Club culture as we know it today, not to mention pop’s multifacted sound, owes a big debt to the 1980s acid-house revolution
They called it acid. Or acieed, if you were the British dance producer D Mob. A sound minted in Chicago clubs and warehouses in the mid to late 1980s, acid house, with its flurry of squelchy synths and hypnotic sci-fi sounds, quickly found a home from home in British, Irish and European clubs and fields, and the rave movement ignited.
It was a very strange trip. Who knew that the sounds produced in Chicago through experimenting with Roland TB-303 synthesisers would cause social mayhem across the Atlantic? But those experiments by Marshall Jefferson, Larry Heard, Phuture and others, using a piece of kit that its Japanese maker originally pitched as a machine to produce basslines for guitarists, had many unforeseen side effects.
Club culture as we know it today would probably not exist without acid house, and pop’s current multifaceted sound owes much to acts’ addition of 303 squawks to tunes like Beat Dis, by Bomb the Bass, Voodoo Ray, by A Guy Called Gerald, or Theme from S’Express, by S’Express.
The early Chicago tracks that kickstarted it all still sound good. Soul Jazz’s forthcoming compilation Acid: Mysterons Invade the Jackin’ Zone collates two dozen or so beefy tunes from the golden age of acid house.
You can feel the progression, and the confidence build, as the compilation roams from 1986 to 1993. Even some of the very early tracks, like the majestic, melancholic Can You Feel It, from Larry Heard, aka Mr Fingers, originally recorded in 1984, sounds remarkably timeless.
Five years before Heard made Can You Feel It, something he did on the day he bought his first Roland synth, an event called Disco Demolition Night put the city on the map for more anti-dance reasons.
Organised by a local DJ and anti-disco campaigner, Steve Dahl, this involved thousands of anti-disco fans descending on a city baseball stadium in July 1979 to watch Dahl blow up a crate of disco records. As far as those White Sox fans were concerned, disco sucked as badly as their own team did at the time.
There was another side to Chicago, though, and this one was a lot friendlier to music that contained grooves. The New York DJ Frankie Knuckles had established a healthy scene at the city’s Warehouse club, and local record stores began to rack the records he was spinning in sections tagged “house”.
But the home-grown house that began to emerge from Chicago within a few years sounded a lot different from the disco, new-wave electro and Italo disco Knuckles was spinning at the time. The music that was to become acid house was a lot more alien, futuristic and other-worldly. It was music that sounded as if the machines had taken over.
Chicago’s producers weren’t the first to fall for the synth. Robert Moog, Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder, Afrika Bambaataa and even the Mumbai musician Charanjit Singh, with his Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat acid album, from 1982, all predated the Chicago school.
Yet Roland’s musical arsenal, particularly the TB-303, devised by an engineer named Tadao Kikumoto, empowered reams of eager producers to produce the vivid squelches and squawks they were hearing in their heads.
A similar revolution was taking place four hours away in Detroit, where techno began to take flight thanks to craftsmen like Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. But, in Chicago, it was house that ruled the roost.
The rough, wild tracks produced by people like Heard, Jesse Saunders, Jamie Principle, Phuture (whose Acid Tracks gave the nascent movement its name) and Marshall Jefferson began to appear on playlists at clubs around the city like the Music Box, where Ron Hardy was the man in the DJ booth, the Playground and the Power Plant. A local radio station, WBMX, followed suit, and house found a home in the American midwest.
Amnesia
These acid tracks, though, then began to appear in unlikely places many thousands of miles away. A bunch of UK DJs and scenesters, like Danny Rampling, Paul Oakenfold and Nicky Holloway, were turned on to house music by DJ Alfredo in the Ibiza club Amnesia, in 1987. Back in cold, dark, gloomy Britain that winter, they set up clubs like Shoom, Spectrum and Trip, and the story entered a new phase. By the following summer, everyone involved in club culture was claiming to be heavily into acid house.
The numbers who wanted to go raving couldn’t be accommodated by the existing clubs or licensing laws, and the action moved from established venues to warehouses and fields. Tabloid outrage soon followed about the ravers’ choice of stimulants, and acid house began to go well with moral panic in newspaper headlines.
There were plenty of other long-term effects of acid house’s transatlantic drift. Those raves gave way in time to bigger, legal events like Creamfields and Homelands, which contributed to the modern mania for summer festivals. The club scene too was changed forever both musically and culturally by what happened in 1987-8.
But acid house’s biggest long-term effect was arguably on the music itself. There was no shortage of acts and producers looking to make hay from the fad for all things acid, embroidered with yellow smileys (come on down, D Mob), and that was just the beginning of the love-in. Acid house was perfect fodder for pop’s magpie-like tendencies when it came to new sounds and styles, and it became something else to be thrown into the melting pot when searching for a tune with the real X factor.
Acid house would also ensure decades of micro-genres, as electronic-music producers experimented by placing the sounds from Chicago and Detroit into other streams and strains. The record shops in Chicago that once categorised records simply as “house” would soon have to draw up dividers for dozens of new genres, as house multiplied and divided incredibly quickly.
Back in the Windy City, a new guard of producers, DJs and labels came to the fore to carry on the work of the pioneers. It turned out that acid house’s experimental days were to last a whole lot longer than anyone anticipated back when things were starting out.
You heard it there first Five acid-house greats
Phuture, Acid Tracks: The track that started it all. DJ Pierre, Spanky and Herb J’s 1987 thumper was the soundtrack to what was happening in clubs like
Chicago’s Music Box.
Mr Fingers, Can You Feel It: This classic is Larry Heard at his most majestic and inspired.
A Guy Called Gerald, Voodoo Ray: You didn’t have to be from Chicago to make hard-hitting tunes. You could hail from Manchester and sample Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, as Gerald Simpson did.
Armando, Land of Confusion: Armando Gallop’s classic always moves a floor.
Josh Wink, Higher State of Consciousness: What acid house sounded like by 1995.
Acid: Mysterons Invade the Jackin’ Zone – Chicago Acid and Experimental House 1986-1993 is released on Soul Jazz on April 2nd
