I was DJing at a relatively mainstream club night recently on a bank holiday Sunday and the place was heaving full of gratifyingly enthusiastic dancers. At about 2am, to repay the indulgence of the revellers, who’d stuck with what I’d been playing all night, I decided it was time to break open some stone cold classic house, techno and disco and started off by playing ‘Move Your Body (The House Music Anthem)’ by Marshall Jefferson. As soon as those tumbling, hesitant, melancholy yet uplifting piano chords chimed out, people started shouting and screaming in sheer joy and going crazy dancing. There was only one person in the room who didn’t seem to like it but his reaction was pretty extreme. Doing that I’ve-just-shat-a-bowling-ball walk that Liam Gallagher does he elbowed his way roughly across the floor to stand in front of me shouting, “What the fuck is this shit? Why can’t you play something that everyone likes?” he said, framed by 249 people going fucking nuts. And then stood there making the wanker sign at me.
Under any other circumstances I would have ignored him. There’s no accounting for taste (or lack thereof) that drunks have and you can’t accommodate literally everyone. Moaning about your lot while DJing is idiotic. It’s not like it’s a hard or unenjoyable job making people dance. There will always people who go out in order to have a bad time. But then, ignoring all this, I thought, “You know what, we’re talking about Marshall Jefferson here. I’m simply not standing for this level of ignorance from someone who looks like he could be a member of King Krule with rickets.”
I texted head of security – a Russian gentleman with infinite patience and hands like JCB scoops who looks like Robo Cop with an ill fitting human skin pulled over his metal chassis: “We have a young man up here disrespecting ‘The House Music Anthem’ in a most unpleasant way. I think he could do with a quick breath of fresh air to consider the further trajectory of his night out.” The young man went outside to consider the error of his ways for a few minutes while everyone else finished off enjoying the tune.
If you don’t know this track you’ll probably write it off as me playing a dick move but if you do you’ll probably get where I was coming from. It’s like telling a rock fan that ‘Ace Of Spades’ is mediocre or a disco head that you’ve heard it all before when the Patrick Cowley remix of Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ comes on.
It simply won’t do.
There are certain songs that you essentially need to show some respect to. And this, in my opinion, is near the top of the pile.
Marshall Jefferson was born in Chicago in 1959 and began producing dance tracks electronically in 1985 when he was still working nights at a local post office. He had already made a few tunes as Virgo when he wrote and recorded ‘Move Your Body (The House Music Anthem)’ – with three postal worker colleagues. Even as an unreleased cassette it was a (heavily bootlegged) big hit in Chicago house clubs in 1986 and was then released officially via Trax the following year. Also in 1987, Jefferson produced the seminal ‘Acid Tracks’ for DJ Pierre’s Phuture outfit. Not content with putting his stamp on two genre defining tracks he moved into an area he thought of as spiritual house (which would later be called deep house) and became one of the sub-genre’s best producers. Since then Jefferson has worked on countless house tracks for the likes of Kym Mazelle, CeCe Rogers and Ten City but kept a lower profile than most due to his insistence on not taking top billing over vocalists and artists he works with.
He has always been a big DJ draw in Europe (and in fact currently divides his time between Prestwich, Greater Manchester and New Jersey – as well as having spent several years living in Essex) but latterly the EDM boom in the States has revitalised his fortunes in his home country as well. When we found out he was helping out with Trax’s massive, 16-disc, 216 track box set with 100 page book, we jumped at the chance to have a talk with a true house music innovator, gentleman and raconteur.
What was your introduction to making music and did you grow up in a musical household?
Marshall Jefferson: Well yeah, I guess it was kind of a musical household. My parents were playing Motown a lot, I got into Diana Ross And The Supremes, The Temptations, Lou Rawls especially. Nancy Wilson. Then in the 70s I got into rock music, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and that kind of thing right? My friends were all into soul so I decided to get into rock and I was really into it. It had more versatile subject matter… they were singing about every kind of thing. I was into the heavy stuff that pisses off your parents the most! Which is what every kid wants to do.
I can dig it. I love Black Sabbath and I love house music!
