This new house
Tweekin Records helps build the California house sound.
By Peter Nicholson
IT'S A COLD summer
day in the Lower Haight, and I'm sitting on the back patio of Mad
Dog in the Fog with Josh Michaels, laughing about how, given the
state of the music business, he might have to cut corners on his
upcoming album. "Part of me is saying I could just record some
people in my bathroom – beg, borrow, and steal to make an album,"
he says. Michaels is one of San Francisco's more successful
house DJs and producers, under names including Joshua and Iz. He
does A&R for Lower Haight's Tweekin Records, and he's also responsible
for one of a handful of labels that define the elusive California
house sound, which has made its mark on the international house
scene.
Michaels grew up in San
Jose, but it was during regular trips to Chicago to visit his grandparents
that he began to really discover house, eventually hooking up with
Derrick Carter. Michaels DJed around the Bay Area (including doing
a hip-hop night at Nickie's BBQ in the Lower Haight) while studying
architecture at UC Berkeley, and worked at Hotwired after
graduating and before moving to Chicago, where he collaborated with
the labels Prescription and Cajual just as they hit their heyday
with releases like Cajmere's "Brighter Days." "It
was basically my grad school, a great musical education," Michaels
says, citing a knowledge there of disco roots he didn't encounter
as much on the West Coast. But when Prescription fell apart,
he returned to San Francisco to join up with the Tweekin Records
store.
"Tweekin was kind
of a hippie store when I left," he says. But Darren Davis was
running the shop when he returned, and Davis is anything but a hippie.
The former accountant came over on a trip from England with the
DIY crew that spawned Wicked, never left, and owns the shop today.
Several years ago Davis made the decision to branch out into online
sales, which today represents the majority of his business. He also
launched Tweekin Records, and Michaels wrote and produced four of
its first five releases. On the first, eponymous Stereo People EP,
he delivered laid-back, loungey house spiced with a Specials sample;
for the Stereo People's Beautiful Day EP, his production
was deeper, with a hint of the time he spent in Chicago.
And he teamed up with longtime partner Diz for the more pumping
and tracky feel of Iz and Diz's Bioflava 2, which even flirted
with tech-house on the driving "Feels like Dub." In short,
Tweekin and Michaels were hard to pin down to one sound, yet they
often got lumped in with the "West Coast" house sound
being hyped by the powerful British dance press.
While Michaels has certainly
benefited from the attention that swirled around San Francisco's
next-big-thing status, he seems somewhat bemused. "I don't
really know what the San Francisco sound is. It's so varied, and
half the people that they lump under that name aren't even from
San Francisco. There's definitely something happening here [on the
West Coast], but it's kinda misleading to put it under one name.
I mean the Naked [Music] stuff is so far from like, Hipp-e and Halo.
At the same time, I think people here are more open and trying to
encompass bits of all those different sounds – and that's what
makes this scene a little better than some other place where they're
really focused on one type of music."
Michaels has done his
own part to make the scene a little better, with the weekly Sunday
night Bionic at the Top, which he's been putting on with Solar for
five years. Original cohost Mark E. Quark has moved on, but much
of the same crew of Lower Haight friends is still coming down, according
to Michaels. "Most of the people are from the neighborhood....
It's all fairly incestuous. A lot of people live within three blocks
of the area."
The night has gone through
its share of changes, as has San Francisco in the past five years.
"The week before we started, there was one person [in the Top]
besides the bartender and the DJs, so we definitely built it up
from nothing," Michaels says. "It grew steadily, and then
with the dot-com thing it got to the point where we had to shut
the doors.... Now all those people are gone, and we're sort of left
with our friends. [But] the rise of the Top has been a really big
part of the scene down here." Michaels says he tries to support
those friends, giving guest slots to up-and-coming DJs who don't
get a chance to play out much, unlike when he first started and
the competition wasn't so fierce.
The struggle for a finite
number of DJ slots comes up again in another conversation, this
one with Kuyumptiwa Kopavi Grok Tinkelman, better known as DJ Buck.
As a founding member of Third Floor Productions, with Rasoul and
B. McCarthy, Buck put out some of San Francisco's seminal early
house music and was playing definitive parties like Osmosis and
ToonTown when the DIY crew that included Davis showed up. "Knowing
how quick things happened for them, any DJ who doesn't say they
weren't jealous to some degree, they're fucking lying through their
teeth," Buck says. "[But] regarding Wicked's Jenö
and Thomas specifically, thank God those are the English people
that we got! We were blessed with those two. But there tends to
be too much credit given and too much taken."
Never one to mince words,
Buck goes on to say that any sense of sour grapes on his part quickly
disappeared as his own success grew, ultimately leading to the Third
Floor trio's move in 1994 to London, the acknowledged nerve center
of the house music industry. "In '95 they're coming over to
play the Ministry [U.K. super club Ministry of Sound], and Jenö
and Markie are playing the back room, and I'm playing in the main
room. That's fine with me," Buck says. Despite the acknowledged
impact English expats have had on San Francisco's house scene, it
is Americans, whether in the studio or behind the decks, who continue
to define the sounds for which California is known around the world.
Tweekin's 10th release,
as well as its 20th, came from Buck, and both showcase his refined
production technique, in which each sound is fully realized and
maximized for dance-floor impact. While the earlier Lovin' Haight
EP has more of the "psychedelic" tinge Buck says is an
essential element of California house, with rolling congas and quavering
keys, the recent Gettin' Thru 12-inch keeps the same feel
and adds a bit more pump, as well as a catchy-like-a-virus hook
on the truly infectious "Ease." However, there doesn't
seem to be much of an emotional attachment to the Tweekin label
on his part. "Let's see, how to put this?" he muses over
the phone as he's heading back to Los Angeles after a weekend here
for the Haight Street Fair. "I got some money off Darren [Davis],
and then after a few years and a lot of yelling later, I finally
gave him a record." Despite his seemingly mercenary attitude,
which pales in comparison to Davis's (sample: "My aim is to
sell as many records as possible, and along the way, do it as efficiently
as possible"), Buck has scruples, which he surprisingly points
to as a reason for his 2001 move from S.F. to L.A., saying that
S.F.'s "too trendy." And he doesn't come back to the city
for many gigs. "I've turned down lots of offers because I've
had such terrible times.... Everybody's too laid-back and just,
'Ooh, check out what I got at Bebe today.' [People say how spiritual
the S.F. scene is] but have you seen the new KitKat flyer? So there's
a cartoon character of a naked chick with her tits hanging out –
I bail from all that kind of shit." Buck doesn't deny that
L.A. has its own share of sleaze, but he says the market is big
enough that he can pick through it. "The beautiful part about
L.A. is that it is just so ridiculously spread out, wide open, with
room for anything. The Wax nights are always experimenting with
bringing proper talent that aren't necessarily a draw at all."
Though the store has
far from a warm environment, Tweekin the label has proved to be
a welcoming home for some of California's most promising producers,
with SoCal's tech-house prodigy Rithma delivering the goods alongside
NorCal's S.W.A.T., which features Rasoul, Kwai Le Chief, and Nikola.
On the label's latest EP, Nu Cycles, Michaels again serves
up the beats, this time with a healthy dose of chugging, electro
flavor, proving that, as soon as the California house sound is defined,
it will continue to mutate and grow.
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