“There is no underground in Las Vegas. If there's any underground in Vegas it's probably connected to gambling or cock fighting pr something like that. People go to Vegas to live the glitz life, that's Vegas. Am I being approached to play there? Not in Las Vegas, no way".
Sitting on a stool in the shabby backroom of Berlin’s Hardwax Record store, Detroit pioneer and techno overlord Carl Craig chuckles as he admits having nothing whatsoever to do with Las Vegas’ latest reinvention as a superclub, superstar DJ saturated American ‘new Ibiza’.
“My impression of Vegas is that if you want to get big in Vegas as a DJ, you've gotta’ be a blonde chick with big ass titties,” he laughs, “And then you'll be sooooo fucking famous.”
Though neither blonde nor particularly busty, Craig is nevertheless both famous and a ‘big DJ’ pretty much everywhere else, whether headlining the likes of Space and Pacha in Ibiza or Berghain’s Panorama Bar (where he’s due to spin later tonight). Currently presenting his ‘Twenty F@%&ing Years Of Planet E’ tour (and compilation) with support from the likes of Sven Vath, Richie Hawtin and Luciano he’s arguably the most popular ‘underground’ DJ in the world today, though as far as Vegas is concerned he remains adamant he’s unknown.
"We're getting some better bookings now but that's because I've started a booking company,” he concedes.
“David Guetta's name is everywhere, sure, and he's making a lot of money and that's because he plays pop records. But for guys who aren't doing anything close to pop, it's not going to happen for them in Vegas,” he predicts.
“New York, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago are cooler, in big city terms,” he says.
As is the city he remains permanently associated with, Detroit, and the electronic music genre it remains synonymous with: techno.
Though Derrick May, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson remain most recognized as Detroit techno’s key pioneers and inventors, Craig’s role in popularizing it is arguably more significant, not least through his relentless productivity and experimentation that’s allowed him to stay on the genre’s creative cutting edge for two decades.
Releasing and remixing consistently under a myriad of aliases (notably BFC, Psyche, Paperclip People, 69, Designer Music and Innerzone Orchestra) he’s remained prolific throughout his career from the moment he fortuitously connected up with Derrick May in the late 80s. Not that he’s ever been lucky, he’s quick to clarify.
“Have I been lucky? I prefer to call it fortunate. Luck is bullshit. Luck is complete bullshit,” he declares.
“Everything happens for a reason. If a safe falls out of a window when you're walking across a street and it lands next to you instead of on your head you can think that you're lucky, but actually that's more about fortune.
I've been fortunate in that I met Derrick May when I did, because that was the start of the whole thing but having said that, even before that my cousin had already made a record with Juan Atkins. And that's how I got into even first touching synthesisers.”
“Meeting Mark Moore from S Express was something similar. I met him the very first day I landed in England in 1989. My on/off girlfriend at the time, Sarah Gregory, knew Mark and that's how I met him. We were also staying in the same hotel as the B52s and Was (Not Was): that same time.
My mom told me before the trip’; 'don't go to England, stay in University, I'll pay for you to go when you graduate'. I had to make a decision. Should I stay or should I go?' So I went and it was the right time and I was fortunate that it was the right time."
Fate, fortune and destiny issues aside, he’s chatting to Skrufff today to promote his afore-mentioned compilation ‘20 F**King Years of Planet-E’, so named after a brain storming session with fellow Planet E associate Monty.
“When we were coming up with a name for it, Monty came in and said so what are we gonna’ call this compilation and I was like ‘I don’t know, it’s been 20 fucking years’,” he smiles. “We were like ‘oh shit, there we go’. That’s the title.”
IhouseU.com: It’s 20 years since you started the label, much has changed in the music business since then, what’s your assessment of the state of it today from Planet E’s perspective?
Carl Craig: "My cousin runs our distribution network and he needs a job (laughing) . . . We still release vinyl and I love doing it and in fact there are not many more sales in digital for this kind of music we release. Vinyl and digital go hand in hand and I would really love to see vinyl live a strong life. Planet E has always been known as a vinyl label but the kind of tracks that we’d previously sell 10,000 copies of easily, we’re now struggling to sell 1,000. It’s a shame.
