Jeff Mills

Detroit wizard

Interviewed by Frank in London, February 17, 2005

‘The Wizard’ is no exaggeration. The way Jeff Mills plays records is supernatural. With three decks, slipping tracks on and off, playing little snatches, longer grooves, segments, samples, hints. Not flustered and frantic like a turntablist, but smooth, adding momentum, always pushing things forward. The effect is mesmerising. Jeff Mills is known as a second-generation Detroit techno producer, making tracks in the wake of Juan, Derrick and Kevin’s first brave records, and releasing quintessential Detroit techno on his labels Axis and Underground Resistance, the militant-minded imprint he launched with long-time collaborator Mike Banks.

Mill’s importance to Detroit goes far beyond this, however, as he was a fixture on the city’s airwaves as early as 1982. Mills ruled Detroit radio with a blaze of hip hop and other fresh sounds, thrown down in the style of his heroes D.ST, Jazzy Jeff and Cash Money. He stayed at the station all day and would be called into the studio at a moment’s notice to whisk up a live remix of the latest club hit. His three-hour show developed to the point where as well as re-editing tracks he made his own music for broadcast. We meet in the wood-panelled bar of a refined London hotel. Drinking just water, he’s scrupulous in the way he answers questions, and keeps control of the situation by taping it himself on an iPod he places on the table.

You come from a musical family?

I come from a big family, four sisters and a brother. There’s bound to be someone who’s going to pick up an instrument.

You played the cornet.

The trumpet, the cornet. It was quite common in Detroit for any family to have some instruments in the house: a guitar or a piano.

Did you get into DJing early on?

Early for Detroit. Compared to New York, reasonably late, but say for the Detroit area, yeah.

How old were you when you got your first set of decks?

About 19 or 20

And very quickly you started playing in clubs?

No. First couple of years it was mainly practising at home and I would offer my services as a DJ for home parties, but I never got hired.

What kind of music were you first playing?

It was funk, dance, more Euro electronic type, electro boogie type of music. And then bass station came from Miami and the west coast. Egyptian Lover and those kind of things. Industrial music, industrial dance, a mixture.

Where were you hearing all this?

On the radio, that was where we got our information about new music. On Mojo’s show. There was another station called WLVS and they were the first station to bring in young DJs off the street, so they had mix shows long before I got on the radio. It was stuff that was happening in New York. Friends of mine that I knew from the street, 14-, 15-year-old kids, were on. A guy named Delano Smith, a guy named Daryl Shannon, Kevin Diezard. They were real successful mobile DJs, they were really, really influential and popular at that time so they used to do mix shows on WLVS. It was them for a short time and then Mojo for most of the time.

So you’re getting music from all over.

That was an alternative station playing mix shows and Mojo was on an R&B and funk station, and then the rock stations were playing more derivatives of rock, more dance punk, more electronic stuff like Kraftwerk, B52’s, ‘Frequency 7’ from Visage.

Where were you hearing the real industrial stuff, the Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb?

Generally on rock stations. They weren’t playing classic rock, even they were playing grey area type of music.

As a DJ were you looking to New York, to hip hop styles?

Back then there weren’t any magazines, so you would hear about what Grandmaster Flash had did the previous weekend, or D.ST, by word of mouth.

So who were your DJ heroes at that time?

Grandmaster Flash, Jazzy Jeff, Cash Money, Red Alert, Marley Marl, Mr Magic.

Were you hearing mix tapes as well?

No. It was really hard to get mix tapes. Unless you could go to New York and tape radio stations like WBLS. It was very much a New York thing. You would hear it from your older brothers and sisters who knew someone who went to New York.

Your friends who got on the radio, were they playing a similar style?

No. By the time I reached the radio the city of Detroit had many different types of DJs. We had hip hop DJs which is what I was mainly known for, playing basically street music, more bass station, hip hop, industrial and all that stuff in between, stuff like 900 Foot Jesus, Section 25, stuff that was really considered new wave or industrial, but hip hop DJs were playing it too. So it was a lot of mixing of genres at that time. I was the youngest of all the DJs. So I was kind of the exception. Most of the DJs that were mixing on the radio were house DJs.

So their influence was coming from Chicago.

We were all influenced by Chicago.

