Simon
2004-06-07, 11:41 AM
“To me Farley started house. Because while Frankie (Knuckles) had an audience of 600, Farley reached 150,000 listeners”. Mike ‘Hitman’ Wilson: Guinness Book of Rap, Dance & Techno.
The 150,000 listeners legendary backroom producer Mike ‘Hitman’ Wilson was referring to when he branded Farley Jackmaster Funk as house music’s genuine godfather were the audience for his radio shows on Chicago station WBMX, who during the early 80s started tuning in to hear the world’s first ever DJ mix shows. Simultaneously, he maintained a DJ residency at Chicago’s Playground between 1981 and 1987 and also eleased the world’s first ever crossover house record, the gospel inflected anthem Love Can’t Turn Around (which burst into Britain’s top 10 pop charts in the summer of 1986.) His success made him effectively the world’s first superstar DJ, though already came with a price.
“One of the biggest problems I had back then was because I was number one,” Farley tells Skrufff this week.
“Being number 1 is one of the hardest things in the world to handle because as the bible itself says ‘you can gain a whole world but lose a whole soul’ because you end up giving up all moral things just to stay number one.”
His biblical references come from Farley’s rebirth as an evangelical Christian in 1990, after he’d lost virtually his entire career and reputation amidst bitterness, ambition and arrogant, unrestrained greed.
“I can see myself in hindsight how I was and how it all happened. It made no difference to me, whatever I had to do to stay number one, I did,” he confesses.
“You stop caring at all about whose feelings you hurt because all you want to do is continually have people praising you and telling you you’re so great. And what extent you will go to, to stay number one is the part where you lose your soul,” he adds.
14 years later, he’s still a born again Christian as well as an internationally rated, highly crowd-pulling DJ, occupying an appropriate position and status as a respected elder statesman of house. Still performing prolifically, he’s also recently lent his support to a new triple house compilation for Trax Records, the label that like Farley, helped invent house music before struggling when success got the better of them, sometime Farley recognises.
“I was totally sceptical about getting involved in the CD initially because of the whole history of how Trax records initially came into existence, given that they were one of the main powers of the industry back then and so many things got misconstrued,” he explains.
“But at the same time, being the spiritual man I am today I realise that I wasn’t a perfect man then either and I’m still not a perfect man today, but I now know that you have to be able to forgive people to move forward.”
Skrufff (Jonty Skrufff): What exactly is your role in the CD?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “We’re still trying to find the extent of what my role is going to be, right now I’m helping to promote it, in terms of trying to give it some credibility. There might not be so many others around anymore with a name and the marketing skills. So I’m kind of a spokesperson for the CD, but in my own words being able to say what I want to say. Because doing interviews always opens up avenues for me to get my message across, which is important to me as a Christian. Whenever I can get a platform I use it, I guess you could call me a spiritual mixer because I can mix the two sides.”
Skrufff: How important is music to you these days?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “I guess music is the backbone of life for a lot of people and for me given that I’m a Christian, that’s about being positive and giving something back positive to people which is what God gave me. He gave me a platform with my music to be able to go out there to give people something positive, as opposed to records being about sex, for example.I think we’ve heard enough things about sex though on the other hand someone could say we’ve heard enough things about God on records. But actually you can never talk about God enough because there’s always another generation coming through and another kid to pick up a record and if there’s a chance that kid can get something positive then that’s a chance the kid can come to Christ.”
Skrufff: The US authorities seem intent on branding dance music as drug music, what do you make of the way they perceive house music?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “I believe the authorities are spot-on in saying that electronic music is drug music. What I mean by that is that drugs go hand in hand with the music, unfortunately, because it’s tied to a substance of some sort. There used to be a time when people went out just for music, for example my club (The Playground) and Frankie Knuckles’ clubs used to be called Juice bars and in those juice bars people would drink juices, there was no alcohol or drugs. People came purely to dance and have a good time then throughout the years, people have infiltrated the clubs who’ve realised it’s a big business to sell drugs in clubs. You’ve also got alcohol abuse where people have to be carried out- they call it having fun. If you have to be carried out of anywhere, that can’t be fun.
I believe that clubs and drugs are separate entities but when clubs are opened up they become one entity, because when people open clubs they think ‘I have to make money’ and they stop looking at the music and think about making money off alcohol. They realise they can make more money off alcohol than the punters that come in the club.”
