Looking for Larry Heard

"Can You Feel It?" remembered 40 years on

Back in the distant mists of the 20^th century, my father used to own this HiFi system when we lived in SW London. A cheap plastic Sanyo number he picked up at Argos in the sales, it was the size of a massive box although hollow inside and, therefore, strangely weightless. I mostly remember the elaborate graphic equalizer sprawled across the front that never seemed to work or intrude too much on people’s lives. He would tune into Radio 3 or the Today programme, whilst I would track down illicit radio stations in my local area. We quickly came to a tacit understanding that we would never be in that living room at the same time.

My curiosity in house music had started to pick up from around ‘94 onwards. Hopelessly square and ignorant of what was going on in London, the radio and music press were my main guide to what was going on. In Exeter where I was living, I’d started going to a night at The Timepiece called Who’s Ya Daddy? where you would hear music by the likes of South Street Player, Sagat, Lil Louis, Latour, Slo Moshun, Renegade Soundwave and whatever else was big at the time. The night had a small but fervent following, keen to make the most of a rare as hen’s teeth quality night in the cultural arse of nowhere.

Back in the capital, my erstwhile college friends had no interest in dance music (of any kind). Indeed, their visceral hatred extended to its fans too. A perception gathered momentum around the old man pubs of Mortlake that I was a fraud or trying too hard. I stopped caring what they thought. You get it or you don’t.

And then I discovered Girls FM.

It was the quintessential London pirate station. Transmission was often interrupted and hyper sensitive to interference, possibly due to the fightplath, ambulances or rival stations. I would record stuff randomly just to see what a tinny TDK blank cassette could pick up. There would be all this cool stuff like Jesus Loves You After the Love, Leftfield Not Forgotten, or Innocence Natural Thing which I’d never heard before and which left me yearning for more.

And then there was this really haunting tune, bursting with melancholy. That long intro and then whoosh. It might have been the Martin Luther King bootleg but I wouldn’t remember. And that was that. Can You Feel It? was my introduction to Fingers Inc aka Mr Fingers aka Larry Heard. Unbeknownst to that 19 year old casual listener, our paths were destined to overlap on many other unexpected occasions over the next 25 years.

There is no need to regurgitate the history of Chicago House. It is already well documented by the musical scholars. My knowledge is strictly limited, mostly via the books, forums and magazines. The influence is everywhere, the story well-trodden. There is nothing left to add from any musical or empirical angle. It’s common knowledge that Can You Feel It? was created using a Roland Juno-60 synthesizer and a Roland TR-909 drum machine. Analogue toys of their time and still venerated by anyone seriously into the music. You can hear the sonic influence on everything from Culture Beat Der Edbeermund to the Gil Scott-Heron Leftside Wobble Space Shuttle edit and thousands of other records offering varying degrees of similar emotional heft.

I’ve often written about my clubbing years in the past. What I haven’t really covered is how often Larry Heard seemed to feature, in person or in spirit. I was never consciously a fanboy yet over the ensuing years I would periodically see him in the unlikeliest places. In London, I first saw him DJ around 2006 when The Sun Can’t Compare came out. The track with its distinctive Mr White vocal and insistent squelchy bassline struck an immediate chord with everyone and seemed to spark a renaissance of interest in the ‘early’ house of the mid 80s, coming at a time when the currents all leaned towards clinically cold European minimalism. It seemed to unite all sorts of people from the different tribes, from technoheads to deep housers, jazzers, balearic assassins, warehouse warriors and all water refill points in between.

I probed further into his back catalogue and fell in love with tracks such as Stars, Deja Vu and Mystery of Love. It was soulful house but not Soulful House – a significant not pedantic distinction. As a constantly touring DJ, there were plentiful opportunities to see him everywhere. There was that long night at the Egg in King’s Cross with his old sidekick Robert Owens in full flamboyant PA mode and a wild night at the Sub Club where I spent much of the evening talking to an electro enthusiast from Dundee called ‘Dave Bowie’. There was a separate occasion in Glasgow when LH played a very different kind of venue called the Barrowlands. Beforehand, we met our Scottish pals in a nearby pub which presented a strange mix of party heads and old school drinkers. “Who the fook’s Larry Heard?” growled one heavily freckled gent with an Irish tricolour tattoo.

Then there was the time he came to Brixton. I was a semi-regular at the club above the Prince of Wales pub (with the hot tub on the rooftop). I can’t remember for sure who booked him but clues were to be found in the roaming presence of ‘Foolish’ Felix Dickinson and Jaime Read who ran the Larry Heard Appreciation Society collective. Brixton at the time had a strong house and techno community, and Felix’s flat was wall to wall records, keyboards and mixing gear.