When did you first go over there?

My older sister moved to Chicago so I would go over there frequently to visit her. Go record shopping, so I would tape WBMX.

Hot Mix 5?

Yeah, and go record shopping and bring all that stuff back.

What year did you first go?

Maybe 1979, 1980.

So Chicago was always part of your musical background?

Yeah, from an early point.

Did you get to go to clubs?

No, I was too young.

What about later.

Well, a few times. I don’t remember the names. I didn’t go to the Power Plant and those places.

Were you going out in Detroit?

Yeah, a club called L’Uomo on Six Mile. Ken Collier used to play there late nights on Saturday.

Was he basically the biggest DJ on that scene?

On the late night scene. There were a couple of other guys. You had the gay crowd, black gay crowd, house parties, really progressive, where Ken Collier used to play. You had that in one direction, and a lot of my friends used to go because the music was so good. And then there was the more mainstream dance audience where I spent most of my time DJing. Which crossed over into Chicago house as well. And then you had hip hop street music, and I also played in that direction as well.

I’ve heard a lot about the prep parties. Was that the kind of thing you were going to?

When I was very young. Say between the ages of 10 and 16. It was based around high school, basically varsity.

It sounds like a very affluent scene.

Generally when you’re in high school people want to be mature and older and as sophisticated as they possibly can. It had got to the point where people were trying to create this atmosphere. The parties, although they were very young they were very sophisticated, very nice places.

It really broke down into which high school you were from. Some schools were considered academically higher than others; that created a separation between students. Of course that also brought in certain connections: whether you knew about a particular party over someone’s house, and whether you could be invited to it. It became a very higher type of consciousness [ie snobby]. Yeah, at these parties the DJs were very carefully picked and the music was exceptional. It was basically the music they were listening to in New York. At the Paradise Garage and places like that.

“  It really broke down into which high school you were from. At these parties the DJs were very carefully picked and the music was exceptional. ”

Did you DJ for them?

I was practising in a basement at the time, I was part of a DJ group but we never got hired. We were called Frequency Sound Systems.

When did you first get to play out then?

Well, my first real gig, my older brother used to be a DJ and he stopped ’cos he got married, he used to work with a group of older DJs and he referred me to them. At the time I knew hip hop tricks but I did not know DJ theory: how to read a crowd, how to pace the crowd, really important things. These older DJs taught me that. I would go every Tuesday, sneak in the back door ’cos I was too young to be in the club, stay up in the booth and they would let me play at certain times to learn how to handle a crowd, and I would move up and they would let me play longer, until I would play the entire night. That’s where I learned how to really, really DJ. This is in a club called The Lady. My reputation grew, I got older, got more parties, and I began to do my own residencies, and from there I went to radio.

Where were these residences?

Wow, at one time I had three residencies. One was at a club called UBQ on the east side of Detroit, which was a much rougher situation. It was okay; I had that for a long time. Then Tuesday nights at The Lady, downtown; and then I had a residency at a club called Cheeks, just on the outskirts. It was the most progressive place at the time: Wednesday nights, a really progressive audience.

You could play anything you wanted?

No, but the music was really cutting edge.

In a lot of accounts of Detroit there’s a lot made of the fact that there wasn’t much of a club scene.

No, that’s not true. It was massive. You had four or five different parties you could go to on any given night. There was a tremendous amount of people out and about.

So were the high school parties more progressive in terms of music? Is that why people have placed so much emphasis on them?

Yes. We were very hungry to learn more about the music. And it was a very competitive time. DJs had to have the most current material, and we were all young and very heavily influenced, so you could play anything and we’d just eat it up.

Did it feel like experimental times?

We didn’t think about it at that time but I suppose it was. We were listening to stuff from brand new Cybotron, from that to B52’s to Pink Poodles, to… It was a lot of music.

“  If I played something in the afternoon, by the time I went out in the evening DJs were playing it. They had went to the record store to buy it. ”

How were you plucked from here to get a show on the radio?

