get these nets
Veteran
Interview from 1995, with the late Frankie Knuckles
Frankie Knuckles on the Birth of House Music
Where did you start DJing?
I started spinning at the Continental Baths in July 1972. As well as the club area, there was an Olympic-size swimming pool and a TV room at the very end. Alongside the pool was a sauna and a shower room, then there was like boutiques and restaurants and bars, and back into an area where there was apartments and private rooms.
I was scheduled to play Mondays and Tuesdays, and Larry [Levan] played from Wednesday to Sunday, and on the nights he played I found myself playing at the beginning of the evening or playing before he woke up... If he woke up. I mean, Fridays and Saturdays he was generally OK, but Wednesdays and Thursdays he wouldn’t get started till very late.
I played different other clubs around the city, including this one after-hours called Tomorrow. Larry eventually left Continental and went to work at a club called Soho, which was owned by Richard Long, who was the premier sound engineer.He was the one who taught us everything about sound.
The Continental went bankrupt and closed in ’76. I worked a couple of other places here in the city, but I was looking for something a little bit more than just a job. I figured I’d already put five years in one club and it had gone bankrupt, so if I was to go and work at a particular club at this point I wanted more of an incentive. If you give me a piece of what’s going on, then I wouldn’t have a problem applying myself and working hard to make everything work. Or else, to me, it just wasn’t worth it to just go and play records and collect a paycheck.
Originally they wanted Larry in Chicago, but Larry didn’t want to leave New York, and besides, the club Soho was beginning to take off – no, as a matter of fact, he had left Soho and they were already at Reade Street which was what Paradise Garage came from. They were already building that and he didn’t see himself leaving. They pretty much already had their ideas for what they wanted to do with that.
He had no intention of leaving the city, so they came to me second and asked me to do it. I went out to play for the opening and stuff and I was there for about two weeks, and I really liked the city a lot. I only played twice because the club was only open one day a week, on a Saturday. But it worked really, really well.
They offered me the job at that particular point and I gave them my terms, how I felt about it. They offered me a piece of the business. So at that point I realized I had to think about what I wanted to do and if I really wanted to uproot from New York City and move there. Then, actually when I looked at it, I didn’t have anything holding me here. I figured, “What the hell!” I gave myself five years, and if I couldn’t make it in five years then I could always come back home.
Describe walking into the Warehouse.
It’s such a long time ago. I look at a lot of different parties and stuff that I play for when we go out on the road, like the Def Mix tour, playing over in England and things like that, and I look at the energy of the crowd and the stuff like that. The energy is most definitely the same. The feeling, the feedback that you get from the people in the room, is very, very spiritual. The Warehouse was a lot like that. For most of the people that went there, it was church for them. It only happened one day a week: Saturday night, Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon.
Was that the first time you’d experienced that sort of energy?
No, because it was the same thing here [New York]. I mean, you know a lot of these kids that are hanging out and doing all these parties and running around all these different clubs in England. Not so much here in the United States, because it’s a much more surefire thing in England. I guess it’s pop, so that’s the reason why. A lot of them think what they’re doing and the type of fun they’re having in clubs is something new. It’s not. I’m here to tell them that it’s not. This is something that’s been going on a very long time. What they’re doing is actually nothing new. What they’re doing is carrying on a tradition, which I think is great.
As for the Warehouse, it was predominantly black, predominantly gay, age probably between 18 and maybe 35. Very soulful and very spiritual, which is amazing in the Midwest because you have those corn-fed Midwestern folk that are very down-to-earth. Their hearts are always in the right place, even though their minds might not always be. Their hearts are definitely in the right place. And I think those type of parties we were having at the Warehouse, I know they were something completely new to them, and they didn’t know exactly what to expect. So it took them a few minutes to grow into it, but once they latched onto it, it spread like wildfire through the city.
And in the early days between ’77 and ’80-’81, the parties were very intense – they were always intense – but the feeling that was going on, I think, was very pure. And a lot of that changed between ’82 and ’83, which is why I left there. There was a lot more hard-edged straight kids that were trying to infiltrate what was going on there, and for the most part they didn’t have any respect for what was going on.
