LOOKING FOR THE PERFECT BEAT

The iconic dance and hip-hop producer recalls his greatest hits and worst habits.

Few artists did more to define the sound of club music in the ’80s than Baker, who produced canonical rap tracks like Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock,” dance classics like Freeez’s “I.O.U.,” and remixes for Cyndi Lauper, Bruce Springsteen, and Hall & Oates that brought house and electro to the suburbs. It was an odd feat for a self-described quiet Jewish boy from the Boston suburbs. But a gift for blending a variety of sounds, as well as for managing multiple personalities, made him a go-to producer and remixer through that decade and beyond. Indeed, one shortcoming of this book is that Baker was often juggling so many projects simultaneously that he gives only so much space on the page to each one. But he’s candid about how dependent he was on cocaine to get all that work done, and about which artists enabled his habit more than others. (New Order helped push him off the wagon not once but twice.) Baker’s clubland success opened doors for him in the rock and R&B worlds, and he’s especially proud of his production work with Bob Dylan and his ringleading “(Ain’t Gonna Play) Sun City,” a 1985 anti-apartheid anthem featuring dozens of rock, pop, hip-hop, and R&B stars. Though he’ll occasionally call out a difficult artist, Baker is usually praiseful of his musical collaborators. (Businesspeople are a different matter, especially when he tried launching a London soul-food restaurant, which opened on 9/11.) The speed-run approach of the memoir can be frustrating because it reveals little about him personally (one divorce is literally relegated to a parenthetical); now sober, he’s kept busy long after many of his contemporaries flamed out. How he did it remains relatively obscure.

A whirlwind, at times overly manic, journey through a producer’s very full discography.