I was playing at UBQ on the east side and it was Prince week. Prince and the Revolution were in town doing seven shows to promote the Purple Rain movie and album. The whole city had basically opened up for Prince. Around the city there were all these Prince parties, and the radio stations were jockeying to do live broadcasts from them. It just so happened they came into the UBQ and they wanted to broadcast at the exact time that it was my time to DJ, so they broadcast what I was doing live, and the day after they found out that the ratings were extremely high at that time. The day after they asked if I could come into the station for an interview and audition.

You must have been tripping.

Yeah, because maybe a year and a half prior to that my brother and I were sending tens of demo tapes to all stations. We had the idea.

And you had friends on the radio

Not at this time, WLVS had stopped. So we knew they were mixing in Chicago, we knew about New York, but there wasn’t mixing in Detroit, really. So we were eager, sending demo tapes and they never replied back, so when I got this opportunity to go into audition I was ready.

What was the audition like, hip hop pyrotechnics?

I’m not quite sure how they judged it, probably skill and programming.

What kind of presence did you have on the radio after that?

It was anonymous. No-one knew who I was. I used an alias as The Wizard and the show was called the Wizard.

Why did you want to be anonymous?

I did not. It was the choice of the radio station. It was okay because I could see the reaction from another perspective. I could see from the street how many people were actually listening. I loved it actually. At first it was six days a week; two, maybe three times, sometimes four times a day. The idea of a mix show was so new in Detroit, no-one really knew how it was supposed to be, so basically I stayed at the station all day and when the programme director decided it would be interesting to do something mix-wise I was called into the studio.

On standby.

Yeah. And then at night I had my show, which was three hours, every night. At the weekend it was five hours.

It must have been a dream. Hard work though.

I had complete access to their sound library, plus they gave me money to go and buy any and everything that was new on the streets. I was travelling to Chicago, Toronto, buying everything I could find, and playing it immediately. So you can imagine if you’re young and listening to the radio and you go from Madonna to Klein & MBO, and really, really obscure stuff, in normal everyday programming, you’re really excited about it.

What can you claim to have brought to Detroit?

Lots of stuff. ‘Cooky Puss’ by the Beastie Boys, all the early Def Jam stuff, LL cool J, Run DMC, I was the first one to play all that. Lots and lots of hip hop stuff for the first time. Things like ‘Boogie Down (Bronx)’ by Man Parrish, umm, so much. I brought so much stuff.

You must have been working hard to fill that time.

I was doing residencies. I was kind of at school. If you are a resident at a club you’re expected to play five hours, so three was actually quite easy. The station had given me everything I needed to be able to do the show live. Three turntables, a tape machine; in my show I had a request line, an assistant. I was really plugging in to the station.

But you never spoke.

I never spoke. I wanted to say things so I went into the sound library and created each show with a theme based from the sound effects, like for Halloween, and that was how I got into conceptual music.

So that was how you learned production as well.

I learned how to edit tape and all that at the same time.

You say you were aware of your influence, were there any examples where that was made obvious?

Yeah. If I played something in the afternoon, by the time I went out in the evening DJs were playing it. They had went to the record store to buy it. I could very easily see. It was a very powerful influence. I immediately began to be more responsible for the type of music. They weren’t sculpting my show. I had complete authority to design the programming. So at a very young age I was deciding what would be on the radio. At prime time. Immediately I became more responsible and began to really think in terms of programming. So there was some method to it.

And that’s the germ of making records.

Yeah, especially conceptual music. I had literally mastered by the first year, taking music and shaping it into what I wanted it to do. And then the stations became so competitive, I decided just having records wasn’t enough. So I decided to buy equipment and bring it into the station and make music earlier in the day. And then play it as if it were a record. Or do different mixes just so the other station wouldn’t have it. And that’s how I learned how to programme. I started off dealing with drums. I bought a little Boss drum machine and I would layer records on top of that, just to give it a different feel. and then I bought a Yamaha RX-15 with a slight modification to it, and then I discovered MIDI.

This is what year?

About six months after I got on the radio, 1982 or 1983.

How long were you on the radio?

About eight years. Until 1990.

You must have met a lot of people involved in making music in Detroit.

And nationally. From Public Enemy to LL Cool J, Run DMC, George Clinton, UTFO, everybody, Queen Latifah. And then Juan, Derrick and Kevin used to bring in their music.

So you met them early on in their careers.