MJ: [laughs] Funnily enough it was when they started saying, “Disco sucks”, that I got into dance music. I started working in the post office where Curtis McClain was. and I started getting into the Hot Mix 5. They were local DJS and the best mixers I’d heard at the time. As far as mixing it up went, they’d run 40 songs per hour and they would cut up every single record, and, oh man, it was brilliant. And Curtis would teach me all of the techniques that the Hot Mix 5 used. And incidentally, Curtis is the guy who sang ‘Move Your Body’. So he was well into dance music and DJing. We used to go record shopping together and spend a lot of money. We’d spend like $400 a week. Back then that was a lot of money to spend on records so we had everything twice. We weren’t famous; we were working in the post office on the graveyard shift which was midnight to eight am every night. And that cuts heavily into party hours. So we’d do our mixing during the day and bring our cassette tapes into work and listen to each other’s mixes on the job.
When did you start making music?
MJ: That came at about 84/85. I took a friend of mine to a music store – a guitar store in town. And the guy who worked there was talking about a “sequencer”… a Yamaha QS-1 right? He told me, “With this thing you’ll be able to play like Stevie Wonder… even if you don’t know how to play at all!” And my friend who was a guitar player was like, “Get out of here.” He didn’t believe any of it. But I was like, “Wait… what? Stevie Wonder? I think I could do with some of that. Man, I’m gonna do it! I’m gonna play like Stevie Wonder!” At the time Jessie Saunders had started making music and I thought that this must be the thing that he was using. I asked him how much it was and he told me it was $3,000, which I didn’t have. He said, “Have you got a job?” So I told him about the post office and he said, “Oh! Let me get you a credit line.” He got me a ten grand credit line. So then he said, “Well you don’t want to have a QS-1 and not have a keyboard to play it on do you?” I was like, “Oh yeah! I can’t have it without a keyboard, you better get me a keyboard…” And then he was like [whispers conspiratorially] “Listen man, you can’t have the QS-1, a keyboard and not have a drum machine.” So I said, “Oh yeah! You’re right, I’d better have a drum machine.” And then he said, “Look, you don’t want to have this QS-1, the keyboard, the drum machine and not have anything to listen to it on do you?” I was like, “Oh YEAH! YOU’RE RIGHT!” And so I bought a mixer… and another keyboard, a TB303… and ANOTHER drum machine. I bought all this stuff and took it home.
About an hour later all my friends came over to see all the gear. Oh man, they took the piss out of me for five hours straight. They made me feel about two inches tall. [puts on squeaky voice] “Stoopid sucker bought all this stuff and he doesn’t know how to play! Ha ha ha!” But using that gear I wrote my first song two days later. And about two years later I wrote ‘Move Your Body’ on that gear and then DJs would be hiring keyboard players and telling them to play like Marshall Jefferson! Ha ha ha! It’s funny I guess because I play all the instruments on all my records but I wasn’t really a musician, I would just play stuff at 40bpm and I would stack notes and do stuff like that. And very meticulously [I learned how to make tracks]. I learned how to do the timing so it would sound natural when I’d speed it up from 40bpm to 120bpm.
What was the first house record you ever heard?
MJ: That would be Jesse Saunders, and either ‘On & On’.
What was the first house record that you made?
MJ: Virgo ‘Go Wild Rhythm Trax’.
How did you meet Larry and how did the hook up with Trax [the label] initially happen?
MJ: Well, Jesse Saunders was a well known DJ in town and I bought a record that he had out. And it was right there on the label where it was getting pressed up at, Precision Records. So I went down to Precision Records and said to them, “I want to press up some records, just like Jesse Saunders did. Larry Sherman [owner of Trax] was there and I told him I wanted to press up Virgo ‘Go Wild Rhythm Tracks’. He made a lot of money off of that. I thought I was going to quit [music] after that. One thing was Vince Lawrence [producer and co-writer of ‘On & On’] helped me to produce it and he just made it all seem so complicated. All I wanted to do was make music and it made me think, “Ah, I don’t want to do this any more.” And also Larry Sherman didn’t pay me for the Virgo ‘Go Wild Rhythm Trax’ even though I paid to press it up. It just made me think, “Ah man, this [scene] is messed up.” But I’d been making tracks for a while and one night I went to [legendary Chicago nightclub] Music Box and I’d been making these songs and putting them on cassette and my friend Sleezy took it down to the Music Box and Ron Hardy played nothing but an hour of my songs and then I thought, “Ah, OK, well I might be kind of good at this.” People were screaming and everything and I guess that gave me the confidence to carry on.
