Phuture - Acid Tracks

We can also add Bryan Dougans, who began to record acid tracks using a 303 in 1984. A compilation of his early tracks are available on Rephlex. I think DJ Pierre has always been a bit pretentious with this all acid thing :-) ...

On its release in 1987 House Music had been around for a couple of years.The music had found its formular and nothing much was changing.Then came this.
I first heard this played on the radio at 2:30 am, quickly followed by the B-Side track 'Your Only Friend'.To say I was blown away would be an understatment.Up until this point we had never heard this sound.There had been a couple of tracks before but they had largely been missed by the House Music scene.
This track was so dark and long, relentless but never repelling.The acid sound, so unfamilar then, was used to full effect. Repetative and hypnotising.
Then there was the B-Side track 'Your Only Friend'.Actually an anti drug song but it was never accepted as so.This had a more traditional house sound with the deep, evil sounding voice promising to be your only friend.
The other B-Side track 'Phuture Jacks' was also a very good.A well composed, slighlty less dark track, but failed a little in comparision to the two other tracks on this release.
This 12" release changed my life in some way.It is one of the only releases I can still remember hearing for the first time some twenty years later, an absolute milestone in Electronic music history.

1988 was the year when Acid House music, created by the African-American producers of Chicago, USA - was catapulted in Europe. Among the labels responsible for this 'invasion' were Desire, ZYX and the Belgian Who's That Beat - this one responsible for releasing the early T99 tunes from Patrick de Meyer & Olivier Abbeloos, as well as Patrick's Tragic Error.

This Belgian label, a sub-division of Play It Again Sam, released the classic "Acid Tracks" as well - the same early Acid House tune played three years before, in 1985, by Ron Hardy on the legendary Music Box - now a hit in Europe, with a different title - "Acid Trax" (had Larry Sherman's homonimous label from Chicago - the same that licenced this tune to the Belgian label - anything to do with this title change?)

On the first side, "Your Best Friend" is in fact "Your Only Friend" from the original Trax release. The name here came out different, but it's the same tune. The acquisition of this Belgian pressing, though released only one year later after the American one by Trax, is highly recommended for it's much higher pressing quality.

Considered the earliest Acid House tune ever, "Acid Tracks" story begins with the friendship of two friends which later were behind Phuture - DJ Pierre and Earl Spanky Smith. Very close to each other since the high school, they grew up together in a very strong musical environment, until a day when DJ Pierre got surprised by his friend Spanky when he came on his house while he was DJing and told something like "Hey, I bought a drum machine, it's time to produce!", back in 1984.

Since Earl Smith had a job, he could afford the expensive equipments necessary to do it. But at the first moment, it was just a Drum Machine, which made them do drum solos – cleverly used by Pierre on his DJ sets. Earl Spanky had a natural hability with kicks, snares & hi-hats, so he quickly turned himself into an amazing drum line maker.

One day, Earl Spanky bought a Roland 303 acid bassline, and they both tried with their friend Herbert J to manipulate those sounds, and that acid loop seemed to be already there, but at that time they really did not know yet how to create different ones. “We didn’t know how to program. When we plugged it, it was already making that sound. It had plenty of different acid loops. As we didn’t know how to ‘create’, we worked on the only one that sounded good. No one really invented it, it was already in there. We sequenced it, and Spanky made the beats”, said Pierre, trying to remember his first steps as a producer, about 21 years ago. Boof, the "Acid Tracks" was ready.

Marshall Jefferson, who was giving counsels to them, became a sort of an executive producer for their first tunes, and was also behind their partnership with Larry Sherman from Trax Records (the single got out on Sherman’s red label many months later, in 1987). Jefferson told them immediately to slow down the “Acid Tracks” BPMs from 125 to 120, because it was too fast for the dancefloors when it was made. “This is too fast, New York won’t accept it”, remind DJ Pierre about his friend’s advice.

