Sunshine Jones Interview
Since this interview was conducted, Sunshine Jones began a project to finance a "community supported album" - a revolutionary idea in response to the changing economics of the music business. Click here for the low-down.
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Dubtribe was born as a party. We didn't have anywhere to play, so we would set up our equipment in the front room of a flat I lived in on Bryant Street and have a party. We tried to DJ, but didn't know how really. We ended up just making electronic music all night. Drummers came and sat in, and the idea was born out of the party.
The name came from that party. It was DJ La Paix... he didn't really like our music, and called us too "dub-tribey" for his taste. I loved the description and took it as a compliment. So we were born, and from there it was a matter of making endless cassette tapes of our improvisations, and giving them away to people. We played the three places there were to play in San Francisco a couple times, and then literally got into a van and drove to New York, to play a gig booked by Onionz who'd gotten ahold of one of our tapes, then LA to play for someone we'd never met who had heard from someone we were great, then Seattle to play for Tom who owned a record shop and had one of our tapes. Once we were in New York we met Scott Henry and drove to Baltimore to play at Fever for him. It was completely on the fly, and based on cassette tapes, word of mouth, and a voice mail number we'd printed on cards to give out to invite people to our parties.
From there it got a lot easier. We made some records, and played shows all the time. We spent a decade doing nothing but traveling, recording, and playing live. Those were wonderful times.
5: Is a dancefloor a dancefloor - are they the same to you? Do you miss the more carnival-like outdoor events of the 1990s?
SUNSHINE: I do miss playing outside. Bass bins sound much better outside, and there's nothing like dancing under the stars, on a beach, or in a renegade field somewhere. But I gotta admit, I have never liked raves. I never liked the carnival, or the festival-type events which never seemed to hold together at the center. That said I have been at some sincerely amazing events which seemed so close to being absolute chaos. I have had great experiences at those events. But there were just too many dead kids. I couldn't stand being up on a stage in front of thousands and thousands of people, all of us with our fists in the air, cheering for revolution, claiming ownership of House Music, and then twelve of them would die before they got to the hospital from drug overdoses. That kind of crap, from city after city, event after event starts to break your heart. It broke mine. I just lost faith in the people, and didn't want to be in that position anymore.
But by the same token, you really can't have an orderly epiphany. There is no way that people can file in nicely and take their seats, sit at attention completely sober and lose control of the bullshit that society lays on us day in and day out. I am also not in any way opposed to drugs. I don't take drugs, I don't drink alcohol, but I know what hard work it was for me to open myself up to what it is to dance for eight hours straight. It doesn't come easy, and I'm fairly open to that experience. I think that MDMA was a beautifully revolutionary drug for it's time. A whole lot more interesting than Wellbutrin and Zoloft. I realize that many people may need those pharmaceuticals to live normal lives, and I respect that, but I never wanted to live a normal life. I am not interested in anything which might suppress me into the confines of the average and the acceptable.
Still, I think that what happens at an event, if it's 50 people in a little bar, or 500 people in a fancy club, is all about the intention of the sound system, the DJ, the dancers. We create our own scene. We make it exactly what we want. It is always changing. I don't think that it's possible to go backward, so we're never going to see what we used to have again. But who knows, maybe what's coming next will be even more intense, more inspirational, and more wonderful. I'm open to that.
5: There's an emotional description of the decline of the scene in the liner notes to Seven Tracks in Seven Days - it sounded like you hit complete burnout with not just the scene but music as a whole after ending Dubtribe.
SUNSHINE: To be entirely honest, I think what I really hit the end of was the cult of personality. My life had really become fractured into several pieces. I seemed to suffer from being pulled so hard in so many directions that I could not longer tell the true from the false. I was a new father, unhappily married, a deeply frustrated artist, some of my issues from the past were really getting the better of me. I was starving for love and connection, yet I wanted everyone to get the fuck away from me. I was a failure as a businessman, and had edited so much of myself that most of the time I was walking around like a vacant shell of a person. There was nothing happy, or positive in me. The turn of the century was a terrible time for me personally.
I undertook cognitive therapy, ended my marriage, and began to feel around in the dark for my limbs. Seven Tracks in Seven Days was, in every way, a soul searching experience for me. The process alone saved my soul, and it came after a long period of silence. I was going out to clubs and watching, listening, but not feeling anything. I would go out and see singer/songwriters, Hip-Hop "bands" and even a few punk bands... but I would just get bored and go home feeling hollow inside. I really felt that this had all come to a slow, and unhappy ending.
So I took my favorite pieces of equipment, and challenged myself to express everything that was in me.
I don't think that the "burnout" was so much a response to cultural or economic things, though I might have expressed it that way at the time. In the end, I feel that this was serious personal work that was well over due.
5: You limited yourself to four pieces of equipment - a 303, 808, 909 and Juno 60. Why those?
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