DJ Maurice Joshua hits Wired Fridays at the Chicago Cultural Center today to pay tribute to the house music pioneer Frankie Knuckles by spinning his music from noon until 1 p.m.
DJ Maurice Joshua
(Below) Frank Knuckles
Frankie Knuckles made house music. The sound he created, named after the Chicago club, The Warehouse, where he played during the late '70s and early '80s, was copied by literally thousands of DJs and producers over the next 40 years. And yet, an ear trained to the nuances of club music can detect a Frankie Knuckles mix and distinguish it from so many of his contemporaries and followers because first and foremost it's musical — there are harmonies and melodies and countermelodies in it that you just can't create without working with musicians schooled in music theory and classical composition. His sound is earthy yet ethereal, without gravity. To listen to his "The Bomb Mix" of Chanté Moore's 1995 R&B song "This Time" is to be suspended in air for 10 minutes.
It's like Debussy or Satie for the dance floor. Whereas most club mixes accentuate hardness to drive dancers to the floor, Knuckles did the truly daring, inspired thing and made this one actually softer. The original may have been a ballad, but Moore sings Knuckles' rendition more tenderly (she recut the vocal in his studio, following his directions to sing it at a club-friendly tempo), more like she's having a secret talk with God, as if she's praying that this time, heaven allowed, things are going to work out. She's singing as if she's asking to be blessed.
Not everything he made was this eloquent, but Knuckles, who died on Monday at his home in Chicago at the age of 59, made dance music at a spiritual level for nearly four decades. Born Francis Nicholls on January 18, 1955, in the Bronx, he started out as a DJ in Manhattan at the Gallery, one of the earliest gay discos, and the Continental Baths, the same gay bathhouse where Bette Midler and her accompanist Barry Manilow launched their careers. Another musician who started at both of those places was his pal Larry Levan, the DJ often cited as the greatest-ever, who soon moved on to the Paradise Garage, the late '70s/'80s downtown club routinely tagged the greatest-ever. [I sometimes danced there. Both were more phenomenal than there's space to get into here.]
A fan of soul and disco, Nemiah Mitchell, Jr. (left) let the taste of his son, Vince Lawrence, shape the output of his record labels Mitchbal and Chicago Connection.
The Record
This Old Chicago House: EDM's Family Roots
"When Larry started the Garage, Frankie didn't know what he was gonna do with himself," says Knuckles' manager, Judy Weinstein, of Def Mix Productions, who at the time also ran one of the first record pools, For the Record. "Then somebody in Chicago said, 'We have a club for you.' That was the Warehouse."
Like the Garage, the Warehouse was patronized by a private membership of mostly gay black (and to a lesser degree gay Latino) men. And like the Garage, the Warehouse was so popular that the so-called death of disco — one most historians pinpoint as starting in Chicago's own Comiskey Park during rock radio DJ's Steve Dahl's notorious "Disco Demolition Night" promotion on July 12, 1979 that turned a normal baseball double-header into a full-blown riot — didn't diminish its following. In fact, both the Warehouse and the Garage got more popular after disco supposedly went kaput. At the Warehouse, the crowd got whiter and straighter to the point that its owner gave up the membership system that protected its gay clientele, and Knuckles abandoned ship to start his own club, the Power Plant.
Like the Garage, the Warehouse was known for a particularly soulful strain of disco, one that maintained its connection to R&B via Philly soul's lush strings and pulsating rhythms. And just like Levan, Knuckles modified the records to suit his crowd, and mixed the soul with synthesizer-based productions from Europe and edgier cuts from the New Wave scene. In New York, that combination was called "Garage music." In Chicago, that exact same combo was called "house music."
And while there were songs that came out of the New York scene that were specifically designed for the Garage, some of those were so musically savvy that they became national R&B radio and club hits, like Taana Garner's "Heartbeat," which Levan himself remixed. What came out of Chicago, however, was significantly cruder and even more leftfield than most Garage-bound tracks. There was no way that early house tracks like Jack Master Dick's "Jack the Dick," for example, was going to be confused with any other genre, and so the house tag stuck in a way that Garage didn't. Even more than Garage, House at this stage was black gay ghetto music and although it got played on Chicago's dance music station WBMX, it wasn't going anywhere.
Or so it seemed. England adores music precisely like this. In the '70s, Northern England fell in love with Motown-sound flops of the '60s and resold them as "Northern Soul." This time, London got in on the action faster and sent its music critics to Chicago in the mid-'80s to write about the underground house scene just as it would send writers to Seattle just a few years later to write about grunge. But Chicago didn't have a Kurt Cobain to sell papers. Instead, it had a bunch of mostly black, mostly gay DJs.
What Chicago had were loads and loads of records that were recorded, pressed, and licensed for export quite cheaply. The first one to go pop in the U.K., Farley "Jackmaster" Funk's "Love Can't Turn Around" featuring Darryl Pandy, is a literally screaming 1986 remake of Isaac Hayes' "I Can't Turn Around." No American major label would touch a record like it. The second major hit, Steve "Silk" Hurley's "Jack Your Body," topped the U.K. charts for two weeks in early 1987. For the next several years, English labels went on a house spree, licensing Chicago tracks so obscure that some of them hadn't even been pressed back home, so American DJs had to buy the imports in order to get the music that was originally designed for them.