So it was a black gay scene?
Yes.
Who else was involved?
Just a lot of outsiders.
Some people have said there was quite a merging of the alternative, punk scene.
Not with what we were doing. When punk came about they had other clubs like Neo’s, places like that where those punk kids went to. Chicago, believe me, it was very segregated, very much like it is now. The white kids didn’t party with the black kids. What really tripped me out was when I first moved there... Growing up in New York City, all kinds of people grow up around each other, it’s pretty much like you see it. To me, here it’s not that big of a deal; race and color is not that big of a deal. There, when I got there, it was. You had the black folks living on the south side of Chicago, and on the immediate west of the city.
The only place where you found people who were different colored people living together was on the north side of Chicago like Newtown, that type of area, which is where I lived. It bothered me at first, when I didn’t see enough white or other races on the dancefloor at the beginning, and then I realized I had my job cut out because I had to try and change that.
And then when I found that the black gay kids didn’t want to party with the white gay kids, and the white gay kids weren’t gonna let the black gay kids hang out in their clubs, I was like, “Everybody’s rocking in the same boat but nobody wants to...” Everybody wants to play this game and it made no sense to me.
We’re all living the same lifestyle here. We’re rocking in the same boat, but you don’t want me playing in your clubs because you don’t want my crowd following me in. It made no sense to me. When you go out in the gay clubs in Chicago now, it has changed a lot. But while I was there it didn’t change at all.
What were the drugs that were driving the scene at the time?
Probably a lot of acid. A lot of acid.
What was the club scene like when you arrived in Chicago?
By the time I got to Chicago, the disco craze had pretty much already kicked in. The difference between what was happening with music then and music now is that songs lasted a lot longer than they do now. I don’t mean length-wise: Songs lived in people’s consciousness a lot longer than they do now. So a lot of the stuff that came out in the early ’70s on Philadelphia International, I was playing a lot of stuff like that. That was still working pretty strong in ’77 when I moved to Chicago.
When did you start doing edits?
I didn’t actually start doing things like that until like 1980, ’81. A lot of the stuff I was doing early on, I didn’t even bother playing in the club, because I was busy trying to get my feet wet and just learn the craft. But by ’81, when they had declared that disco is dead, all the record labels were getting rid of their dance departments, or their disco departments, so there were no more uptempo dance records, everything was downtempo.
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Skatt Bros. - Walk the Night
That’s when I realized I had to start changing certain things in order to keep feeding my dancefloor, or else we would have had to end up closing the club. So I would take different records like “Walk The Night” by the Skatt Bros. or stuff like “A Little Bit Of Jazz” by Nick Straker, “Double Journey” [by Powerline] and things like that, and just completely re-edit them to make them work better for my dancefloor. Even stuff like “I’m Every Woman” by Chaka Khan, and “Ain’t Nobody,” I’d completely re-edit them to give my dancefloor an extra boost. I’d re-arrange them, extend them and re-arrange them.
Was that a revolutionary thing to do?
No, I’m sure there were other people that were doing it, but to my audience it was revolutionary. But it had been done. It was already being done before I moved to Chicago. When I was still here [in New York] there were people that were doing it here. It was just a matter of time before I could learn how to do it myself.
And it was all on reel-to-reel.
Yes. And by the time I did get around to start doing it, it might not have been revolutionary to anyone else within the industry, from the DJ side of it. But as far as the crowd in Chicago [was concerned], it was revolutionary to them because they had never heard it before. They went for it immediately. They would rush to the record stores the next day looking for that particular version and never find it. It used to drive the record stores crazy.
Did you ever do the same things live?
That’s how I used to do it before I started editing. Once I learned how to edit, and I started changing things around like that, it wasn’t necessary for me to play like that in a club any more. I could do it all ahead of time and pre-record it.
What about the extra beats that people would lay over songs. When did that start to happen?
