Rewind: Maestro Fresh-Wes’ Symphony in Effect
Introducing Rewind, a new series featuring the oral histories of some of Toronto’s most important albums. In the inaugural edition, we look at Maestro Fresh-Wes’ 1989 debut, Symphony in Effect, the album that forced an indifferent music industry to pay attention to Canadian hip-hop.
BY: Chris Dart

In the late 1980s, Toronto’s hip-hop scene was so underground that it bordered on subterranean. The only radio play came courtesy of college-radio jocks like Ron Nelson and Adrien “DJX” King. Domestic record labels weren’t interested in hip-hop, while American labels largely weren’t interested in Canadian rappers. (As of 1989, only the duo of Michie Mee and L.A. Luv had signed a deal with an American label.) Symphony in Effect, the full-length debut by Scarborough native Maestro Fresh-Wes, would change all that.

Released on American independent label LeFrak-Moelis Records (LMR) and distributed domestically by Attic, Symphony sold nearly 200,000 copies, was the first domestic hip-hop album to crack the RPM Top 5, won the first-ever rap Juno, and held the record for being the best-selling Canadian hip-hop album for over 20 years. By 1991, Maestro was on the vanguard of a Canadian hip-hop boom that included artists like Mee, the Dream Warriors, and Kish.

That said, it’s never easy being first, and Symphony would never have happened without the single-minded determination of two guys from Scarborough, as well as some help from a zealous record executive, ’80s dance music star Stevie B and, um, long-forgotten pop-rockers Haywire.

Prologue

Wes Williams (a.k.a. Maestro Fresh-Wes): I started rapping in 1979. I was 11 years-old… I started making demo tapes when I was about 15 or 16, thinking [rap] could potentially be a career.

Steve Waxman (former Vice President of Radio Promotion, Attic Records): Years before Symphony in Effect, I saw [Wes] at the BamBoo. He was playing in a rap duo called Vision, and I thought they were fantastic. I went up to them, gave them my business card and said, “Do me a favour, call me.” They never did.

Part I: Wizards and Parkway Mall

Maestro funds his hip-hop dreams by working as a mall cop at Scarborough’s least exciting shopping destination.

Farley Flex (Maestro’s first manager): When I would come home from university, during the summer and spring breaks, I worked at a little roadhouse restaurant called Wizards in Scarborough, and we’d have these little rap battles with the door staff against the kitchen staff.

Wes Williams: It wasn’t really battles; it was just having having fun with the fellas at work. It wasn’t like we were battling on a stage with mics and everything.

Farley Flex: The guys on the door were winning all the time, and then the kitchen and bus staff started getting good, and I wanted to know why. I found out this guy in the back, Wes Williams, was feeding them lines. That was how I encountered Wes as a rapper.

Wes Williams: I went [to Carleton] for a year… then I said, ‘Okay, well, let me just give [music] a chance’ and took a year off.

Farley Flex: Wes called me, and told me he was thinking about taking time off school to try and become a recording artist. He knew I had a business background from promoting events and stuff like that.

Wes Williams: I got a job to pay for my demo tapes. I was working security at Parkway Mall. It was a job where I didn’t have to work that hard, but I could make some money and work on my music while I was there, do some writing. The majority of the album was written at Parkway Mall.

Part II: Coming to America

The King of Freestyle helps out the future Godfather of Canadian Hip-Hop.

Farley Flex: We’d approached some Canadian labels, who, at that point didn’t have a lot of experience with the genre. Their approach was to find something that had already worked. They were looking for a Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince replica.

Wes Williams: It’s not their fault really. It was a gamble, no one had ever done it before. There was no point of reference for them to look at… I say that being mature about that now.

Farley Flex: The story really begins when [Wes] performed on Electric Circus a couple of times. The second time he was on, Stevie B, who was signed to LMR, was also there.

Wes Williams: I didn’t even necessarily want to do it… [but] because I’d already done that, Farley said, “Let’s give it a shot one more time.”