(Below) Frank Knuckles
Frankie Knuckles made house music. The sound he created, named after the Chicago club, The Warehouse, where he played during the late '70s and early '80s, was copied by literally thousands of DJs and producers over the next 40 years. And yet, an ear trained to the nuances of club music can detect a Frankie Knuckles mix and distinguish it from so many of his contemporaries and followers because first and foremost it's musical — there are harmonies and melodies and countermelodies in it that you just can't create without working with musicians schooled in music theory and classical composition. His sound is earthy yet ethereal, without gravity. To listen to his "The Bomb Mix" of Chanté Moore's 1995 R&B song "This Time" is to be suspended in air for 10 minutes.
It's like Debussy or Satie for the dance floor. Whereas most club mixes accentuate hardness to drive dancers to the floor, Knuckles did the truly daring, inspired thing and made this one actually softer. The original may have been a ballad, but Moore sings Knuckles' rendition more tenderly (she recut the vocal in his studio, following his directions to sing it at a club-friendly tempo), more like she's having a secret talk with God, as if she's praying that this time, heaven allowed, things are going to work out. She's singing as if she's asking to be blessed.
Not everything he made was this eloquent, but Knuckles, who died on Monday at his home in Chicago at the age of 59, made dance music at a spiritual level for nearly four decades. Born Francis Nicholls on January 18, 1955, in the Bronx, he started out as a DJ in Manhattan at the Gallery, one of the earliest gay discos, and the Continental Baths, the same gay bathhouse where Bette Midler and her accompanist Barry Manilow launched their careers. Another musician who started at both of those places was his pal Larry Levan, the DJ often cited as the greatest-ever, who soon moved on to the Paradise Garage, the late '70s/'80s downtown club routinely tagged the greatest-ever. [I sometimes danced there. Both were more phenomenal than there's space to get into here.]
A fan of soul and disco, Nemiah Mitchell, Jr. (left) let the taste of his son, Vince Lawrence, shape the output of his record labels Mitchbal and Chicago Connection.
The Record
This Old Chicago House: EDM's Family Roots
"When Larry started the Garage, Frankie didn't know what he was gonna do with himself," says Knuckles' manager, Judy Weinstein, of Def Mix Productions, who at the time also ran one of the first record pools, For the Record. "Then somebody in Chicago said, 'We have a club for you.' That was the Warehouse."
Like the Garage, the Warehouse was patronized by a private membership of mostly gay black (and to a lesser degree gay Latino) men. And like the Garage, the Warehouse was so popular that the so-called death of disco — one most historians pinpoint as starting in Chicago's own Comiskey Park during rock radio DJ's Steve Dahl's notorious "Disco Demolition Night" promotion on July 12, 1979 that turned a normal baseball double-header into a full-blown riot — didn't diminish its following. In fact, both the Warehouse and the Garage got more popular after disco supposedly went kaput. At the Warehouse, the crowd got whiter and straighter to the point that its owner gave up the membership system that protected its gay clientele, and Knuckles abandoned ship to start his own club, the Power Plant.
Like the Garage, the Warehouse was known for a particularly soulful strain of disco, one that maintained its connection to R&B via Philly soul's lush strings and pulsating rhythms. And just like Levan, Knuckles modified the records to suit his crowd, and mixed the soul with synthesizer-based productions from Europe and edgier cuts from the New Wave scene. In New York, that combination was called "Garage music." In Chicago, that exact same combo was called "house music."
And while there were songs that came out of the New York scene that were specifically designed for the Garage, some of those were so musically savvy that they became national R&B radio and club hits, like Taana Garner's "Heartbeat," which Levan himself remixed. What came out of Chicago, however, was significantly cruder and even more leftfield than most Garage-bound tracks. There was no way that early house tracks like Jack Master Dick's "Jack the Dick," for example, was going to be confused with any other genre, and so the house tag stuck in a way that Garage didn't. Even more than Garage, House at this stage was black gay ghetto music and although it got played on Chicago's dance music station WBMX, it wasn't going anywhere.
Or so it seemed. England adores music precisely like this. In the '70s, Northern England fell in love with Motown-sound flops of the '60s and resold them as "Northern Soul." This time, London got in on the action faster and sent its music critics to Chicago in the mid-'80s to write about the underground house scene just as it would send writers to Seattle just a few years later to write about grunge. But Chicago didn't have a Kurt Cobain to sell papers. Instead, it had a bunch of mostly black, mostly gay DJs.
What Chicago had were loads and loads of records that were recorded, pressed, and licensed for export quite cheaply. The first one to go pop in the U.K., Farley "Jackmaster" Funk's "Love Can't Turn Around" featuring Darryl Pandy, is a literally screaming 1986 remake of Isaac Hayes' "I Can't Turn Around." No American major label would touch a record like it. The second major hit, Steve "Silk" Hurley's "Jack Your Body," topped the U.K. charts for two weeks in early 1987. For the next several years, English labels went on a house spree, licensing Chicago tracks so obscure that some of them hadn't even been pressed back home, so American DJs had to buy the imports in order to get the music that was originally designed for them.
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