Feature: DJ Pierre’s enduring acid influence

Feature: DJ Pierre’s enduring acid influence

3 December, 2008 | 3.35PM

• Written by: Terry Church
• Filed under: Music News: dj pierre, marshall jefferson, music box, phuture, ron hardy

You probably don’t remember 1987. If you do, then you might have hazy memories of wearing aviator sunglasses, big leather jackets and fingerless gloves.

Top Gun was at the cinema. Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad’ was blasting out of radios everywhere.

But away from the mainstream the first seeds of acid house were being sowed by four house music lovers in Chicago: DJ Pierre, Marshall Jefferson, Spanky and Herb Jackson.

Together, under their alias Phuture, they created the world’s first acid house record called ‘Acid Tracks’, an 11 minute 17 seconds-long house trip based around a sound that has become synonymous with electronic music ever since, the bassline of the Roland TB-303 synthesizer.

The 303’s one octave keyboard with its six parameters creates trippy, polyphonic sounds; a squiggly tone that is chaotically cyclical and evolutionary.

In his book Generation Ecstasy, Simon Reynolds described the perculiar sound as an “amnesiac hook: totally compelling you to listen but hard to memorize or reproduce after the event.”

The Phuture crew gave a tape of their ‘Acid Tracks’ studio session to Chicago DJ Ron Hardy, and the track became such a hit at his club the Music Box that it became known as Ron Hardy’s ‘Acid Trax’, referring to a rumour that the club’s intense wild vibe was caused by the promoters putting LSD in the water supply.

The nod to hallucinogens on ‘Acid Tracks’ was not purposeful, claimed Phuture, but rather the name was chosen because the weird and wacky 303 sound reminded them of acid rock.

Phuture even deliberately sought to distance themselves from drugs, and on the flipside of ‘Acid Tracks’ is ‘Your Only Friend’, an anti-cocaine song that begins with the words “This is cocaine speaking,” and goes on to say “I’ll make you die for me, in the end I’ll be your only friend.”

By 1989, acid house had run its course, but the 303’s acid hook remained in dance music, and has been recycled over and over ever since.

The squelchy acid sound defined an era and became the soundtrack to the explosion of rave culture and ecstasy in the U.K. - it even spawned its own logo - that bright yellow smiley face.

And what DJ Pierre and his friends kick started, he has kept pushing.

Today sees the release of his new single ‘I’ve Lost Control’ on DJ Hell’s Gigolo imprint, a track that isn’t acid house but celebrates the effect it caused on dancefloors.

Beatportal caught up with DJ Pierre in his studio in Chicago to discuss the past, the huge impact he had on electronic music, and that whirly amnesiac acid sound.

You’ve been making house music for 20 years. Are you still addicted?

Most definitely. I don’t actually listen to any other forms of music, except maybe some Christian music. Hip hop now is way too corny. I need to surround myself with what I’m doing, to stay in the game.

You’ve been in the game since the beginning; are things much different to the early days?

Things are way different, man. There’s a different kind of passion in the scene now.

I’m not saying people ain’t passionate about electronic music now, but it’s more subtle and a lot less intense than in the 80s.

People probably don’t know, but back then if you disagreed with somebody about a DJ or a record you might get into a fight.

People were really emotional about the scene back then. You’d run into people in the street or in a club in Chicago and you had to be careful what you said, otherwise you could get into a fight.

Did you ever get into fights?

Yeah, I was in many arguments. I’d get into fights about who was a better DJ, Frankie Knuckles or Ron Hardy.

I guess the passion people had about DJs and house music back then was similar to the passion shown by soccer fans in Europe. It got pretty nasty at times, but passion is a good thing.

So you were passionate about what you were creating, but did you ever imagine the lasting impact it would have on electronic music?

Defintely not. When we made ‘Acid Tracks’ we just hoped to make a track that people would like.

We hoped that we would be the only ones creating acid house but then Armando released ‘Land of Confusion’. When I heard that for the first time, my stomach fell out. ‘Shit, somebody else got a 303’.

But whilst other producers were playing with 303s, you guys were the pioneers. You influenced them.

