DJ Pierre

Acid originator

Interviewed by Frank in Kensal Green, February 17, 1999

Pierre staked out his spot in dance history when he and his mate Spanky took an obscure piece of music equipment and tweaked the controls until it squealed for mercy. The Roland TB-303 was designed to provide buskers with basslines, but if you turned everything up to 11 what came out was a bubbling alien scribble. So weird was this sound that a whole new genre could be built from it: acid house. And because the acid records were the most out-there of the new imports, in Britain this phrase grew to cover the dance explosion itself, the whole social movement this music propelled. In truth, acid house records were just a small part of the rave soundtrack. But in spirit they were its revolutionary vanguard.

Emboldened by early success, Pierre has enjoyed a long career as a producer. His wild pitch records were so distinctive they could arguably be another sub-genre in themselves: hypnotic, slow-building epics built from layer upon layer of relentless loops. He moved to New York in 1990 to be near the dance industry, because, as he says, ‘house was my life and house was dead in Chicago.’

A knackered Pierre arrives at the west London offices of Strictly Rhythm from Kiss FM where he’s just done a review programme. He dumps his records and jumps on the phone to New York. He’s got to be at Bar Rumba by 11, time is running out. We walk to the William IV on Harrow Road in the rain and Pierre shows what a gentleman he is by carrying Fran from Strictly’s shopping. We get a table in the back. Pierre picks at some chips, saying he’ll fill up on gross fast food before his gig. As he relaxes he turns into Cheshire Cat mode, talking through a constant smirk in that tuneful southern accent so many Chicagoans have. He’s as generous as ever with his time, and would talk for ages if he didn’t have to go off and play some records.

When did you start DJing

I started DJing when I was 13, around ’83. I had met Spanky [his partner in Phuture], I had seen him in the neighbourhood. Then everything happened fairly quickly. It wasn’t like it was a lot of years. Everything kind of happened ’84, ’85.

You started playing regularly at Lil Louis parties out in the Bismarck Hotel.

That was the first time that Chicago had heard me. But before then I was playing out in the south suburbs of Chicago, playing in skating rinks and places like that.

What were the Bismarck parties like?

Fuck. 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 people. It was just like… you know how small parties have a lot of energy? It was like a big small party. It wasn’t like big parties are normally, with small crowds going off here and there. At the Bismark the whole crowd would be going nuts. Everybody would be slam-dancing.

People would slam dance to house?

Oh yeah, that’s where it started. The whole crowd would sway this way and then this way.

It was a hotel ballroom?

Yeah.

What was the crowd like? Was it just suburban kids?

It was mostly Chicago but suburbs too. They would scream the DJ’s name and they’d get really interactive, and you know who was DJing. Not like these days, you wouldn’t get anybody yelling a DJ’s name.

What kind of music were you playing back then?

At the time I was playing Euro type of house music – like Happy Station ‘Fun Fun’, lot of stuff like that. Doctor’s Cat. You probably don’t even know these songs, but that’s the kind of stuff I was playing.

Things coming in from Europe? A lot of Italian things?

A lot of Italian house, but Spanky said, ‘You got to get off of that.’ He said, ‘Pierre you got to get with this real house music and you got to start playing these kind of songs.’ So he would come to my house and I’d be in the garage practising, he kept bringing all this disco stuff over. And he brought ‘Chocolate Chip’ by Isaac Hayes.

I was like, ‘I can’t play this old stuff. I don’t even like this. I was trying to mix it.’ I said, ‘Damn it’s going all fast here and slow here. I can’t even mix that. I can’t do it.’

He was like, ‘You just got to go to the Music Box, you’ll see the real deal.’ I really couldn’t get in the club, but Spanky took me down there one night, snuck me in the place, and basically it blew my mind. I heard all that old stuff, and I heard house music, real house tracks, made with drum machines, and after that I was baptised or something. I got goose-bumps. Going crazy, dancing, and people were screaming Ron Hardy’s name. I had never seen that before. I seen famous DJs playing, they never got that reaction, ’cos they never played that kind of music. I seen how soulful everybody was.

