THE DJs THEY COULDNT HANDLE

The DJs They Couldn’t Handle

New Musical Express, 9th August 1986 — Pages 12–15

House music, the pulsating sound of Chicago nightclubs, is on the brink of invading Britain. Stuart Cosgrove visits the city of big shoulders to meet local DJ legends Knuckles and Farley Jackmaster Funk. AJ Barratt jacks the lens and the clock tick tocks as your body rocks.

From The Showstoppers’ ‘Ain’t Nothing But A House Party’, 1967

The House Sound

HOUSE MUSIC is as new as the microchip and as old as the hills. It danced through every inner city finally settling in Chicago, “the city of broad shoulders”: the home of jacking bodies.

House music is the sound of the moment. J.M. Silk’s ‘Music Is The Key’ reputedly sold 100,000 copies without any help from a major label, record companies are at war trying to sign the best of Chicago, imports are flooding back into Britain on the crest of another new club sound, and like flies around the proverbial hot shit, British journalists have been flying to America daily to track down the sound. Eat excrement: a million flies can’t be wrong. Believe me diners this shit is tasty.

From The Showstoppers’ ‘Ain’t Nothing But A House Party’ to Lovebug Starski’s ‘House Rocker’, the term ‘house’ has been around soul music for decades. And if it’s a term, then it’s also a place: the rocking dancefloor that predates disco. House has been going on for years but suddenly in 1986, through the acumen of DJ International Trax and another couple of small independent record labels, it has become a style, a scene, a marketing strategy, and Chicago’s most credible challenge to the perfect beat supremacy of New York hip-hop and DC go-go. In more ways than one House Music, the garage industry of Chicago, is the business.

House music is more a tradition than a fad. It refers back to the black dance music of the mid ‘70s and particularly to richly produced underground club classics like Loleatta Holloway’s ‘Hit And Run’, Martin Circus’ ‘Disco Circus’ and Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King’s ‘Shame’. But taking and making, that is best represented by Farley Jackmaster Funk’s ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’, a modern reworking of the Isaac Hayes song ‘I Can’t Turn Around’. It is expected to enter the British pop charts next week on the strength of advance orders alone. Farley Jackmaster Funk is one of Chicago’s Hot-Mix 5, a group of local DJs whose appearances on radio, in local clubs and in recording studios has turned the act of playing records into a supreme skill and a local cult.

Chicago is currently rife with expectation. The offices of DJ International Records are stacked to the walls with obscure dance tracks that carry the coded language of house — ‘Jack Your Body’, ‘Dub-Can’t Turn Around’, ‘J.A.B. Traxx’, ‘J’Adore Dub’, ‘Occasional Mix’, ‘Jack’s House’, ‘R.Traxx Q.Rai’… names and titles that only make sense to bodies that have been distorted by the need to dance and bodies brought up on D Train disciplines and jacking that body ’til the early light.

They say Chicago is something else, an instant city, “storming, husky, brawling, the city of big shoulders”. DJ International certainly fits the image. The company claims to have over 100 acts including most of House music’s emergent stars: Farley Jackmaster Funk, Chip E., Jack-In-House, Ham Tha It, Shaovon Christopher, the great disco diva Loleatta Holloway, a white Wisconsin DJ called Farm Boy, a young dreadlocked star, Khalid, who’s half way between Michael Jackson and Marcus Garvey, and a curious character called Bang whose music could raise a dead dinner conversation at the most comatose of meals. They have grand plans for a House movie and run a hectic diary of events. Recently the company’s Vice President offered recording deals to an obscure gospel group, a Haitian priest with The Rolling Stones, a Baptist preacher and the taxi driver’s daughter. I was cruelly selected: the dub mix of ‘Flower Of Scotland’ had clearly fallen on deaf ears.

But beneath the bluff, the cries of hope, the usual commercial aspiration and the predictable accusations that the house sound was conceived off the files of the London media, DJ International has the hottest shit on forty-modern and current dance sounds whose influences are drawn from many contradictory sources. Chicago has some of the biggest import record shops in America and most people I meet will tell you that European music is one of the biggest inspirations on the emergence of the sound: Bowie, New Order, Kraftwerk.

Pull Quotes

“House is the modern sound of Chicago made by DJs and local singers using the most up-to-date studio techniques. It’s a club sound: dub, sampling, cross-fading and jacking the house.” — Farley Jackmaster Funk, DJ and Producer

“House. Sometimes we say it’s Disney music: a simple beat and kids love it.” — Bo Sharpe, recording duet, DJ International Records

“House is old style music like Harold Melvin and The O’Jays. Don’t let them tell you it’s a new synthesized sound, it’s real underground, a real voice.” — Marshall Jefferson, Trax Records

“House is Chicago music. If I played Run DMC or New York beat music they’d stop dancing. I like rap but my crowd on the South Side are serious house. They won’t accept anything else.” — Treter Cooper, DJ Jackmaster House

“The term House music comes from three different factors: funk, imported European dance music and the technology factor. It’s the sound Chicago invented by borrowing from everyone else.” — Rocky Jones, President, DJ International Records