Yeah. I was aware of Juan of course because of Cybotron, but I didn’t meet Derrick until much, much, much later. Kevin used to bring his records, stuff on his Incognito label, just before he had made ‘Big Fun’, his Reese and Santonio records, to a club I used to spin at in Ann Arbor, about an hour out of Detroit. It was a really successful residency and I would play his records instantly because I knew he was waiting to see the response. I knew him from that.

What did you think of Juan’s music when you first heard it?

It was incredible. The only thing we had to compare it with was Kraftwerk. If you really think about how young Juan was, and his technique of putting the music together, it’s mindblowing. Even now, when I listen to it and I think about what we were doing at that time. Juan was so far ahead.

Was that an inspiration to you to make records?

Sure, of course.

When did you first make records, making a track rather than these soundscapes?

It started from radio. I had got into the idea of programming these machines so much that I had literally began making my own compositions, and just playing them in a mix. Not trying to press them up or anything. And that led me to production. I used to belong to an industrial techno group called Final Cut. From radio I learned how to programme enough to be able to put together an album.

Tell me about Final Cut. Was industrial the music you felt closest too?

It was what was happening in Detroit at the time. Techno and industrial. Front 242, Nitzer Ebb, the more danceable things. Shriekback, Love and Rockets. I got together with someone who was more interested in industrial and made two records. We performed once, we were asked to come to Berlin from a label called Interfish which was now called Tresor. They put together a festival. Great Pretty Little One was there, Baby Ford was there, Clock DVA, a couple of others

Why did a place like Detroit take to this European music so much?

Mainly because of radio, what Mojo was doing. Geographically, I think that had something to do with it as well: you’re so close to Canada. It’s another country! You can see it, just across the river. The history of Detroit has something to do with it. Detroit was a very wealthy place back in the ’20s and ’30s because of the automobile industry and the army. Planes were built here. So people were quite wealthy and they adopted a more sophisticated, a more progressive way of thinking, and that was handed down through generation and generation. My relatives came from the south to the north to work in the factories. Like many other black people they discovered a whole new world, that was futuristic I suppose. So we grew up wanting to go beyond the barriers of Detroit. It was always there. A lot of us searched out certain things, unique things, to define ourselves. And music was just one of them. Fashion is another. You had this small group of kids who were very heavily influenced by those sort of things.

When did you first hear the word techno?

Probably in ‘Musique Non Stop’ by Kraftwerk.

But when did you hear it applied to what was happening in Detroit?

Probably through the records of Juan, Derrick and Kevin.

Did the industrial stuff lead naturally into what happened later?

At some stage in Detroit they used to mix: the techno crowd and the industrial crowd used to party together. It’s a very segregated city so it didn’t last very long. The club owner got threatened that maybe something was going to happen.

The two crowds were very different racially?

The industrial scene was more suburban, more white. The techno scene was predominantly black. We were partying together for a time, so this is where we were integrating, and certain people, certain club owners, certain clubs didn’t like it. They cancelled a lot of nights. They didn’t like the fact that black guys were walking out of the club with white women, and vice versa.

Simple bigotry?

Yeah. Ritchie Hawtin can attest to that. He used to spin in a club which was predominantly white, and he noticed that there were more black people coming so he started playing more black music, and the club owner told him to stop. Stop playing that music so they would leave. Lots of things like that happened. It didn’t last very long so eventually it split in two different directions. Some really interesting things happened in that short time.

What sort of time period is this

This was 1983.

“  It started from radio. I had got into the idea of programming these machines so much that I had literally began making my own compositions, and just playing them in a mix. ”

Tell me about how Underground Resistance came about.

Mike Banks was in a band called Members Of The House, a funk, dance band. I used to call him and borrow his keyboards, and he would come over and listen to what Tony and I were doing. One of his band left to go to Los Angeles to be a studio musician, so Mike was left by himself, so that’s how we started UR.

We were both frustrated about the industry at the time. We had both tried to work with major labels and it just didn’t work out. I had a really bad time with Final Cut, to the point where we had to literally give our music away to get out of bad contracts. It was really ridiculous. I thought, okay if I’m going to make a career out of the music industry I’m going to basically have to do everything myself. And that was the same way Mike was thinking.

And by that time there was the example of Transmat and Metroplex.

