Farley Jackmaster Funk
People Get Ready - He's Back!

by Terry Matthew | Published March 2008 | Features Archives

SOME PEOPLE ARE BORN underdogs. Farley Jackmaster Funk, one of the most influential figures in the history of House Music, with a career spanning three decades, clearly relishes the idea of being underestimated. More than twenty-five years since he hit the radio with the other members of the Hot Mix 5 and held down his legendary residency at The Playground, Farley is gearing up for one of the most ambitious projects to hit this city in years: more than 70 tracks ready to hit, and a new nightclub with a unique twist.

It seems that every few years, a writer "rediscovers" House Music and goes to those Chip E. has called "the usual suspects", asks the same questions and writes the same article as those who came before him. Farley by this point has been interviewed dozens if not hundreds of times about the Hot Mix 5, about radio station WBMX, about DJ contests at clubs that no longer exist, about "Love Can't Turn Around", the smash single that broke Chicago House Music around the world, about all of the triumphs and controversies of House Music back in the day. You can find it in a number of books, and it's a fascinating story, but I didn't want to go over it one more time.

Instead, for this interview, I wanted to get the straight dope on a few issues lingering from those days - but focus mostly on the present and the future. Farley's clearly a man with a plan: a global touring schedule, several albums ready to pop after nearly seven years of recording silence, the new vocalists he's working with, a new manager (industry veteran George Jackson, who chipped in at a few points in the interview), and the Christian nightclub he's developing here in the city. I also wanted to give him a chance to address some of the stories that circulate about his passionate faith and the manner in which he incorporates it into his DJ sets and appearances.

FARLEY: I never would have thought it would have evolved into what it has. You really can't think that far ahead. At any point in my career, I never thought it would turn into the next phase, and then the next phase, and then the phase after that, and so on. My mind couldn't conceive of that.

5: Did you know then that the Hot Mix 5 would be more than just a normal radio gig?

FARLEY: Never. I never would have dreamed that it was going to elevate us to this level. We were some guys that intrigued some other guys to do what they're doing, and then it was like a whole nation of music was started. All over, everywhere, everyone wanted to do the same thing. I never dreamed that it would be like the commercial - "Be Like Mike." I didn't think anyone would want to "Be Like Farley"!

If I would have known then what I know now about playing on the radio - in retrospect, hindsight being 20/20 - you probably wouldn't have been able to drive through Chicago without me owning the whole city, I would have been so rich. I had no clue! I was on the radio at 21 years old, and there were even younger guys influenced by what we were doing. We had no way of marketing that to younger people, knowing this was exactly what they were going to get into. It would have been just mad if I had known what we had. But we didn't. Nobody did.

5: You've done radio since then, on a Gospel station?

FARLEY: Yes, it was on 106.3 FM around 1997, and syndicated in seventeen markets.

5: Is it possible to compare the two radio experiences?

FARLEY: With Gospel, it was definitely different because of the spiritual dimension. I elaborate differently in the musical area playing for a Christian audience than I do DJing for the secular world. With Gospel House, I have to think about every bit of the content of every record. I have to listen to all of the words to make sure they're all saying the right thing. In that area, the music was definitely limited in terms of what I could do. All things go together in secular music. Not all things go together in Gospel. You have to listen to the spirit of the music.

I had to create all of the breaks in the records, too. It would take me seventeen hours to put together a one hour mix! I was trying to do something creative - in one respect I was doing something no one had ever done before with contemporary Gospel music. Isn't it so ironic now that Gospel House is so common that you wouldn't even notice it if you heard it?

5: Is the Gospel industry open to their music being played on a dancefloor?

FARLEY: It's huge in the Gospel industry now, but back then it wasn't. What I was doing was I was taking an itty-bitty piece of an accapella that was on someone's record, sampling it, and turning it into a whole track. I had to literally manufacture everything I played on the radio. For the songs that were already there, I had to try to stick my beat up under it to create a House feel to the track. That's why it took so long to do a mix - it was all of this production. But I'll tell you what - doing it gave me so many ideas about what I could do with this type of music. And now, boom!