“  People were dancing, jumping up in the air. Doing these twists like they were some modern dance, ballet sort of people. It was amazing. ”

What was his style?

He was energetic, real energetic. He played classics and tracks and vocals, all in one set, and everything was real energetic. And when he took you down, it was real moody and soulful. Like you would feel love. People were literally doing the nasty on the dancefloor.

Literally?

Yeah. It was dark. He didn’t have all these lights that clubs have now. The only lights he had was strobelights.

And then he switches them off and that’s it.

When it wasn’t some crazy track and it was just something regular the strobes would just pop slowly: boop… boop… boop… and you would see him like that.

Did he play the classics and the tracks mixed up, or did he have a section for one and a section for the other?

Whatever… he wouldn’t play a track and then a classic and mix it literally like that. If he was playing tracks he played a certain amount of ’em. He played stuff long. He didn’t play no track for no three-four minutes. You got the full shit. Fifteen, 20 minutes.

He’d be extending it and extending it…

Yeah yeah, and he did editing. You know ‘Bad Luck’ [by Harold Melvin & the Bluenotes]? He would make a part just keep going. You know where it go [sings], ‘Hey hey hey hey’, he’d loop it, on a reel and keep that part just keep on and on.

He’d loop it on a reel-to-reel?

Yeah. Like ‘It’s Not Over’, he looped that beat, and it would go on a long time, and everybody just be there, just dmm dmm dmm, just dancing off that one beat. Then finally, he’ll let the rest of the song go, and everybody just explode. I mean stuff like that you just can’t do nowadays, ’cos people get bored with it. He would play a beat, like just a couple of bongos or a couple of sounds in it, and that was good enough.

So what were Ron Hardy’s biggest records. The records he would play, records that really summed up the Music Box?

‘Acid Tracks’. Wow, a lot of Robert Owens tracks. ‘Move Your Body’. Damn. I remember when he played that song.

How would he play that?

Man, he had that damn piano part at the beginning, he had that shit going forever. Marshall must have made an extra long beginning, or he edited it and made it longer, but he would do that shit for a long time. And then the vocals would come in. Man, that stuff, I’ll tell you, never be like that again, never be like that again.

Were you a real regular?

Yeah, but I only got to go to the Music Box for a short time. Because like I said I stayed in the suburbs.

Can you describe the Music Box. What was it like the first time you went?

A lot of people. It was small. It was really like a hole in the wall, basically.

What was your reaction?

I just looked at it and soaked it all in. You know how you could be somewhere and you can catch the vibe of the people and it just sweeps you in. That’s sort of what happened. It was just as much the people’s reaction to what he was playing as to what he was playing.

But the music, it grabbed me also. People were dancing, jumping up in the air. Doing these twists like they were some modern dance, ballet sort of people. Like spinning, they could spin around a long time. People can’t dance like that now. They’d jump, spread their legs, come down, spin around, go down to the floor, and then come back up. And you’d be like, wow. Just sit there, it was amazing. Nowadays you don’t see nobody doing nothing fancy. They would spread their arms out. They would literally do legitimate modern dance ballet moves out there.

Everybody wasn’t doing that, but you always had the die-hard Music Box people that was, and everybody else could do a little bit. A guy would actually pick up a girl and start spinning her and stuff. Can you imagine seeing that in a house party? That would fuckin’ blow your mind.

And it was a mostly gay club back then?

I guess when it first started. But you know most gay clubs get invaded by straight people. So I really don’t know what it was at that time. I didn’t really pay it no attention. I mean at that age I didn’t even think about that shit.

How did people dress in those days?

To be in house music that meant that you dressed really well. People had on nice Paisley shirts, that’s what was in, and a solid colour pair of pants, the slacks, with some shiny shoes. And your shoes had to be slippery, ’cos if they wasn’t you couldn’t spin. So everybody would have shiny shoes, and you’d put salt on the floor, or powder…

Baby powder?

Yeah, so they could spin real good. And then the pants have to be baggy. And the haircuts were sharp.

