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“House music magazines only talk about the music or the culture, they don’t get involved with the people- what are they like, do they have a family? It’s too empty. It can’t grow if people don’t put a face on it.”
As the first man who discovered the Roland 303 squelch that put the acid in acid house, Chicago legend DJ Pierre is eminently qualified to discuss the pros and cons of both the image and health of dance music today and to say he’s unimpressed is no exaggeration.
“It was cool before to be faceless, that was underground and they’ll always be that underground element, but house music needs to have credibility now,” he declares.
“House music has a fan base of the sound but not fan bases for the producers- you’ve got to prove yourself over and over again with every single release whereas with other forms of music people form connections with the artists.”
The other forms of music he’s thinking of are hip hop and R&B, both genres that have made their biggest stars millionaires while house producers, he says, have struggled.
“In house music we’re so close to the level of the fan there’s almost this attitude of ‘why should he get rich?’ Pierre complains, “In hip-hop it’s different, the fans see them on TV and they want to support the artists. And the difference is because in house music nobody knows who we are. They don’t know about our life, about how we live, even what we look like. That needs to be fixed; record labels, magazines and promoters really need to start putting a face to the music.”
He’s also fiercely critical of fans downloading dance music for free, declaring ‘Any time I’m interviewed I talk about this and I’m telling the truth- I ain’t worried about the fact that I’m calling people who do it a thief.
I’m not losing a record sale anyway because they ain’t buying the music in the first place; they’re already stealing it. I believe in keeping it real and being honest, I’m not out there kissing anybody’s butt.”
“People don’t realise that they’re destroying the industry they love through digital downloading for free. I think a lot of people are ignorant about how damaging it is, even though there are millions of people doing it across the world. House music isn’t like R&B where you can sell seven million copies, you’re selling literally just thousands of copies of tracks so if you lose a few thousand sales through downloads; that’s it. R&B can lose 500,000 in download sales and still sell six times platinum (6 million units).”
As well as pioneering acid house in the 80s, Pierre went on to A&R for New York’s Strictly Rhythm in the 90s, becoming one of the industry’s key executives though today he’s firmly back in his DJ/ producer role and despite his reservations is pushing ahead to release his long awaited artist album ‘DJ Pierre’s Afro-Acid Project’ in the new year.
Before that, he’s just released the Paris Collection, a French Kiss style dirty house workout featuring the orgasmic vocals of Hanna Hais. Despite its salacious style, Pierre is nowadays a fully-fledged born again Christian and he insists its vibe is accidental.
“I’m so disconnected these days that a moan to me is a different sound,” he insists, “I was thinking ‘I like that sound, people might make those kind of sounds when they’re working out in a gym’. A sound can be taken as a lot of different things.
“The lyrics on the track are about model girls, walking the runway, and they say when they walk the runway they feel sexy. That’s what the lyrics are about, though the track gives it even more of a sexual flavour,” he continues.
“I want people to see that song as being about the music making you feel all the things that you feel, it has nothing to do with a person, it’s that you’re in love with the music. I was trying to convey being in love with the music.”
Whatever his intent, the song is a dance-floor winner and top quality DJ tool, and is released on vinyl and CD on Black Tech Records, despite his passion for (paying) downloads.
“I still think CD singles and vinyl are worthwhile because sometimes you don’t want to shop online, you want the experience of going to the music store and looking through the music physically, some people get into that,” says Pierre, adding a pointed message to DJs who do it for free.
“Truly it will impact on them sooner or later because they’ll be less music being made and they’ll find themselves no longer being hired as DJs,” he predicts.
“You’ve got to support what you love. Downloads are liked 99c or $1.50, I was shopping online the other day and I spent $45 and got so many songs. I got the mixes I wanted, didn’t buy the ones I didn’t want. I think it’s better now than it’s ever been- in the past I would have spent two or three hundred dollars to get that amount of music. It’s already more affordable to DJs than it’s ever been and to me it’s absolutely appalling that somebody wants it for absolutely nothing.”
Skrufff (Jonty Skrufff): According to my dance encyclopaedia you started your DJ career in 1983, played a disastrous set and changed your name; what happened?
