Happy Birthday Ronnie!

Ron Hardy is to House Music as Big Star is to Indie Rock.... supremely influential, yet little known in the mainstream. 

While others may have been more technically proficient, Ronnie gave many of us Chicago DJ wannabes our first evidence that we could reach for and, at times, touch the sublime using only some records, turntables, and the occasional reel-to-reel tape player.

It's an over used phrase, but that brotha changed my life. For real… Happy Birthday, Ronnie!

Further reading

• Wax Poetics feature which gives a great overview of Ronnie, The Music Box, and their influence.
• (for the DJ / music-obsessive) Gridface's list of Ronnie's mixes with track IDs

Classic Material: Eddie Kendricks - He's A Friend

pressed for time? just listen to the tune... hearing music is way more important than reading about it!

If you have a few minutes... please allow me to share.

Taken as a whole, I think that American popular music is a human achievement that stands up there with the Pyramids and the Library at Alexandria. It is truly, truly majestic. You can't talk about American popular music without talking about the music of Black Americans... and you can't talk about the music of Black Americans without talking about the influence of religious music such as spirituals and gospel.

Now, before you go thinking I'm about to write about Buildin' me a home or Get Away Jordan, I'm not. (Not that there's a damn thing wrong with talking about either of those songs, mind you)

No, I mention gospel because it provides the thematic underpinning for Eddie Kendricks' deep-house banger He's A Friend.

The title track of Kendricks' 1976 Tamla/Motown album, He's A Friend is a wonderful blend of the Philly Soul and Mid-period Motown vibes. That I call it a deep-house banger speaks to my own initial exposure to the tune. Although it rose to #2 on the Billboard R&B chart in the year it was released, I was about 5 years old then... so it didn't enter my consciousness until I was a teenager and heard Ron Hardy bang it at the Warehouse in the late 80s... it's what us DJ types would call a "5am track"... the track you'd play when only the hardest of hardcore dancers were on the floor. Interestingly, it seems that a lot of 5am tracks have a spiritual/gospel flavor. Maybe it's something about celebrations and sunrise... I remember my mom and her friends sitting around singing church songs in our living room at 5 or 6 in the morning after her and my step-dad's world-famous halloween parties (which I DJed, thank you very much).

But, back to the matter at hand... although Jesus and/or God never get shouted out by name, by the end of the first verse, there's no doubt about the "He" that's being referred to. It's an easy pun, but it is truly an inspired vocal performance by Eddie Kendricks.

Vocals alone do not a classic make however, and producer/arranger/guitarist Norman Harris and the other players on the tune lay down an absolutely killer groove. Soaring string and horn arrangements are anchored by a rock solid rhythm section... for the life of me I'm still trying to figure out how the drummer can be locked-in and swing like that at the same time... guess that's why I'm a DJ and not a drummer! Don't even get me started on the rhythm guitar work. This thing has a bridge (2:17) that lesser songs would kill for as their main theme. And the break (3:29)... my god, the break... well, if I were ever in a debate about the why disco edits are wonderful things... this break would be the only argument I'd need.

If you take the time to dig into the biographies below, you won't be surprised by the massive number of hits the personnel have contributed to. Classic.

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Eddie Kendricks - He's a Friend
From Album "He's A Friend" Tamla/Motown 1976 T6-343S1

Written by: Allan Felder, Bruce Gray, T.G. Conway
Produced & Arranged by: Norman Harris

Players:
Earl Young - Drums
Norman Harris - Guitar
Vincent Montana - Vibes (note: my ears don't hear vibes on the track, but Montana's a multi-instrumentalist and I just know in my heart-of-hearts he played on this)
Allan Felder - Percussion
Ron "Have Mercy" Kersey - Keyboards
Don Renaldo - Strings, Horns

Biographies:

Norman Harris


Vince Montana


Allan Felder


Earl Young

The Dance Music Space-Time Continuum

It's always been an interesting feature of Dance Music that trends and what's hot/not move very quickly. Although downloads now make this a feature of just about every genre, this was the case with Dance/Electronica when Vinyl/CD were the main formats.

I think that this trend has only accelerated for Dance music now that digital files are so prevalent and many (but certainly not all) DJs are playing out with digital rigs such as Serato, etc.

By way of example, up until yesterday I thought I was somewhat up on the latest tunes, until Beatport and Resident Advisor whacked me upside the head with how behind the curve I am. Of the 50 Tunes in their July Chart, I recognized about 7 artists (15% if you're keeping score at home). That really should be between 90-100%... gotta get my weight up!

Oh, the space-time continuum thing? Seeing how rapidly I got "out of date" made me think of Einstein's description of how time slows down as one approaches the speed of light, something about growing old very slowly... I'm down with that, don't close the spaceship door!

On a slightly different tangent, here's some interesting industry analysis from New Music Strategies