Sunshine Jones Interview

by Terry Matthew | Published February 2008 | Features Archives

Every artist, if they really care about what they do, goes through some pretty dark times. But you never expect that from the likes of Sunshine Jones. Co-founder of Dubtribe with his wife Moonbeam, Sunshine toured the world through most of the 1990s, introducing legions to the sound of House Music through Dubtribe's funky, soulful sound. From the outside looking in, it seemed like a fairy tale.

And then - to use an awful cliché - the music stopped. Sunshine and Moonbeam had split, and Dubtribe officially disbanded. Their record label, Imperial DUB, closed down. The musical landscape had changed and honestly, it's probably a little hard to be so relentlessly positive when everything in the world as well as your personal life seems to be driving at full speed into oblivion.

What do you do? If you're Sunshine Jones, you challenge yourself. You sit in a room with a few pieces of old equipment and conjure up your muse. Sunshine challenged himself to write seven new songs in seven days, with each released on the internet as they were finished. The results were collected on his 2007 album Seven Tracks in Seven Days, released on King Street (reviewed in our June 2007 issue here).

It's not a cliché to say this album is autobiographical in a way that dance music usually isn't. Seven Tracks is the sound of a man digging deep into his soul, trying to find an answer, a reason to go on - confronting and embracing all of the hope, fear, despair and love that we all have within us. It's the sound of a man and an artist being reborn.

SUNSHINE JONES: I was born and raised in San Francisco. Most people think that makes me an automatic hippie... I do wear sandals, and talk a lot about human potential, but the San Francisco I grew up in was a political city, a protest city. I grew up in the shadow of the Black Panthers, the SLA, and the Zodiac Killer. But by the time I was 12, the world had changed. It wasn't army jackets and fists in the air any more... now it was feathered hair, Love Boat, and key parties. For me and my friends, by the middle 1970s it already seemed like we were doomed to be outsiders.

Punk rock made perfect sense to me. Not because of what would eventually happen to it, but in the late '70s, punk was really a trans-gender, art school, welcoming and creatively supercharged way to discover ourselves and bail completely on the whole idea of being like everyone else. I loved the political ideals of some the characters who hung around, and wrote little magazines, or made the occasional speech, but we were leaping up and down, and having sex in the bathrooms of night clubs we were way too young to get into back then. It was social anarchy, we were objects d'art in an experiment which expressed "I don't care" as a mission statement, a response to the hypocrites who had dragged their bell bottoms up the street ahead of us.

As the '80s delivered a suburban monster version of punk, where the teenagers from wealthy families all bleached their hair and rode skateboards into the mosh pits, I checked out. I had a lot of personal issues to look at, and violence was something I was leaving behind me. I cut my hair and read a lot of books. I learned about Reggae and Jazz, and started to explore what the world had to offer besides youth culture. So to answer your question, no, I don't think so. I was at the center of what was going on. I didn't read the magazines any more once they stopped printing Search and Destroy. I knew all the people at Maximum Rock'n'Roll (I was in the first couple issues, and did a show for a few months called Real Punk) but in those days we were busy breaking things, and going places, shooting up and throwing up. We had no idea there was supposed to be a political or cultural set of ethics or values to go along with what we were doing.

5: There's a great renaissance of electronic music going on right now, but it seems that it's sometimes lacking the self-awareness of the 1990s. Do you still think it has that revolutionary potential?

SUNSHINE: I'm not sure if I agree. I think these are inspirational times for music. Every day some new track gets released on Beatport, by someone I've never heard of from places I never thought House would blossom. I am delighted with what's going on in Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, and all over the world. Pins Thomas, Lindstron, Jimpster, Manuel Tur, Woolfy and people who are beautifully fearless and completely revolutionary are knocking my socks off all the time.

To me, what's important is that dance music, electronic music, House Music is alive. Kids go see Tiesto and have that experience, and eventually a certain percentage of them will come knocking on our doors, looking for more, wanting something more visceral, more emotional, more personal. I really believe in House Music, it saved my soul so many times I stopped counting. But the main thing, especially right now, is to let go of the past, and stop wasting time with things which don't inspire you. Just give your head, and your heart to the things which turn you on. Personally I don't like to complain. I haven't seen much good come from being negative.

SUNSHINE: I was always in the clubs at the end of the '80s. I never knew who anyone was. Doc Martin was my favorite DJ, but he didn't play House then. He played Hip-Hop. He was really amazing. No one else played those records in SF. My friends would take me to afterhours parties like at the 20/20 gallery and other loft-type speakeasies, but I was always disappointed when the music was House. I didn't feel the soul in it.

One night I was at a party called Osmosis - it might have been 1990, I'm not sure - and something happened to me. I was dancing, half-heartedly as always, and the beat just grabbed me. I fell in between the kick drums and felt the surge of the bass. I felt what was implied in the music, and I danced until well after all my friends had gone home. I peeled myself apart like an onion that night, and I was never the same again.

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