The first time I started doing some of that might have been in ’83, because I had a rhythm maker then.
A what?
A rhythm maker is what they have with organs – it sounds like “chik chik chok ka ka.” You just set what particular rhythm you want. I would just set the rhythm that way and play it underneath whatever I was doing.
Had anyone done that before?
I don’t know. I didn’t finally get my first drum machine until 1984 I think. I got it from Derrick May. It was a Roland TR-909. Somehow he had two of them, and he called me from Detroit to tell me he was coming down. At this point I was at the Power Plant. I left the Warehouse in spring of ’83. I opened the Power Plant in the fall of ’83.
Anyhow, he had called me up and said he had these two drum machines and he wanted to sell me one. And I told him I didn’t know the first thing about programming them. He said, “It’s easy, I’ll show you.” So he came down that weekend and he brought it.
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Frankie Knuckles - Your Love
The first time I used it, I used it on a version of “Your Love” that I did with Jamie Principle. And I would use it live in the club. I would program different patterns into it throughout the week, and then use it throughout the course of a night, running it live, depending on the song and playing it underneath, or using it to segue between some things.
Jesse Saunders is credited with making the first beat track.
Well, they would come and hear me play and then go back to their clubs, the Playground, and they would do the same thing. And they started putting together their own beat tracks. Which is OK, but I’ve never been one to sit back and play a bunch of beat tracks. They said that they were having the same kind of parties at the Playground that we were having at the Warehouse or the Power Plant, but they really weren’t. Because they were into playing a lot of beat tracks all night long, and to me that’s all they were, a bunch of beat tracks.
And they didn’t overlay them with songs?
No, not necessarily. They would play a bunch of beat tracks all night. And the type of crowd I played for was much more sophisticated than that. They wanted to hear songs. Granted, I can break it up here and there a little bit, but for the most part they wanted to hear songs. And if didn’t play enough of them, then they had a problem.
The audience I had were very true, very loyal and they would never come down on me about it, but I knew exactly what they wanted. I could read them really, really well. I couldn’t stand there and play beat tracks all night long.
Frankie Knuckles on the Birth of House Music
Where did you start DJing?
I started spinning at the Continental Baths in July 1972. As well as the club area, there was an Olympic-size swimming pool and a TV room at the very end. Alongside the pool was a sauna and a shower room, then there was like boutiques and restaurants and bars, and back into an area where there was apartments and private rooms.
I was scheduled to play Mondays and Tuesdays, and Larry [Levan] played from Wednesday to Sunday, and on the nights he played I found myself playing at the beginning of the evening or playing before he woke up... If he woke up. I mean, Fridays and Saturdays he was generally OK, but Wednesdays and Thursdays he wouldn’t get started till very late.
I played different other clubs around the city, including this one after-hours called Tomorrow. Larry eventually left Continental and went to work at a club called Soho, which was owned by Richard Long, who was the premier sound engineer.He was the one who taught us everything about sound.
The Continental went bankrupt and closed in ’76. I worked a couple of other places here in the city, but I was looking for something a little bit more than just a job. I figured I’d already put five years in one club and it had gone bankrupt, so if I was to go and work at a particular club at this point I wanted more of an incentive. If you give me a piece of what’s going on, then I wouldn’t have a problem applying myself and working hard to make everything work. Or else, to me, it just wasn’t worth it to just go and play records and collect a paycheck.
Originally they wanted Larry in Chicago, but Larry didn’t want to leave New York, and besides, the club Soho was beginning to take off – no, as a matter of fact, he had left Soho and they were already at Reade Street which was what Paradise Garage came from. They were already building that and he didn’t see himself leaving. They pretty much already had their ideas for what they wanted to do with that.
He had no intention of leaving the city, so they came to me second and asked me to do it. I went out to play for the opening and stuff and I was there for about two weeks, and I really liked the city a lot. I only played twice because the club was only open one day a week, on a Saturday. But it worked really, really well.