Spiky?

Yeah. If they didn’t go up in a box, they went up a little bit at the back and then they would tilt up like that. In a fade side. They would wave it up, put some of that holding gel in your hair so it would hold up like that. I’m telling you, that’s how it was. Whoever had the longest, the highest – we used to call them ‘pumps’ [a high-rise flat-top]. People’d be like, ‘Damn, look how high his pump is.’ Everybody used to talk about how high my hair was. If you look on them records…

And then Girbauds came out. So everybody started wearing Girbaud jeans, ’cos they were baggy. I mean you had a whole scene that was dressed like that. And everybody would know somebody that was house. ’Cos we be like, ‘Ah, they house,’ You’d point out somebody that was house music, and say that they were house. ‘He’s house, she’s house. There’s some house people.’

I’ve seen a picture of you with a pretty impressive pump.

But that’s not even the highest. When I did ‘Time And Time Again’ on Jive Records, I had my hair up even higher, and then I had a gold streak up in it. That’s how it was.

What year was that style?

Back then! It carried on from ’83, all the way up until ’88, ’89.

What were people into if they weren’t into house. Who were the opposition?

Hip hop. Or rap, as it was called.

Hip hop never took off in Chicago until recently.

It never took, well it’s took now, it’s took all over. But back then it didn’t really take; it was kind of underground, like house. People like A Tribe Called Quest, when they first came out they were opening for me. I was the headlining act, not them. It’s weird how it switched.

Why did people get into making beat tracks in Chicago? What was their motivation: why did people go out and buy the equipment, to go home and make a track?

I don’t really know. Spanky from Phuture, he kept buggin’ me, he kept saying, ‘I’m gonna buy this drum machine. I want to make some music.’ He told me, ‘Hear those tracks? You know how they make those, don’t you?’

I said, ‘How?’

He said, ‘They buy this thing called a drum machine and it has those drum sounds in it, you punch a button and they play,’

I said ‘They have drum sounds in a box?’ I just couldn’t comprehend.

Were people making them so they could get played in the clubs?

Yeah. They were making them to play in a club. Most of the time when people made those drum beats it wasn’t to make a record. It was to play in the clubs. So you wanted to find some DJ that would play it. Spanky would give me his tracks, and he would bring the drum machine to the party. And I would play his drumbeats, and play his acappellas over his drum beats, like ‘You Ain’t Really Down’ [by Status IV], and stuff like that.

Back then they wasn’t on records yet. They was mostly on reels. DJs like me would want somebody to make me a beat, so I had a beat no-one else had, and I would play it in a club, and that was all it was for. I never really thought about making any records or nothing like that. Nowadays people make records. They think of that.

Spanky was like, ‘Pierre, I want to make some music.’ He would give me his tracks, and he would bring the drum machine to the party. And I would play his drumbeats, and play his acapellas over his drum beats, like ‘You Ain’t Really Down’, and stuff like that.

Tell me about when you got into making tracks. You come from a musical family right, and you play some instruments?

Yeah, I play the clarinet and the drums.

What made you want to make drum-beat records and take that direction?

It was just the interest in the equipment. Just being a kid, being excited about what a drum machine did, how it worked. I would just play with it, and I kept making good stuff. Spanky’d be like, ‘Oh that’s dope, we gonna use it, that’s dope.’

The funny thing is that wasn’t even my dream. It was Spanky, he was the one that said, ‘Oh I gotta do it, I gotta find out how they do that. I wanna make music.’ I was just along for the ride. I was only supposed to be a DJ, who played his tracks, ’cos back then a producer found a DJ to play they stuff. And they would be a team. Like: ‘Pierre’s my DJ, he plays all my tracks.’ That’s sort of how I went.

Was that the kind of team that a lot of people had?

Yeah. It was a competitive thing. Every DJ had their own people that gave them special edited tracks or different mixes, just to make them better than the other DJ, and so Spanky was the person that gave me special tracks, and he didn’t give them to no other DJs. Once you chose a DJ, it was an unwritten agreement that, okay now you give me your tracks and I’m gonna play ’em at the parties. He would get attention from me playing his tracks, and I would get attention from having tracks that no-one else had.

