By day, Steve Hurley is a family man with a wife and three children and a home in Chicago’s south suburbs. By night, Steve “Silk” Hurley is a dance club deejay of worldwide renown. And on Wednesday, that renown may deepen if he wins a Grammy award as remixer of the year.
Hurley looked sharp in a suit and tie on the morning of his nomination, even though the hour was early for a man who makes his living keeping people up all night on a dance floor.
“When I started doing this in 1984, I didn’t even think there’d be a category like this, let alone a day that I’d be nominated for it,” Hurley said.
His excitement was as much for his nomination as it was for the award’s existence. “Maybe through this people will begin to learn what a remixer does; I think it’s hard for most people to visualize,” he said. “I don’t think they could distinguish between a remixer working in the studio on a song, a deejay mixing records on turntables and someone mixing a pitcher of Kool-Aid in their kitchen.”
Hurley laughs, but he’s not far off base. Remixer of the Year was added only last year as a Grammy category, even though remixing has been a vital part of dance culture for 20 years. Artists ranging from Bruce Springsteen and Robbie Robertson to Madonna and Michael Jackson have hired remixers to have their music tailored for clubgoers. Yet even to many music fans, remixing remains an arcane, even dubious art. Springsteen fanatics cried foul when dance deejay David Baker remixed several of the singer’s tracks from the 1984 “Born in the USA” album, even though Baker didn’t so much overhaul the original songs as tweak them in intriguing ways.
Today, remixers are frequently far less reverent about the records they are hired to retool for club play. Hurley equates his role to that of a “mad scientist” working out of his home studio in Olympia Fields. “I’m basically recomposing the song from scratch,” he said. “I usually keep the original vocals and remove everything else, which means I come up with new bass lines, string parts, piano sections — it’s a whole new song by the time I get through with it.”
Hurley’s attitude toward mixing was shaped long before he entered a recording studio. The notion of mixing was forged in the 1970s by deejays in underground dance clubs, where a community of outsiders — primarily gays, blacks and Hispanics — created a new context for how music was made and heard.
There’s not a problem that I can’t fix
Because I can do it in the mix
So intoned a baritoned rapper on Indeep’s R&B hit “Last Night a Deejay Saved My Life.” In 1982, the song provided a mini-education in the evolving role of the deejay. For decades, deejays had been regarded as people who played other people’s records on a radio station or at a wedding or sock hop. And that’s how Hurley got his start — by playing the records he loved at parties.
But by the late ’70s, club deejays were no longer merely stringing records together but manipulating them with fade switches, rewind buttons and pitch adjusters to alter their sound and tempo, and often blending together the sounds of different records playing simultaneously on two and sometimes three turntables. They came to be seen as godlike figures, the prime attractions at clubs such as the Warehouse in Chicago and the Paradise Garage in New York. “House music is a religion, and deejays are its priests,” one house music impresario remarked.
Among the most revered was Frankie “The Godfather” Knuckles, who arrived in Chicago in 1977 from New York’s thriving disco scene (he returned there in the late ’80s) and immediately created a sensation in the clubs with his sophisticated approach to dance music.
“When (radio deejay) Steve Dahl pulled that stunt in Comiskey Park (burning disco records in 1979), it was the end of the disco era, and dance music died for the record companies,” he said. “So to keep my dance floor working, I took old records and did my own mixes. I was running different rhythms, bass lines and drum tracks underneath them. They may have been old standards, but people were hearing them in a completely different way.”
Knuckles and his contemporaries were doing the first remixes, taking the basic elements of a familiar song and rearranging or enhancing them to create a track that was better suited to the needs of their audience. One of the favorites at Knuckles’ club was his remix of the 1983 hit “Ain’t Nobody” by Rufus and Chaka Khan. “At home, I set up two turntables and a reel-to-reel tape recorder and played two 12-inch singles of the song, one slightly behind the other, to create a little echo-delay effect. Then I extended the beats on the intro and the bridge section,” he said. The crude tape was such a hit with Knuckles’ crowd that Khan’s record label eventually approached the deejay to create a version for commercial release.
In much the same way, Hurley made the transformation from deejay to recordmaker and mixer. His 1985 house classic “Music is the Key” debuted not as a commercial record but as a propulsive rhythm track with a sparse, catchy vocal hook that he would play while deejaying clubs and parties to jack up the energy on the dance floor.
“I had to borrow money from my dad to make a record out of it,” he said. “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.”
From that modest base, Knuckles and Hurley evolved into much sought-after remixers and producers. Knuckles has done remix work for Michael Jackson, Pet Shop Boys, Will Downing and Loleatta Holloway and has produced records for himself and other artists. Hurley has remixed singles for Jackson, Prince, Madonna and Boyz II Men and now produces entire albums for other artists; he also runs his own record label, Silk Entertainment.
At the same time, Hurley and Knuckles continue to deejay at dance clubs around the world.
“It comes back down to you in a room with two turntables and crowd that is depending on you to entertain them,” said Knuckles, who was interviewed a few days ago between deejay stints in Japan.
Knuckles won the first Grammy for Remixer of the Year last February — only fitting given that he has been one of the cornerstones of club culture for 25 years. He’s again nominated this year, along with Hurley and three New York-based house deejay-mixer-producers: Masters at Work (Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez and “Little” Louie Vega), David Morales and Roger Sanchez.
Omitted so far from the nominations has been the new wave of remix artists. These range from relative traditionalists such as the duo Cassius, who are part of an emerging French disco scene deeply indebted to the “deep house” of mid-’80s Chicago, to cutting-edge sound processors for whom there is no such thing as a finished “song.” For these artists — DJ Spooky; Chicago postrock band Tortoise; the Beastie Boys’ Mix Master Mike; Japan’s Cornelius; England’s Roni Size, the Aphex Twin and Tricky — the song is merely a set of elements that can constantly be reconfigured or replaced.
When Spooky, for example, performs concerts, he takes vinyl versions of the tracks he recorded for his latest album, “Riddim Warfare” (Outpost), and then remixes them on two turntables while improvising freestyle raps over them–in effect, remixing himself.
Spooky is symbolic of the new remixer, constantly surfing the “data cloud” of sound to create unexpected juxtapositions. With computer and sampling technology gaining in sophistication almost monthly, the future of remixing seems limitless. Once exclusively the playground of underground dance deejays, it has become pop culture’s international language.
RETOOL TIME
The art of remixing has its origins in the studios of Jamaica, where producers such as King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry pioneered the use of the studio as an instrument. They created “dub” versions of reggae recordings by dropping out certain elements (often the vocals) or fading them in and out, while emphasizing others (especially the bass).
In the South Bronx in New York during the early ’70s, deejays such as Lovebug Starski and Kool Herc began to use turntables as instruments and introduced techniques such as “scratching” that altered the sound and duration of a popular record.
As disco began to explode, deejays began embellishing 12-inch `’extended singles” with their own homemade effects, adding keyboard sounds, beefing up the tempos with drum machines and mixing them with the sounds of other records playing simultaneously. Demand for these new “mixes” spurred the rise of the remix industry in music that catered to an after-hours club audience: hip-hop, disco, house and later the rave music of Europe.
The rise of new computer technology widened the options for mixing and remixing the sonic elements in a pop record, so remixers could construct and endlessly deconstruct an entire record in the comfort of their bedrooms.
