Black History Month: Larry Heard and house music

Black History Month: Larry Heard and house music

23 February, 2010 | 8.27AM

• Written by: Terry Church
• Filed under: Music News: black history month, larry heard, mr. fingers

As part of our Black History Month celebrations, we produced this audio interview with one of Chicago’s house music originators, Larry Heard, a producer and DJ who has released house music for over 25 years.

He was responsible for some of house music’s most important moments, including 1988’s ‘Can You Feel It’, and proto-acid gems like ‘Amnesia’ and ‘Mystery of Love’.

Yet despite his mammoth discography and the wealth of house classics he is responsible for, Larry Heard hasn’t once lost touch with the demands of the ever-evolving dancefloor - his 2007 opus ‘The Sun Can’t Compare’ is widely considered to be one of the best house tracks of the noughties.

We sat down with Larry Heard to find out more about his earliest house music memories, his musical influences, and the technology that started his lengthy house music career.

What was the underground scene like, back then?

I guess you’re referring back to the beginning days, of the whole house music movement. I can’t say I’m a really authoritative person to ask that question to because I was coming from the live scene myself, and kinda came into the underground scene kinda late, maybe around ‘83 when I showed up, whereas we all know the history goes right way back into the early ‘70s with the scene.

But as far as the cultural diversity of it, it seems pretty comparable to right now. It was music that was basically open to anyone who wanted to hear it.

Whereas you know, usually music on radio or television is directed at specific groups of individuals, whereas this was for whoever was interested in the club music. It was pretty much open door policy as far as who was welcome.

How does it compare to today’s house music scene?

I don’t really think there is a real comparison, I mean, there’s a totally different group of individuals now listening to and dancing to the music. The big issue is who’s buying. Everyone is talking and dancing and coming into clubs and what have you, but are they actually buying something, because that’s pretty foundational to the scene’s survival.

It’s kinda, not looking that great from where I am here as far as what’s going on with sales in comparison. I mean if you compare the sales back then to the sales right now, it’s light years difference. And even if you jump from house music in the 80s to disco in the 70s, there’s light years difference in those sales too.

Hype and publicity and all that other stuff, of course those things have been mastered over time.

There can be talk about producers or releases or labels or what have you, but then there’s no corresponding sales numbers that go along with those things, so at the end of the day it takes the capital to keep things moving, with the label, with the artist, or production company, or whatever it may be, or even with the individual’s life.

They can’t really sustain themselves off adulation and things like that so, the fundamentals are the most important.

There is an investment of time, energy, emotion, and the sum of everything else involved in this stuff, and it starts to turn into more of a hobby than a livelihood, and if there are not really corresponding sales going on, all the popularity in the world, is, is nice, but having your artwork appreciated by someone patronizing it, that’s a lot better.

How different is today’s DJ and club scene to the early days?

The thing I do notice is - well a couple of things I notice that are quite concerning is how the global scenes seem to be reliant on guests coming in as opposed to just strong residents in some of the places with great taste.

Which is what we were fortunate to have in Chicago with guys like Ron Hardy, Frankie Knuckles, Louie DeVito, and Brett Wilcox, and a whole list of folks.

Only a short list of them are known to the outside world, but those of us who were in Chicago, there were a lot of people who could be counted on to just keep you entertained and keep you writing things down to run to the store to buy the next day after a party, and things like that, which is one thing we always did, which doesn’t seem to happen now.

There’s lots of philiosophical discussions but they can’t really give too much weight to what you’re talking about if we get to your house and you have no record collection, or everything you have is basically free downloads and things like that.

So you don’t really fall into the category of people that these labels need to address, which is people who buy music, not people who just get it. That’s totally different.

So Ron Hardy, Frankie Knuckles and other DJs influenced the whole Chicago house scene, but what were your musical influences?

I guess I would say my musical influences were probably already in place, with guys like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gay, Herbie Hancock, and George Duke, and a whole bunch of different musicians that inspired me to even get on my first instrument which was drums.

But as you notice I listed out several individuals who played keyboard and piano, and things like that, and I was always interested in the piano.

We grew up with a piano in the household, my mother and father both played. So, it was basically to me being in numerous bands playing drums that I realised that I wasn’t really involved in the creative process, I was involved in the rhythmic aspects of the band. But I was more interested in expressing something more musically than just a beat.