The big difference that made this early acid house tune a hit probably lies on the combination between the legendary Music Box cellar and its historical resident Ron Hardy. At the same year of 1985, Spanky came to Pierre and said: “This is the place to be, you gotta go to the Music Box, the DJ there is incredible”! They both started to be regulars on that venue, more precisely an underground parking place for about three hundred people which would change their lives forever.

Ron Hardy did not know them the day these two kids (Pierre & Spanky) decided to give him a tape with the Acid Tracks demo. That was still in 1985, just before the Music Box opened. As soon as they gave Ron the tape, the DJ listened to it and said, smiling: “It’s ok... When can I get a copy?”

That first night, Ron was bold enough to play “Acid Tracks” four times. The first one was immediately rejected by the public, and nobody stayed on the dancefloor. But Ron Hardy was a visionnary, and so he played a second time, and some people started to pay attention. The third time, it was already well accepted, and on the fourth one, the crowd went mad; the impact was so strong that it became a hit.

As nobody imagined who could be the author, the regulars thought that it was something made by Ron Hardy himself, so they named that tune “Ron Hardy’s Acid Trax”, but later, by the time it was released in 1987, the audiences discovered it was made by Pierre, Spanky and Herb J from Phuture.

Let’s go back to 1985. Some months later of “Acid Tracks” conception, DJ Pierre started to think about another music. “About that time, I already knew how to program it”, said Pierre on an interview years later. He did some basslines, wrote some lyrics, and recorded them with his personal vocals, but Marshall Jefferson interfered, saying that the sinister lyrics with “This is cocaine speaking!” on its ouverture needed a deeper and more scary voice. Earl Spanky Smith had it, so he owned the chance to sing the legendary tune – as well as to make the beats for it. The tune was baptised “Your Only Friend”.

With a quote that sounded like mentionning the white powder, “Your Only Friend” was like reflecting the reality of all those nightclubs at that time. Acid and cocaine were both largely consumed by the underground audiences since the Disco era, and they certainly remained consumed by them since the early House scene.

Fantastic milestone record that coined the name 'acid'. It's such a shame that all the original Trax records were pressed on re-cycled vinyl(!) and that often had lumps & bits of paper in them. The artists were all payed a flat fee ($25?) and got no royalties :(

This kind of sound were used way before : even in some late 70's Pink Floyd records !!! Let's just say that the powerfull way to use it as the central sound and the denomination "acid" clearly came from this record. Another point is that this record has been made without synchronizer, and as it is quite long .... well .... another way to be so pychedelic !!!

Like anyone that eared acid traks in 1987 i was amazed.
It was so futuristic and so different of the others house music tracks.....
Just a tb 303 a tr727 and a tr707 to enter the legend.
I can't get enough listening to this 12 minutes of pure madness.
thank you pierre.

Hardly the first ever record to use the tb-303 for an acid sound (DAF "Verschwende Deine Jugend" 1982, Heaven 17 "Let Me Go" 1982, Sleazy D "I've Lost Control" 1985, Section 25 "Looking From A Hilltop" 1982), but it uses it to a much more powerful effect. 12 minutes is a bit long for such a simple beat and acid line but nevertheless one of the trippiest records ever. Pyschadelic, scary stuff.

"Phuture was me and two other guys, Spanky and Herbert J. We had this Roland 303, which was a bassline machine, and we were trying to figure out how to use it. When we switched it on, that acid sound was already in it and we liked the sound of it so we decided to add some drums and make a track with it. We gave it to Ron Hardy who started playing it straight away. In fact, the first time he played it, he played it four times in one night! The first time people were like, 'what the fuck is this?' but by the fourth they loved it. Then I started to hear that Ron was playing some new thing they were calling 'Ron Hardy's Acid Trax', and everybody thought it was something he'd made himself. Eventually we found out that it was our track so we called it 'Acid Trax'. I think we may have made it as early as 1985, but Ron was playing it for a long time before it came out."

DJ Pierre quote from The History Of House