When you say Sleezy, do you mean Sleezy D?
MJ: SLEEZY D!
Ah right… I was talking to some guys in a record shop the other day and they were convinced that you are Sleezy D.
MJ: Nah. Sleezy is an actual person. If you ever met him, you’d never forget him. Oh man, he is… sleazy. Everybody who came to town [starts laughing] Sleazy would take them round. Everybody loved Sleazy…
Can you tell me about ‘Move Your Body…’? I know it was a hit with the crowds but there were a few prominent taste makers who didn’t get it at first weren’t there?
MJ: Yeah yeah. It was a hit on the dancefloors but not the radio. And there was a reason for that. Larry Sherman didn’t want too much attention being focused on him because [massive pause] well, he was on witness protection [laughs]. That’s why he went for the smaller labels and the smaller distributors. He didn’t want too much attention on him. He had a chop shop upstairs from Trax Records and that’s where he was making his real money. A chop shop is what he did before he went all witness protection. A chop shop is where they take stolen cars apart and sell the parts.
How about making the track? Obviously it was a revolutionary song and it set the template for several different types of house music that came after it.
MJ: Well, I just wanted something to drive the track forward and the piano seemed reasonable. The hard guitar just didn’t seem soulful enough for a black dancefloor so I said, “Well, let’s try some piano and see how that works out.” I chose minor chords because they were easier for me to do and then: bang! I thought, “Oh man, this is bumping!” I called up Curtis and my boys from the post office, Thomas Carr and Rudy Forbes and I said, “Man, we’re going into the studio and we’re going to make a record.” And we went straight into the studio and the travel time, recording and mixing took, oh, about five or six hours. I listened to the finished thing and I said, “Oh, this is the greatest thing ever made. This is awesome. THIS IS BEAUTIFUL!” And the guys said, “Don’t let anyone hear this man! This sucks… oh my GOD! THIS IS AWFUL!” Don’t let it get out, we got to fix it up.” I was like, “Fix it up?! It’s ready to go!” That wasn’t the reaction I was expecting. So I went to the Sheba Baby club where my friends were playing, Mike Dunn, Tyrree Cooper and Hugo Hutchinson. I gave them a copy and they were like, “Oh yeah, this is OK. Nice. I don’t know Virgo, it’s ok.” I was like, “Damn! I thought they were going to be jamming!” So then I went down to the Music Box and I asked my friend K-Alexi to come out to my car and I played it to him on the cassette deck of my car. And he was like, “Ah yeah, that’s nice. That’s alright.” So then I took it inside The Music Box to Ron Hardy and I said, “Look, here’s my tune, listen to it, if you like it, keep it, take it home with you. Maybe you can play it in the future.” He listened to it on his headphones and he looked at me and said, “Oh man! This is jamming!” And he played it there and then six times in a row! Each time he rewound the tape to put it on again he would play a sound effects tape and each time the crowd would be like [starts whooping] and I was like, “Yeah! That’s more like it! That’s what I thought!” [laughs]
So that must have been the tune of the year in Chicago right?
MJ: Oh yeah. Because it took so long to come out. I mean I took it to Ron Hardy in August of 85 and it didn’t come out until June of 86. Even though I paid to have it pressed up, Larry Sherman didn’t like it. He said, “That’s not house music!” Which is why I ended up putting ‘…The House Music Anthem’ bit on the title. It probably never would have come out but it had gotten so big in all the clubs in Chicago. And what happened was there were a bunch of UK reporters who came over to cover house music. And word had gotten back to Larry and he was like, “I know all about house music yadda yadda. I’ll take you to all the house clubs.” And he took them to five clubs and in every single one of them the DJ had a bootleg cassette of ‘Move Your Body…’ and when the DJ would put it on everybody would be like [starts hollering]. So it was everywhere, all over the city and Larry owned the pressing plant. And then, the very next day, ‘Move Your Body…’ came out on Trax Records! It was produced by Virgo but he put Marshall Jefferson on it and that basically screwed up my Virgo nickname for the rest of my life because it was my biggest hit and I had to use Marshall Jefferson from then on. And it was a shame because I used to love that Virgo nickname. Everywhere I went people would be like “Virgo! Virgo! Virgo!” to me. But in one fell swoop he wiped out my nickname. [laughs] Man! I really wish I’d had a nickname! What is Marshall Jefferson? [puts on boring voice] I’m Marshall Jefferson… Golly! I wish I’d been Virgo! [laughs]
So it wasn’t that long after you put out ‘Move Your Body’ that you were involved in another revolutionary record, when you worked with Pierre on ‘Acid Tracks’ and I was wondering what it was like being involved with the genesis of another form of dance music, acid?
