C + C Music Factory

In the early '90s as the creative team guiding C + C Music Factory, Robert Clivillés and David Cole personified the reemergence of the producer/songwriter as star in pop music. They also endured clashes with artists who felt that their work within this dance-pop collective hadn't been properly acknowledged.

Clivillés and Cole met in the mid-'80s at a Manhattan nightclub where Clivillés DJ'd while Cole played live keyboards. Before long, they were remixing club hits for the likes of Janet Jackson ("Pleasure Principle"), Natalie Cole ("Pink Cadillac"), and Fleetwood Mac ("Big Love"). The duo next set its sights on making original recordings, using keyboards and a computer to write and arrange material, then recruiting performers to lay down vocals. Their breakthrough came when they assembled the R&B trio Seduction, whose debut album, Nothing Matters Without Love (#36, 1989), produced several hit singles, including “You’re My One and Only (True Love)” (#23 pop, #56 R&B, 1989) and “Two to Make It Right” (#2 R&B, 1989).

With C + C Music Factory, Clivillés and Cole brought their own involvement to the fore. The outfit’s 1991 debut album, Gonna Make You Sweat, hit #2 on the pop chart and yielded a #1 title track (on the pop and R&B charts) and the #3 single “Here We Go, Let’s Rock & Roll” (#7 R&B). The album featured singers Martha Wash and Deborah Cooper and rapper Freedom Williams; but these vocalists were only briefly mentioned in the LP’s production notes and liner material. Furthermore, Wash, whose booming soprano had also been the uncredited voice of Seduction and the dance group Black Box (she sang with the Weather Girls [see entry] and Two Tons O’Fun, as well) was conspicuously absent in C + C’s popular videos, in which the more lithe, attractive Zelma Davis lip-synched to her vocals.

In 1991 Wash filed two lawsuits against Clivillés and Cole, one charging that she hadn’t received ample credit for Sweat, the other protesting her deceptive exclusion from the videos. While still hashing it out with her lawyers, the producers worked with Mariah Carey on her single “Make It Happen” and, in 1992, released a followup album, as Clivillés and Cole. Greatest Remixes, vol. 1 (#87, 1992) spawned the #4 single “Things That Make You Go Hmmm....” and the dance-club smash “A Deeper Love” (#44), which the team would later produce for Aretha Franklin. Later that year, Williams also sued the team, claiming they had misled him about solo opportunities and withheld royalties (part of Wash’s claim, too).

Williams did strike out on his own, releasing Freedom in 1993. Wash settled her differences with Clivillés and Cole, though, and in 1994 C + C Music Factory resurfaced with Anything Goes! featuring Wash, Davis, and the Latin hip-hop/R&B threesome Trilogy. That same year Clivillés and Cole won a Grammy for their production work with Whitney Houston on the soundtrack to The Bodyguard.

In early 1995 Cole died of complications from spinal meningitis at the age of 32. Columbia and its parent label, Sony Music, released three repackaged hit collections under the name C + C Music Factory after Cole’s death. Clivillés continued to work behind the scenes, producing several cuts on Wash’s second solo album in 1995.

from The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001)