Skrufff: You don’t drink yourself at all now?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “Nah I don’t, it’s been going on for 11 years now. Before I became a Christian, I had an occasional beer, I never was a heavy drinker. But I thank God that he came into my life and took all those bad things away from me.”
Skrufff: When you’re DJing, I guess many clubbers will be on alcohol or other drugs, does that pose a problem for you as an evangelical Christian?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “No it doesn’t pose a problem for me. In London and definitely in Chicago it seems as though 90% of the people smoke cigarettes. Also in England, it’s more a question of who doesn’t drink, it’s like there’s a drinking culture that’s been developed over time. Over here it’s totally different because you have to be 21 to drink; if you get caught by a drink here by your parents you get a smack. Whereas in England drinking is much more accepted, everybody goes to the neighbourhood pub, in TV soap operas for example, everything takes place in pubs, such as the Queen Vic in Eastenders.
So the images that you see, even when you’re a child, are pitching you alcohol. So as a child you don’t know ho to decipher what’s good and what’s bad for you so you grow up in that culture where you don’t see anything wrong in taking a drink. Here in America drinking a lot is seen as negative and people call you a wino, a drunk, a lot of thing, whereas in England the expression is ‘he was pissed off his head’, they have a laugh with alcohol. Either way you look at it, though, any kind of alcohol abuse is bad.
To go back to your question, it doesn’t offend me to see people drink or smoke, but what it does do it makes my heart cry, more for their souls. Hopefully when they meet Christ, Christ will clean them up and the abuse, which they can’t see because they’re so into themselves, will be wiped away.”
Skrufff: Marshall Jefferson chatted to Skrufff recently about going to the places like the Nimbus Club, Club 69 and the Godfather with you, in the days before house took off, and reminisced about picking up girls when the DJ played slow dances at the end of the night, what were these clubs like for you?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “Those clubs were typically disco clubs, I was actually too young to be in the clubs officially but because I had the gift of being able to DJ, a lot of clubs jeopardised their licences to let me be in their clubs. I was 17 or 18 and I had to stay in the DJ booth and I wasn’t allowed out of there because alcohol was being served. If the cops had been in the clubs and recognised my age they’d have shut the clubs immediately. So in those days, I was a kid that practised his craft a lot and really wanted to be involved in the industry. Of course, I wanted to be the best.
The music was disco and old funk, plus tracks like Queen’s Another One Bites The Dust, Ecstasy by Barry White. . .. Back then people couldn’t even play one record after the other one and talk on the mike quick enough. Because I was young and excited about DJing and also didn’t need to do a 9 to 5 job, I was able to totally concentrate on it. I was into girls but girls weren’t into me because back then I was a chubby chap. That was one of the reasons I practised so hard.”
Skrufff: did you know Marshall Jefferson well back then?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “Marshall was three years older than me. He wasn’t really a face on the scene back then, he popped up around 1983 as far as I remember. I’m talking about back in 77/78. He might have been clubbing before that but I didn’t know him. Though up until ‘81 none of us was playing house, we were just DJs playing records.”
Skrufff: You said in an earlier interview that the main reason you made Love Can’t Turn Around was to meet women, did it work?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “Man, I had harems. It was ridiculous. When I first started at the Copperbox there was a DJ called Derrick Northfleet who was an outstanding DJ and I first started watching his skills rather than the girls that would come up to him. After I’d checked out his skills then I noticed how the girls were always coming in the DJ booth and I was like ‘Man, look at these chicks’. And I was looking at Derrick, he became a friend of mine even though I basically ended up taking his job, but I was like, ‘that’s amazing’. He wasn’t your average looking guy, he wore thick bottle glasses, his teeth weren’t the straightest, and I was thinking ‘this guy’s pulling these kind of chicks? I’ve got to go home and practise.’ That was one of my goals at the time, to be the best DJ I could be, so I could get these chicks.”
