About The Touch
Mona
Track Time: 4:36
Mona was actually a real person, with a slight name change. Wonder how she's holding up 15 years down the line.
Miles Joseph (pictured) transformed this song. This was originally conceived as a hard stomp blues song. He listened to the bass and drum track up to the first turnaround, told us to go back to the front and turn the recorder on. Thirty minutes and four tracks later he was done and we were on to the next song.
After we recorded the basic tracks for this song, I was doing some consulting work in the inner city of Detroit with a health clinic that was treating addicts for heroin addiction and severe mental illness. I met the clinic’s recipient’s right’s advisor, a social worker named Anne R DuConge, and discovered through our conversation that she co-wrote a few songs with Willie Dixon. In addition, she worked for Marshall Chess in Chicago. She was in her late 70’s/early 80’s but still going strong. She told me stories about the old days at Chess Records in Chicago and I mentioned I was recording a CD. She asked if I had a copy and I told her I had some basic tracks with bass, guitar, and drums. We went to my rental car and I played the Mona track for her. It had the initial tracking vocal on it and, at the time, contained a real hard edged Miles Joseph guitar solo. She listened to it once, never saying anything and then said: “Play it again.” I played it one more time. She sat there very intently focused on the song, kind of nodding her head a little with knitted eyebrows. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. After it ended, she made one statement, got out of the car and went back to work. She said: “It’s a song about sex, you need to get that guitar off the solo and put a saxophone on it.”
I called Stephen Gardner, my co-producer, and said: “A woman in Detroit that wrote songs with Willie Dixon and worked for Marshall Chess says we need a sax solo on Mona. I’m going to go to Memphis and get Jim Spake back in the studio.” Steve’s reply was: “Yeah, right man. Whatever it takes.”
