I pride myself on my good memory. It’s an attribute that has been intrinsic to my success. In the past, when I was far from sober, I could always remember most of my nights out and antics, conversations and music that were part of my weekly adventures. My recall of names and faces came relatively easily, too… most of the time. Anyway, I say this because whenever I trawl through my Independent Blog on Wayback Machine, I can remember the stories behind pretty much every interview on there but this one in particular is a very vivid memory…
I was still working at the MailOnline when I hooked this one up. I was up to my eyeballs with my day job and freelancing, so I had to arrange the interview one evening (as Pierre was on US time) when I was scheduled to do a shift at the Mail. Night shifts were from 5pm until 2am, and our dinner breaks were not fixed so I had to speak to the night editor, Liz, to try and make sure I could get away from my desk at the time of the interview.
What made it a bit more complicated was that most of the quiet places I could’ve used to do the interview were locked up overnight. I considered doing it in the canteen, but that was still a bit too noisy. In the end I ducked into a disabled toilet and did it in there, oh the glamour. What made things worse was that, halfway through the interview, some random alarm started beeping. I had to keep apologising for the beeps while we chatted and it was pretty comedic, Mr. Bean-esque levels of slapstick. I still have this image of me sitting on the bog in a disabled toilet, alarm beeping, trying to keep a level head and chat with this legendary pioneer.
I’d had no dinner at all and the interview was quite a long one in the end, so it was challenging all round. Thankfully DJ Pierre was very accommodating and we managed to have a very good, insightful chat.
I made sure I never organised an interview during a night shift ever again after that…
A chat with Acid House pioneer DJ Pierre
I’ve always been a big fan of Acid House music – it was the soundtrack to the Summer Of Love in 1988. It was a huge movement within electronic music that spawned many imitators, many raves and parties and left many people with hazy memories indelibly etched into their minds. Of course it was also frowned upon by the authorities with huge illegal raves in fields and the drug culture seen as a sign by some that society was coming apart at the seams. The pioneer of this timeless sound was DJ Pierre, AKA Nathaniel Pierre Jones, who formed the group Phuture with his friends Spanky (Earl Smith Jr.) and Herb J (Herbert R Jackson Jr.). The threesome were responsible for creating Acid House and Pierre went on to work alone on many more productions using the infamous 303 synthesiser from which the Acid sound came. Still making music and producing 24 years on, I was privileged enough to have a chat with Pierre…
So, Pierre what I wanted to know first of all was what inspired you in your formative years?
Lots of stuff, from jazz – Count Basie, Bennie Goodman, all those guys – my father was a jazz musician, so was my uncle… John Coltrane all that stuff got me into the rhythm side of things. I’d sit at home and bang on pots, pans, whatever I could find around the house, I just wanted to be a drummer.
How old were you then?
I was like five or four, there are pictures of me when I was three just playing a piano – I was doing that stuff. Also, other people like Joe Tex – that was my mum’s favourite – Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole, Smokey Robinson all of the Motown people. My father was the jazz guy and my mum was the RnB/Soul influence. Then I got to fourth grade (aged nine to ten) and my parents bought me a clarinet, so I played that fourth grade to seventh grade – and in seventh grade I switched to the drums. I played in the school marching band. My musical influences when I reached about 13 were more RnB, funk – previous to that I was into soft rock, more lighthearted music. Then my sister was playing more difficult stuff, I remember thinking that was too deep – it wasn’t commercial enough I guess. I was too young..
Yeah, you need a certain level of maturity to appreciate some music.
Exactly, so those were my influences growing up in school.
So how did the acid house thing all come together? Because it’s quite a jump going from playing drums in the high school marching band to experimenting with 303s…
You know what happened, I got interested in being a DJ and, once I caught that buzz, I was just interested in all things electronic.
And, where did the interest in DJing come from?
I went to a party, a school dance, a DJ was there and I just remember looking at the guy playing music – and I don’t even know if I was interested in the music at the time – I was just curious that he was doing what he was doing. I knew he was touching the records but I wasn’t hearing the music stop, so I’m like ‘OK’… so I see him touching the other record and I said ‘Man, that beat sounds exactly the same!’ So he was extending a break, and I thought ‘Wow, that’s hot how he does that’ and from that moment I wanted turntables… then came the whole music bug and producing… I wasn’t curious about making dance music, I just wanted to be a DJ. But I remember when Spanky said, ‘I wanna get a drum machine’ and I was like, ‘A drum machine, what does that do?’ and he said it stores drum beats in it, drum sounds. And then I was curious again, I was wondering what that looks like – I hadn’t seen a drum machine, but I played the drums and I wondered how the hell they got that into some little box because that’s how he described it, ‘a little box’. I’m such a technical person I have to visualise things to grasp them… so once he came with the drum machine I was like, ‘How do they get the sounds in the box?! How do you capture the drum sound and have it on a button to press, that doesn’t make sense!’
It’s like ‘magic’!
Right! I couldn’t even get my head round that! So when he came with it and I was hitting buttons and they had drum sounds on them I was like, ‘OK! I guess they can put it in a box!’ [Laughs] After that point I was more excited to mess around with the drum sounds.
And what kind of music were you aiming to produce when you messing around with the drum machine?