How come the DJs didn’t make the tracks themselves?

I don’t know. Later on they started to. Personally I never thought about it. I just wanted to be a DJ.

What originally inspired you to start DJing?

Ever since I went to a party and I seen this guy DJing and I seen him doing something with this record here, moving it back and forth and I didn’t hear it. And then I seen him touchin’ the other record, and I was like, wait a minute, how come I didn’t hear nothing change? ’Cos he was making this one part of the song go longer and longer, he was extending it, he was looping it. The beat was the exact same and he was changing from one record to the next, and I was like damn, how does he do that? I was, about 12. And ever since then I was like I wanna do that. That was my first fascination. It wasn’t with making any tracks. It was with being a DJ.

“  Everybody would know somebody that was house. You’d point out somebody that was house music, and say that they were house. ‘He’s house, she’s house, there’s some house people.’ ”

How important was the radio, the Hot Mix 5?

Oh, very instrumental. Because even before I started DJing, I was making mixes. I would hear songs on the radio, tape them, and then I would get the record. Then I’d record it and use the pause button to make a part go more than once. Me and my friends would compare mixes. Listen to what I did!

So you were inspired by hearing the mix shows, people like Farley on the radio. I heard kids would skip lunch to tape it?

Hot Lunch mix. Every day.

And you also had battles like the hip hop DJs in New York

Our competitions had the whole thing. A DJ had to bring his own sound system, his own MC, and bring a big sign with his name on it. And it’d be in a big gymnasium. Then another DJ, he’d bring his sound system, and a third DJ’d bring his sound system. And you had to do your thing for 30 minutes or an hour, and whoever’s sound system and DJing skills sounded the best won the competition.

What year was that?

Some time around ’84.

And you did that kind of thing?

Yeah. I didn’t have no tables or nothin’, but my friend, his father was a DJ, and his father let us use his stuff. He brought the stuff down to the gym. And he let us DJ under the banner of his DJ team. So we was like juniors or something.

Who did you battle against?

Two of the other DJs in our area.

No-one who became known?

No.

How often did that happen?

It happened all summer. It was always at a school, or a skating rink. I lost a battle because I didn’t have ‘Time To Jack’ [by Chip E]. It was brand new, the buzz was huge on it, and we lived in the suburbs, and you couldn’t get the record in a suburban record store. You could only get ’em in the city. Maan, I was winning this battle, and then my toughest competition didn’t have the record either. So I was gonna beat him. But then, he borrows the record from somebody else in the competition who wasn’t any good. So he plays the record, and he wins ’cos he had that record.

Was this just something the suburban DJs would do or was that happening in the city too?

You know what, I don’t know, ’cos all the competitions I knew were in the suburbs. Maybe they did do it in the city. I don’t know.

And what was the music like then, this was after the tracks had started coming in.

Yeah, cos ‘Time To Jack’ was out.

So tell the story of how you came to make ‘Acid Tracks’? What happened?

To make a long story short. Spanky bought a 303, him and Herb was messing around with it and heard the acid, they called me over. I heard it and at the time it was just playing straight. And I started turning the knobs up and tweaking it and they were like, ‘Yeah, I like it, keep doing what you’re doing.’ We just did that, made a beat to it, and the rest is history.

“  When we made ‘Acid Tracks’ that was an accident. It was just ignorance basically. Not knowing how to work the damn 303. ”

What did you want it to sound like?

I wanted my shit to sound like anything I heard in the Music Box, or I heard Farley play. But when we made ‘Acid Tracks’ that was an accident. This sounds wild and different. It was just ignorance basically. Not knowing how to work the damn 303. And putting a beat behind a track that was already in the 303. We didn’t programme that track. When we bought it, it was in it. And whenever the batteries would go dead and you would put new batteries in, it was in it again. It couldn’t go away. You could erase it and programme something different, but once the batteries went dead and the memory went away, ‘Acid Tracks’ was back up in there. It was part of some kind of pre-set noise or something I guess. I don’t know. It’s in that same 303.