Farley Flex: As we were leaving the building, [Stevie B] kind of beckoned us. He informed me that he had a show in Mississauga that night, and that his label was in town. He said he really liked the song [“Let Your Backbone Slide”] and he’d like to talk to us about it.

Larry Moelis (Vice President of Operations, LeFrak-Moelis Records): Stevie B was big in Canada, and he told us about Wes. We were not in the rap market at all. We were basically trying to use the American dance market as a segue into the pop market.

Farley Flex: Stevie B was their artist; it wasn’t a lengthy roster. I went out that night and met with a vice president of [LMR], Larry Moelis, who was the son of the man who owned the label. He offered a single on the spot.

Larry Moelis: That was pretty standard for an independent. No independent was going to commit to a new artist for an album. You did a single, you put it out, you promoted it and, if you saw potential, then you went for it.

Farley Flex: Wes and I wanted an album deal. We were thinking bigger. We went down and met the patriarch of the label, Herb Moelis. We talked about our interest in an album deal, and we had some other songs on the demo that they liked, and then I asked Wes to drop a rhyme right there on the spot—that took them aback. I guess Herb thought he had potential.

Part III: The Return to Canada

An unlicensed sample helps Maestro land a domestic distribution deal.

Farley Flex: When the “Let Your Backbone Slide” single came out, it was available only as an import… many of the [local] DJs didn’t know that Wes was a Canadian kid. He came in in sort of a backwards way, living here, with a record on import.

Larry Moelis: We were originally affiliated with A&M [in Canada], for Stevie B. A&M didn’t want to take on rap product, which kind of shows you where Canada was at the time.

Steve Waxman: I was at, of all things, a Soundgarden concert at a club out in Mississauga called The World; the DJ was playing all this dance music. He put on “Backbone Slide”—and it wasn’t on the radio at the time, the video wasn’t being played—and the place went absolutely fucking bonkers. The kids went apeshit.

Farley Flex: We did the [“Let Your Backbone Slide”] video and that got on Much—that was when Attic Records started negotiating with our American label.

Steve Waxman: I got the record and played it for [Attic President] Al Mair. He said, “Do you think could be a hit?” I said, “Al, I think it already is a hit. Somebody just has to put it out.”

Farley Flex: Part of the negotiation was that [Attic] owned the sample that we used on the album, the “Drop the Needle” sample.

Haywire was a PEI-based band—a sort of CanCon Bon Jovi—that released three albums on Attic between 1986-1990. “Drop the Needle” samples roughly three seconds of Haywire’s biggest hit, 1987’s “Dance Desire.”

Steve Waxman: At the time, record company people used to meet regularly with club DJs. We’d be promoting 12-inch singles and things like that. Someone played [“Drop the Needle”] for the DJs. I was very intricately involved with Haywire at the time; I heard the sample and told Al Mair about it [the following] Monday when I was back in the office, and he kind of went, “Ah ha!”

Farley Flex: It wasn’t a strong-arm situation; that was a bargaining tool they had, and they used it.

Steve Waxman: I think LMR was probably looking for a better deal at the time. I don’t know what the deal ended up being, I’m never involved in that stuff. But I remember, back at that time, people were sampling records and there were a lot of lawsuits flying around. I think [Wes’ deal with Attic] was basically a distribution deal cut on avoiding a lawsuit.

Larry Moelis: There may have been some internal horse-trading, but I have no idea.

Farley Flex: You want to do well on your home ground. With Attic, we had distribution from Nova Scotia to BC.

Wes Williams: All I knew was Toronto; I didn’t know the world or nothing like that, so [being on Attic] was cool.

Part IV: Can-Rap Rising

Symphony in Effect inspires a Canadian hip-hop boom.

Farley Flex: At the time, the only hip-hop shows were on the campus stations; CIUT, CKLN and CHRY. Literally 100 per cent of those early spins were coming from that.