By this point, there was already stuff out there like ‘Time To Jack’… there was house stuff out there. I was aiming to make drum beats, drum tracks… it wasn’t so musical yet. Then came voices. When I heard ‘Time To Jack’, I was like, ‘Whoa, wait a minute, how’d that guy do that?’. Everybody was saying, ‘It’s this thing called a sampler, you can put your voice in a drum machine’, so I was like, ‘How the heck do you get your voice in a drum machine?!’ and I went off again, I wanted to get the machine that does that. I was mainly playing acapellas over drum beats and Spanky was making drum beats, we were trying to make music like Robert Owens, but that was very difficult. Spanky didn’t know to play keyboard, the other guy in the group didn’t know how to play keyboard and, although I could play keyboards to a degree, I wasn’t a pianist – I played the clarinet and drums, but since I know music I knew notes and when something’s in key and all that stuff. But I didn’t want to be the keyboard player – so I was making sure everything came together, more of the overall producer. I would fix things, Spanky was good at making drum beats, I could make drum beats, or I could play the keyboard or I could write lyrics and make sure things were in key… but with Herb I would really have to do his stuff for him. But it was ok.
So how did the sound that everyone identifies as the ‘Acid sound’ come about?
Well, we decided to use a 303 because we didn’t like what we were coming up with. My friend made a track and I heard it and thought, ‘That sounds hot’ – but he wasn’t making acid with it, he was just using the 303 for a bassline. You know like ‘No Way Back’ (by Adonis) it’s not really Acid, it’s just a bassline. I said, ‘Damn the texture of that sounds good, if we had that we could make hot basslines!’ You need the right tools to a degree, but the funny thing is once we came out with Acid I could make a good bassline on any keyboard! It just seems like sometimes you just need the confidence.
Would you say confidence played a big role in your development as an artist then?
Oh yeah definitely because then I knew what I was doing. I knew that what I believed was good, was really good and that’s the thing, sometimes you don’t believe something is good until somebody validates it. You need that outside validation to propel you to the next level.
Where did that validation come from? Did you test your stuff out in clubs or…
Yeah we did, before ‘Acid Tracks’ came out, when it was just being played on cassette or reel-to-reel, we saw how crazy people were going so once we seen that we were like ‘Yo, we got something hot… we got something that people are going crazier over than all the established producers out there’ so that gives you a certain level of confidence.
That must be a great feeling.
Trust me, there’s nothing like it in the world.
So when you were making your music was it always the intention to rock a club, or did you need to satisfy yourselves first?
Never really to be self-satisfied, only doing something with the vision of people going crazy for it. The only track I made that was a self-satisfying track was the ‘Horn Song’… when I made that I didn’t care about anybody.
How does it feel to be responsible for music that’s so timeless?
I don’t know… normal I guess. I don’t know how to describe it, I don’t feel puffed up or anything – I don’t have this feeling that I’m all that or anything. I just feel like ‘Yeah, I did that…’ It’s hard to describe because it’s such a big thing, if you start to think about it it becomes so unbelievable.
Why do you think the Acid sound is so timeless?
It’s so different. When you think of other genres of music, it takes other sounds to create that genre. Acid, it takes one sound, that’s it. One sound, whenever you add this one sound to any kind of beat it becomes Acid. And that right there is timeless – it means, no matter what driving force is of the genre in that era, if you add that particular sound to it it’s gonna totally covert it into Acid. The thing is, what I want people to understand, what made Acid Acid is not the 303, that 303 was around before I touched it.. so it wasn’t the 303, it’s what I did with the 303. It was a way that I responded to that thing, twisting the knobs – the reason why I responded that way is I loved twisting the knobs on the EQ to make music change. That thought pattern to me is truly what Acid is.
And who actually named it Acid House?
The people did. The track was real popular in the Music Box (a seminal Chicago nightclub) and it was coming back to me that there was a track called ‘Ron Hardy’s Acid Track’ that was hugely popular in Chicago and everyone was going crazy for it. And I was like ‘What track is this, I’ve never heard it’. And a guy played it for me, because people were sneaking in micro cassette recorders into Music Box to record Ron Hardy’s sets, and the track came in and he said, ‘That’s it, that’s Ron Hardy’s Acid Track’ and I said, ‘That ain’t Ron Hardy’s track, that’s my track, I made that track’. He was like, ‘Man, that’s Ron Hardy’s track’, I said, ‘That’s our track, we made that track!’ So I had the cassette on me and I told him to play it and he was like, ‘What?! You guys made that track? Man, they going crazy for that track! They calling it Ron Hardy’s Acid Track’ I said, ‘Ok, I got you. We gonna take the Ron Hardy off and call it Acid Tracks’ And so, the people tagged it the Acid Track, it didn’t make sense to change that name – it made sense that that name stuck, there’s no point changing the name of something if the people are already calling it that. It’s a sound that no one’s heard before, it’s not a piano sound, it’s not a string sound you don’t know what it is, you just think that sound is Acid. For some reason it just makes sense, too.
So what are you up to up to these days?
I’m actually recreating myself, I’m starting a live show called Pierre Live. I’m not all the way there yet… I’m just gonna do a live show with the 303 and Maschine by Native Instruments. I’ll probably mix some tracks in there as well, DJ some stuff – it’ll be like a mash up of live stuff and some DJing. The acid is gonna be the main element of the live show. I’m aiming to have that together by the end of March.