”The Warehouse was dead before the word `house` ever came into vogue,”
says Jones of D.J. International. ”It`s more a term used to describe a style of music played at house parties and those warehouse type of clubs, a mix of the Euro-disco, Kraftwerk sound, old R&B, Philly, Motown-put it all together and you have house.”
”It was a deejay thing, a way of outdoing the other guys,” Farley says. ”A James Brown record was a house record once the deejay got through with it.”
Though Farley often entertained 2,500 people a night at his club, his fame and that of other club deejays zoomed when they went on radio.
The ”Hot Mix Five”-Farley, Hurley (later replaced by Edward Crosby), Ralphi Rosario, Kenny Jason and Mickey Oliver-on the now-defunct WBMX in 1981-86, and later on WGCI, ”took house to the people in a major way,” Jones says.
The ”Hot Mix” shows soon became showcases for locally made records as well.
”We weren`t musicians, but technology gave us the ability to express what was in our minds,” Jones says. ”We just took the old R&B that was our base one step further.”
Or, actually, one step grungier.
Seminal house records such as Jessie Saunders` inaugural effort, the 1983 track ”On and On,” were simply reworked rhythm tracks. The brilliant lyricist and singer Jamie Principle got his start by having his homemade cassettes played on the air.
”Musicians would be insulted to play such simple chord structures and simple beats, but we knew what combinations worked on the dance floor,” says Julian ”Jumpin` ” Perez of D.J. International, one of Chicago`s hottest late-night house deejays with his Saturday show on WBBM (96 FM).
The key to the do-it-yourself trend was the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or MIDI, a computer that put hundreds of musicians out of work by the mid-`80s. With a MIDI, a keyboard and a drum machine (total cost: $2,000- $3,000) even a nonmusician could make a record in his living room.
”Before MIDI, everyone spoke a different language,” Perez says. ”If you couldn`t play, you couldn`t write a tune. MIDI brought it all under one language.”
The language of house went international when the deejays started to make and press their own records. Steve ”Silk” Hurley`s 1985 record ”Music is the Key” on D.J. International became one of the top-selling house singles worldwide, even though Hurley barely knew what he was doing in the studio.
”The track started out as something for me to play at parties and clubs, but then it got popular, so I borrowed money from dad to make a real record,” Hurley says. ”I do my own engineering now, but I didn`t have a clue back then.
”It was a real raw, real street record. That`s what made house different from other forms of music: a bunch of deejays who didn`t know what they were doing musically but knew everything about moving a crowd.”
”Music is the Key” defined that ethos rhythmically and lyrically: ”I am a deejay/and music is my plan/to ease your mind and set you free/from all your days of misery.”
In the winter of 1985-86, postal worker Marshall Jefferson followed suit. ”My only experience with music had been listening to the radio, but I was getting fed up because the rock that I loved so much was getting stale and boring,” he says. ”Then I saw Ron Hardy do his thing at the Music Box and I`d never heard music so loud and hard and emotional. I was blown away. That`s when I knew what I had to do. . . .
”So after work one day, we went to a friend`s basement on the West Side to lay down a track, `Move Your Body.` I got another friend from the post office, Curtis McClain, to sing on it.”
McClain`s singing was fine, but at the heart of the song was an insistent and unforgettable chord sequence. Jefferson couldn`t play keyboards, which made the riff he composed on a sequencer (a computer that enables a programmer to arrange and then replay a string of notes at the touch of a button) all the more unique.
”I only found out later that a normal keyboard player wouldn`t play that way,” he says. ”A real player has to keep his hands on the keyboard to be sure where his hand is. The `dum-dum/dum-dum` is not supposed to be together; you`d have to go against training to do that.”
”Move Your Body” became known as the ”House Music Anthem,” bits of which have been sampled or copied on ”80 percent of the house records I`ve heard,” Jefferson says, including two recent Top 10 singles, Seduction`s
”Two to Make It Right” and Technotronic`s ”Pump Up the Jam.”
Yet artists such as Funk, Knuckles, Jefferson and Hurley remain unknowns in their own backyard. Their art is their records; they have yet to become MTV personalities like rappers M.C. Hammer or L.L. Cool J.
Many people who call house the Next Big Thing compare its rise to rap, which also originated as a deejay phenomenon, in the South Bronx during the mid-`70s. To achieve similar success, however, it needs more than just great music.
”The problem that disco had and rap overcame is that people didn`t dance to singers, but to a bass and a beat,” says Robert Ford, manager of Screamin` Rachael.
A Billboard writer in the mid-`70s and former manager of breakthrough rap artist Kurtis Blow, Ford has been involved in three dance movements: disco, rap and house.
”What we did in rap was establish characters,” he says. ”We developed a stage image and then developed the act of people like Kurtis Blow and Run-DMC.
”House is only just beginning to develop a style. Right now, it`s a bunch of people who say get up and shake your butt. That ain`t enough, cause the Andrews Sisters were telling people the same thing 40 years ago.”
Farley Funk agrees that house has an image problem: namely, no image.
He says that when he went to visit Britain a few years ago on the heels of the success of ”Love Can`t Turn Around,” he was mobbed by fans.
”I kept saying, `No, no, no, I`m the producer. Daryl Pandy is the singer. This is the man you want to see,” he says. ”But nobody cared, because when the record hit in Britain it was `Farley Funk presents . . .` ” The lack of leading men and women in house is coupled with a serious shortage of house performers who use live vocals and real instruments while performing in concert.
”It`s too much hassle for most of the clubs,” says Screamin` Rachael, who moved to New York from Chicago several years ago. ”They need stage monitors, drum kits, all kinds of equipment that they wouldn`t need for a disc jockey or a singer who`s lip-synching to a tape machine.”
But Rachael`s recent show at the hip Red Zone club in midtown Manhattan with her four-piece band proved that house has a future on the concert stage. Her house hits ”Fun With Bad Boys,” ”I Like to Get Wild” and the recent ”Rock Me” sounded even grittier and more powerful live, as she pushed her formidable, bluesy voice to its limit. Meanwhile, a band that included two keyboardists, a guitarist and bassist drove the house beat into hard-rock territory.
”House is rock `n` roll,” Rachael insists. ”It takes soul and blues and marries it with technology.”
Knuckles, whose career as a producer has taken off since he returned to New York and who is currently working on his own album for Virgin Records, says ”house was viewed as a fad five years ago, but they said the same thing about rap.”
”I think this year at the New Music Seminar (the major music-industry conference held recently in New York) it was clear that the industry had accepted it. Once the industry gives it a category at the Grammys, the rest of the world will know what we`ve known all along: It`s the real thing.”
Hurley, whose recent remixing credits range from Liza Minnelli (the name as published has been corrected in this text) to hit rapper Mellow Man Ace, says the fact that British acts have grabbed the house limelight ”doesn`t make me mad. It`s not worth it. Some day the world will catch up. People in the industry know what I can do, and I think everyone of us is doing the same thing-Frankie, Marshall, me. We`re pursuing our careers and continuing to get better at what we do.
”I just started my own record company in Chicago, and I want to continue working out of here. Before I move I want to win a Grammy, just so I can tell the world that I`m from Chicago”-the home of house.
Photos by Janette Beckman