Let me tell you, I'm going to be opening up a Christian club here on the southside of Chicago. I have 8,000 square feet for the main room, 4,500 square feet for the kids downstairs and a VIP that's 2,000 square feet. It's in the making, but we have the venue already and we're working on it now.

I also have 74 Gospel House tracks ready to go right now. I'm getting ready to release them with the club. The club will have its own soundtrack that I created. We'll also have Holy Hip-Hop - there will be all kinds of nights that are going to happen.

5: When I first got into this in the mid-1990s, I'd see your name on flyers so infrequently that it created a sort of mystique about you. Most people my age had no idea about the history, we just knew the myth. Were you ever aware that you had this myth that had gathered around you?

FARLEY: Never. Well... a few times, maybe. My mentor was Kenny "Jammin'" Jason, and I felt that way about him. I was astonished that people could feel that way about someone who was just playing records! But seeing how people have always been fans of singers, I can see how people could be fans of mine in the same way. But I have to be modest and humble about it, because I never wanted to walk into a room and have everyone start worshipping me. No, no, no: there's only one God that we worship and that's God in Heaven. It's funny because people actually do that to you in different countries - grab your hand and kiss your hand and bow down to you like your Jesus... It's like, "Stop, stop, stop already! We're just playing records. Nothin' but an itty-bitty piece of vinyl. Calm down!"

5: There's still a lot of acrimony left from those days. Both Chip E. and Steve Hurley have told me that their movie documentaries were at least partly intended to clear the air, yet you still hear from some of the pioneers biting at each other. Do you think those raw feelings will always be there?

FARLEY: Yeah, I think it will go on for infinity. The reason is because you're talking about something that is so big in the world and nobody knew where it was going. It's almost like Shaquille O'Neal's dad. He didn't raise him - his stepfather did. Now that Shaq's famous, he's like, "That's my son!" Nobody involved in House Music then knew what this would turn into. They were just doing what they felt and they loved what they did. Now that this baby's a little older and has become famous, everyone is saying, "I'm the daddy!" Maury Povich wasn't around to say, "You're not the daddy!" Maybe we can all do a blood test on Maury Povich's show and find out who the real father of House Music is!

But to have been there is to know just how hard it was to get a House record played in those days. I can laugh when I hear somebody say they were there, because they don't know how hard it was to get a House record played at a club.

For years, I went to the New Music Seminar in New York and I was deemed the "big mouth fool" in the room. Kenny Jason, Julian Perez - we were all in the room, and I was trying to get our music known. If someone was on a panel and said something such as, "I was playing the stereo the other day at my house..." I'd shout, "He said House! HOUSE! HOUSE!" What happened is that by the time we went to the second panel, everyone would catch on to me saying "HOUSE!" Tom Silverman from Tommy Boy and the guys from New York were asking, "Why do these guys keep screaming 'HOUSE!'?" He asked me "What's House Music?"

It was very difficult. People used to ridicule me for years, calling me the clown of House Music for going around and screaming "House Music!" everywhere. But all of them knew my face when I went to a conference. I was always controversial because I would always say things other DJs were afraid to say. We needed that. We needed the truth to come out about what's really happening in our dance scene, and how come they're always giving credit to the wrong person.

Derrick May used to drive to Chicago and beg me to play his records on the radio. Nobody would probably even know of Derrick May outside of Detroit. There are interviews on his myspace where he says he went to the Music Box and gave his music to Ron Hardy - this is true, but the world found out about his music and the sound of Detroit from the WBMX Hot Mix 5. He's got super-amnesia. He used to drive all the way down from Detroit some five hours away to meet me in front of our cornerstone for music in Chicago, Importes, Etc. record shop, just to ask me to play his music. Check it out - I'm so glad he did, because his music was and still is the bomb. He didn't stop there - he also use to tape our mixes and drive them all the way back to Detroit, and let them hear what the Windy City was doing.

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