Wes Williams: Ron Nelson from CKLN was my major support.

Steve Waxman: It was a hit on the dancefloors, it was just a matter of getting it on [commercial] radio. I believe the first station that added it was CFTR here in Toronto. They were so influential; once CFTR added it, it only took a few more weeks for us to have a significant amount of the radio panel playing the track. Once we started getting significant radio play, MuchMusic started playing the video even more.

Wes Williams: With the reception from radio, I knew I was onto something. I was doing shows from Public Enemy and Ice-T, and that kind of etched it in stone. I knew I was good, I knew I was ready. Then the next step was to prove that it wasn’t a fluke, and come back with more heat. Then “Drop the Needle” dropped.

Larry Moelis: One of the things that was really big back then was getting video play. If you were an independent, they didn’t play you unless they had to. I think when [MuchMusic] started to play the video, that was a major breakthrough. Stevie B had a number one record in the States and we couldn’t get the video on MTV.

Farley Flex: There wasn’t a finite goal—“we want the album to sell X-amount of units,” or whatever. But we definitely broke through the ceiling for Canadians doing well in Canada, especially black Canadians doing a black genre of music. We broke that mold and the skies opened up.

Steve Waxman: It was like a competition: Who’s going to have the bigger record? “Let Your Backbone Slide” and [Dream Warriors’] “Wash Your Face in My Sink” were going head-to-head. As the singles got bigger, the hip-hop scene got bigger, and more and more people started covering it. Everything was kind of building together. It was like this giant monster and, luckily for us, Wes was always on the top of the mountain.

Farley Flex: If you talk to studio owners at the time, they’ll tell you how much business they started to generate as a result of Wes’ impact.

Steve Waxman: “Backbone” was a really big hit, then “Drop the Needle” was a really big hit, and Symphony wound up selling a couple hundred thousand. But then, coming into the Junos, no one in the industry—outside of us who were directly involved—thought this was for real. They didn’t believe the sales were the sales. This was before we had Soundscan, so you’d call record stores and they’d say, “Here are my top 10–selling records,’ and you had to take them at their word.

Wes Williams: Getting nominated for a Juno was like, ‘Oh my goodness—I’m from Scarborough, and I’m getting nominated for this award.’ Then, the next year, they created a category at the Junos for best rap record. I was a part of that.

Steve Waxman: I was trying to get the people on the [Juno] performance committee to put Wes on the show, and they just didn’t want to do it. I would send [them] article after article, chart after chart, video after video, and they finally agreed. I have a letter, to Al Mair, from someone on the committee saying, “We want to commend Steve Waxman for being so thorough and sending us so much information on Maestro Fresh-Wes.” I was like, “You betcha, buddy. I’ll pound it into your ass.”

Wes Williams: My whole thing was: I’m not making records, I’m making history. We just didn’t know it was going to last so long.

Afterword

Wes Williams: The artists that I’m inspired by aren’t necessarily the most popular, but they made ground-breaking music: KRS-One, Public Enemy, Rakim, Big Daddy Kane. When I made music, I wanted it to last and have the same sort of impact those artists made. When you put on a Public Enemy record, you remember where you where when you heard it. That’s what I wanted to do. The fact that people still want to interview me 25 years later proves that I was doing something.

Larry Moelis: At the time, there was no market at all for rap [in Canada.] Wes was a total original: He clearly opened the door, and he did it in a way you couldn’t argue with, with sales, Juno awards, and video play.

Farley Flex: If you look at track and field in a place like Jamaica, the history of [1970s Olympian] Donald Quarrie has a lot to do with the success of Usain Bolt. A lot of people don’t make that connection. If you do a work-back schedule from Drake’s career back to Maestro… if you take away the success of Kardi and Saukrates and k-os and all the way back to Wes, Drake might be working as an accountant somewhere.

Steve Waxman: It opened people’s minds to what Canadians could do, that it wasn’t just Platinum Blonde and Loverboy.

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