Just in the store here a guy said to me just now ‘I want to buy one of your records but you’ve got them all behind the counter’ so I said ‘OK, tell me which one you want’. His friend said ‘You Can Dance’, the remix I did of Bryan Ferry last year and I said ‘OK, but I don’t think that came out on vinyl’ and he said ‘yeah, I have it on MP3.’ I asked him ‘did you buy it’; he said ‘no, I got it for free’.
I think I said ’well how do you expect for us to stay in business?’ But that’s how it is now. I have a daughter who is 15 and she was upset when Limewire went down. I told her ‘you shouldn’t have been on Limewire. anyway’ (laughing) go to a record store, or at least go to ITunes.”
IhouseU.com: What are the implications of that?
Carl Craig: "For Planet-E as long as I’m alive, Planet-E is alive, that’s just the way it is. I think where it’s going with a lot of labels is that if a track does well on digital then we put it out on vinyl. Before it was the other way round but sales dwindled.”
IhouseU.com: Going into your background and the Detroit music scene, how big a role did ecstasy play in the birth of techno in Detroit?
Carl Craig: "Not at all. That aspect of psychedelic mind expanding drugs didn't come into play until Plastikman's (LSD themed) album Sheet One (released in 1994). Derrick, as far as I know, never did any drugs, Kevin (Saunderson) wasn't doing anything, Juan was smoking just weed.
The drugs that were in Detroit then were either weed or crack, there was no in-between and even after Sheet One came out ecstasy really didn't hit the Detroit scene. People didn't become aware of it really until D12 did that record where they started talking about E (D12’s Purple Pills, released in 2001). So it wasn't until hip hop got on it that E became this phenomenon in Detroit.”
IhouseU.com: Turning to dance music crossing over into the US mainstream, we mentioned Vegas earlier, there’s an argument that the rise of DJs such as David Guetta and Black Eyed Peas will open the doors to more underground 'proper' dance music, I guess you don't think so?
Carl Craig: "No. If you'd asked me that question a couple of years ago about Black Eyed Peas I might have said 'yeah' but not now. When Will I-Am produced My Humps for them he was using ideas from Egyptian Lover and all this stuff that was really cool in the early 80s. But now they've done that record, what's it called, …. Oh my god. It was from that Patrick Swayze movie, Dirty Dancing (he struggles to remember the track: Black Eyed Peas-Time of my Life . . .) Forget about it, that guy has lost it.”
Pop guys like to stick with pop guys which is cool, plus everybody in that world is trying to sniff out their next hit. When you have a hit in America you can buy ten Bentleys, you know what I'm saying. This is big time. I had so much respect for Will I-Am when he started out because he was producing music for (NWA gangsta rapper) Easy-E, he was signed to Ruthless Records. You've gotta’ give him respect for that, whereas now, with this 'Dirty Dancing track (shuddering . . .')
IhouseU.com: Detroit as a city seems in terminal decline with houses for sale for US$200 in the downtown area, I know you grew up in the middle class areas, how are those areas faring in the current US crisis?
Carl Craig; "They're the hood now too. Detroit collapsed a long time ago. For the middle class in Detroit today, it's a survival thing. The middle class was mainly made up of autoworkers and Detroit was the first place where people who weren't from a typical American background could be in the middle class: from working at Ford or General Motors. But these types of people were already being laid off years ago; in fact they were always being laid off. People would work for two years then be laid off for six months, then go back to work.
I didn't have this realization until quite recently that lots of these people didn't have High School educations. They were making US$40,000 or US$50,000 a year to work in a car plant and they didn't need education to do those jobs. This was Detroit's middle class. So where it is now, the concept is about the fact that you've got to survive and you've got to be able to hustle. That's very prevalent now in Detroit. So people who were already doing that when they still had jobs during the periods when they were laid off, would have to do whatever they had to do, to survive.”