You still have it?

Spanky has it, it was Spanky’s 303.

What happened once you’d made the track?

We gave it to Ron Hardy, and if Ron hardy had said he didn’t like it, it would have been the end of acid. Because he was the man: if he said he loved something, that was it. If he said ‘I don’t like it,’ we’d have thought, ‘Oh well, back to the drawing board.’ We’d be tryin’ to make something different, and acid may have never been born.

Were you there when he played it the first time?

Hell, yeah.

So what happened?

Fuckin’ floor cleared.

Really?

Hell, yeah. And we were like, ‘Okay, I guess he won’t be playin’ that ever again.’ But then he waited until the crowd got real full, and he played it again. And the people stayed on the floor, they thought, it’s that track again, okay, whatever. They just danced through it. Then, at peak time, he dropped it again, and then they were like, ‘Fuck, what is this damn track?’ And they started going off to it a little bit. ‘This shit is crazy.’ Then… he played it again, like about four in the morning. Then they just went ballistic.

When their drugs had kicked in.

Yeah, I guess. Maybe that’s what it was. People were dancing upside down… this guy was on his back kicking his legs in the air. People going crazy. They started slamdancing, knocking people over and just going nuts. And he had the crossover working so it just stopped and all you hear was the high hats going tss-tss-tss, then everybody, Aaaagh!, started screaming, Then he went just the bass: bom, be-bom, be-bom. Everyone was going crazy.

After that all these rumours started coming out. Everybody was buzzin’ about this new track, and we started asking people, ‘Whats this new track, whats this new track? And someone said I got it on tape, its called Ron Hardy’s ‘Acid Tracks’, he’d been taping it in the club. And sure enough, we heard the bells: it was our track. He said, ‘Man, people are going crazy over this track. Ron Hardy’s ‘Acid Tracks’.’

So it got its name from the clubbers in the Music Box. You didn’t even call it that?

It was called ‘In Your Mind’, whatever that means. But if everybody’s calling it ‘Acid Tracks’, it would be stupid to come out under a different name. Then the shit just blew up and the name caught on, not just as the name of the track but as the name of the sound.

How come it took a while before the tracks came out on records?

We didn’t even know how to make a record. We made ‘Acid Tracks’ and we was running around trying to ask people, ‘How do you make a record? How does a record come out? Who do you go see?’

Marshall was doing ‘Move Your Body’ at the Power House. He was onstage. I wrote my name and number down: it said ‘My name is DJ Pierre, I’m in a group called Phuture, and we did a track called ‘Acid Tracks’, and Ron Hardy has been playing this track off a reel. Could you help us make a record.’ I gave it to [vocalist] Curtis McLain. And he gave it to Marshall, and he called me the next day. That goes to show you how much we knew about making records, let alone getting royalties and stuff like that.

So how long was ‘Acid Tracks’ made on reel before you made it into a record?

I think it was on reel in ’85. And it came out in ’86.

What did Marshall do for you? He mastered it, mixed it?

He set the levels on it. We mixed it. But he had a big impact on ‘Your Only Friend’. That cocaine song [B-side to ‘Acid Tracks’]. I wrote the song and I had it in my regular voice, and he was like, ‘You know that’s cocaine talking. You got to do something with that voice, Pierre. Make it sound scary.’ He said, ‘Here, we’ll put it through this and it’ll make it sound real deep and nasty.’ And he put it through that machine, that harmoniser, and that voice was born. After that we started using it on every track. So he gave that idea to us, and countless people have been using voices like that ever since.

And it was going real fast too. It was going 130 [bpm], and back then, nobody had tracks going 130. He said, ‘Oh that’s too fast Pierre. If you want New York to get into it you’ve got to slow it down to like 120, 117, 118.’ He said if the DJs want it faster, let ’em speed it up.

So you were looking to New York already?

