Marshall Jefferson: How Chicago House Went Global

As one of the main actors in the eighties Chicago house scene, Marshall Jefferson really is one of the originators.

He's still DJing up and down the country, including at Fac 51 The Hacienda at the HMV Forum this weekend, but what we think is the real story with Marshall, is his rational and balanced recall of history.

He knows he was part of something special - he's not shy about that - but he's also very aware that the Chicago house music explosion couldn't have happened without the influence of other cities, and it is this that we discussed with him.

Each city's scene is well documented - we read about New York, Detroit and Chicago, then how the British towns and cities embraced and reinvented the sounds from the US; but how exactly did the sounds get here? And did the scene spread across the US before we got a hold of it? Marshall gives his views...

When you were partying in Chicago watching DJs, did you think that was the place, or did you think that there were other cities where a similar hedonistic party culture was going on?

The party culture wasn't publicised that much back then. I remember really thinking that Chicago was unique, because we were listening to a lot of European stuff, like Kraftwerk, Visage, even Divine. We were listening to New York music, we were listening to Philadelphia stuff… all this was mixed together as house music.

I remember going to parties with 5,000 black kids and listening to things like 'Rock Lobster' by the B52s (hear below) and I was thinking, 'there can't be black kids dancing to stuff like this anywhere in the world like this!' I kinda realised back then that we were pretty unique.

You called all of this 'house music', things like Divine which was Italo kind of stuff. A lot of people wouldn't say that's house.

At what point would you say the playlists of Chicago DJs changed to incorporate mostly purpose-made tracks for mixing, made in Chicago or the US, as opposed to European stuff?

I'd say that started 1984, '85, after Jesse Saunders came out with 'On And On' and we started making our own records.

You and your mates in the post office!

Well yeah, but not just us in the post office, but people all over the city. When Jesse made that song we said 'hey, we can make records too, and we can make them better than Jesse'. So that was '84, '85 and that's when I started giving music to Ron Hardy and Frankie Knuckles and they started playing it.

So at what point did you realise that the music coming out of Chicago had importance outside of Chicago?

That was 1985 when I did 'Move Your Body' and it was on cassette, because it didn't get released on record until 1986, but somehow I got a phone call from Jazzy M, all the way from England! We'd speak on the phone for like, two or three hours at a time, talking about music and all kinds of stuff, and the records weren't even out yet! They were just playing in the clubs on cassette.

And Jazzy M was getting all this shit in England, I repeat, off cassette! He'd be calling me up and saying, 'what about this song?', 'what about this song?'!!

Hahahaha, how did that happen?

Ummm, well, I gave 'Move Your Body' to Ron Hardy first and he said 'don't give it to anyone else', so I didn't give it to anyone else. However my friend Sleazy D, who I did 'I've Lost Control' with… he wanted to get buddy buddy with people like Frankie Knuckles so he could get in all the clubs for free, so he gave Frankie Knuckles a copy.

You know, 'Move Your Body' was shit hot back then, so Frankie Knuckles gave it to Larry Levan. I'm not sure if Larry Levan gave it to Alfredo in Ibiza, but from conversations I've had with Pete Tong, Danny Rampling and Paul Oakenfold, he was definitely playing my music and he helped it reach London (NB: this is unlikely to have been the case with 'Move Your Body' specifically - this would have been two years before the infamous Ibiza lads' holiday of '87 - so Jazzy M must have received the cassette from another source).

So I'm just getting all these phone calls! Mainly from Jazzy M. He was really on it back in the day.

Yes, he was actually the DJ who played the first ever record in the Ministry Of Sound, a few years later.

Yeah, he was on a radio station back then called LWR - like on the same level as Kiss, but they went legal first and left LWR in the dust after that. So Jazzy was on LWR, and oh man oh man, it was kinda fun, just crazy. That was how I realised early on that it was going to get big.

But actually, I thought it would get a lot bigger. I thought by now we'd have branched out beyond the dancefloor like Rock 'n Roll did, because you know, Rock 'n Roll started out as 'dance music', so I was thinking we'd have a house music hall of fame by now and, you know, I'd be in there, hahaha!

