RIP Frankie Knuckles - The Godfather of House Music

Frankie Knuckles - Your Love Uploaded on Jul 23, 2009 Backintday·196 videos
"The original 1987 best version Jamie Principle/Frankie Knuckles"
[Tribute cover on a Roland MC-909 uploaded by Lee Mitchell today featured below]

The Godfather of House music has passed away. He was one of, if not the first DJ to incorporate an instrument, in this case the drum machine, into his live performances, as well as working with sound manipulation by splicing tape (musique concrete meets House).

Frankie Knuckles via this interview on Muicradar:

Regarding tape: "That probably started around the late 70s or early 80s. I'd been DJing for the best part of ten years by then, so I knew what worked on the dancefloor. I knew which bits of a song worked. I instinctively knew if the intro needed cutting or extending. My imagination was already doing its thing. I got hold of a quarter-inch Pioneer reel-to-reel machine, and that's what I used to do all my edits.

"And when I say 'edits', I really do mean edits, in the old-fashioned sense: cutting up little bits of tape and sticking them back together to make a new song. Like when I saw the video for Michael Jackson's Thriller on TV, I thought, 'Damn! That's the version I should be playing at the club.' I wanted that whole stripped-down section where the zombies do the dance. So I sat there with my reel-to-reel and started making copies of the relevant bits of music from the original song. I had a rough tape copy of the video version and worked out every bit I needed to recreate that zombie dance backing track.

"In the end, I had a gazillion little bits of tape – some no more than half a second of sound – all stuck together. You know something? It worked! I pieced it all together and I had my two-and-a-half-minute breakdown. And it was perfect – even if I'd been just a few milliseconds out with one of those edits, it would have thrown the whole thing. I was a master of rhythm. A master of editing." [Be sure to see his note regarding the manipulation of sound for effect in The Chicago Tribune quote below]

And on the drum machine: "It wasn't really a drum machine. It was just one of those rhythm boxes that you get on home organs. Y'know… a boom-chikka box. I got the idea because there was always a metronome sitting in the DJ booth at the Warehouse. I never really understood the metronome, but I eventually started messing around with it and used to have it running while I was DJing – it would be tick-tocking just in the periphery of my vision. Eventually I started locking into this thing– locking the tunes and the metronome together, understanding the idea of beats per minute and the number of bars."

"One day my friend gave me this Rhythm Maker box, and I had it plugged into the auxiliary inputs of the mixer. It sounded great. The crowd loved it, and it was very handy if you had a problem with a record or one of the decks. You'd just fade up the Rhythm Maker and people would carry on dancing."

The 909 and the birth of House music followed:

"That was a few years later – I'd say 84 or 85. Derrick May and his friends would come down to my new club, the Power Plant. One night he was carrying a bag, and inside was something wrapped in a towel. I asked him what it was and he just said, 'Oh, I got you something very special – but you got to wait till the end of the night.'

"After I finished my set – which was about 11am the next day – we went into the booth and he pulled out a box with some buttons on it. I said, 'Wow! That looks great, but what the hell is it?' Derricksaid, 'This is a Roland 909 drum machine, and it's going to take us to the future. It will be the foundation of music for the next 10 years.'"


via The Chicago Tribune

"Knuckles bought his first drum machine from a young Derrick May, one of the founders of techno music, who regularly made the trip from Detroit to see Knuckles at the Warehouse..."

"He would extend mixes of soul and R&B records and turn them into dance tracks, introduce new singles being produced by fledgling house artists and incorporate drum machines to emphasize the beat. In addition to building dynamic ebb-and-flow sets that would keep his dancefloor filled from midnight to noon on weekends, he would create theater-of-the-mind scenarios with inventive sound and lighting. 'Sometimes I’d shut down all the lights and set up a record where it would sound like a speeding train was about to crash into the club. People would lose their minds.'”

And via Wikipedia: "Frankie Knuckles (January 18, 1955 – March 31, 2014) was an American DJ, record producer, and remixer.[1] He was born Francis Nicholls [2] in the Bronx borough of New York City and later moved to Chicago. He played an important role in developing and popularizing house music in Chicago during the 1980s when the genre was in its infancy. In 2005, Knuckles was inducted into the Dance Music Hall of Fame for his achievements.

Due to his importance in the development of the genre, Knuckles was often known as 'The Godfather of House Music',[3] and as such the city of Chicago named a stretch of street and a day after Knuckles in 2004."

You can find some previous posts featuring music inspired by Frankie Knuckles here.



Frankie Knuckles Your Love Published on Apr 1, 2014 Lee Mitchell·83 videos

"ROLAND MC909 COVER OF YOUR LOVE BY FRANKIE KNUCKLES...RIP HOUSE LEGEND...."