June is Caribbean-American Heritage Month, a month dedicated to recognizing and celebrating the importance of Caribbean people and their descendants in the history and culture of the United States. Over the next few weeks, Loop News will profile several people of Caribbean descent who have made a tremendous impact on the entertainment industry in the United States.
Franklyn Grant remembers the first time he met Mariah Carey.
Before meeting her, the musician, producer and audio engineer had expressed doubts about the authenticity of her famous whistle notes.
When she walked into the recording booth, she hit the mark and he knew he was wrong.
“I apologized and from that moment me and her working together was like magic. We worked for about four hours. We were like the Bobbsey twins from then on,” he says.
Carey is one of Grant’s favorite artists to work with. Her work ethic, he says, is amazing.
Working with world chart toppers and countless others across multiple genres has given Grant insight into what it takes to be a successful music star.
He plans to use that knowledge to help artists in his native Trinidad and Tobago and is currently on the lookout for unknown new talent who are willing to listen and learn.
Grant hails from the eastern city of Tacarigua and began his musical journey at the age of nine playing the tambourine.
“I couldn’t wait for school to end to go to the yard. Music and art were the two main things I was interested in and football,” he recalls.
In December 1970, aged 19, Grant left T&T for the shores of the United States to live with his mother.
“When I landed in America I wanted to go home. I was in Connecticut and after the first two weeks I said I was going home, there was no steel bar. The woman my mom was working with asked me what the problem was, I said I’m a music guy and she asked me if I could get steel drums would I stay? She said she would buy the batteries for me,” Grant recalled.
He went to the Manhattan workshop of legendary pan pioneer Ellie Mannette, who made the pans to create his steel band. The band was called Trinidad Panasonic and played events all over Connecticut.
“I could upload anything and they’d always say OK,” he says with a laugh.
The Vietnam War was going on at the time and Grant received several draft papers. He joined the United States Air Force in February 1973 as an Air Operations Specialist and was assigned to Las Vegas. There he started a grassroots band, bringing his steel drums from Connecticut and introducing an American electric bassist.
From Nellis where he first settled in England and the US, Grant performed continuously, winning competitions such as the Worldwide Force Talent show, where he won the Classical Division playing Variation on a Theme by Paganini in double seconds. The judges were Quincy Jones, Artemus Gordon from Wild Wild West Television and Lyn Collins from the James Brown Touring Band.
While stationed in England, Grant, who by then was married with a son, thought about his future and decided to attend audio engineering school so he could work in the recording industry.
He participated in Audio Research Institute in Manhattan and scored his first internship in audio engineering at Platinum Factory Recording Studio.
IN Platinum, Grant created a package called Breakthrough. For US$250, artists could record for five hours on a Sunday and receive a two-inch tape.
“Set It Off” by the electro band Strafe, which Hip-hop, house, techno and EDM artists have extensively sampled over the years, exited that program.
Rawlston Charles, New York’s leading calypso producer and owner of Charlie’s Records, recorded at Platinum until he decided to build his own studio. Rawlston Recording Studio.
Grant helped Charles develop his studio and immersed himself in the sounds of the Caribbean. Rawlston’s Studio also introduced him to many of the top Hip Hop stars of the day.
“I worked with everyone. Duke’s Thunder, all the Explainer songs, all the Blue Boy… I was the mixer and they loved the way I guided them through the vocals. Then came the Americans. I worked with Dougie Fresh on The Show, Levert, Fat Boys, Kids at Work, Kurtis Blow, Heavy D, Dr. Jackll and Mr. Hyde, Whodini, Pieces of a Dream, Bernard Wright, Doug E. Fresh and BJ Nelson, Teddy Riley, Andre Harrell and Alonso,” he says.
During this time, Grant also assisted Ed Watson with the innovation of Chutney music for JMC Record Label, owned by Mohan Jaikaran and worked on projects with Sundar Popo, Atiya, Babla and Kanchan and Anand Yankaran.
