from playing my copy rather loudly.
The Battle Across the Street
I had a fairly large bedroom at my parentsâ house. Actually, it was more or less two rooms combined.
When my parents built the house, they intended to have two children, so they created enough space for two bedrooms. My sister/brother never materialised, which meant I ended up with the space of two rooms. Enough to put in two massive speakers.
My room had a big window facing the street. And directly opposite lived the son of our neighbours, whose bedroom window faced mine.
We shared a love for dance music. But more importantly, we both had two turntables, a mixing panel, amplifiers and (loud) speakers.
You can probably see where this is going. đ
Whenever our respective parents werenât home, the windows opened and the battle commenced.
Who had the loudest system? Who had the best records? Who could make the biggest impression on the other side of the street?
Completely silly, of course. Looking back, it still makes me smile, although I suspect the rest of the neighbourhood has slightly less nostalgic memories of two would-be DJs conducting a stereo war across the street.
They probably werenât happy when, one day, I unveiled my âsecret weaponâ.
Hit âN Run Lover.
My parentsâ house was solidly built. I know this because it could withstand the bass on that twelve-inch. My speakers werenât state of the art. They were big, which obviously seemed much more important to younger me at the time, but they certainly werenât JBLs or anything remotely audiophile.
It didnât matter.
When Hit âN Run Lover started, you didnât merely hear the bass.
You felt it.
And forty-five years later, that teenage memory actually tells us something rather important about the record. Because that bass didnât end up on the twelve-inch by accident.
đ Welcome, Iâm Pe Dupre, thanks for stopping by.
This is The Twelve Inch, a community about the history of dance music from 1975 to 1995, told one twelve-inch record at a time.
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Herb Powers Jr. Enters the Story
Last week I wrote about the Bombers and the MontrĂ©al production system behind Everybody Get Dancinâ. I also mentioned that some Canadian disco productions could sound a little flat compared with their American counterparts.
Certainly compared with records like Hit âN Run Lover. And the âsecretâ was the mastering. This record was mastered at Frankford/Wayne Mastering Labs in New York and cut by Herb Powers Jr., one of the great (dance music) mastering engineers of his generation.
Frankford/Wayne was one of the places to go if you wanted a disco record to work on a club system. Powers cut records for labels such as Prelude and West End and knew exactly what a twelve-inch needed. Hot. Punchy. Bass.
So there I was, unknowingly testing the work of one of New Yorkâs best mastering engineers on my parentsâ house.
It passed. đ
And this is also our first clue as to why Hit âN Run Lover is such a perfect record for the final chapter of my Can-Con series.
It was sung by a Nigerian-born singer living in Montréal, produced in Montréal, arranged by Denis LePage, mastered in New York, remixed in San Francisco and somehow sounded as if it could just as easily have come from Europe.
If MontrĂ©al really was the transatlantic switching board Iâve been describing these past few weeks, this record is almost the perfect illustration.
But first, who was Carol Jiani?
From Nigeria to Montréal
Carol Jiani wasnât born Carol Jiani. She was born Uchenna Ikejiani in Nigeria.
Her father was a physician and, after her mother died and relations with her stepmother became difficult, she was sent to Montréal to study at Concordia University. Like most students, however, she could use some extra money. Luckily, she could sing.
Jiani began performing in piano bars while studying, and it was in one of those bars that producer Joe La Greca heard her. He asked her to sing on one of his productions.
That relationship started well before Hit âN Run Lover. In 1979, La Greca released an album under the wonderfully imaginative project name MontrĂ©al.
Recorded in...
Wait for it...
MontrĂ©al. đ
Salsoul picked it up for America, where, in what should by now sound very familiar to regular readers of this series, it was remixed for the US market. Jiani sang on the record under her real name, although supposedly she arrived too late for the photoshoot and someone else ended up on the cover.
Disco and album covers. Thereâs always an interesting story
The project didnât do much, nor did several other studio productions to which she lent her voice. Then came Hit âN Run Lover.
Thatâs when suddenly everything clicked.
Joe La Greca and the Montréal Machine
Joe La Greca is slightly more difficult to pin down.
I know he was deeply embedded in MontrĂ©alâs disco and dance industry, but I havenât found enough reliable material about his early life to tell you whether he was Canadian-born or part of the post-war Italian immigration wave I discussed in last weekâs episodes.
So I wonât pretend I know.
What I do know is much more interesting anyway. Like Pat Deserio, La Greca became involved in numerous studio projects. But two of his productions broke well beyond the specialist disco world.
Lime and Carol Jiani.
And both demonstrate what happened when Montréal disco moved into the eighties.
Hit âN Run Lover sounds like Lime because much of the machinery behind it is the same. La Greca produced it and Denis LePage arranged it, just before Denis and Denyse LePage broke through internationally as Lime.
This is the time when the lush orchestral disco sound of the seventies was disappearing. Synthesizers and electronic rhythms were taking over. Montréal adapted remarkably quickly.
And, as weâll explore in this weekâs B-Side, while American record companies were dramatically reducing their disco output after the backlash, MontrĂ©al was already looking towards the more electronic sounds coming from Europe.
So we have the right record, coming from the right city, at the right moment.
But you still need somebody who knows what to do with it.
Enter Matra.