MJ: I just like doing things differently from everybody else. Back in early house music everyone had their different styles and you could tell everyone apart. You could tell me from Farley. You could tell Farley from Larry Heard. And you could tell Larry Heard from Chip-E. And you could tell Chip-E from Steve Silk Hurley. And you could tell all of them from Adonis. You know, we all had all our own identities. We had our way of doing things. We couldn’t hire expensive musicians, so we basically had to play everything on our own records. This was different to what they’d do in New York where they’d record in big studios and be able to hire a good keyboard player and bring him in to lay down some good things. But we had to play all the stuff ourselve so it sounded like us. Now ‘Acid Tracks’ was given to me on cassette by Ron Hardy. And he said, “Listen to this.” I was like, “This has to come out.” So I played it to Larry Sherman and he was like, [screams] “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?” [laughs] He was like, “There’s no words on it!” Anyway, in 86 I gained control of the A&R process of the [Trax]. And by that point Jesse Saunders and Vince Lawrence got a major label deal with Geffen. So one of the first songs that they got out there was Larry Heard’s record, the Washing Machine EP by Mr Fingers and it had this big tune ‘Can You Feel It?’ which was an instrumental and did very well. So I had that to point at and say, “Larry, this is instrumental music and it is a genre defining song right here. I mean it’s going to change a lot of things.” But he didn’t really understand things that didn’t have any words. One of the songs, took off pretty quickly. It caught on a lot quicker than I expected. I mean, it took a while with ‘Move Your Body…’ but this one just shot out there because of that sound. Basically Phuture twisted knobs on that machine, the TB303, and oh, I loved it. I had a TB303, I’d done the Sleezy D track ‘I’ve Lost Control’ but it was nothing like that. I mean, ‘I’ve Lost Control’ came out and it did well but it wasn’t genre defining, you know what i mean? ‘Acid Tracks’ took it a step further. With the twisting on the knobs. I was saying, “Oh, this is a symphony right here.” But Larry was looking at me like I was crazy. Oh man, you should have seen those boys in the studio when they did it… They had the entire song planned out, they knew exactly which knob was going to be turned by how much and they had three pairs of hands on the TB303 to record it and they all knew their parts and where to come in. It was amazing. It was special.
I heard A Guy Called Gerald in conversation with Derek Walmsley of The WIRE at Incubate festival recently and he had this very interesting take on what the genre name “acid” meant. He said that he imagined that if you put a funk song into a bath of acid, what would come out would be an acid house tune, with everything stripped away apart from the drums, the bass and these squelches. What’s your take on the genre name acid? What did it mean to you?
MJ: Well, to me and to Phuture, acid was basically a state of mind that you entered into when you listened to that song. It was kind of like the feeling I got when I made songs like [Marshall Jefferson presents Truth ‘Open Our Eyes’] was losing control and I was trying to get deep… deep into stuff. It took me back to a place where I used to be a lot. I used to get stoned a lot in the 70s. I stopped getting stoned when I got into the music business but I was trying to take myself back to that place without getting high, which is something I found myself able to do quite well sometimes. I hate to say it but a lot of people who got high, they got it! [laughs] So that’s where I was trying to go for, that euphoria when you’re just staring at the ceiling or something, thinking, contemplating life and different things. That’s what Pierre and Phuture and I meant by that. We weren’t meaning for everyone to go out and do acid. We just wanted people to go into that state of mind.
You came over to the UK twice around 1987. How was the vibe around acid house different here to how it was in Chicago?