They offered me the job at that particular point and I gave them my terms, how I felt about it. They offered me a piece of the business. So at that point I realized I had to think about what I wanted to do and if I really wanted to uproot from New York City and move there. Then, actually when I looked at it, I didn’t have anything holding me here. I figured, “What the hell!” I gave myself five years, and if I couldn’t make it in five years then I could always come back home.
Describe walking into the Warehouse.
It’s such a long time ago. I look at a lot of different parties and stuff that I play for when we go out on the road, like the Def Mix tour, playing over in England and things like that, and I look at the energy of the crowd and the stuff like that. The energy is most definitely the same. The feeling, the feedback that you get from the people in the room, is very, very spiritual. The Warehouse was a lot like that. For most of the people that went there, it was church for them. It only happened one day a week: Saturday night, Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon.
Was that the first time you’d experienced that sort of energy?
No, because it was the same thing here [New York]. I mean, you know a lot of these kids that are hanging out and doing all these parties and running around all these different clubs in England. Not so much here in the United States, because it’s a much more surefire thing in England. I guess it’s pop, so that’s the reason why. A lot of them think what they’re doing and the type of fun they’re having in clubs is something new. It’s not. I’m here to tell them that it’s not. This is something that’s been going on a very long time. What they’re doing is actually nothing new. What they’re doing is carrying on a tradition, which I think is great.
As for the Warehouse, it was predominantly black, predominantly gay, age probably between 18 and maybe 35. Very soulful and very spiritual, which is amazing in the Midwest because you have those corn-fed Midwestern folk that are very down-to-earth. Their hearts are always in the right place, even though their minds might not always be. Their hearts are definitely in the right place. And I think those type of parties we were having at the Warehouse, I know they were something completely new to them, and they didn’t know exactly what to expect. So it took them a few minutes to grow into it, but once they latched onto it, it spread like wildfire through the city.
And in the early days between ’77 and ’80-’81, the parties were very intense – they were always intense – but the feeling that was going on, I think, was very pure. And a lot of that changed between ’82 and ’83, which is why I left there. There was a lot more hard-edged straight kids that were trying to infiltrate what was going on there, and for the most part they didn’t have any respect for what was going on.
So it was a black gay scene?
Yes.
Who else was involved?
Just a lot of outsiders.
Some people have said there was quite a merging of the alternative, punk scene.
Not with what we were doing. When punk came about they had other clubs like Neo’s, places like that where those punk kids went to. Chicago, believe me, it was very segregated, very much like it is now. The white kids didn’t party with the black kids. What really tripped me out was when I first moved there... Growing up in New York City, all kinds of people grow up around each other, it’s pretty much like you see it. To me, here it’s not that big of a deal; race and color is not that big of a deal. There, when I got there, it was. You had the black folks living on the south side of Chicago, and on the immediate west of the city.
The only place where you found people who were different colored people living together was on the north side of Chicago like Newtown, that type of area, which is where I lived. It bothered me at first, when I didn’t see enough white or other races on the dancefloor at the beginning, and then I realized I had my job cut out because I had to try and change that.
And then when I found that the black gay kids didn’t want to party with the white gay kids, and the white gay kids weren’t gonna let the black gay kids hang out in their clubs, I was like, “Everybody’s rocking in the same boat but nobody wants to...” Everybody wants to play this game and it made no sense to me.
We’re all living the same lifestyle here. We’re rocking in the same boat, but you don’t want me playing in your clubs because you don’t want my crowd following me in. It made no sense to me. When you go out in the gay clubs in Chicago now, it has changed a lot. But while I was there it didn’t change at all.
What were the drugs that were driving the scene at the time?
Probably a lot of acid. A lot of acid.
What was the club scene like when you arrived in Chicago?
By the time I got to Chicago, the disco craze had pretty much already kicked in. The difference between what was happening with music then and music now is that songs lasted a lot longer than they do now. I don’t mean length-wise: Songs lived in people’s consciousness a lot longer than they do now. So a lot of the stuff that came out in the early ’70s on Philadelphia International, I was playing a lot of stuff like that. That was still working pretty strong in ’77 when I moved to Chicago.