Skrufff: Did pulling all the girls Love Can’t Turn Around brought along match up to your expectations?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “I blew my mind, it would blow anybody’s mind, and that was when I started losing all touch with reality. You start thinking these girls want you because you look so good, it’s not that, it’s because people are drawn to success and power positions. Because I was the DJ in the club, I was the guy with the most notoriety in the club so of course girls would gravitate to me. I wasn’t the best looking guy; I was overweight. So there had to be another reason these girls were flocking to me. I lost all sense of who I was, when I’d look in the mirror I stopped seeing the person I used to see and I saw what I wanted to see, because all these girls were flocking to me. I was looking at myself thinking ‘these girls want me because I’m the most handsome guy’, but no, I’d lost all touch with reality.”
Skruffff: When did it all turn around and go bad?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “It changed in 1988, which was one of the worst years of my life. I was blessed back then because I had the highest music ratings for a DJ doing mixes on the radio back then on, on WBMX. So a rival station approached me to switch channel because my ratings were so high. The radio station at that time was not paying us but because of the radio show we could name our price on the street. Through being on the radio we were being promoted everywhere. So I got approached, offered money, immediately I said yes. And before I got a contract- dumb, I was young’, I went to the radio station and they made me a premier DJ. So the stations changed places and the first one ended up at number 5. So the WBMX owner wanted to sell but his manager wanted to get the ratings high again to get more money for it, so he re-approached me and said ‘Farley. If you come back to WBMX we’ll make it good for you. They didn’t tell me they were selling the radio station because if I’d known that I wouldn’t have gone back no way.
They said to me ‘well how much money do you want?’ and to cut a long story short, we negotiated that I’d get $40,000. That was $2500 a month, on top of what I was already making. At the time I had the freedom to say what I liked on the radio station, so I went on my show and said ‘this is going to be my last mix, I’m moving back to WBMX’. Oh my God, why did I say that? So I went back to WBMX, the ratings shot through the roof again but after a year, they refused to renew my contract, then six months later the radio station was sold under me. I lost my job, the format of the radio station and of course the other station said ‘do you think we’ll take you back?’ So I lost out completely.”
Skrufff: What happened next?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “Well now all the people I met on the way up that I didn’t treat right through the years, all the promoters that I didn’t treat fairly, now was the time for them to say ‘we’re gonna sock it to you because you don’t have radio any more to boost your personality’. So now we’ll pay you what we want to pay you. So that became the worst year of my life, I felt like I was in prison in my own city. So I started promoting my own parties and gradually made my way back up but, man, it was a horrible period.”
The 150,000 listeners legendary backroom producer Mike ‘Hitman’ Wilson was referring to when he branded Farley Jackmaster Funk as house music’s genuine godfather were the audience for his radio shows on Chicago station WBMX, who during the early 80s started tuning in to hear the world’s first ever DJ mix shows. Simultaneously, he maintained a DJ residency at Chicago’s Playground between 1981 and 1987 and also eleased the world’s first ever crossover house record, the gospel inflected anthem Love Can’t Turn Around (which burst into Britain’s top 10 pop charts in the summer of 1986.) His success made him effectively the world’s first superstar DJ, though already came with a price.
“One of the biggest problems I had back then was because I was number one,” Farley tells Skrufff this week.
“Being number 1 is one of the hardest things in the world to handle because as the bible itself says ‘you can gain a whole world but lose a whole soul’ because you end up giving up all moral things just to stay number one.”
His biblical references come from Farley’s rebirth as an evangelical Christian in 1990, after he’d lost virtually his entire career and reputation amidst bitterness, ambition and arrogant, unrestrained greed.
“I can see myself in hindsight how I was and how it all happened. It made no difference to me, whatever I had to do to stay number one, I did,” he confesses.
“You stop caring at all about whose feelings you hurt because all you want to do is continually have people praising you and telling you you’re so great. And what extent you will go to, to stay number one is the part where you lose your soul,” he adds.
14 years later, he’s still a born again Christian as well as an internationally rated, highly crowd-pulling DJ, occupying an appropriate position and status as a respected elder statesman of house. Still performing prolifically, he’s also recently lent his support to a new triple house compilation for Trax Records, the label that like Farley, helped invent house music before struggling when success got the better of them, sometime Farley recognises.
“I was totally sceptical about getting involved in the CD initially because of the whole history of how Trax records initially came into existence, given that they were one of the main powers of the industry back then and so many things got misconstrued,” he explains.
“But at the same time, being the spiritual man I am today I realise that I wasn’t a perfect man then either and I’m still not a perfect man today, but I now know that you have to be able to forgive people to move forward.”