MJ: Well, acid house actually came back to Chicago. We didn’t know it as that until the British press got hold of it and called it that. It was just a song that Ron Hardy jacked at The Music Box because Frankie Knuckles wouldn’t play it. It was a little bit too disorganized for Frankie! He had the clean crowd. The Music Box had a dirty, crazy crowd… A dirty, crazy, funky crowd! Frankie Knuckles had the nice, clean, respectable crowd. So back in Chicago ‘Acid Trax’ was a Music Box record. You really went wild to that track when you heard it there. Overall Chicago didn’t take to it except for except for at The Music Box. It was also a little bit too disorganized for New York. But when I got to England it was a completely different thing. The press had gotten hold of it and everyone was, “Aciieeeed! Aciieeeeed!” The smiley face T shirts. I was like, “Oh these people have lost their minds!” [laughs]
You’ve worked with so many different brilliant vocalists over the years from Kym Mazelle to CeCe Rogers to Byron Stingily; which of the singers you’ve produced is the most overlooked?
MJ: The most overlooked is probably Paris Brightledge. He is just this pre-eminent stylist. He has complete control over his voice. I mean we’re talking Luther Vandross level control. He’s just so good. We recently remade his song ‘It’s Alright’ and he sang it better than he sang it 27 years ago. Some of the singers I work with, their power has dropped off, they don’t have the same energy, Paris actually got stronger and more powerful. It’s ridiculous how good he is.
One of the reasons I’m talking to you today is this insane box set Trax are putting out which features about one million CDs and has to be pretty much everything that the label put out in its formative years. And even though it’s insane how much stuff Trax reissue, I have to admit, it’s a mighty mouthwatering box set this one. Was there any of the stuff you hadn’t heard for a long time until the box came out?
MJ: I hadn’t heard a lot of stuff for a while, including some of my own stuff. What I did notice when I heard it was the sound quality is greatly improved from the actual records. There are no bits of paper sticking out of the vinyl on these CDs! Larry just used to grind up records and melt them down to make new records. When people ordered a Trax record, they got a Trax record! It had Trax on the labels but there would be a lot of other Trax labels torn up [and put in the vinyl mix] to help make that record. So I’m just happy this stuff came out, remastered and clean, the way the artists intended them to be heard. A lot of house artists and producers back then really didn’t think about the future.
People never look to the future when they’re involved in something new though do they?
MJ: Well, I did say we shouldn’t do remixes. I knew it was going to kill us. But everyone else did them and they paid so much money. I even did a couple because everyone else did. I guess people had to do them because we didn’t really have the songwriters who could turn round and write, say, Whitney Houston a hit in Chicago but we could remix her. We had maybe me and Steve Hurley who could write songs. I think things were a bit too money orientated. I think I had a sense of the future in which way the music was going. I’d always imagined there would be a house music hall of fame by now and I would be the first inductee! [laughs] But it didn’t work out that way. For one thing we didn’t leave the dancefloor. We didn’t evolve. Rock music evolved. Rock & roll started off as dance music. It left the floor with Fabian and those guys but The Beatles brought it back to the dancefloor and then it evolved again to Clapton and Hendrix and The Stones and that harder stuff, it evolved into Jefferson Airplane and Fleetwood Mac, it evolved and expanded and I always hoped that house would evolve as well. I mean, where are the house music ballads? Where is the house music’s ‘Dust In The Wind’ [by Kansas]? I was hoping that a lot more songwriters would get into the field but it never happened.
Have you ever been able to put your finger on what it was about Chicago that led to this sound? I find it easier to suss out where the Detroit sound came from culturally and socially.
MJ: You do?
Well, only speaking as an outsider who has read books and interviews, I don’t have the local perspective which is what I’m interested in.
MJ: Well, I think Chicago more than anybody else showed that the non-musician that they could make music and that was a huge change because before that the non-musician didn’t even think of making music. And then, here it is, BAM! Jesse Saunders comes out with this and he’s a known DJ, came out with… well, frankly they were crap tracks and that’s why the floodgates opened. Everyone thought it was that easy. I know that’s the way that I thought and I wouldn’t have thought that way if it wasn’t for Jesse Saunders coming out with those songs. That’s how I got started and that’s how a lot of cats like Farley, Chip and all these other guys got started as well. None of us would have made a record if it wasn’t for Jesse Saunders. Now I can lay claim to defining some of the sounds but damn, I wouldn’t have got started if it wasn’t for Jesse and Vince Lawrence. Vince Lawrence’s dad owned a record company and he was putting out poorly produced music but it was that name… Saunders. This DJ that all of us knew and he came out and put a record out and that was it. But when the Chicago sound travelled to Europe and other areas it was all about the DJ. People would be like, “Woah, that’s a DJ with no talent [for playing instruments] making a record. What’s that all about?” And that’s what has led to the current state of affairs. And now the non-musician can make records. I think it was a different state of affairs in Detroit… We didn’t even know Juan [Atkins] was a DJ. But in Chicago everyone was, “DJ’s are making music! DJs are making music!”