When did you start doing edits?
I didn’t actually start doing things like that until like 1980, ’81. A lot of the stuff I was doing early on, I didn’t even bother playing in the club, because I was busy trying to get my feet wet and just learn the craft. But by ’81, when they had declared that disco is dead, all the record labels were getting rid of their dance departments, or their disco departments, so there were no more uptempo dance records, everything was downtempo.
Skatt Bros. - Walk the Night
That’s when I realized I had to start changing certain things in order to keep feeding my dancefloor, or else we would have had to end up closing the club. So I would take different records like “Walk The Night” by the Skatt Bros. or stuff like “A Little Bit Of Jazz” by Nick Straker, “Double Journey” [by Powerline] and things like that, and just completely re-edit them to make them work better for my dancefloor. Even stuff like “I’m Every Woman” by Chaka Khan, and “Ain’t Nobody,” I’d completely re-edit them to give my dancefloor an extra boost. I’d re-arrange them, extend them and re-arrange them.
Was that a revolutionary thing to do?
No, I’m sure there were other people that were doing it, but to my audience it was revolutionary. But it had been done. It was already being done before I moved to Chicago. When I was still here [in New York] there were people that were doing it here. It was just a matter of time before I could learn how to do it myself.
And it was all on reel-to-reel.
Yes. And by the time I did get around to start doing it, it might not have been revolutionary to anyone else within the industry, from the DJ side of it. But as far as the crowd in Chicago [was concerned], it was revolutionary to them because they had never heard it before. They went for it immediately. They would rush to the record stores the next day looking for that particular version and never find it. It used to drive the record stores crazy.
Did you ever do the same things live?
That’s how I used to do it before I started editing. Once I learned how to edit, and I started changing things around like that, it wasn’t necessary for me to play like that in a club any more. I could do it all ahead of time and pre-record it.
What about the extra beats that people would lay over songs. When did that start to happen?
The first time I started doing some of that might have been in ’83, because I had a rhythm maker then.
A what?
A rhythm maker is what they have with organs – it sounds like “chik chik chok ka ka.” You just set what particular rhythm you want. I would just set the rhythm that way and play it underneath whatever I was doing.
Had anyone done that before?
I don’t know. I didn’t finally get my first drum machine until 1984 I think. I got it from Derrick May. It was a Roland TR-909. Somehow he had two of them, and he called me from Detroit to tell me he was coming down. At this point I was at the Power Plant. I left the Warehouse in spring of ’83. I opened the Power Plant in the fall of ’83.
Anyhow, he had called me up and said he had these two drum machines and he wanted to sell me one. And I told him I didn’t know the first thing about programming them. He said, “It’s easy, I’ll show you.” So he came down that weekend and he brought it.
Frankie Knuckles - Your Love
The first time I used it, I used it on a version of “Your Love” that I did with Jamie Principle. And I would use it live in the club. I would program different patterns into it throughout the week, and then use it throughout the course of a night, running it live, depending on the song and playing it underneath, or using it to segue between some things.
Jesse Saunders is credited with making the first beat track.
Well, they would come and hear me play and then go back to their clubs, the Playground, and they would do the same thing. And they started putting together their own beat tracks. Which is OK, but I’ve never been one to sit back and play a bunch of beat tracks. They said that they were having the same kind of parties at the Playground that we were having at the Warehouse or the Power Plant, but they really weren’t. Because they were into playing a lot of beat tracks all night long, and to me that’s all they were, a bunch of beat tracks.
And they didn’t overlay them with songs?
No, not necessarily. They would play a bunch of beat tracks all night. And the type of crowd I played for was much more sophisticated than that. They wanted to hear songs. Granted, I can break it up here and there a little bit, but for the most part they wanted to hear songs. And if didn’t play enough of them, then they had a problem.
The audience I had were very true, very loyal and they would never come down on me about it, but I knew exactly what they wanted. I could read them really, really well. I couldn’t stand there and play beat tracks all night long.
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