We didn’t know what we were doing. When we made ‘Acid Tracks’ we were just playing around with the 303 and thought ‘wonder what it would sound like if we put a beat to that acid wiggle’.

We weren’t influenced by any other producers, it was the machine that influenced us.

Do the machines still influence your music in the studio today?

Not as much as they should. It’s weird, maybe even a little sad, but as you get older and more intelligent about music, you become less experimental.

It’s like you become too smart to be creative. When you’re just starting out with producing music you think something really dumb sounds good cos you don’t know any better.

It was more of a hit and miss thing back then, but not anymore. Software doesn’t lend itself as much to happy accidents as much as hardware does.

Is your studio still a room full of 303s and drum machines?

My studio is real simple now. There’s hardly any physical gear at all, just a few MIDI controllers, some outboard soundcards, mics and a few keyboard controllers.

I’ve still got a digital mixing desk though, a Tascam DM-24. I refuse to throw that out, because I like to think I’ll get back into hardware again someday.

I want to buy some drum machines because I’ve come to realize that software just doesn’t produce as nice beats as a drum machine. But right now, the digital mixer is dusty and there’s a computer and keyboard on top of it ironically.

Analogue sounds better - it’s a common argument from producers who’ve made music for years.

Well you know, software just isn’t as simple as fiddling with a 303. I use Reason now which is a pretty good program when you’re transitioning from hardware to software like me, but the way producers treat music now is totally different because a visual dimension has been added to the process.

Before you’d only use your ears for making music, but now you use your eyes too.

It diminishes the influence of your ears on the music which probably isn’t a good thing.

I know I shouldn’t use my eyes to produce music but I can’t help it.

Can’t you just turn off the computer screen? Put a record sleeve in front of the screen?

Haha, yeah I sometimes do that. But when I EQ a song, I’ve been doing it for so long that I actually know what the waveform is supposed to look like. I know how a kick drum is supposed to look when properly EQ’d. So I use my eyes not my ears, which is a bit lazy.

You missed out on a lot of potential earnings from your early records because you didn’t own the copyright to your music. Is that true?

It’s not that we didn’t own the licenses or whatever, it’s just that back then we didn’t have any Internet so we didn’t know what the hell was going on in Europe.

There were no magazines or newspapers that covered the music, so we didn’t know what was happening out of our own city.

We were in the dark, and a lot of record labels exploited that fact by using our music on compilations.

Plus back then we didn’t know anything about music business.

What 16-year-old kid is going to understand publishing? You know, I read a story about Aretha Franklin that she only ever received 1% of royalties for her music.

The label bought her a house, but that was it. Record labels exploit artists and that’s unethical.

You’ve released music on all the big house labels – Strictly Rhythm, where you did A&R for a few years, Nervous, Ovum, Twisted and King Street. But your new single ‘I’ve Lost Control’ is on DJ Hell’s Gigolo, which is a new one for you.

Yeah it’s funny. A friend of mine, who is the sound guy for Mary J. Blige said to me ‘Hey, you should send your music to Gigolo. It’s a cool label man.’

So I did, and DJ Hell liked it. It’s not acid house at all, it’s kind of a Wildpitch meets nu skool minimal tech.

It’s actually a celebration of acid house as the record talks about how people lose themselves to acid, like they did in the Music Box club in Chicago that was run by Ron Hardy.

It’s also a tribute to Marshall Jefferson who was the first guy to put a record out about “losing control”.

Is that ‘losing control” theme still relevant today?

Of course, people still get crazy. Although I’m not sure if that’s the music or the drugs [laughs].

One of acid house’s most endearing images is the bright yellow smiley face logo that appeared on t-shirts and record sleeves. As one of the pioneers of acid house, were you anything to do with that association?

We were nothing to do with it. I actually think that smiley face logo started out in the UK.

The first time I ever saw that logo on an acid house record was when I picked up one of my own imported records from Europe.

I wish we had invented that logo cos then we would have copyrighted it and probably would have made a bunch of money.

But even if we had invented it, we wouldn’t have known about copyright anyway. Things back then were just more innocent.

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