1988
In truth, acid house had already started
long before 1988. Amongst the scores of Chicagoans who were buying
equipment and trying to learn how to make tracks was one DJ Pierre,
who'd started out playing Italian imports at roller discos in the
Chicago suburbs, and who had joined Lil Louis for his notorious parties.
"Phuture
was me and two other guys, Spanky and Herbert J." remembers Pierre.
"We had this Roland 303, which was a bassline machine, and we were
trying to figure out how to use it. When we switched it on, that
acid sound was already in it and we liked the sound of it so we
decided to add some drums and make a track with it. We gave it to
Ron Hardy who started playing it straight away. In fact, the first
time he played it, he played it four times in one night!
The first time
people were like, 'what the fuck is this?' but by the the fourth
they loved it. Then I started to hear that Ron was playing some
new thing they were calling 'Ron Hardy's Acid Trax', and everybody
thought it was something he'd made himself. Eventually we found
out that it was our track so we called it 'Acid Trax'. I think we
may have made it as early as 1985, but Ron was playing it for a
long time before it came out."
Explanations for
the name of 'acid' have been long and varied, but the most popular,
and the one endorsed by a number of people who were there at the
time was that they used to put acid in the water at the Music Box.
Pierre though, stresses that Phuture was always anti- drugs, and
cites a track about a cocaine nightmare, 'Your Only Friend' that
was on the same EP as 'Acid Trax'. 'Acid Trax' came out in 1986
but made little impact outside Chicago, as was the case with another
acid track, Sleazy D's 'I've Lost Control', which slapped a deranged
laugh and some geezer repeating the title over the 303 squelching.
'I've Lost Control' was made by Adonis and Marshall Jefferson and
was certainly the first acid track to make it to vinyl, though which
was created first will possibly never be known for sure.
It wasn't until
well into 1987 that the acid sound began to infiltrate Britain,
fuelled by another track that was getting a lot club play, and which
fitted into the sound Bam Bam's 'Give It To Me', and a diversion
of the regular acid track which put vocals into the equation, developed
by Pierre's Phantasy Club with 'Fantasy Girl'. The house scene in
Britain had faltered following the commercialisation of the poppier
end of the spectrum, but towards the end of 1987 the underground
was taking off with new LP compilation series like 'Jack Trax' and
the opening in London of seminal clubs like Shoom and Spectrum and
the move of Delirium to Heaven where the main dancefloor became
exclusively house.
Delirium's
Deep House Convention at Leicester Square's Empire in February 1988
which featured a number of seminal Chicago artists like Kym Mazelle,
Fingers Inc, Xavier Gold. Marshall Jefferson and Frankie Knuckles
was a depressing event because of the poor turnout. But the people
who did go were to be become the prime movers of London's house
explosion. The next week a warehouse party called Hedonism was rammed
and the soundtrack was acid. Acid house UK style had begun.
As acid tracks
like Armando's '151' and 'Land Of Confusion', Bam Bam's 'Where's
Your Child' and Adonis' 'The Poke' began to flow out out of Chicago,
the scene grew at a rate of knots with Rip, Love, Future, Contusion
and Trip opening in London, and the legendary Nude in Manchester.
DJs suddenly discovered they had a year's worth of classic house
which hitherto they'd been unable to play. When WBMX in Chicago
closed down, signalling the end of radio play for the music in the
city, it was clear that the emphasis had switched to the UK.
Acid house became
the biggest youth cult in Britain since punk rock a decade before
as British house records like Bang The Party's 'Release Your Body',
Jullan Jonah's 'Jealousy & Lies' (later used as the backbone
of Electrlbe 101's 'Talking With Myself'), Baby Ford's 'Oochy Koochy',
A Guy Called Gerald's Voodoo Ray, and Richie Rich's 'Salsa House'
became huge club hits, before the chart UK house records emerged
with S'Express' 'Theme From S'Express', D-Mob's 'We Call It Acid',
which popularised the ridiculous but funny club chant of 'Aciiieeeeed!'
and Jolly Roger's 'Acid Man'.
Opinions differ
as to the effect on the scene of the relatively new drug ecstasy,
but there was little doubt that the sudden rise in availabilty of
the drug was directly related to the growth of the club scene. Before
the tabloids discovered what was going on with their inevitably
lurid headlines about 'Acid House Parties' and drug barons, it was
easy to see people openly imbibing the drug in any club.
Like Chicago radio
was to prove crucial to spreading house in Britain. But this wasn't
any kind of legitimate radio. Save for a few token shows, you couldn't
hear Black music or dance music on legal radio, and eventually the
demand turned into supply in the form of numerous pirate stations,
mostly in and around London but also in a few other big cities.
Most of them were on and off the air in months or even weeks, but
the more organised stations managed to keep going, supplying hungry
listeners with the music they wanted to hear - reggae, soul, jazz,
hip hop - and house. Steve Jackson's House That Jack Built on Kiss
and Jazzy M's 'Jacking Zone' on LWR pumped out the new music week
in, week out.