They were already up and running. I think by then Kevin had come up with ‘Big Fun’ and ‘Good Life’ – big hits, and ‘Strings Of Life’ was already out, so we had things to refer to and people we could talk to about starting up. We tried to put Underground Resistance material on various labels but there wasn’t much response. So that was more incentive to do it ourselves. We first tried it at Metroplex, Juan’s label, then we went to Derrick at Transmat, after that we decided to do it ourselves.

There was this radical element: all these manifestos and politics. Just the name alone suggests you’re really subversive.

We thought by minimalising the structure, keeping a distance from the audience from a personal standpoint and just focusing on the music, using the music to make contact, we have the ability to be much more profound.

How can non-vocal, non-lyrical music be political in that way? Or carry a message?

We figured there’s only so many ways of creating a certain ideology. It was a combination of the label design, the titles of the tracks, the name of the EP itself, and then we would give mostly to distributors just a small paragraph, a few words or some type of image as a supplement to the release, to give them some sort of idea. And then it grew from there.

Getting away from the mythology of the artist?

We just wanted people to know us as Underground Resistance.

What about before that? When they first licensed all those tracks for the Virgin compilation, and that blew up, what was the feeling in Detroit?

The city really had no idea what was going on, but the DJs, we knew that it was something special. We never got magazines or anything like that. We did not know what the world was saying but we knew it was a collection of new music coming from Detroit. It was very forward-thinking.

When did you first feel that Detroit techno was something unique, its own genre?

I could hear it much earlier ’cos I had became accustomed to always listening to everything. So I knew what the unique characteristics were. It was the programming of the drum machines, the type of drum machines we used. The melodic type of sequences, the basslines, were much different from Chicago. The music I always thought was more progressive than Chicago house. It was more difficult to listen to because it was more complex. I think that was because we had a more European appetite.

Do you think the theories that Derrick and Juan came up with to explain their music was to a certain extent post-rationalising?

To a certain extent, maybe, because I’m sure they had no idea, really, what they were doing, at the very beginning. And I think I suppose it happens naturally that way. You see the response of people: what they say and what they think. Yeah, you can fall into that type of agreement, I suppose, and it gradually shapes itself.

How did it feel that your music was strongest as an export market.

It felt great. It was a really great feeling.

But how did it feel that your music was applauded all over the world but not in its home town?

Yeah that’s true. Well… yeah, especially when you consider the history of Detroit, the success of Motown. When you think about how Detroit really didn’t accept techno, it’s really sad. But I realise it’s just not one of those places… It’s known for making and manufacturing and exporting out. It’s just one of those cities.

© DJhistory.com

JEFF MILLS SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY

JEFF MILLS – Changes Of Life (writer/producer/mixer)

JEFF MILLS – Berlin (Mills Mix) (writer/producer/remixer)

MILLSART – Step To Enchantment (Stringent Mix) (writer/producer)

H&M – 88 (producer/arranger)

H&M – Suspense (producer/mixer)

H&M – Drama (Upstage Decision) (producer/mixer)

JEFF MILLS – Condor To Mallorca (producer/mixer/editor)

JEFF MILLS – Untitled (Axis 009ab) (producer/mixer)

X-103 – The Gardens (writer/producer)

JEFF MILLS – Humana (composer/producer/mixer)

JEFF MILLS – Growth (composer/producer/mixer)

JEFF MILLS – Reverting (composer/producer/mixer)

JEFF MILLS – Alarms (First Mix) (producer/mixer)

JEFF MILLS – The Bells (producer)

CYRUS – Enforcement (Mills Mix) (remixer)

DJ HELL – Allerseelen (Jeff Mill Remix) (remixer)

UNDERGROUND RESISTANCE – The Seawolf (writer/producer)

FINAL CUT with TRUE FAITH FT. BRIDGET GRACE – Take Me Away (writer)

MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE – Party Of The Year (writer/arranger)

UNDERGROUND RESISTANCE FT. YOLANDA – Livin’ For The Nite (producer/arranger/mixer)

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

VARIOUS – Live@The Liquid Room, Tokyo (DJ mix)

JEFF MILLS – Waveform TransmissIons Volume 1

X-102 – Discovers The Rings Of Saturn