Well you know, you've still got a 30-year career to fall back on! Not the end of the world!

Yeah man, right. Not many Rock 'n Rollers could say that!

This is pretty mind blowing though, that the UK seemed to get onto it quicker than, say, New York. From the looks of history, they had a far more established and hedonistic party scene than anywhere in the UK at the time, so what were the DJs predominantly playing in New York, if not that kind of stuff?

Well actually yeah, New York were on it pretty much from the beginning. They were asking me to come and perform. I remember someone, I forget his name, 'Al' something, trying to book us for a gig and me saying 'the record ain't even out yet - we've got no live show or anything', but yeah, Larry Levan was playing it at The Paradise Garage for a few months before the UK and Ibiza thing.

So did you have much interaction with the New York set? Did you get on with Larry Levan for example?

I had a lot of interaction with Tony Humphries, but not so much with Larry Levan. You know, he was sealed off in that booth away from the crowd. The first time I came I was in the VIP section I was like 'shit man, he ain't going to have nothing to say to me' - that night in the VIP bit he had Eddie Murphy, Mike Tyson, he had people like Robert De Niro up in there.

He did actually invite me to the booth and stuff and bowed his head and said 'great show' and all that, but that was about it.

So the playlists of New York DJs at the time… were there any producers like you who were making house music, but house music in the sense of tracks with long intros and outros that were designed to be mixed as part of a continuous DJ set?

It didn't start out in New York that way, but they did jump on it real quick. They were doing their own thing anyway, you know, they had Arthur Baker, Colonel Abrahams and people like that. As far as straight house music… the first ones I would know were Blaze and Kevin Hedge. They were the first I remember who intentionally made house music.

So what about Detroit? How did you first become aware of what they were up to?

Funnily enough, I got a phone call out of the blue from Derrick May telling me they were gonna come out slammin' with some techno music! Out of the blue, right? And I said 'what's that stuff?' and he said 'you don't know me man - we jam, me and my boys'… Kevin Saunderson… all of us, we're gonna be jammin'!'

What year was this?

This was '87.

So before then you had no idea those guys were using the same drum machines and samplers as you?

No, I had no idea. Eventually we started travelling back and forth across Chicago and Detroit. Derrick May was doing it already, so he was coming to the Music Box so he pretty much had a good idea of what was playing in Chicago. If you ask him now who he thinks was the greatest DJ ever, he'd say Ron Hardy was.

So he was going back and forth a lot. He basically brought that mindset to Detroit. But we would all go back and forth a lot, embarrassingly enough, to play video games with each other! We would beat each other's asses at these Nintendo games called Techno Bowl and Double Dribble!

That's brilliant. This is a revelation! 'How the house and techno scene became a mobilised force… it was Derrick May and Marshall Jefferson playing on the Nes!' And didn't Derrick May have a big hand in getting the Detroit records into the New York record pool because one of his parents moved there or something?

Well the Detroit sound wasn't as big there as it was in Europe for example. New York were into a kind of a more soulful sound. For instance, 'Acid Tracks' went down huge in Europe but New York wouldn't play it. So a lot of the techno scene skipped past New York, with the exception of a few songs like 'Big Fun' and 'Good Life' (hear below).

Would you say that the Chicago sound was somewhere in the middle? That it was a bit more acceptable to New York?

Yes, it was more acceptable to New York, because New York was always into vocal stuff, and techno didn't have that many vocals in it.

You've said in the past that it was a big pay day when you got booked to play in New York, but how come?

I'll tell you why… it was because New York clubs were money laundering for the mafia. So all the New York clubs… I've never seen more high class clubs. The mob would put so much money into the clubs that making money wasn't really that big a deal - it was a secondary consideration. The primary consideration was quality.

There were over three hundred clubs in New York man; and all of them had separate sound systems for live acts and DJs, and most of them had Richard Long sound systems, all of them had spectacular lighting, so they were really top notch clubs. Even Paradise Garage was controlled by mob money.

