The fascinating life and times of Dexter Wansel
In the music industry, it’s sadly inevitable that some names are going to come and go without you ever really becoming acquainted with them. Dexter Wansel was just one of those underrated icons.
For those well-attuned to the funk and classic R&B scenes, Wansel is, of course, more than likely to be a name they are familiar with. Yet after he died on May 31st at the age of 75, it truly put into perspective all that he achieved, without ever being a household name. Put simply, those genres would be nothing without him.
Despite many different roads and journeys taken, however, the one thing that remained constant throughout the musician’s life was Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania city was where he was born and raised, taking his first official job backstage in the Uptown Theatre as an errand boy, under the watchful eye of his step-uncle, Georgie Woods.
Yet this stint was more than just an extended family favour. It was a job which introduced the young Wansel to many acts as they graced the stage of the local theatre, many of whom encouraged him to take up a career in the music industry while passing through. It may have been fleeting advice, but it stuck with him more than words can say.
It was some years later, after Wansel had left the US Army, that he took up a junior post as a synthesiser at Sigma Sound Studios – but it was almost as though as soon as he got his foot in the door, there was really no stopping him. Playing with various artists at various labels, he was rising to prominence as the man who could pull all the levers behind the scenes. Then it was time to make his own mark.
Wansel’s debut album, Life on Mars, may have seemed plagiaristically titled to some. But this was 1976, five years after David Bowie had released the original space-age opus. What the synthesist was doing was to take that story to the next stratospheric chapter. If that was the aim, though, he managed to shoot the product beyond the stars.
It’s easy to see this as another influential funk and R&B record – that’s not to discredit it, but it’s fair to say that there are plenty of them out there. Yet even still, Life on Mars specifically had some pretty seismic effects. We wouldn’t have artists like Jamiroquai without it, as Jay Kay previously credited the album as inspiring him to pursue music, listening to it over and over again as a teenager.
And Wansel’s massive footprints in the wider world of music didn’t stop there. Listen to the drum beat introduction to the record’s track, ‘Theme From the Planets’. Does it sound at all familiar? If it does, that’s because it became one of the sacred foundational stones of hip-hop, being sampled across the genre by the likes of Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and Rick Ross.
If that doesn’t tell you just how influential that body of work was, then nothing will. Of course, Wansel went on to do far more than just Life on Mars, but there’s a powerful symbolism behind the fact that he took an existing muse and made it into his own galactic odyssey, with tendrils of inspiration reaching far and wide across the musical spectrum.
Indeed, that even played a role within his own family dynamic. His son is the producer Pop Wansel, who has worked with and written songs for Rihanna, Kehlani, Ariana Grande, and many more. Yet as he said in his own Instagram tribute to his father in the wake of his passing: “Keep sampling his music! He absolutely loved that!”
That’s probably the greatest legacy that anyone could ever leave. You don’t have the pressures and tribulations of being necessarily globally famous, but every so often, you’ll just hear a snatch of something you know to be yours, and realise just how important that contribution really is. That was Dexter Wansel, and that is exactly how he will be remembered.
