Richard (Ritchie) Weeks, 78, from the Bronx, sounds like he’s describing two different selves when he recalls his work life.
For 30 years he was an employee of the United States Postal Service, working primarily in the sprawling mailroom behind the imposing columns of the New York City General Post Office in Midtown Manhattan.
At the same time, Weeks is a dance music producer, songwriter, arranger and artist, releasing albums on influential New York labels Salsoul and Prelude. He has collaborated with major lights in the city’s disco and post-disco boogie scenes, including studio magician Patrick Adams, chart-topping vocalist Jocelyn Brown, and soulful singer-songwriter Leroy Burgess. did.
Adams, who died in June at the age of 72, once compared Weeks’ recording studio prowess to the prowess of Quincy Jones. “He’s so great,” Burgess agreed in his recent phone interview. “Ritchie is the real deal when it comes to talent, humility and a true true genius. Not enough people know him.”
During his heyday in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Weeks was prolific. He would sometimes go to the recording studio in the evening and quit his job at sunrise to head to the post office. “I had a lot going on. I’m not going to lie,” Weeks said, laughing over the phone from his home in Newark, New Jersey.
He took the advice of his father, Ricardo Weeks — co-writer of Doo-Wop Hits “Why” It was originally recorded by Dion and the Belmont family. “And I kept them handy,” Weeks said.
The material, almost all unpublished, was archived for decades. Well, on Monday, Chicago label Still Music will release “The Love Magician Archives,” a treasure trove of never-before-heard songs. This is the first of a planned multi-volume set dedicated to Weeks’ obscure body of work.
Weeks’ music career peaked in 1981 when his group Weeks & Co.’s anthemic single “Rock Your World” became a Top 10 hit on Billboard’s US dance charts. “People were all over the city, riding bicycles playing my songs, or riding buses playing my songs,” Weeks recalls. “It was all over the place.”
“Rock Your World” is on heavy rotation in New York’s nightclubs and roller discos. “It’s got this aggressive chant, it’s a very well-recorded track, and it sounds great when played loud on a club stereo system,” said a regular at the legendary clubs Loft and Roller Rink, The Roxy. said veteran DJ Danny Krivitt. He still regularly incorporates the song into his sets at his monthly 718 Sessions parties. “It really keeps people going.”
Riding on the song’s popularity, Weeks & Co. — the loose collective Jocelyn Brown joined years before her first debut No.1 dance single — Performing several times a week at Studio 54, Paradise Garage and Roseland Ballroom, they became an in-demand live act overnight. On stage, Weeks often wore funkadelic outfits befitting his musical alter ego, Love, his magician. Just hours after finishing the concert, usually with little sleep, he returned to his post office uniform and tapped his watch.
Although he wanted to tour the world, “I couldn’t let go of my pension because I thought music might be boring,” Weeks said.
Then one day it happened. Salsoul Records disbanded in 1985 as disco declined. For several weeks House worked on a handful of his singles, but none were as wildly successful as “Rock Your World”. After retiring from the military in 1993, he moved to New Jersey and joined the bricklayers’ union.
“When Salsoul went out of business, I thought, ‘This is curtains. It’s over,'” says Weeks. “I thought I had a good run and did a little show. I really haven’t looked back.”
In 2018, a sudden phone call sent Weeks back in time. The person who answered the phone was a French ex-radio DJ and record collector. Henri Claude is a longtime fan of Weeks’ boogie group The Jammers, and in 1982 he released their self-titled album on Salsoul which spawned his single Top 20 Dance. “And you know it.”
Weeks notes that he happened to be sitting on a pile of unreleased music. Claude moved to Chicago in 2004 and linked him with Jerome Derradji, a French friend and fellow DJ who founded his record label, Still Music. For the past 15 years, he has championed black music that has been overlooked by the mainstream, including Memphis gospel and Bay Area funk.
Deraj’s father was Algerian, which made him an outsider among his French peers. is,” he said. “I was able to relate to stories of racism and xenophobia because I lived through them.”
Over the phone, Deraj recounted his passion for finding crate diggers for weeks. At the age of 10, Delaj visited Gallo, where he participated in an archaeological excavation of a Roman burial site, where he was scraping the soil with a small shovel, where he found the skull of a vertically buried man. I came across. “Since then, I’ve been fascinated by finding things,” Deraj said.
Weeks shared his own formative experience with Deraj. As a boy, he practiced singing harmonies on echoing storm drains he found while fishing in the Bronx River. During his teenage years, he performed at the Apollo Theater with a group called the Fascinators. The group was preceded by Timothy Lymon, and Lymon’s older brother Frankie rose to doo-wop fame with Teenagers. Weeks then explained that Patrick Adams had heard a demo of his vocal group, Central Park West. The producers soon hired him regularly for sessions, becoming his mentor and teaching Weeks how to use the studio as an instrument.
Over the winter and spring of 2019, Weeks stuffed his life’s work, hundreds of cassettes and reel-to-reel audio tapes, into four plastic shipping totes. When Delaj opened the first box, something excited him: next to a listing of tracks titled “At the Disco,” there was a vintage sticker with someone scribbling “HOT” in red pen. With his Ampex tape on his cover. At the top of the label was scripted “Patrick’s Mix”, which Derradji correctly assumed was his reference to Adams.
When the engineer who was digitizing the song rolled up the reel-to-reel tape of “At the Disco” and played it, Deraj’s spine straightened. Featuring lead vocals from singer Thanyaet Willoughby, reminiscent of disco queen Donna Summer, the song celebrates the freedom and possibilities of the dance floor, saying, “This is pure New York. It’s real.” he said. “We’re really digging into New York’s historic disco — something no one’s heard. Even Richie hasn’t heard it since he made it.”
As part of the deal, Deraj agreed to help Weeks regain the rights to the music he released on Salsoul.officially called process Termination of copyright assignmentauthors must submit notice to the U.S. Copyright Office within a specific time frame, along with any associated fees.
“At the time, I didn’t think anyone could do it,” Weeks said. “I was shocked.” Deraj added, “He looked like an angel sent by the Lord or something.” This deal release paves the way for Still Music to reissue his Weeks & Co. and Jammers albums in 2019.
When Weeks first spoke with Deraj, he said he had received no royalties or financial statements for his music since 2015. At that time, BMG Rights Management acquired Verse Music Group, where since 2010 he had managed Salsoul Records’ catalog. “It’s the constant exploitation of African Americans.”
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the surge in Black Lives Matter activity that followed in the summer of 2020, BMG announced a historic record deal “noting the music industry’s record of disgraceful treatment of black artists”. has publicly announced that it will consider So what happened to Weeks’ check?
“If you’re Richie Weeks, you’re like, ‘Who are these guys? They bought my music and they can’t even pay me,'” said senior vice president of global corporate communications at BMG. said Steve Redmond in an interview. “But it wasn’t because we didn’t want to pay.” Redmond said the problem was that the company’s royalty department didn’t have Weeks’ current address and bank information.
Ultimately, Deraj got Weeks back a pittance, as he did for other artists on his label. Money wasn’t life-changing, according to Weeks, but the battle was more a matter of principle than economics. I hope it will help me become a better person, but I’m not financially dependent on his songs these days. He collects pensions, which makes him the envy of his musician friends.
“Now,” Weeks said, “a lot of people look at me and say, ‘I wanted to do what you did.'”