and quickly landed a job as an assistant at Sunset Sound, where he met George Massenburg, who was working there with Earth, Wind & Fire. Rouben, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, had been a drummer but went over to the tech side of music after studying electrical engineering at UC Berkeley. “He was what you would call a classic old-school producer, in that he was classically trained and he really knew music,” comments Jack Rouben, who engineered for Perren at Mom and Pop’s for a while in the late ’70s and was part of several hits cut there. Perren’s string of successes (sans The Corporation) continued with hits from The Miracles, The Sylvers, Peaches & Herb and a pair of tunes (by Tavares and Yvonne Elliman) on the multi-Platinum soundtrack for Saturday Night Fever. area in the late ’60s and become part of the Motown Records writing and production group known as The Corporation (Perren, Berry Gordy, Deke Richards, Fonze Mizell), who churned out hit after hit for the Jackson 5 and others through the early ’70s. (adjacent to Hollywood), owned by songwriter/producer/musician Freddie Perren. Which brings us to 1978, and a recording studio known as Mom & Pop’s Company Store in Studio City, Calif. They also worked on a couple of subsequent Gaynor albums for Polydor, but those were only moderate successes.
Side One featured a re-working of “Honey Bee” and new disco takes on Motown favorites “Never Can Say Goodbye” and “Reach Out, I’ll Be There,” mixed masterfully into a nonstop 19-minute groove by Tom Moulton, and produced by Meco Monardo, Tony Bongiovi and Howard Wheeler. Her 1975 album, Never Can Say Goodbye, was among the first to offer a club-style string of tunes connected by a pulsating disco beat. By the early ’70s, she’d been “discovered” anew-first by Clive Davis of Columbia (for whom she recorded one single, “Honey Bee,” before he exited the company) and then by Mike Curb, who signed her to his MGM label right as disco music was first becoming popular. By her mid-teens, she’d put out a single called “She’ll Be Sorry” on a label run by singer Johnny Nash, who also gave her a stage name: Gloria Gaynor. Gloria Fowles was a New Jersey girl raised on such records as Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder she emulated their techniques as she tried to forge her own singing style. One of the most enduring songs to come out of the late-’70s disco scene, “I Will Survive” actually began its life as a B-side for a song that never became a hit.
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