JDC Records: The San Pedro Record Shop That Gave Us the Party Sound of '80s L.A.
It was "Get Off Your Ass and Jam" that led Jim Callon to the disco. As a recording engineer, he worked on that Funkadelic song, which is on the band's 1975 album "Let's Take It to the Stage." When he learned that the tune was getting play on disco dance floors, he wanted to hear how it sounded in the venues. So Callon ventured to a club in West Hollywood. He was impressed by the light show and the DJs — it was the first time he heard Donna Summer's now-classic cut "Love to Love You Baby" — and the crowd's enthusiastic response to the Funkadelic song.
That night, Callon had a revelation, "I've got to make some disco records." He did that, and scored two late-'70s club hits in the process. He also launched a record label and distribution company that would supply the West Coast, and, crucially, Los Angeles, with bangers that heated up Los Angeles parties throughout the '80s. "My Forbidden Lover" by Tapps, "Spin It" from Sunbelt, "Wake Up" by Stop and L.A. Dream Team's "Dream Team Is In the House" are just a few of the party jams that his company, JDC, helped get into the hands of DJs and on the shelves of record stores.
Today, JDC is a beloved San Pedro record shop that serves casual shoppers, DJs and hardcore record collectors. The story, though, starts with The Glass Family Electric Band, which Callon formed back in the 1960s and with whom he still plays today. As a UCLA student, Callon's surf band played around fraternity parties and school dances. Then, after he had moved on to graduate school at Cal State L.A., Glass Family Electric Band, was signed to Warner Bros. They released an album in 1968 and, having adopted a more psychedelic sound, played alongside The Doors, Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead and others. Callon, however, wanted to settle down, so he looked for work in the recording studio. That's how he linked up with the P-Funk crew, lending his skills to albums like "Let's Take It to the Stage" and Parliament's "Mothership Connection." After that fateful night when he heard "Get Off Your Ass and Jam" inside the West Hollywood dance club, Callon and The Glass Family made the pivot from rock to disco.
"All of my rocker friends thought I was nuts. But, I was very proud of the work that we did. It was great. We licensed the stuff all over the world and we did it on our own label, JDC Records," says Callon. When we meet for our interview, Callon is adding a new release from seminal L.A. electro producer Egyptian Lover to the store's inventory. On the wall to the side of Callon, a Donna Summer poster hangs next to one from his own band.
Callon created JDC as a response to his previous experience as a musician. "I had done all this work for the major companies and had gotten very little of the profit, so I planned to do this myself with the help of the DJs in the clubs, who were playing our records," he says. "That's how [The Glass Family Electric Band] got noticed and how we got on the charts and everything else."
DJs took to two of the band's singles. "Boy, if you had an influential DJ, like Larry Levan at Paradise Garage in New York — he played for 3,000, 4,000 people a night — if he was playing your record, you were in," Callon explains. And Levan was one of the DJs who championed the wah-wah funk of "Smoke Your Troubles Away." Another single, "Mr. DJ You Know How to Make Me Dance" also lit up the decks inside discotheques. Thanks to the club play, The Glass Family was able to tour. "Then," Callon says, "disco died."
But, there was a catch: disco never truly died. "That was the headlines in the newspaper," says Callon. Dance clubs, though, kept pulsing with the beats that emerged in the wake of the 1970s disco craze. Freestyle, hiNRG, synthpop and electro were just a few of the genres to perk up the ears of '80s youth that owe at least a partial debt to disco and, in Los Angeles, these sounds would converge and continue to influence DJs, producers and musicians for decades to follow. As the dance music artists of the '80s flourished, JDC helped get the records into the hands of DJs and fans in a few different ways.
As a record label, much of the music JDC released was from artists based in Canada or various European countries, whose music was licensed for release in the U.S. "That's the way it was done back," says Callon. "Nowadays, it's kind of unheard of because everything streams everywhere."
JDC focused on 12" singles, an innovation that came about with the onset of disco and DJ culture. In addition to their own releases, the company also distributed other record labels to retailers. "We became the largest distributor of that format on the West Coast," says Callon. "Out here on the West Coast, we were the ones supplying Music Plus and Tower and all of the stores with this 12" single format that was originally just for DJs. But, people, everywhere were buying things on this format. They would hear it in the club and want the long version."