I can’t name drop any individuals or what have you, other than like I said, the ones that I just did. They’re kinda old skool, they would be more soul and rock artists than anything. Arethra Franklin and Rush - I’d practice drums off Rush and Frank Zapplin, and Genesis records, and things like that.

So who inspired you to get into electronic music?

I guess there would be another group of people, maybe like the Gino Soccios, and the Giorgio Moroders, and the Kraftwerks who were more directly connected with this musical style that we were stumbling across in Chicago.

The forum that we had available to us was underground dance clubs, so it wouldn’t have fitted in for us to write a country song, or a reggae song, or an opera. It just wouldn’t have worked. We were trying to fit into this thing that they had going on at the underground clubs.

Especially, since they were the ones that were willing to listen to what some of the people around town were doing. Our modest interpretations of the disco music, without the budget, and the orchestras, and the rhythm sections, and sometimes everything from top to bottom, we just took whatever tools we had available to us and just made them work.

Can you remember what your first studio equipment was?

The first couple of things I got was, I got a Roland Jupiter 6 synthesizer, I got a Roland TR-707 Drum Machine, a Roland 909 Drum Machine, and a Yamaha DX7.

That first group of recordings were pretty much done on those things, and all of the digital recording methods and mediums weren’t around at that time, but I did have two cassette decks and I had a reel-to-reel, so I would just, bounce back and forth between those things and add additional elements in to the recordings.

But basically those initial songs, that’s the core group of pieces of gear that you’re hearing on those songs. Then of course over time, you pick up things here and there, as you’re able to.

I think within a couple of years time, I had so many pieces of gear, that I was starting to get rid of things at that point, because you have to maintain all of the stuff and take care of it.

And I was pretty transient, so I moved a lot, so it was pretty hard on me to lug that stuff from place to place and to lug it to recording studios.

So it was good when things like ADATs and the digital recorders did come on the scene so I could start some ideas off at home, as opposed to having to lug equipment back and forth, and after all that lugging, your motivational level would never be the same.

And the feel you’d get sometimes would be slightly different, if not totally different, cos we did have some things where we had prototypes that we were able to do at home, and we were in a comfortable setting, but then when you’re in the studio you feel, a little bit of pressure I guess, because you’re kind of doing an hourly thing, where you’re paying by the hour, and it tends to maybe have its own mental effect.

You mentioned prototypes. Do you have any unreleased tracks from the early days?

Yes, I have tons, and tons and tons of things that we didn’t put out at that time. We were young folk with plenty of energy and we were just really geeked about what was going on.

It was for some of us, like a guy like me who had been playing drums since ‘77, to come around to 85/86 and people are starting to hear what you’re doing, now that kinda gets a fire lit up under you. So yeah there’s tons of things.

I just had Robert [Owens] in town, and I was letting him hear some things that were in the archives over here and he was quite surprised that I still had some of them, and I think he has lots of things that I don’t have where he is, so yeah I have a virtual archive of stuff.

Thousands, and thousands and thousands of tracks, old and new, that I hope will see the light of day at some point.

You were a young man when all of this was happening. Did you ever anticipate the magnitude of what was to come for this groundbreaking genre?

I think our expectations at the time were pretty basic. We were just happy to have people listening to the music and enjoying it, and showing that they enjoyed it, and once there were records out, them showing their appreciation and enjoyment level by patronizing the releases.

We weren’t really going ahead and saying ‘well what’s the future gonna look like?’. We were pretty much enjoying what was going on. I think that even applied to the scene itself. It wasn’t really stuck in the past, or anticipating the future, it was just really enjoying the present.

The music that was out at the time, is what we were enjoying at the time. But it’s good that it did lead to all the things that it did lead to, though there were periods in there when I was utterly confused myself by all of the different offshoots and different titles of the music.

It became a confusing kinda chore to understand what each of the terminologies meant. I’m more of a kinda person where I like to hear the music not hear the description.

I’m not really into all the genres, just let me hear it. I know which music I like, and which doesn’t appeal to me, without anybody putting any genre tags on it.

Because I like a variety of stuff, so it could be a reggae song, it could be a country song, it could be a classical piece that I like. It’s pretty simple for me, just let me hear it, don’t try to explain it, the music will explain itself to my ears when I hear it. 

Larry Heard’s latest DJ chart

Larry Heard hasn’t once lost touch with the cutting-edge sounds that the ever-evolving dancefloor needs. As this new and rare DJ chart from Larry Heard shows, he is still, after 25 years, right at the forefront of new house music.

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• Check out Larry Heard on Beatport