WRITTEN BY RONNY KERR – FOR·MA·TIVE CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
“Public Works is my church.”
If you’d asked about my spirituality in 2012, that’s how I would have answered.
I was fresh out of college and hadn’t been going to clubs for very long—a little Mighty here, a little Mezzanine there—but in November 2011 I saw Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson go B2B at Public Works. A month later, again at Public Works, I saw Juan Atkins.
Amazingly, a few months earlier, I knew nothing about these Detroit techno innovators. In August 2011, I had ordered a copy of Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk by Dan Sicko, and I read it voraciously.
The book vastly expanded my understanding of techno, including its rich roots in Kraftwerk and other innovators as well as its multiple branches in contemporary music. I was methodical: Going through my copy of the book, you can still see a slight gray penciled notch next to every line that specifically calls out the name of a track. That’s hundreds of notches across the book, and I did this to make it easy to look up and listen to the tracks after finishing each chapter. It fueled my love of left-field disco and underground pre-techno classics, including “Problèmes d’amour” by Alexander Robotnick, “Sharevari” by A Number of Names, and “Tell Me That I’m Dreaming” by Was (Not Was).
It’s also how I learned about how the legendary Belleville Three—Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, and Juan Atkins—created techno.
24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE
It may seem strange that I learned about techno through a book. But it didn’t remain an academic practice for very long. I was new to living in San Francisco, having grown up in Daly City (the suburb just south of the city). At the risk of sounding like a cliché, I found myself with two other young guys sharing an apartment that functioned as an ever-brewing concoction of culinary experiments, drug-and-hormone-fueled hedonism, and seemingly endless energy to party.
I bought my first Technics SL-1200 from the downstairs neighbor who had owned it since the 1970s. He explained the cracked dust cover by saying it fell off a table in the ‘89 earthquake, but the turntable still worked perfectly, of course. Wheels of steel.
Sometimes my roommates and I would plan parties, but more often they were spontaneous. The living room was my bedroom, and so we’d inevitably gather there to hang out. If enough people came, in a moment’s notice I’d lift my mattress off the floor (no bed frame because bachelor life), lean it against the wall, and revel in the extra dance space.
The neighbor who sold the turntable to me never complained, no matter how loud or how late we played music. He said he was paying penance for his younger days. Other neighbors were less accommodating: Somehow the neighbor two floors beneath our unit could hear our absurd soirées, especially when we opened the windows in my bedroom and the beats ricocheted against the building across Franklin Street. One night, another neighbor on our same floor but on the other side of the building, just casually walked into my bedroom (the heart of our apartment parties) taking us all by surprise. As I sheepishly turned down our blaring beats, he inhaled slowly and said, “Don’t you have any Billie Holiday or something?” Music lover that I was, I did have Billie Holiday, so I put the record on while my roommate whipped up a drink for our neighbor.
From an outsider’s perspective, we were terrors. But in my immature post-college brain, this was just worship. Growing up, my religion was rock & roll, and over time the spiritual practice branched out into classical, jazz, electronic, and hip hop. In high school, I held immense respect for Aphex Twin, Nine Inch Nails, and Radiohead as “true artists” making “real music” but didn’t see DJs or dance music in the same light. That changed one night in college: I drunkenly waltzed into a dorm where someone was blasting Daft Punk’s “Robot Rock” and in a flash gained appreciation for electronic dance music the way a Zen student suddenly attains enlightenment.
They became my obsession—and I saw them three times on the “Alive 2007” tour. From there, it was a short skip to disco. Next came techno.
Naturally, for my disco head, my favorite of the early Belleville Three releases was Big Fun by Inner City. On tracks like “Paradise” (or “Big Fun”), “Do You Love What You Feel,” and “Good Life,” the thumping bass and melodic synths perfectly complemented the generously divine and soulful voice of Shanna Jackson (aka Paris Grey). The beats may have been made with a machine, but the essence was human: amid the squalor of a dystopian, we seek boundless love and freedom. Once again, this music served as the soundtrack to a young person making sense of love and life in the city.
METROPOLIS
Techno is city music. One feels a strong sense of how it formed when exploring Detroit, which I finally did last year. I visited during a warm week in August when two techno festivals were happening—Charivari and Tec-Troit—so I got to see DJs perform at Spot Lite, Lincoln Factory, and the incredible Container Globe, a venue that reimagines Shakespeare’s famous Globe Theatre with shipping containers. The highlight for me materialized at Northern Lights on my last night: After a sweaty, pounding, Berghain-esque set by new Detroit standout Henry Brooks, Juan Atkins took the stage, blending groundbreaking Cybotron classics into a varied set revealing his deep experience across the techno landscape.
But it was 15 years ago at Public Works that he first blew my mind.
On the night of December 17th, 2011, my girlfriend and roommates walked the 15 minutes from our apartment to that shadowy sanctuary of sound. We paid $12 each, and then danced, danced, danced. Juan Atkins slammed out the delicious techno for three hours on a blissful Saturday night, thoroughly pleasing our bodies and souls. It was ecstatic, and the climax arrived at 3 AM when he dropped the Hi-NRG gem “Do Ya Wanna Funk” by Sylvester and Patrick Cowley.
I had no idea what this song was. I had no notion of these local geniuses, even though I had lived most of my life in and around San Francisco. I was a suburban-raised boy who had taken years to appreciate dance music, to find my way to disco and techno, and to this moment. I literally had to go on the Facebook event for the party the next day to hope and pray that someone had posted something about the track. (They did.) I still had so much to learn about techno, disco, San Francisco, Detroit, and the incredible constellation of musical artistry.
The learning sounds so good.