DJ Pierre: “My first DJ name was Nat Jammin Jones because my name was Nathaniel and at that time in the early 80s everybody had to have these names with nicknames in the middle, that’s how it was then. I was DJing and breakdancing and the names everybody had were usually flashy. I didn’t have a bad night in DJ terms; it was a disaster because of the needles. Somehow the guy setting up the system messed them up and there weren’t any replacements, everybody was at the party and there was no music. Everybody was really angry, they’d paid money to get in and my name had been splattered all over that party on flyers and posters. People back then thought the DJ was the person who threw the party because at that time they often did. So I thought they’re never going to come to my parties again, that was my first party so I changed my name. I changed it to my saint name, I grew up Catholic and they called me Peter. I thought Peter was a little corny, it didn’t sound cool enough so I went for Pierre. So everybody started calling me Pierre. I also added Scratching in front of it and became known as Scratching Pierre, then later on I became DJ Pierre.”
Skrufff: Nowadays, you’re a born again Christian?
DJ Pierre: “Yes.”
Skrufff: When did that happen?
DJ Pierre: “It didn’t happen until 2000. I was raised Catholic though never really connected with that religion, it seemed as though the church and the priests were so much in between me and God that it was hard to connect. They always seemed to be a buffer. So I was unsure of what direction to go in, I just knew I wanted to be close with God.
When I came to New York I got deeply involved in the Muslim thing to see what that was about, they called it Back Muslims, the Nation Of Islam, with Farrakhan, Elijah Mohammed. I didn’t connect with that either, it’s so much of a conspiracy based religion, there’s a lot of truth but also conspiracies about the enemy putting things out there to catch you out, but that’s not the only facet to knowing God and living life. They were too extreme for me on that side so I got out of that, around 1992.
I was married at the time and for most of the 90s I was being married, doing my music, and the spiritual side of things was on hold for a while. I was always willing to have a spiritual conversation with someone, to pray, but I was waiting for the right thing to come.
I did that until late in the marriage, around 1998, when I started feeling that I needed to establish myself as a Christian. I had already accepted Jesus in my life, but not fully. You can be a Christian and not live it, you’ve got to live the word, you can’t just talk the talk and not live your life right. I never did anything like drugs and drinking, that was never a part of my life and I never had problems with that.”
Skrufff: You never drank at all?
DJ Pierre: “I drank a little but never consistently, maybe on my 21st birthday I drank. Throughout all the early club years I’d drink dust occasionally, maybe twice a year. I just didn’t want to do it, I saw taking drugs and drinking as a sign of weakness, I knew it wasn’t something for me. People would do it around me and I would have fun laughing and giggling at them, I could be around them, it was fun to watch but I would see how silly they looked and the things they’d be doing and I’d think I don’t want to get involved.
There were so many problems in the marriage that I was looking to God for help, and that really pushed me to make a decision. I understood things weren’t right because God wasn’t in his rightful place and everything else could work from that. I wanted my wife to do the same but she was like ‘if you wanna go to church and do all that, well go ahead’. I wanted my partner to do it with me, which at the time I thought was logical. But when I did become Christian and started following the word of God I realised I should have just gone myself. Because it’s about my personal relationship with God. Sometimes people can see God in you, by the way you carry yourself and do things, it draws people in, more so than hammering them over the head with the word.”
Skrufff: The story of you discovering the 303 acid sound is in every history of acid house, did you literally find it by accident?
DJ Pierre: “Spanky bought the machine in the same way everybody else did, to use as a bass guitar. At the time we were struggling to find a good bass sound or even a rhythm that sounded good. Spanky hooked up the machine and had it playing before I got to the house and when I arrived he was like ‘I can’t figure how to work this machine.’ He had the beat on with this crazy sound and I said ‘that sounds interesting’. He liked it too, and it was working just running by itself. So I started turning the knobs thinking it’s got to do something, then Spanky was like ‘yeah, I like the way that sounds’, We had an hour jam session just turning the knobs of this one acid sound and that became Acid Traxx, We recorded it there and then and I gave it to Ron Hardy. He played it at the Warehouse and everything took off.”
DJ Pierre: Paris Collection (featuring Hannah Hais) is out now on Black Tech Records.
Article by Jonty Skrufff (Skrufff.com)
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