You made a really cool album in 1997, Day Of The Onion and as far as I’m aware that was the one and only solo studio album you made. Was it just something that you didn’t feel like going back to?
MJ: I could make another album but if there’s one thing I definitely can’t do, I definitely can’t sing. Day Of The Onion was an instrumental album. And I don’t feel comfortable having somebody else sing and putting me down as the featured artist. I’ve never felt comfortable doing the Marshall Jefferson featuring thing. I’ve always liked the artist to get top billing, so it’s always Ten City, CeCe Rogers, Kym Mazelle because they’re the artists, they’re the singers. And I’ve never felt comfortable taking that away from the artists and their ability to perform live. I know some people now such as Paris Brightledge have problems. He has problems performing because he never had a hit as Paris Brightledge but he did under Sterling Void’s name. Nobody remembers the second name. Paris Brightledge sang that song but people only remember Sterling Void. Another great singer was Xaviera Gold who did that song ‘You Used To Hold Me’ but people only know that song as being by Ralphi Rosario. He was a Hot Mix Five DJ! He didn’t sing shit! And she has problems performing to this day because it was her biggest hit and nobody knows she sang it. So I never felt comfortable taking that away from the artist and I didn’t want to make another instrumental album.
I wanted to get your take on the current EDM boom in America was. Finally after 25 years, house music and stuff related to it has become the big thing in the States. I was wondering what you thought of this?
MJ: Well, there’s a lot of energy in it and people have discovered a formula for it and how to turn it into a factory operation which is good because it makes the music more popular and more profitable. There are more avenues opening. It used to be ghettoized playing in the States and sometimes I would be like, “I’m not going to play in the States no more, you can’t afford me.” But now? Shoot. Deadmaus is making a million a night playing in Vegas. They got all these festivals popping up in the States, paying ridiculous amounts of money, so it’s good playing in the States right now. So we can thank the EDM boys for that. It’s the same thing that it’s always been, artists who are good looking and marketable succeed. You can’t really complain about that, it’s always been that way.
Another current thing I wanted to ask you about was the analogue wars. I guess it’s pretty hip to own analogue gear in the UK and the States. I was wondering how you feel about this. You’ve always been quite progressive and cool with using digital haven’t you?
MJ: Yeah. Well, I think I’ve figured it out how to make digital sound analogue. There are a whole lot of steps to go through. But the truth of the matter was, back in the day, you would just tape it onto your big old tape deck and it would sound as fat as hell. Now cut to today and despite all the modern technology you have, you still need that dirty ass tape machine to make the tunes sound fat as hell. But I don’t have a dirty ass tape machine so I have to go through this procedure, meaning this plug in, then that plug in and then this plug in linked to this plug in but I’m a lot more gifted in the engineering stakes [than I used to be] because of it. Because I know how it sounded and I know how it needs to sound. And fortunately the technology has finally caught up.They’ve been trying to duplicate this sound for so long they’ve finally caught up and they’re good at it now. Digital is thin and cold sounding otherwise but it’s very, very close now [if you use the steps].
And what’s in the near future for Marshall Jefferson?
MJ: Well, I’m getting round to releasing a song by Donna Hidalgo, which is one of those tracks which has been crying out for release in Chicago for 28 years but it’s coming finally coming out now. I’ve got some labels in a bidding war for it at the moment. Also I did five songs with Dave Lee and Joey Negro. I also did a song with Robert Owens which is coming out. I also did a crazy song with K-Klass. I’m working on a song with DJ Pierre… I’ve got a few things coming out. Also my House of Virus stuff, got a lot of that coming out. I’ve worked on more music this year than I have in the last 20 years, so I’m thankful for that. I’ve finally got a stable studio together in Manchester with proper soundproofing and stuff like that. So things are looking good at the moment.
It’s been a pleasure talking to you Marshall. Take it easy.
MJ: Thank you. Take it easy. See you later.
