The History of Red Hot, the Pioneering Social Change Organization, in 8 Great Songs

On November 22, the Red Hot Foundation will release Transa, a project benefiting charities for trans folks like GLITS and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. As with the last 34 years of Red Hot albums, it’s full of inventive musical pairings and ideas. Transa’s 46 tracks include collaborations between pop star Sam Smith and the new age innovator Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Wilco leader Jeff Tweedy and emo ambient artist Claire Rousay, singer-songwriter Helado Negro and the poet Eileen Myles, and experimental saxophonist Cole Pulice and actress Hunter Schaefer, among many others. There are choice Prince and Sylvester covers, and brand new tracks from André 3000 and Sade, who contributed a song she wrote for her son, Izaak Theo Adu, who is trans. Red Hot albums always feel like events, and Transa is no exception.

The album’s focus on trans rights bittersweetly mirrors the Red Hot Foundation’s original mission. When the non-profit was founded in 1989, AIDS was the leading cause of death for young people in New York City. That year alone in the city, 19,494 people died from AIDS, and 29,807 people received new diagnoses. Like many people living in New York at that time, the art writer and curator turned entertainment lawyer John Carlin saw friends and acquaintances living one day and gone the next. He was angry, and wanted to do something about it.

So he got together with Leigh Blake, a filmmaker he knew, and began compiling Red Hot + Blue, a charitable compilation album featuring artists like Sinead O’Connor, the Jungle Brothers, and Neneh Cherry covering classic Cole Porter songs. Red Hot + Blue earned $1 million for ACT UP. Its accompanying ABC special—a collection of PSAs and videos by directors like Jonathan Demme, Wim Wenders, and Jim Jarmusch—featured Richard Gere, then the most beloved actor in America thanks to Pretty Woman, advising primetime viewers to wear condoms and stop sharing needles to prevent the spread of HIV.

It is hard to capture how groundbreaking this was at the time, when homophobia was rampant in culture and government, and AIDS was still spoken about in the media with hushed, otherizing tones. But transphobia in the U.S. today provides a shameful parallel, as the demonization of trans folks echoes the way gays and lesbians were scapegoated for all societal ills in the 1980s and ’90s. Transa is a spiritual counterpart to the original Red Hot + Blue, both groundbreaking and necessary.

I spoke with Carlin about Transa and his three decades of working with some of the world’s most innovative musicians. Below, he tells the history of Red Hot through a few of the compilations’ greatest songs.

David Byrne: “Don't Fence Me In” (Red Hot + Blue, 1990)

John Carlin: When I was young, in the mid-’80s, I got to curate an exhibition at the Whitney called the Comic Art Show. I talked Keith Haring into doing his first commercial T-shirt for the exhibition. By the late ’80s, things got very dark in that scene.

Eventually, I went to law school and became an entertainment lawyer and ended up representing a lot of the artists who were my friends: David Wojnarowicz, Art Spiegelman, Kathy Acker. While I was working at this big Midtown law firm, one of my clients, a very well-known cosmetics company, got a lot of celebrities to do a TV ad campaign for nothing by saying that they were going to give money to amfAR, which at the time was the biggest AIDS organization. But the cosmetics company never gave any money, and it got me mad. That’s when the idea of Red Hot + Blue popped into my brain. I thought, Wow, you can get celebrities to do things for next to nothing. So instead of going crazy, I was like, “Let’s just try to do something.”

David Byrne was the first artist who said yes. And later I found out that was because his sister-in-law, Tina Chow, was HIV-positive. With David on board, we got a bunch of other artists to say yes. The very first record label we had was Sire, because David was on the label. But then Mo Ostin, who was the head of Warner Records, Sire’s parent label, basically told Seymour Stein, head of Sire, that he had to drop the record because they didn’t do charity records. We scrambled and ended up with a UK label, Chrysalis, but we lost some artists along the way. One of my great regrets is that we lost Lou Reed, who was gonna sing “I Get a Kick Out of You.” And Martin Scorsese had agreed to do the video too.

George Michael: “Do You Really Want to Know” (Red Hot + Dance, 1992)

The Red Hot + Blue TV special aired on Channel 4 in the UK and ABC in the United States. Richard Gere was the host of the U.S. version, and he got to utter the words “condom” and “needles” for the first time on American television outside of a news context.

Right around that time, George Michael’s manager called me and said, “George really loves Red Hot + Blue. He would like to donate a song to your new album.” But we didn’t have a new album; Red Hot + Blue was a one-off. He was probably the third-biggest pop star in the world at that point, after Michael Jackson and Madonna. He was still in the closet, so he was incredibly brave. 

He ended up giving us three songs, one of which became a pop smash, “Too Funky.” But one of the other songs nobody really talks about was called “Do You Really Want to Know,” and it was just talking about HIV testing. I will confess, I didn’t really listen to George Michael. But working with him, I became really impressed. His management told me he played everything and produced it, and I was like, What? We’d heard that about Prince and some other people, but George Michael didn’t really get that respect. He was, like, a teen pop star, and people kinda thought of him as a lightweight. He wasn’t!

Nirvana: “Verse Chorus Verse” (No Alternative, 1993)

We all knew that the crown jewel of No Alternative would be a Nirvana track. Chris Mundy, one of our producers, got in contact with Kurt and Courtney’s babysitter, who asked Kurt, and the band said they wanted to do it. But Kurt was in a perpetual dispute with his record label. John Silva, Nirvana’s manager, begrudgingly agreed, but said, “We can’t give you a Kurt Cobain song. We’re gonna give you a song by the drummer.” And we’re like, “Wait, we don’t want a song by the drummer!”

