By Howard Campbell—
Boris Gardiner
When Mac Davis was writing hit songs like Memories and In The Ghetto for Elvis Presley during the late 1960s, Boris Gardiner was laying down some heavy bass lines at Studio One in Kingston.
Gardiner, also an established singer/songwriter, topped the British national chart in 1986 with I Wanna Wake up With You, originally done six years earlier by Davis as I Wanta Wake up With You, a slow country ballad.
Davis died September 29 at age 78 in Nashville, Tennessee.
I Wanta Wake up With You was not a hit. But once producer Willie Lindo heard it on tape at Dynamic Sounds in Kingston, he wanted to do a reggae version with Gardiner as the singer.
“I knew of him (Davis) through songs like It’s Hard to be Humble and Why Don’t we All Just Get Stoned. We listened to the song and realised it was a good idea to do a reggae version,” Gardiner recalled.
Lindo, who lives in South Florida, said Gardiner was not keen on recording the song. By his recollection, it was three years after they lay tracks at Dynamic Sounds that their version was released.
A session guitarist at Federal Records, Lindo was also a member of Gardiner’s band, The Happening. In the mid-1980s, he was making a name as a producer, guiding singer Beres Hammond on his acclaimed Soul Reggae album which contained One Step Ahead, his breakthrough song.
Gardiner does not remember if he was not impressed with the melody of I Wanna Wake up With You, but the writing impressed him.
“It had good lyrics… soothing lyrics that people can relate to,” he said.
This was Gardiner’s third song for Lindo. The first was a cover of Jim Reeves’ Guilty, followed by an adaptation of Let’s Keep it That Way, another Davis original. Produced by the Lindo-owned Heavy Beat Records, I Wanna Wake up With You was released in the United Kingdom by Revue Records, a move Gardiner said Lindo was not keen on.
“He didn’t think it would do well because at the time everybody there was into Boops (by Super Cat) and the whole dancehall thing,” he recalled.
After a slow start, sales for I Wanna Wake up With You picked up. It was encouraging enough for Revue’s owner Phil Mathias to approach the larger Creole Records to help with marketing.
That strategy worked and the single topped the British chart in August 1986 for three weeks.
Neither Gardiner nor Lindo ever met Mac Davis. They did, however, meet the composer Ben Peters who visited Jamaica for one week after his song became a hit. Peters died in 2005 at age 71.
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