Skrufff (Jonty Skrufff): What exactly is your role in the CD?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “We’re still trying to find the extent of what my role is going to be, right now I’m helping to promote it, in terms of trying to give it some credibility. There might not be so many others around anymore with a name and the marketing skills. So I’m kind of a spokesperson for the CD, but in my own words being able to say what I want to say. Because doing interviews always opens up avenues for me to get my message across, which is important to me as a Christian. Whenever I can get a platform I use it, I guess you could call me a spiritual mixer because I can mix the two sides.”
Skrufff: How important is music to you these days?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “I guess music is the backbone of life for a lot of people and for me given that I’m a Christian, that’s about being positive and giving something back positive to people which is what God gave me. He gave me a platform with my music to be able to go out there to give people something positive, as opposed to records being about sex, for example.I think we’ve heard enough things about sex though on the other hand someone could say we’ve heard enough things about God on records. But actually you can never talk about God enough because there’s always another generation coming through and another kid to pick up a record and if there’s a chance that kid can get something positive then that’s a chance the kid can come to Christ.”
Skrufff: The US authorities seem intent on branding dance music as drug music, what do you make of the way they perceive house music?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “I believe the authorities are spot-on in saying that electronic music is drug music. What I mean by that is that drugs go hand in hand with the music, unfortunately, because it’s tied to a substance of some sort. There used to be a time when people went out just for music, for example my club (The Playground) and Frankie Knuckles’ clubs used to be called Juice bars and in those juice bars people would drink juices, there was no alcohol or drugs. People came purely to dance and have a good time then throughout the years, people have infiltrated the clubs who’ve realised it’s a big business to sell drugs in clubs. You’ve also got alcohol abuse where people have to be carried out- they call it having fun. If you have to be carried out of anywhere, that can’t be fun.
I believe that clubs and drugs are separate entities but when clubs are opened up they become one entity, because when people open clubs they think ‘I have to make money’ and they stop looking at the music and think about making money off alcohol. They realise they can make more money off alcohol than the punters that come in the club.”
Skrufff: You don’t drink yourself at all now?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “Nah I don’t, it’s been going on for 11 years now. Before I became a Christian, I had an occasional beer, I never was a heavy drinker. But I thank God that he came into my life and took all those bad things away from me.”
Skrufff: When you’re DJing, I guess many clubbers will be on alcohol or other drugs, does that pose a problem for you as an evangelical Christian?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “No it doesn’t pose a problem for me. In London and definitely in Chicago it seems as though 90% of the people smoke cigarettes. Also in England, it’s more a question of who doesn’t drink, it’s like there’s a drinking culture that’s been developed over time. Over here it’s totally different because you have to be 21 to drink; if you get caught by a drink here by your parents you get a smack. Whereas in England drinking is much more accepted, everybody goes to the neighbourhood pub, in TV soap operas for example, everything takes place in pubs, such as the Queen Vic in Eastenders.
So the images that you see, even when you’re a child, are pitching you alcohol. So as a child you don’t know ho to decipher what’s good and what’s bad for you so you grow up in that culture where you don’t see anything wrong in taking a drink. Here in America drinking a lot is seen as negative and people call you a wino, a drunk, a lot of thing, whereas in England the expression is ‘he was pissed off his head’, they have a laugh with alcohol. Either way you look at it, though, any kind of alcohol abuse is bad.
To go back to your question, it doesn’t offend me to see people drink or smoke, but what it does do it makes my heart cry, more for their souls. Hopefully when they meet Christ, Christ will clean them up and the abuse, which they can’t see because they’re so into themselves, will be wiped away.”
Skrufff: Marshall Jefferson chatted to Skrufff recently about going to the places like the Nimbus Club, Club 69 and the Godfather with you, in the days before house took off, and reminisced about picking up girls when the DJ played slow dances at the end of the night, what were these clubs like for you?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “Those clubs were typically disco clubs, I was actually too young to be in the clubs officially but because I had the gift of being able to DJ, a lot of clubs jeopardised their licences to let me be in their clubs. I was 17 or 18 and I had to stay in the DJ booth and I wasn’t allowed out of there because alcohol was being served. If the cops had been in the clubs and recognised my age they’d have shut the clubs immediately. So in those days, I was a kid that practised his craft a lot and really wanted to be involved in the industry. Of course, I wanted to be the best.