“For me House music can be explained in the words of George Clinton: ‘If you ain’t gonna get it on, take your dead ass home’.” — Professor Funk, QJ International Recorder

Jacking With Jesus

From ‘Baptise Me In Your Love’, Clarence Reid and Bo Sharpe, DJ International

THERE’S NO greater beat than one born in the womb of contradiction. For all its modern tricks with technology, the House sound like most preceding forms of soul music is a music of improbably opposites. In the ‘70s, when underground disco had not yet been usurped by Saturday Night Fever, sin and salvation were mixed together and dressed as biblical parables of sexual dance on Chicago’s 12” dancefloors. Records like Loleatta Holloway’s ‘Love Sensation’ were hymns to ecstasy, and notoriously religious words were used at the hi-hat peak of what can only be described as orgasmic disco. According to Frankie Knuckles, probably the House scene’s most influential DJ, “the inspirational classics of old disco are still a major influence on the way we mix and produce records.”

Religion weaves its way through house in ways that are not immediately apparent. Most Chicago mixers admit a debt to New York and particularly to the eminence grise, legend Walter Gibbons, a white DJ, who mastered the basic techniques of studio mixing and paved the way for the DJ’s technical shift from playing records to creating and producing a seamless sound. Ironically, Gibbons drifted away from the centre of disco, became a born again Christian and a gospel singer. That space was eventually filled by a generation of much more famous mixers like François Kevorkian, Shep Pettibone, Larry Levan and Arthur Baker.

Then in 1984 an independent 12” record, Ricky’s ‘Set It Off’, started to create something of a stir at New York’s Paradise Garage, a massively influential black gay club. Increasingly the term ‘garage’ music crept into club conversation and for over a year the original ‘Set It Off’ was revisited time and time again: the mixer was Colonel C.Sharp, Harlequin Four and Masquerade and on Salsoul records like Import Number One’s ‘Set It Off (Party Rock)’. The original ‘Set It Off’ had been released on Jus Born records. The song checks references to born again Christianity and it had been “mixed” or remixed by Walter Gibbons! The original master mixer was setting the pace again.

The music offered a specific sound for club music in the ’80s, slower than hi-energy, tougher than the over-produced mayhem of ’70s disco, club crazy.

While acknowledging the sound of New York hip-hop and sometimes the more legitimate sound of garage heroes like Colonel Abrams’ ‘Trapped’, the name ‘garage’ has its local rival in Chicago where ‘the house’ was jacking.

To get to the roots of House you have to visit the Life Center Church Of Universal Awareness on Indiana Avenue, where Chicago’s most versatile preacher, The Rev T.L. Barrett Jr teases his congregation with Luther Vandross impersonations, blue jokes, tales of bright red Porsches and a sexually explicit sermon “what exactly was Lazarus trying to raise?” One of the House scene’s best vocalists, Daryl Pandy, a classically trained opera singer who is the featured voice on Farley Jackmaster Funk’s ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’, and several other House musicians are to be found in the church choir. As the pastor surveys his upstaged, he has released his own gospel records, which by a strange irony are used by a young Chicago DJ called Frankie Knuckles…

From Previous Page

[Continued from pages 12–13]

…mixes at house parties on Chicago’s South Side.

“I first heard Frankie Knuckles using gospel speeches. Frankie is the final real House style DJ. He would play Martin Luther King’s ‘Free At Last’ speech, then you’d hear ‘Jack Your Body’, drum machine hand-claps, weird voices, ‘I Have A Dream’, a bass line, free at last, jack, jack, jack… The Martin Luther King style was Frankie Knuckles’ technique, and I wanted something originally. My mother goes to the Rev Barrett’s church and has all his records so I borrowed them and mixed it with big House sounds like Marshall Jefferson’s ‘Move Your Body’. My mother thought I was wrong, like an insult to God. But I put her right… Mixing is a mission.”

Music Is The Key

From ‘Music Is The Key’, JM Silk, 1985

FRANKIE KNUCKLES is the undisputed legend of House mixing. He’s a friendly and creative New Yorker who mixed alongside his friend Larry Levan at Continental Baths on the black gay scene. He moved to Chicago to become the featured DJ at The Warehouse, the club that allegedly gave House music its name. At its height, according to a Warehouse original, the DJ International singer Professor Funk, “the Warehouse was a mad house, three classes of wall to wall dancers, people in zebra outfits, punked out glasses and the most serious music. It went all night and lasted until late into Sunday afternoon. It was church for people who had fallen from grace…”

The serious music — that mystifying sound they call the key — was provided by Frankie, now one of the House scene’s most important producers. He raided record stores for anything that could contribute to his performance, obscure European dance records, unknown dub mixes, old soul like Harold Melvin and The O’Jays, and even theatrical sound effects. His signature — now a technique copied throughout Chicago — was to use the sound of an express train.

“At the height of the night I’d switch all the lights off, the windows of The Warehouse were painted black, the crowd would be high on drugs. I’d turn up the bass and cue the train sound. You would hear people scream as if the train was coming through the walls. It was like fear and enjoyment.”