“The crash of Detroit happened 30 years ago. When I was in high School my parents didn't want me to go downtown because they were afraid I was going to get shot. And the concept of living in Detroit was, you tried to make it so you're kids didn't get killed, or go to jail. Or didn't get on crack, that was survival in Detroit."
IhouseU.com: They're bulldozing a lot of the inner city now aren't they?
Carl Craig: "America is too big and Detroit is too big. Detroit has a huge land size but we have no neighbourhoods. So we all look to downtown as being the centre and you think of Detroit as being like one giant neighbourhood. But when you want to go shopping, you don't go downtown, you actually go to the suburbs. So if you want groceries, you get in the car, drive ten miles and go and get some. If you want organic food you'd have to drive even further.
Detroit is in a bad state, I still have hope we can get past that bad state but it's gonna’ take a lot of input from people outside Detroit to come and stake a claim in the city. The best thing to happen in this time of mass unemployment and recession is to start businesses and I would really love to see people from England, Germany, Poland, wherever, come in and say 'there's an opportunity here to open up a small grocers' market, there's an opportunity to bring our trade into this place where so much is missing.
I met this woman in a hotel in New York recently where my wife had her nails done and we were talking to the lady and I asked her where she lived. She was Romanian and she said 'I live up in the Bronx.' I said 'your rent is probably a lot of money, like two grand a month or something’, she said 'right', I said, you could buy a large house for that much if you moved to Detroit, in fact for US$200 you could get one.
She was like 'what?' She was doing nails; nail salons are big in Detroit! A friend of mine started a weave shop (hair-weaving/ extension shop) two years ago and now he's got ten of them in Detroit."
IhouseU.com: Have you had periods in your career when you've lost faith or direction?
Carl Craig: "That's part of being a business owner, sometimes business is good and sometimes you think it's bad, or whatever. I've been fortunate that I've had a really good career and part of that success has come because of the effort I've put into it. The effort I put into it wasn't about thinking 'that guy is famous, OK, I'm gonna’ go and meet him', instead I've always had a direction and a drive, which has been to make good music."
IhouseU.com: What's been the happiest period of your career?
Carl Craig: "It's all been happy. Everything comes together in really nice ways. I'm a daddy now and that makes me happy in another way, which inspires my living which in some way or another inspires my music."
IhouseU.com: I read about you playing a gig in Romania a couple of years ago when there was hardly any one there and you were perched far away from the dancefloor, do you still have many bad gigs?
Carl Craig: "I've been to Romania twice and the second time I went I refused to play because, again, the same thing happened (laughing). We all have good and bad dates, but I haven't had a year where I've thought it was a bad year which happens to some people."
IhouseU.com: Do you feel boxed with people's expectations?
Carl Craig: "I was playing in Amsterdam once in a squat party which was this old church which was round. It was a really cool place. And we did these Saturday afternoon gigs, just for fun. There was one where Kenny Dixon was playing and I was playing these CDs and this girl comes up to me and says 'that's not real DJing. What’s the matter with you?' So, just think what she thinks now, with everybody using computers?'"
IhouseU.com: do you think anyone out there, if they put their mind to it and work hard, can achieve what you've achieved?
Carl Craig: "Yes. If you have it in you. Take someone like Kanye (West); I don't think anyone else can be like him. It's something that's in me that's me specific. I've found a way to give myself to people in a way that they can appreciate it. Everybody has something to give but not everyone has the skills to give it. Sometimes those skills are to be a hustler; sometimes those skills are just about totally standing back.
Look at Basic Channel, they had something to give but you never saw who they were and they were never pushing it in anybody's face. But it was a very special gift you got when you put their record on. Like 'what the fuck is this?" It's that 'what the fuck is this?' thing that's really necessary."
‘Twenty F@%&ing Years Of Planet E’ is out now on Planet E.
http://bit.ly/GEUIZ (Detroit Electronic Music Festival)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2BE7mvKu5Y (DEMF: Youtube)
http://www.zootpatrol.com/index.php/2009/12/the-ruins-of-detroit (Since the 50′s, “Motor City” lost more than half of its population. Nowadays, its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great civilization . . .’)
Jonty Skrufff: http://listn.to/JontySkrufff