Matra, Moby Dick and a Slight American Mess
Matra Records was founded in Montréal in 1981 by George Cucuzzella, another familiar name from our Can-Con journey. Cucuzzella understood the club market, but he and La Greca also knew that breaking a record internationally required connections outside Canada.
And Hit âN Run Lover certainly travelled.
It reached No. 4 on the Billboard dance chart, became a major European club hit and crossed into the pop charts in the Netherlands and, especially, Belgium.
The American release history is rather more complicated.
San Francisco Hi-NRG label Moby Dick licensed the track for a remix on Gold Standard. Ariola America then picked it up, only for that company to cease operations after making a distribution arrangement with Arista. Arista consequently became another company handling the record.
That makes three companies releasing the same song. Probably one of the reasons why the record didnât cross into other markets.
Despite the remixing, it was the original version that everybody seemed to want. Including me. Which brings us to something very peculiar about Hit âN Run Lover today.
Why Does Hit âN Run Lover Sound Slightly Off?
Listen to the digital version of Hit âN Run Lover (like on this weekâs mixtape), particularly once the synths enter.
Can you hear it?
Thereâs a strange wavering, almost whining quality to the pitch. Iâm quite sensitive to this kind of thing, but this one is noticeable. Technically itâs called wow, a slow fluctuation in pitch that can be caused by something as simple as an off-centre spindle hole.
Hereâs the strange part.
My original twelve-inch doesnât do it.
I first noticed the problem much later on a European pressing. Then, when I was working as a compilations manager at Universal and wanted to include the track on a compilation, I couldnât find a digital source without that wavering sound.
And this is where we enter one of the less glamorous corners of the Record Industry.
Master tapes disappear. Or nobody knows where they are. Or somebody knows where they are but they contain the album version and not the twelve-inch mix you actually need.
Dance music is particularly vulnerable because remixes and alternate versions were often treated as disposable once the vinyl had been manufactured. When catalogues were digitised, the original tape wasnât always available.
So what happened?
The used a vinyl to make a new master.
There are plenty of digital masters in circulation that were clearly sourced from vinyl. Sometimes the transfer was done beautifully. Sometimes you can still hear ticks, wow, flutter or unstable turntable speed.
Try beatmatching one of those.
Iâve seen digital files where the BPM wanders so badly that you wonder whether the turntable was sitting on a boat. My suspicion is that the currently circulating Hit âN Run Lover master ultimately comes from vinyl, and not from a particularly good copy.
I canât prove that without access to the master history, so letâs call it what it is, a collectorâs educated suspicion. But it would explain a lot.
Jiani later re-recorded the song, presumably partly for the usual business reason of having a version she could control herself.
A Record Made Between Worlds
Hit âN Run Lover sums up everything Iâve been trying to explain during Can-Con month. A Nigerian singer moves to MontrĂ©al. A MontrĂ©al producer discovers her in a piano bar. Denis LePage arranges the record. George Cucuzzellaâs Matra releases it. Herb Powers Jr. cuts it in New York. Moby Dick gets involved from San Francisco. Europe embraces it. Belgium, for some reason, turns it into a Top 10 pop hit.
And teenage PĂ© uses it as heavy artillery against the neighbours across the street. đ
You couldnât really invent a better MontrĂ©al disco story.
Carol Jiani never had the enormous international pop breakthrough that Hit âN Run Lover seemed to promise, but she kept making dance records, eventually working with Ian Levine and moving firmly into Hi-NRG. La Greca continued too, most famously through Lime, and remained involved in dance music for decades. He died on June 21 this year, aged 73.
But perhaps their most interesting legacy is right here, on this twelve-inch. Because Hit âN Run Lover doesnât sound like disco dying. It sounds like dance music figuring out what it wants to become next.
And that is exactly where weâre going in this weekâs B-Side.
The Twelve Inch is a growing community of people who love disco, eighties, and early-nineties dance music.
If you know someone who would enjoy these stories, feel free to share this post with them or pass it along on Substack Notes. Every share helps the music, and the community, travel a little further. đżâš
đ B-Side, Going Deeper Into The Groove
Weâll look at what happened when the 1979 disco backlash reached Canada, why MontrĂ©al reacted very differently from other Canadian cities, and how the same European connections that had helped build its disco scene left it remarkably well placed for the electronic dance music of the early eighties.
Disco supposedly died.
MontrĂ©al, apparently, didnât get the memo.
Over To You !
If you owned Hit âN Run Lover, Iâd love to know which pressing you had. Can you hear that wavering pitch on your copy?
And more importantly, surely I wasnât the only teenager who occasionally used a twelve-inch as a weapon in a neighbourhood stereo war? đ
So You Wanna Hear More ?
I thought you would !
Itâs fun to write about music but letâs be honest. Music is made to listen to.
Every week, together with this newsletter, I release a 1 hour beatmix on Mixcloud and Youtube. I start with the discussed twelve inch and follow up with 10/15 songs from the same timeframe/genre. The ideal soundtrack forâŠ. Well whatever you like to do when you listen to dance music.
Listen to the Soundtrack of this weekâs post on MIXCLOUD
Or on Youtube :
Omg diva yesssss. I just discovered HitânâRun lover like two weeks ago. I wonder if we follow the same people on MixCloudâŠ
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