Because these singles were the same physical size as a full-length record, but usually only had one or two songs on each side, they were better suited for club play than the 7" vinyl that previously dominated the singles market. "The wider the grooves, the better the sonics, and the sound, you would get out of the vinyl," explains veteran DJ Pebo Rodriguez, who played venues like Fantasia at the Bonaventure Hotel, Circus Disco and Hollywood Tropicana during the 1980s.
Beyond the sound, the songs pressed onto these 12" singles were designed for discos. Where radio often plays shorter versions of songs, club DJs tend to go for extended versions that they can beat-match with other tracks at various different points in the song in order to create a continuous mix that lasts through the night. While the 12" single was designed to be functional for DJs, it also gained a following with listeners.
"Back then, the real disco aficionado would buy these 12" singles because you weren't hearing these versions on the radio," says Rodriguez. "The only time you could hear these really cool songs was once or twice a week when you went out to the clubs, where the DJs played them once a night. You were jonesing for that. Plus, the long versions, which they never played on the radio. It became quite a sought after item."
In 1970s L.A., Rodriguez was the disco fan who scooped up those 12" singles. Then, during a stint in Puerto Rico towards the end of the decade, he became a DJ himself. That's where he started playing The Glass Family's single "Mr. DJ You Know How to Make Me Dance." After returning to Los Angeles and building his DJ career here, he briefly owned a record store in Montebello, where he first met Callon. Later, he worked for JDC. In fact, he and Callon made the first of JDC's popular, and still sought-after, series of Mixer 12" releases.
The concept behind the Mixer was novel at the time. It was, essentially, a very brief DJ mix made with songs from the JDC catalog. "We created this mix on the fly in the warehouse," says Rodriguez. He brought in his turntables and mixer to play the music, while Callon used a two-track tape deck to record. "When I would screw up a mix, we would do it over again until it came out right. Jim edited that whole thing together and that was the very first JDC Mixer," Rodriguez recalls. Then Callon edited the mix so that it could fit on one side of a record.
Between the music that they released and the music from other labels that the company distributed, JDC brought together a cross-section of sounds. Amongst their releases was British group Bollock Brothers single "The Harley David/Son of a Bitch," a Serge Gainsbourg cover that 1980s KROQ listeners will likely recall. They delved into L.A.'s nascent hip-hop movement with singles like "Techno Scratch" from Knights of the Turntables, which Callon also produced, and an early single from Ice-T, "The Coldest Rap." They distributed, and then licensed for subsequent release, "The Dream Team Is In the House" by L.A. Dream Team, which became a hit on both hip-hop station KDAY and alternative rock-minded KROQ. "That was very rare," says Callon. Many other JDC releases were what's known as hiNRG, an '80s tangent of disco that's derived from 1970s anthems like "I Feel Love" by Donna Summer and "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" by Sylvester. Songs like "My Forbidden Lover" and "Spin It," both of which were released by JDC, fall into this category, as does "Wake Up" by Stop, Rodriguez's own group, which JDC distributed.
With its slick, electronic sound and faster tempo, the hiNRG songs also flowed well with the new wave hits that were big in the city. "Because of KROQ in L.A. and L.A./Hollywood being a rock town, it was this really cool crossover with new wave and disco," Rodriguez says.
Altogether, JDC supplied the sound of 1980s Los Angeles. At one point, they even opened a retail store, Dance Music Forever, in San Pedro. By the dawn of the '90s, though, technology had changed customers' habits. CDs usurped vinyl as listeners' preferred format. "Vinyl died and so we had this big warehouse and we said it's time to downsize," says Callon. JDC focused on CD distribution, although they still sold some vinyl and would go on to open up shop in Hermosa Beach. When the 21st century vinyl revival hit, JDC moved its retail outpost back to San Pedro. Today, JDC is a cross-genre, cross-format shop where you might find some of those '80s 12" singles in the bins, along with an ample selection of used vinyl and CDs, as well as new releases. It continues to attract local DJs; you might even be able to catch some play there during the store's monthly Sunday Sessions event.
Meanwhile, Callon has spent the past few years completing a project he began in the 1970s, a follow-up to the 1968 Glass Family Electric Band album. "I spent about 300 hours in the studio over the past two or three years to complete this thing and we put it out," he says. "Invisible World" was released last May, naturally, on JDC Records.
