Greg Kot
Where Disco Died, and House Music was born.
On a summer night in 1979 between games of a White Sox doubleheader at Comiskey Park, Chicago rock deejay Steve Dahl created a fireworks show out of a bunch of Donna Summer and KC and The Sunshine Band albums. Disco Demolition Night started a riot, left the field unplayable and caused the Sox to forfeit a game, but it couldn’t kill dance music. Only a few blocks from the ballpark on the city’s South and West Sides, a rougher, grittier sound called house was already rising out of disco’s ashes.
“I view house as a disco’s revenge,” says Frankie Knuckles, who was already being called “The Godfather” at Chicago’s Warehouse when disco went boom at Comiskey. “I witnessed that Disco Demolition caper and it didn’t mean a thing to me or my crowd. It scared the record companies, who stopped signing disco artists and making disco records. So we created our own thing in Chicago to fill the gap.”
House wasn’t so much a new thing as a wild thing. Like disco, house was an all night religious experience with deejays as ministers who laid down the gospel from on high in a darkened booth armed only with a stack of 12-inch singles, a pair of turntables and a drum machine. But it was rawer, rougher, less glossily produced than most late ‘70s disco. Its audience was primarily black, gay and Hispanic, and deejays such as Knuckles at the Warehouse, Ron Hardy at the Music Box and Farley “Jackmaster” Funk at the Playground built huge followings with their innovative mixing and sequencing. By the mid-’80s house records were coming out of Chicago in ever greater numbers to feed the demand for fresh grooves.
Many of the early house records were homemade and sounded like it; they consisted of little more than a simple keyboard melody and a ferocious groove that made words superfluous. More often than not, the vocals worked like another rhythmic device, urging dancers to “Jack your body” or “Work it to the bone.” Many of the house records that emerged in the mid-’80s out of Chicago might not have passed major-label muster during the disco era, but their raw simplicity worked like an aphrodisiac on the dancefloor. This was the golden age of Chicago house, and the 11 tracks in this collection were among the first to bring the international acclaim to the city’s underground scene.
Steve “Silk” Hurley, who recorded his 1985 breakthrough, “Music is the Key,” as J.M.Silk with vocalist Keith Nunnally, says what made Chicago house different from other dance musics was that its architects were “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 Iyrically: “I am a deejay/And music is my plan/To ease your mind and set you free/From all your days of misery.” The follow-up, “Jack Your Body,” was even more direct, its title invocation a mantra for the dawn-to-dusk< generation in Chicago’s clubs.
Like Hurley, Marshall Jefferson was no musician. But the postal worker concocted “Move Your Body,” subtitled “The House Music Anthem” and arguably the most sampled record in Chicago house history. The vocal was provided by Curtis McClain, a friend of Jefferson’s from the Post Office, but the core of the track was an insistent, idiosyncratic Keyboard riff. Jefferson couldn’t play Keyboards, which made the chord sequence he composed on a sequencer all the more oddly compelling. “I only found out later a normal keyboard player wouldn’t play that way,” Jefferson says. “You’d have to go against training to do what I did.”
Jefferson became an in-demand producer, and his arrangements quickly became more sophisticated, as evidenced by his work with Ten City on “Devotion” and CeCe Rogers on “Someday,” records that courted the pop audience while still engaging the hard-core dancefloor crowd.
But in balancing grit with grace, sumptuousness with sizzle, Chicago house records inevitably erred on the lean-and-mean side, as one listen to LNR’s salacious “Work It To The Bone” or the minimalist soundscape of Finders Inc.’s “Mystery of Love” will attest. Also crucial to the Chicago house sound was attitude, something possessed in abundance by such estrogen-driven classics as “Can’t Get Enough” by Liz Torres; “You Used to Hold Me,” written and coproduced by Ralphi Rosario but wrung of emotion by Xaviera Gold; and especially “Fun With Bad Boys,” by punk-scene refugee Screamin’ Rachael.