Frankie Knuckles, Farley Jackmaster Funk, radio mixers The Hot Mix 5 and young mixers like DJ Pope and Jackmaster House have transformed the DJ’s actions into an art; the aesthetics of house. Record decks, found sounds, simple drum machines, snatched backing tracks, sound effects and samplers are brought together to create live music from records. This — in the words of current controversy — is the ultimate oxymoron: the DJs they couldn’t hang. The House Mix style is creative, brash, extreme, dub crazy and sound, in the most modern and technological sense. The DJ becomes a creator and the hanging of such an artisan performing two bit ripple tricks.

Farley Jacks The Bass

From ‘Cabrini Green Rap’, Sugar Ray Dinke, 1986

CABRINI GREEN is a high rise welfare housing project on the near North Side of Chicago, only two blocks away from the headquarters of DJ International. It is a false front in the city’s imposing architectural landscape, a mass of tower blocks huddled in the afterthought of Sears Tower, the world’s tallest building. Each weekend Cabrini Green’s rival gangs — The Disciples and The Vice Lords — cruise dollar house parties where teenagers jack and break to a mixture of house and hip-hop in hurriedly arranged clubs illegally set up in apartment spaces.

Several miles away, a predominantly Hispanic crowd fills the floor of the Aragon Ballroom on West Lawrence in the Uptown district, to dance to a Hot-Mix DJ Ralph Barker’s “Breaks”. Over on the South Side Farley Funk is mixing for a teenage party at an urban gospel party where teenage packers with Hawaiian shorts and Islamic patriots under Mickey’s candy straw hats swing their heads inside Farley’s mountainous speakers. He jacks the bass unconsciously. He plays a rough mix of ‘Dub Can’t Turn Around’. They scream: part pain, part ecstasy. He ups the bass. The dancefloor takes an eerie hilting. Farley jacks the bass.

Throughout the city, at clubs like The Power Plant, The Music Box and COD, a more adult House crowd dances to hours of pointless sound. Black gays are still very much in the foreground and as the originators of House style they are most worrying about Chicago’s condo-minded, the condominium yuppies who flit into Chicago’s Limelight Club to dance to Madonna and The Eurythmics.

House is a socially extensive sound. Unlike hip-hop and go-go it has a massive crossover potential, appears regularly in estate classes and is genuinely multiracial in its appeal. There is none of the personal utterances and road lyrics that make go-go scenes so difficult to decipher and there is none of the gun-shot terror that is currently in vogue on the underground rap scene. Only on passing and tragic occasions does the urban rival reality of Chicago’s own violence visit the House scene. The death of Jesse Valez was one occasion.

Jesse Valez was one of DJ International’s best and most promising vocalists, a teenager who was well known around the house clubs. He maintained very close links with his own Spanish speaking community and on the day he received an advance from the record company he went out and bought a mountain bike. The total negotiated when gang members forced him off the road. This was the first incident in what became an escalating dispute over drugs which led eventually to threats against the Valez family and to Jesse committing suicide the same night that he was expected at the studio to record the vocals on a new House record.

His funeral brought most of Chicago’s gangs together, and petty bickering amongst local House musicians was suppressed as the scene paid tribute at his gravesite. Since that day several DJ International sleeves have carried personal dedications to Jesse Valez. There is a morbidly apt observation that goes round the block: Soul music usually dedicates the sleeve not the label. In Chicago, it is Jesse Valez.

House music is dedicated. There are one or two releases which have the familiarity that hit records depend on, but most of them are for the dedicated. It is meta-music, a sound that constantly refers outwards to other sounds. Farm Boy’s ‘Mover’ borrows an obvious refrain from Grace Jones’ ‘Slave To The Rhythm’. ‘The Godfather Of House’, a young producer Chip E, owes James Brown a favour, the fierce mix of JM Silk’s ‘Shadows Of Your Love’ is reconstructed D Train. Jamie Principle, an underground Chicago star, is a mix of David Bowie, Gary Numan and Euro Disco. White Wisconsin DJ Farm Boy ‘features’ New York scratch style courtesy of Zulu Nationalist DJ Afrika Islam, and nearly every mix is derived from unrecognised street classics like ESG’s ‘Dance To The Beat Of Moody’. If House is soul music then it’s meta-soul, a mirror. It borrows from Luther Vandross, Colonel Abrams and everyone’s favourite showgirl Patti Labelle.

House music is far from original. It’s a celebration of ten years of club music, strung out and nostalgic. If the last ten years of club music say nothing about your life then House music will be a massive disappointment but if you feel club music personally then House music is for the head. He can gamble and bluff and let it all blow — there are some DJs they’ll never hang.

B Farley Jackmaster Funk and singer Daryl Pandy visit Britain next week for a series of club engagements, radio and television shows. ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’ and a House compilation album will be released to coincide with their visit. For future updates watch this space.

New Musical Express, 9th August 1986 Photography: AJ Barratt

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