One year, I'm thinking it was '89, the IRS closed down every single one of those clubs - they took the mafia out. And since they did that, every single New York club has been a dump since! The only club left standing of all of those good ones was Junior Vasquez's Sound Factory - maybe they really were legit.

At what point did clubs in Chicago start to be shut down, or did it just run its natural course?

It just ran its natural course really because Chicago never really had mafia money in the clubs.

So when was your first UK gig, and did people get it?

I think it was 1987 on the house music tour; and some people got it, some didn't. The Hacienda got it because the DJs there were playing our stuff already, and there was this one place called Rock City in Nottingham - they knew every single thing we put on and sang along to every song we did!

And before long, we've copied, reinvented, recycled and made a big scene out of it - it's amazing how the UK has that kind of ability. Once it started being fully embraced over here, did you think that it was a better place to party than back in the US?

Yes, definitely better. People weren't worried about shots firing!

Well that's handy!

But moving on from that point, yeah, they seemed happier and more energetic than in the States. And yeah, they would freak out at The Music Box or somewhere like that in the US, but I'd say it was more unbridled in the UK than in the US.

So beyond Detroit, Chicago and New York, are there any other cities that deserve a mention as part of the early house music story?

Only really Baltimore and Washington DC - that's where The Basement Boys started. I know some places were playing house music without a particular 'scene' as such, notably Atlanta, Philadelphia, San Francisco, but that was about it; the rest of the country didn't really know what it was, and they still don't.

Did you play in any of those places?

I was only booked in New York, of all the other US cities. Not even Detroit, apart from many years later. Detroit was a bit of a ghost town, there was nowhere to play.  

What house track would you say was the first one that really cracked Europe?

Steve 'Silk' Hurley 'Jack Your Body' (above) - that was number one in the UK in 1987, so that broke the door down. You had a few songs like 'It's House' and 'Time To Jack' by Chip E, and some of the underground Trax stuff like Larry Heard 'Can You Feel It' and Adonis 'No Way Back', but really, after Steve 'Silk' Hurley made it to number one, they were all set for it then.

And once it started blowing up, how many records were you shifting in Europe? You were A & Ring, producing under your name and for others… it must have been a lot.

Nobody knows that man! Larry Sherman owned the record pressing plant and the label, so who knows how many he pressed up?!? But five years later I was in Chicago and by then Ron Hardy was working for Trax Records and he told me that they were still shipping out 500 copies of 'Move Your Body' per week, in 1992!

Ooof, Larry Sherman, that name just sends shivers. But you must have had some sort of good relationship with him though, in order to do what you did? Did you just work around him for the sake of your career?

Well yeah, I just wanted to get records out man. Larry was a very friendly guy - he just took all your money!

He must have made a lot of enemies; how on earth was there not a bounty on his head?

Larry knew who to do business with. He knew I wasn't going to kill him or any of us - he knew we were all wimps!

One thing that must have really annoyed you was the low quality of the pressing from Sherman's plant - that the original pieces of work were not always done justice.

It was bad vinyl, but on the plus side, Larry really knew how to master records. A lot of stuff you'd bring to Larry on cassette thinking it was a demo, and by magic, he'd press it up. But he put it on cheap-ass vinyl with bits of paper sticking out sometimes!

Bits of paper sticking out of the vinyl?

Larry would buy up loads of old vinyl in bulk. And he would have somebody with a hammer break them up and just melt them all down… he'd then press up records from all of that shit.

It's just so wild west, so alien to the way things are now. Even though you made almost nothing from the export sales of your music, what if the UK didn't buy any of them? Do you think you'd still have a career today without the UK?

No, definitely not. It's the same for all of us, Detroit, New York. The UK and Europe were the bulk of our money. After New York went down, almost 100% of our money came from Europe, especially the UK.

And it's nice to see this particular Godfather still getting the love from this fair country. See him spinning alongside The Happy Mondays at the HMV Forum in Kentish Town on Saturday, October 18th. Tickets are available from this link.

Interview: Mike Boorman (follow him on twitter here)

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