He was. We never even thought about New York. Our whole world was Chicago. Chicago, that’s it.

Were people aware that they were dancing to a different music than anyone else on the planet?

I don’t think people thought about it. I knew the music was big in Chicago, and Detroit. That’s it. I didn’t really think of anywhere else in the world. And then, even though Marshall had said something about New York, I still didn’t think about New York. I heard it all over the radio in Chicago. I never travelled to no other cities. I thought it was like just a Chicago thing. That’s how we got ripped off so easily.

We didn’t realise that our music was getting outside Chicago, period. The labels did a very good job of keeping it from us. They knew that if we knew the whole world was listening to our music then we would know how much they were cheating us. And we would start travelling and meeting other labels and they would have competition with other labels, and they wanted to oppress us, keep us in Chicago, and keep our horizons not past Chicago.

How did the success of ‘Acid Tracks’ change things for you?

What’s amazing is the confidence you get after you make a track that everybody loves. ’Cos you like what you doin’, and if you like it they gonna like it. But we stayed on acid for a while. ’Cos we were the only ones doin’ it in the very beginning. But then two or three people came right after that really fast.

How did people figure out how you made the noise?

I dunno. We used to lie. Marshall probably told somebody. But Marshall was already using the 303, and so was Adonis, so they probably already knew. They probably said, ‘Shit, they made a track out of that crazy shit that our 303 makes. Shit, he made one, lets make one too.’ You know.

And the name ‘Acid Tracks’ was because of the drugs they’d take in the Music Box?

Probably, but no-one didn’t really say. Acid was a big thing in Ron Hardy’s club. I never did drugs. But that’s probably why they called it that.

So did you get quite close to Ron Hardy?

Naw. No, I mean…

What kind of guy was he?

I went to the Box a lot, but it wasn’t like we kicked it, or talked. If I seen him somewhere, like at Trax Records, then we’d talk. He was kind of mild-mannered. It wasn’t like he was open to a big conversation, so we’d just say what’s up and a couple of words and show some respect and just kind of leave. That’s how it was. It wasn’t like he wasn’t friendly, it just seemed like…

…he was in his own thing.

Yeah, like you, didn’t feel like trying to talk to him too much.

Would you give Frankie tracks as well?

Yeah, I did though.

Before or after Ron?

After. I went to his house, he was real cool. Frankie always has been real cool, but I don’t know, I’m not real sociable. Besides the people I grew up with – like Felix, Roy, Spanky – I never really teamed up with anybody else.

Let me flip you forward a little and ask you about wild pitch. How did you come up with that sound?

Basically I sampled a popular record and I didn’t want no-one to know, so I flipped it backwards. And I just after I flipped it backwards I did the track, I was adding different sounds and the way I built it up real slow…

This is ‘Generate Power’.

Yeah. It just had its own kind of feel about it. I called it wild pitch because it was real popular in these Wild Pitch parties that this guy Greg Day used to throw in New York. Greg Day and Nick Jones. He used to DJ at these parties.

And the key to it all was it was backwards.

The key was how it builded, the way it built and break down. So I just started calling stuff wild pitch mixes, and kept making ’em similar to that first mix. If you stick with a name at least its recognisable. People be like, ‘Ah, its one of those wild pitch mixes.’

Do people know what the track was that you sampled?

No.

Can I ask you?

I ain’t never gonna say; they’d be tryin’ to get publishing money.

If I go and play it backwards, can I tell?

Well… [laughter]

Is Chicago still different when you play there?

Even now Chicago is so much in their own world. I played there last year, in October, and I played this beat track, and they just was loving it. Just the beat track. Just had a couple of sounds in it. And that’s all it did. I messed with the bass a little bit. They just love it, they feel it. But if I were to play that track out here it wouldn’t be good.

“  The DJ’s power is like a parent. It’s like a president. It’s like anybody who the crowd looks to for direction and looks to learn from. ”

It’s hard to do that these days. People have such short attention spans. I think it’s because there are so few real residencies any more. Everyone’s used to guest DJs who breeze in and play for a couple of hours.