None of these performances quite prepares the listener for the other-wordly, near hysterical intensity of Daryl Pandy on “Love Can’t Turn Around,” however. Pandy sounds like he’d sell his home, his first-born and his soul for one more chance with his lover, but in reality what he was selling was the sound of Chicago. His multi octave wails transformed the Farley Funk-Vince Lawrence-Jessie Saunders anthem into an international siren call, arguably the first shot heard ‘round the world from the Chicago house underground, and certainly not the last.
House music - the gritty, underground offshoot of ‘70s disco - was born in Chicago, and by the mid ‘80s some of the city’s deejays weren’t taking kindly to non-Chicago derivations. The attitude was best summed up in the derisive title of one of Farley “Jackmaster” Funk’s singles, “U Ain’t Really House.”
But even Farley couldn’t deny that the foundation for Chicago house was New York. underground disco. After all, Frankie Knuckles, the acknowledged “godfather” of Chicago house, got his start in Manhattan, where he was spinning records in the early ‘70s with another legendary deejay, the late Larry Levan.
And it was Levan’s nights at the Paradise Garage disco that gave the New York house scene its identity in the ‘80s. Just as Chicago deejays reinterpreted New York disco to create house, East Coast deejays modified and expanded Windy City house to create New York garage. In contrast to Chicago’s jack-your-body house flavor, the 10 tracks on “New York Garage Style” generally place greater emphasis on passionate soul-flavored vocals and favor slightly slower tempos, mostly in the 115 to 120 beats per minute range, as opposed to the 122 to 125 bpm’s of Chicago house.
It was a New York disco-era deejay, Walter Gibbons, who pioneered many of the techniques of disco mixing that would become the lifeblood of house deejays turned- producers in the ‘80s. After years out of the spotlight, Gibbons resurfaced in 1984 with a remix of a 12-inch single called “Set It Off” that would define the New York dance underground. It created a sensation at the Garage, where it was championed by Levan, and spawned countless remakes by the likes of C. Sharp and Masquerade and at least one answer single, Number 1’s “Set It Off (Party Rock).” Perhaps the definitive version of “Set It Off” was Strafe’s, with its mesmerizing vocal hook woven into a spare but hauntingly atmospheric rhythm bed.
“Set It Off” was the apogee of the early garage sound, followed closely by “D” Train’s “You’re the One For Me,” the Peech Boys’ “Don’t Make Me Wait” and Serious Intention’s “You Don’t Know,” which blended underground grit with uptown production sophistication that distinguished them from the raw tracks then pumping in Chicago. Although distinct from each other in sound and attitude, the house scenes of the two cities carrier! on a conversation of sorts throughout the’ 80s; note how Colonel Abrams’ baritone-voiced pep talk on “Music is the Answer” is a mirror image of JM Silk’s Chicago classic “Music is the Key.”
By the ‘80s New York house could no longer be confined to the garage, but had spread into a mansion full of rooms, each with a different style. In one was the plush, inventive keyboards of Josh Milan on Blaze’s “If You Should Need a Friend,” in another the dreamy girl-group vocals of Jomanda’s “Drifting.” The Basement Boys transformed the simmering vocal tour de force “Love Don’t Live
Here Anymore” with ping-pong percussion and percolating, pipe-like keyboard effects. Phase II’s “Mystery” weaved layered vocals into a carpet of polyrhythmic effects, a near-perfect marriage of man-made passion and machine-driven groove. And Todd Terry dispensed with a vocal narrative altogether on Royal House’s “Can You Party,” as he created a dance classic out of a delirious, near chaotic collage of electronicsamples. At the core of this track is a repeated vocal hook that refutes Farley Funk’s Chicago-only definition of house. As the vocal loop in “Can You Party” insists, all that matters on the dance floor is, “Can you feel it?”
By Greg Kot
Rock Music critic for The Chicago Times
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