"When LWR was
what you call the boom, it was on half a million listeners." says
Jazzy M. And we knew that because the surveys were actually being
published in newspapers The Jacking Zone was getting 40-50 letters
a week and I was broke because all my wages went on new tunes. Once
that plane had landed with the imports, I was getting the new records
on the show the same night. It was unbelievable."
1988 wasn't just
acid it was the year that house first really began to diversify.
For a start, there was the 'Balearic' business, an eclectic style
of DJing which at the time encompassed dance mixes of pop artists
like Mandy Smith and quasi-industrial music like Nitzer Ebb's 'Join
In The Chant' Championed by Danny Rampling, Nicky Holloway, Paul
Oakenfold and Johnny Walker who'd all been to Ibiza, Balearic was
an integral part of the club scene at the time, but after the gushing
media overkill it all became a little farcical as people attempted
to make Balearic records There was, of course no such thing
Then there were
the anthems. A year's worth of inspirational Chicago deep house,
which went back to the Nightwriters and took in Joe Smooth's 'Promised
Land' and Sterling Void's 'It's Alright' along the way became some
of the biggest club records of the year, while Marshall Jefferson
took the music to new highs with Ten City's 'Devotion' and Ce Ce
Rogers 'Someday'. Marshall was on a roll in 88, picking up remixes
and linking up with Kym Mazelle for 'Useless' It was the deep house
that spawned the first two house LP's, which naturally came out
in Britain first - Fingers Inc's benchmark 'Another Side' and Liz
Torres With Master C & J's excellent 'Can't Get Enough'.
Ten City were
an important stage in the development of house. With self-conviction
unusually high for the time, they snubbed the Chicago labels which
by that time were losing their artists more quickly than they could
sign them, and headed for Atlantic records in New York where Merlin
Bobb promptly snapped them up. Where nearly all the house that had
gone before them was strictly producer created, Ten City were an
act, and they could be marketed as such. Plus, they returned some
of the soul vision to house, a tradition that went all the way back
to the Philly sound it was no coincidence that 'Devotion' was one
of the first records from Chicago to really do well on the East
Coast, which always had much stronger r'n'b roots in its club music.
After another
huge club hit with 'Right Back To You', they broached the UK top
Ten in January 1989 with 'That's The Way Love Is' Even Detroit was
discovering songs. Though the new techno sound was by now at full
tilt with Rhythm Is Rhythm's anthem 'Strings 0f Life' Model 500's
'Off To Battle' and Reese & Santonio's 'Rock To The Beat', it
was Inner City's 'Big Fun' a techno song with vocals by Chicagoan
Paris Grey that was to propel Kevin Saunderson into the big time.
Originally a track recorded for Virgin's groundbreaking 'Techno!
The New Dance Sound Of Detroit' LP, 'Big Fun' was just too commercial
to hold back, and Saunderson suddenly found himself in a virtually
full-time pop duo making videos, follow-up singles and EPs like
any other pop act.
Chicago however
was still finding new things to do with house, though the next trend
wasn't to be anything like as significant. There had already been
raps put down to house tracks as early as 1985 with 'Music Is The
Key' and more recently with M-Doc's 'It's Percussion', The Beatmasters'
'Rok Da House' and New York's KC Flight with 'Let's Get Jazzy'.
But it was Tyree Cooper (who'd already had a big club record with
'Acid Over') and rapper Kool Rock Steady who defined the hip-house
style with 'Turn Up The Bass', a galloping track which somehow combined
Kool's rap with the classic Chicago piano sound and Tyree's trademark
909 roll. It wasn't long before Fast Eddie, also at DJ International,
expanded it with 'Yo Yo Get Funky'.
But the biggest
new producer of 1988 was someone who didn't come from Chicago at
all. Or Detroit. New York was beginning to flex its muscles, the
city that had always regarded itself the world's capital for dance
music wanted some of the limelight back. But it wasn't an established
figure in the New York or New Jersey dance scene that broke through,
it was a kid from Brooklyn who was showing an incredible alacrity
for the new form of sampling that had been co- developing with house
- Todd Terry. First it was those Masters At Work tracks, but after
that Todd hit house in a big way with 'Bango' (at which Kevin Saunderson
was highly miffed, because it heavily sampled one of his records),
'Just Wanna Dance', Swan Lake's 'In The Name Of Love', Black Riot's
'A Day In The Life' and 'Warlock' and the one that was almost certainly
the biggest club record of the year - Royal House's 'Can You Party!'.
Though in New
York Todd's sample tracks were firmly categorized with the Latin
freestyle house sound that the Hispanics were developing, in the
UK Todd became the toast of the house scene. In a by now familiar
scenario, 'Can You Party' hit the Top 20 in October on a wave of
club support, closely followed by another track on the new Big Beat
label out of New York, Kraze's 'The Party'.
As it became
more and more apparent that Chicago was grinding to a halt, New
York was getting it together, with more labels like Cutting (who'd
already released Nitro Deluxe's classic 'Let's Get Brutal' in 1987)
and Warlock turning to house and new labels starting up. One of
these was to prove more important than all the rest - Nu Groove.