The record label, of course, wanted what became In Utero to sound like Nevermind. The song they had that sounded the most like Nevermind was “Verse Chorus Verse.” So to piss off the label, Kurt was like, “I’m going to give this charity compilation the song that they like, because I don’t even like that sound anymore.”

The label was so pissed off at him—and us—that they were like, “You can’t use Nirvana’s name.” So if you look at the CD or cassette, Nirvana isn’t listed on the tracklist. But it became the greatest marketing. No Alternative was really propelled by Nirvana’s participation. 

Wilco and Syd Straw: “The T.B. Is Whipping Me” (Red Hot + Country, 1994)

Our country compilation came about because the Country Music Awards wouldn’t allow performers to wear red ribbons on stage. Kathy Mattea was very angry about it, and wanted to do an AIDS benefit record. One of my main tenets was: Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music, died of tuberculosis, an incurable viral disease. What’s the difference between TB and HIV, except for homophobia?

I wanted somebody to cover this old Jimmie Rodgers song called “The T.B. Is Whipping Me,” and I couldn’t get the country artists to do it—it was just too political. So I called Uncle Tupelo’s manager and asked if they would do it, and he goes, “Well, the group just broke up, but Jeff Tweedy is starting a new group, and I think he would love to do it.” Literally, that’s the first Wilco track that ever appeared on record.

Femi Kuti, D’Angelo, Macy Gray, and the Soultronics: “Water No Get Enemy” (Red Hot + Riot, 2002)

Questlove wanted to work on a Red Hot tribute to Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On called Red Hot + Riot. But we couldn’t clear the rights for Sly, so we pivoted. It made sense for Red Hot to do Fela Kuti, because he died of AIDS and was a political activist. We brought Fela’s son Femi into the mix on “Water Get No Enemy,” and Questlove brought D’Angelo, Macy Gray, and Erykah Badu; D’Angelo didn’t like Erykah Badu’s vocals and mixed her out of the track. So somewhere there’s a version of that track with Erykah.

It might have been the most expensive track Red Hot ever produced—about a third of the entire budget for that record—because D’Angelo spent three days at Electric Lady Studios. As a producer, it’s my job to manage the budgets, and we did the whole recording in one day. I go back the second day, and everybody’s gone, and I’m like, “Why are we paying for the big room at Electric Lady?” I had no idea how great a producer D’Angelo was, because he spent the whole day adding little keyboard squiggles and moaning into the microphone. When I heard it mixed into the track, I was like, “Oh… that’s how they do it. That’s how Marvin did it. That’s how D’Angelo did it.” It blew my mind.

Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner: “Big Red Machine” (Dark Was the Night, 2009)

I had started a digital design company called Funny Garbage. We built the first Cartoon Network website and did a lot of work for Comedy Central and Nickelodeon. Around 2000, I had to hire an assistant, and the person I hired was Aaron Dessner.

Aaron worked at Funny Garbage for seven years, and eventually became the head of business development. Over that period, the National were incubating, and we’d built a recording studio in our company on Spring Street. We got a great in-house producer, Andrés Levin, who taught Aaron a few tricks that I can still hear on Taylor Swift records. When the National became successful enough that he left, we ended up producing Dark Was the Night together.

Blood Orange: “Is It All Over My Face & Tower of Meaning” (Red Hot + Arthur Russell, 2014)

David France, a New York magazine writer turned documentary filmmaker, was making his AIDS documentary How to Survive a Plague. He loved Dark Was the Night, and started editing the film using those tracks. I was like, “We should use the music of Arthur Russell, because he’s part of the story—he’s someone from that era, he died of AIDS.” Stuart Bogie, a great horn player, ended up doing the Arthur Russell versions that are in the soundtrack, and out of that we started working on the Arthur Russell tribute record.

Sam Smith and Beverly-Glenn Copeland: “Ever New” (Transa, 2024)

Three years ago, Dust Reid, Red Hot’s executive director, came to me with the idea of doing an album supporting the trans community. Red Hot + Blue had been one of the things that changed how the world thought about the “L” and the “G” in LGBTQ+. It felt like the time to focus on the “T.”

As the scope of Transa grew, we felt that the public needed a teaser. We’re calling it Transa Selects. There’s going to be a 12-inch vinyl that comes out at the end of October, with Sade’s song, a Prince cover by Lauren Auder and Wendy & Lisa, a L’Rain track with the voices of the New York City Trans Oral History Project, and a Sam Smith and Beverly Glenn-Copeland duet on [Glenn-Copeland’s classic 1986 song] “Ever New.” And then the whole B-side is André 3000.

We got some real luck while making the album. About a year and a half into it, we were having our weekly meeting, and I said to our producers, “Sade has a trans son.” I’ve known her music producer, Stuart Matthewman, for a long time; he had produced a Maxwell track for Red Hot + Rio. Her team was like, “She wrote a song to Izaak when he turned 21. She’s always wanted to record it.” It’s a love song from a mother to a son, apologizing for not understanding what they went through.

Later, I’m on the phone with Sade’s manager right around the time that André 3000’s New Blue Sun came out. Sade was like, “Is André 3000 on the record?” That was kind of a leading question. So we were able to go to André 3000 and say, “Sade wants you on this record.” We ended up getting this beautifully bizarre, 26-minute follow-up to New Blue Sun. I don’t know what the hell it’s doing on an album of songs.

I sometimes think of myself as a kind of happy idiot who thinks that these things can be done. People have asked me, “Did you think that Red Hot would become successful?” I don’t really think that way. It needed to be done.