The music was disco and old funk, plus tracks like Queen’s Another One Bites The Dust, Ecstasy by Barry White. . .. Back then people couldn’t even play one record after the other one and talk on the mike quick enough. Because I was young and excited about DJing and also didn’t need to do a 9 to 5 job, I was able to totally concentrate on it. I was into girls but girls weren’t into me because back then I was a chubby chap. That was one of the reasons I practised so hard.”
Skrufff: did you know Marshall Jefferson well back then?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “Marshall was three years older than me. He wasn’t really a face on the scene back then, he popped up around 1983 as far as I remember. I’m talking about back in 77/78. He might have been clubbing before that but I didn’t know him. Though up until ‘81 none of us was playing house, we were just DJs playing records.”
Skrufff: You said in an earlier interview that the main reason you made Love Can’t Turn Around was to meet women, did it work?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “Man, I had harems. It was ridiculous. When I first started at the Copperbox there was a DJ called Derrick Northfleet who was an outstanding DJ and I first started watching his skills rather than the girls that would come up to him. After I’d checked out his skills then I noticed how the girls were always coming in the DJ booth and I was like ‘Man, look at these chicks’. And I was looking at Derrick, he became a friend of mine even though I basically ended up taking his job, but I was like, ‘that’s amazing’. He wasn’t your average looking guy, he wore thick bottle glasses, his teeth weren’t the straightest, and I was thinking ‘this guy’s pulling these kind of chicks? I’ve got to go home and practise.’ That was one of my goals at the time, to be the best DJ I could be, so I could get these chicks.”
Skrufff: Did pulling all the girls Love Can’t Turn Around brought along match up to your expectations?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “I blew my mind, it would blow anybody’s mind, and that was when I started losing all touch with reality. You start thinking these girls want you because you look so good, it’s not that, it’s because people are drawn to success and power positions. Because I was the DJ in the club, I was the guy with the most notoriety in the club so of course girls would gravitate to me. I wasn’t the best looking guy; I was overweight. So there had to be another reason these girls were flocking to me. I lost all sense of who I was, when I’d look in the mirror I stopped seeing the person I used to see and I saw what I wanted to see, because all these girls were flocking to me. I was looking at myself thinking ‘these girls want me because I’m the most handsome guy’, but no, I’d lost all touch with reality.”
Skruffff: When did it all turn around and go bad?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “It changed in 1988, which was one of the worst years of my life. I was blessed back then because I had the highest music ratings for a DJ doing mixes on the radio back then on, on WBMX. So a rival station approached me to switch channel because my ratings were so high. The radio station at that time was not paying us but because of the radio show we could name our price on the street. Through being on the radio we were being promoted everywhere. So I got approached, offered money, immediately I said yes. And before I got a contract- dumb, I was young’, I went to the radio station and they made me a premier DJ. So the stations changed places and the first one ended up at number 5. So the WBMX owner wanted to sell but his manager wanted to get the ratings high again to get more money for it, so he re-approached me and said ‘Farley. If you come back to WBMX we’ll make it good for you. They didn’t tell me they were selling the radio station because if I’d known that I wouldn’t have gone back no way.
They said to me ‘well how much money do you want?’ and to cut a long story short, we negotiated that I’d get $40,000. That was $2500 a month, on top of what I was already making. At the time I had the freedom to say what I liked on the radio station, so I went on my show and said ‘this is going to be my last mix, I’m moving back to WBMX’. Oh my God, why did I say that? So I went back to WBMX, the ratings shot through the roof again but after a year, they refused to renew my contract, then six months later the radio station was sold under me. I lost my job, the format of the radio station and of course the other station said ‘do you think we’ll take you back?’ So I lost out completely.”
Skrufff: What happened next?
Farley Jackmaster Funk: “Well now all the people I met on the way up that I didn’t treat right through the years, all the promoters that I didn’t treat fairly, now was the time for them to say ‘we’re gonna sock it to you because you don’t have radio any more to boost your personality’. So now we’ll pay you what we want to pay you. So that became the worst year of my life, I felt like I was in prison in my own city. So I started promoting my own parties and gradually made my way back up but, man, it was a horrible period.”