It was no great secret that all sorts of nefarious activity took place along Coldharbour Lane at any given point in a 24 hour period but it was a second home for a while with mates constantly doing interesting things in galleries, under arches, and in dirty pubs. The local area, moreover, had a long established black music following and a seemingly older and less fickle scene than anywhere out East. I think in the UK, more than anywhere else, the committed fans tended to fetishise American music to the point of obsession, much as the Beatles had adored Little Richard or the mods had lapped up Northern Soul in decades past.

Which is why it was a shrewd move to book someone so widely revered across the underground. The gig went off and in our state of euphoria, 3 of us stalked him back to his hotel room down the corridor afterwards. An awkward pause followed when an ‘assistant’ opened the door with all the sternness of a headmistress, whilst 3 barely sentient fans congealed in rave sweat leaned against a wall outside struggling for words. Craning my eyes across her shoulder through the doorway, my conversation with LH didn’t stretch far beyond a “Nice set. You off tomorrow?” and it was no doubt (even) less memorable for him. How we laughed about it at the time but, on deeper reflection, had we turned into those dickheads that slavishly worship DJs?

I sometimes wondered about those Chicago DJs who came to Europe, these guys rooted in soul, gospel and the church, playing to overly refreshed crowds with zero understanding of the roots or where the ‘windy city’ even was. How did they retain the passion for their craft, going through the motions at corporate festie after festie, playing ‘seminal´ tunes to punters who weren’t even born in ‘86? I would find myself at all these parties where the DJ became the unwitting hero and, whilst flattering, it must have sometimes felt discombobulating for a DJ to have random strangers bowing at him, with theatrical ‘worship’ arm motions.

If Chicago left a imprint on us, what about the other way round? I never made it over, but my mother certainly did. Innocently asking if I wanted any souvenirs, she no doubt thought I would request an Al Capone keyring or a retro speakeasy beermat. Assuming she’d think I was joking, I requested a Fingers Inc record, and something so absurdly obtuse that her mission was doomed to fail. To my great surprise, she returned a week later with an A Path 12 inch, which no mother on the planet (with zero knowledge of dance culture beyond Chubby Checker) had any right to know about. I have no idea how she found the record store, let alone the actual record. And I will almost certainly never find out.

The Larry Heard story didn’t end there. Within a few months of moving to Barcelona, someone tipped me off that he was headlining some bank holiday ‘event’ (as parties were now ‘branded’) in the Encants market just north of the city centre. It was partially covered by a sloping reflective glass roof, but there was no escaping the cold wind and lashing rain. I’m not sure if something was said by a neighbour or the authorities, or whether heated words were exchanged with the Guardia Urbana, but I never heard any music there again. Which, of course, was a real shame. It was undeniably ballsy booking one of the architects of house to play in a gleaming bazaar but we enjoyed it, despite the shocking acoustics, a slightly bored sounding Mr White, and an atmosphere that felt about as flat as East Anglia. Will anybody will ever believe we were there the night Larry Heard came to town?

In truth, I rarely hear old house music out anywhere now. It’s often hard to tell whether the music aged – or I did. A part of me doesn’t want to hear it anymore or live in the past. But equally, a part of you does still feel a frisson when someone does drop a classic, even if it is whilst browsing the satsumas at Carrefour.

On the old Faith Fanzine forum, they once ran a poll to identify the definitive house track and Can You Feel It? fended off strong competition from the Nightwriters Let The Music Use You. Most of the electorate were probably 10 to 15 years older than me, people who had first cut their teeth at parties in the 80s. There was one guy called Appyammer Al (with a mane of hair Barry Gibb would be proud of) who wrote about it beautifully and far more articulately than I ever could.

It mattered to him not just musically but emotionally, because he was there from the start and it changed his life. He evoked an age which seems impossible to imagine now: eager, freaky, improvised, clandestine, and where what happened there stayed there… I can only imagine what it was like hearing those chords on the Washing Machine EP for the first time. It must have felt kinetic.

The music reminds us of the era but it’s the stories that make them. Which is why I sometimes wonder the second generation (i.e. me) can ever fully appreciate an og record without experiencing the rawness and novelty firsthand. But then again, so much of the music I adore was made before I had reached adulthood, or in some instances was even born - that 40 year period between Bill Haley and the internet when culture was naive, music mattered and immortality was largely bestowed by accident.

What Larry Heard himself makes of the adulation he receives is anybody’s guess. It must sometimes feel bittersweet, given how he and other black artists were ripped off for so long by Trax Records. For me at least, Heard has one legacy above all others. He gave human warmth to machine-based music, which is what I think found maximum expression in Can You Feel It? And I think there is no greater achievement in electronic music than that.