Yeah. Clubs used to have one DJ and he played the whole damn night.

And he knew the crowd, and he played there every week

And the crowd knew him. The crowd said, ‘Fuck it I’m gonna see so and so.’ They wouldn’t say they wanted to go to the Ministry of Sound. They say they wanna go hear Tony Humphries. How well do you know DJs now? You’re not in tune with ’em. You used to be sittin’ there listening: ‘Bet you any minute he’s gonna play that record.’ Or if it’s going in one direction, you say, ‘Ah he’s gonna slow it down now, I can’t wait.’ You don’t feel that any more.

Today’s crowds don’t care though. They pay their money, they expect to dance and drink and have a good time, they don’t really care about the music.

But how can you care about music that you don’t get a grasp of? You don’t get a feel for the DJ. You don’t get a feel for what each DJ’s bringing. If you went to a club and there’s one resident, you knew what he was doing, you knew what record he was on. That shit makes people feel like they know the DJ and they feel in touch, and makes them say, ‘That’s my DJ. I like how he plays and I know when he’s gonna do this and do that.’ You feel more in touch and you have more of an intimate thing with them. And if he play a new record, you gonna definitely give it a shot. And if he keeps playing that record you’re gonna say, ‘Fuck, I like that shit.’ And of course he has a chance to win the crowd over: he’s playing all night.

So he can educate them.

Yeah, ’cos most likely he’s gonna play different things. If DJs play for just one hour or two hours, you don’t get a chance to really do a lot of different stuff. And that takes the power away from the DJs.

Do you think clubbers’ attention spans are getting shorter?

Probably. I think you got to slowly start taking it back, so that people start appreciating something for a little bit longer. People play songs real short. They don’t let ’em play no more, they already comin’ in with the next song. People get used to that so they’re bored if they hear one record for six minutes, they just want you to bring in the next one. A new record comes in and then they get hype for like the first minute.

What for you is the thrill of DJing?

Shit, thrill of DJing is being able to express myself. And I like to express what I’m feeling. So the biggest thing I like is to have a crowd that I can express everything I’m feeling with. Most of the time I get a crowd who I can express the hard side of myself, grrm grrm, play some hard tracks. Then I get another crowd I can express some deep house vocals and some disco tracks with them. And then you get a crowd where I can play some classics for ’em.

What is the power of the DJ… when it really works?

The DJ’s power is like a parent. It’s like a president. It’s like anybody who the crowd looks to for direction and looks to learn from. And I think the DJ has a responsibility, because while you’re on those turntables, you in a position of power. So when you have an audience you better do the right thing and make sure you educate, and let them know what you’re about, and make sure that you’re saying something they wanna hear.

© DJhistory.com

DJ PIERRE SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY

PHUTURE – Acid Tracks (writer/co-producer)

PIERRE’S PFANTASY CLUB – G.T.B. (writer/producer)

PHUTURE PFANTASY CLUB – Slam (writer/co-producer)

LISA M – Rock To The Beat (remixer)

PIERRE’S PFANTASY CLUB – Dream Girl (writer/producer)

PHUTURE – WE ARE PHUTURE (co-writer/co-producer)

DJ PIERRE – Muzik Is Life (writer/producer)

PHOTON INC – Generate Power (writer/producer)

JOINT VENTURE – Master Blaster (writer/producer)

PHUTURE SCOPE – What Is House Muzik? (writer/producer)

PHUTURE – Rise From Your Grave (co-writer/producer)

DARKMAN – Annihilitating Rhythm (writer/producer)

DJ PIERRE – Muzik Set You Free (writer/producer)

WAY OUT WEST – Ajare (remixer)

DANELL DIXON – Dance Dance (remixer)

URBAN SOUL – Sex On My Mind (remixer)

YO YO HONEY – Groove On (remixer)

THE DON – The Horn Song (writer/producer/remixer)

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

Various – Hot Wax Volume One (DJ mix) (CD only)

Various – The Essence Files Volume 1 (DJ mix) (CD only)