Rawlston Charles
In 1988, Grant left Rawlston to work at Soundtrack Recording Studios, Manhattan’s largest studio complex. There he became heavily involved in Pop, Rock, R&B, Dance and House music.
“My engineering talent was being fine-tuned in this studio complex, because this was everything big. I’ve worked on mixes for Gun and Roses, Fine Young Cannibals, Kool and The Gang, Ronney Jordan, Pattie La Belle, Rob Base’s famous Hip Hop hit, and DJ EZ Rock’s It Takes Two, he explains.
Sound Track Studios is where most TV commercials are made and Grant has worked on some for Chevrolet Automobile, Kentucky Fried Chicken and many others.
“Most important were the many mixes I worked on with Justin Strauss and Murray Elias. They were the king of Dance Remixes. I was playing a lot of Soca beats on these mixes,” he says.
In 1989, Grant created and produced a band from Antigua called Burning Flames, for their manager Dr. G. He did the entire album at a small studio in the Bronx called E&F Recording producing the hits “Workey Workey” and “Island Girl,” which was used on the film soundtrack for Weekend at Burnie’s II.
At the same time he was producing Burning Flames, Grant was asked by Teddy Riley to form his own band Guy. They made the hit record, “My Fantasy.”
The jobs kept coming.
“Charles Stetler, the most powerful manager in the American music industry called. For him, I worked on, wrote and produced the last Fat Boys album, On and On. After that project I did Puff Daddy’s first major artist, in 1990 at Uptown, MCA, Father MC, which featured his then-new band Jodeci on background vocals.”
In 1991, Riley asked Grant to come to his future recording studio in Virginia Beach.
There he managed his own studio and designed, produced and co-wrote for artists such as Mc Lyte and Wreckx N Effects.
“I actually found the song, ‘Rump Shaker,’ from the files of one of our producers from New Jersey. The list of artists I worked with included Michael Jackson, Blackstreet, LL Cool J., Bobby Brown, Whitney Houston and many, many more. One of the most impactful sessions was with SWV. With them we did, ‘Human Nature,’ which was absolutely beautiful,” he says.
At Future Recording Studio, Grant also designed a joint program with the Virginia City Police Department and Future Records to host an annual basketball tournament for local children, as well as a talent show.
Super producer Pharrell Williams and his band the Neptunes were discovered through this initiative.
“Pharrell used to come to the studio and sit with me, to learn the formalities of production. The result influences music in the international music industry to this day,” says Grant.
Franklyn Grant in the studio with a then-unknown Jennifer Lopez working on her debut album.
Grant returned to New York where Cory Rooney and Prince Markie Dee of the Fat Boys were then A&R representatives at Sony Records.
Rooney was producing Mariah Carey, and asked Grant to engineer the project, which was her Butterfly album.
He followed this up by working on Jennifer Lopez’s first album, On The Six, which took a year to complete. JLO was fresh off the film Selena, and Grant remembers giving her advice on many things, including being aware of sanitation practices in hotels.
Grant says that in his spare time he worked separately with 50 Cents at Mohan Jaikaran’s Studio and worked with Aaliyah on the song, “One In A Million,” which was recorded and mixed in one day.
In 2018, Charles of Charlie’s Records introduced Grant to Soca King Machel Montano. They recorded “The Road” featuring American Hip Hop artist Ashanti and “Famalay” The Road March 2019.
Grant says he’s still working closely with Montano and they plan to build a recording studio in Toco.
“I want Trinidadian music to grow. We are afraid to do things differently. We don’t have that hunger. This is the best time for soca, all the beats in the USA today have soca beats and snares and Americans make songs, learn from the Caribbean.
Asked about a key ingredient to success, Grant said artists must be prepared to listen. He said many Caribbean artists think they know more than studio experts.
“The first thing they have to do is listen and do what they’re told to do. You can’t go into a kitchen with a great chef and tell him what order to put the spices in.”
