Amp Fiddler

Amp Fiddler

Greetings, folks. Glad to be here at the Red Bull [Music Academy], such a lovely place. Thank you.

Brendan M Gillen

Why don’t you give us a brief introduction of where you’re at right now and what you’ve been doing with records, the music you’ve been releasing.

Amp Fiddler

I started some years ago, creating music ago in a lot of different ways. Through electronic music I’ve always bought drum machines and keyboards. I started playing piano as a kid, but electronics always arose my curiosity. So through the years I continued to do that same thing. I’m going to move quickly through where I started to where I am now. We always made demos and created songs through drum machines, like when I saw you guys working with that Roland 909 yesterday. We bought whatever we could get to try to create music. And throughout the past five years, after years of touring, I started to create some music myself, started sending music to a label in Europe. The conversation came up about the possibility of creating dance music, and I thought, “OK, I could do that.”

I considered myself an artist first. Because being from Motown [Detroit], I’ve always been impressed by the history. I’m a Motown singer in a sense, but I also create. This label deal gave me the opportunity to do something that I wasn’t doing before, which was electronic music in the sense of dance music, as opposed to me doing soul or hip-hop. Most of my friends, they didn’t really like dance music. They see it as some kind of “gay house music” for whatever reason. They are sitting in a one-dimensional matrix in a sense. They don’t see the world, they just see the neighborhood and what they hear and what they know.

So I had to kind of kick them out of my past thinking to get involved in new music in the way that I have now. I’m still searching and learning. I want to do more with electronic music and with what I do as a singer. So I’ve been collaborating with as many people as I can who make different kind of electronic music. I’m always listening to whatever I can. I’m not a young kid just starting doing this. Most people who I’ve grown up with are stuck in what they do, they want to hear some smooth jazz and really cool music. Anything outside of that is kind of weird for them. I’m going past that.

Brendan M Gillen

Let’s talk a little bit about the traditional side. What I mean by traditional side is Parliament-Funkadelic. In Detroit, that’s like indigenous music.

Amp Fiddler

When I first heard that, I was excited, because I’d been involved in doo-wop and I didn’t like that before, because before that, I was listening to Janis Joplin and Hendrix, The Beatles, rock & roll, Motown. So Parliament-Funkadelic stuck in the back of my mind. I had just started to play a little keyboards. I think we have to keep our vision as far as who and where we want to be in our future, we have to stand in the now and see ourselves in the future as far as who we want to be in our lives. We have to say it to become it. And beyond that, you’ve got to say: “I am that and it’s gonna happen.” Whatever you say is what is. At that time, I said, “One day, I will play in that band.” I started meeting people who were involved. I was always making demo tapes. I have a whole box of just demo tapes. From 4-track to 8-track and then to 16. When George Clinton heard that demo tape, he called me to the studio and asked me if I wanted to get involved. Started going to the studio and started touring. That’s how that came about.

Brendan M Gillen

What era were you involved with Parliament?

Amp Fiddler

That was 1984. They had just come off of being huge. So they were taking a break and doing more recording in the studio. I was learning a lot about how to record sounds and tones and how they work together. What amazed me even more was how vocalists work in the studio. I couldn’t imagine how people could remember all those notes and sing them together and keep doubling and tripling.

Brendan M Gillen

Is not George Clinton the master of these multi-part vocals?

Amp Fiddler

Most definitely, and not only that, I think that something to learn from it was that he would constantly double, triple or quadruple different parts when making a track. The way he stacked the vocals really made the production stronger. When working with vocalists, you have to have a great concept of making them sound good. Sometimes I’m guilty of that in a bad sense. When I played with a DJ upstate, he said, “Well, your tracks are nice, but your vocals are on the forefront of the kick [drum], whereas on most house tracks you hear the kick right upfront.” I’m not a DJ, so maybe I missed that in some ways, it’s something for me to learn. And that’s why I have a different respect for DJs in that sense.

A lot of musicians are either intimidated [by DJs] or they just don’t like y’all. Because here you are playing their music and they’ve been studying all this time and they don’t get a chance to have the kind of dance medium that you have. But maybe they’re missing that. You also are the people who we need to interact [with] to create the kind of medium that we need to get our records played, and to know how to create the right tonalities to make people dance.

Brendan M Gillen

In general [in electronic music] it was considered a bad thing to be musical, let alone to bring in a bass guitar, a guitar, a piano, any of these types of instruments. This was almost a sin. Or to know how chords are supposed to interrelate. But the knowledge of those things, look how much richer that makes a Galaxy 2 Galaxy record, or the way that Mike Banks can interrelate chords, I think it adds to it. But coming from a medium where people are borrowing from a very musical history – when you look at disco, when you look at where jazz and funk meet, this is a very musical thing. Before it was a sin, and now it’s like, “Wait a minute, electronic music has a history that starts before drum machines.” It’s really easy to trace it back. I don’t know anybody who could listen to a record by Fela Kuti and not see a direct connotation straight into house music. It’s this endless groove. You hear the same thing in a Basic Channel record, you hear the same thing in a Theo Parrish record, a never-ending groove. It has a much longer history.

Amp Fiddler

I totally agree. I heard that same thing as a kid. My dad was from St. Thomas, and when I heard calypso music, I heard [imitating] “Oomp-oomp-oomp-oomp…” It’s the same beat, the same trance I was hearing as a kid. It’s always been there. It’s a beautiful thing. Now it’s time for that change where people can cross over and mix up things.

Brendan M Gillen

Hey, let’s play them a song. What song shall we choose?

Amp Fiddler

Do you have “Love And War”? Because right now, with what’s going on from where we’re from, it’s important to keep that conversation apparent.

(music: Amp Fiddler - “Love And War”)

Brendan M Gillen

Let’s talk about playing with George Clinton and crew on the road – how big was the band?

Amp Fiddler

Probably 18 people. It was kind of scary at first because I had no idea what to play. I was a young musician and they said, “Come to Europe. Here’s a tape of 30 songs that we play. Learn these songs, we’ll rehearse at soundcheck and have a show.” So I had to learn those songs, come to soundcheck and play. It was bad enough not knowing the songs that well and not being able to rehearse, but what was worse than that was the fact that I didn’t know the musicians that well and they didn’t trust me. It’s hard, when it’s that many people, you have to know when to stop and when to play, what tones work in the music that can be heard, what tones don’t work that are too much. Like, you know how strings are, if you have strings in a song that are way up here [raises hands in the air] it’s like, “stop!” All those things were prevalent to make me understand how to play with those musicians. It’s like if you were DJing with a band and you just had to be creative enough to pull samples within that band to make it interesting. Some records just won’t work.

Brendan M Gillen

It’s kind of hard to explain if you’ve never experienced it, but when you play live on stage, things that never happen in your brain will happen. It’s much different than a group of people practising together in a room. It’s gonna be different when there’s an audience there, there’s going to be so much more in your head, you have to go to a different part of yourself. But it’s like, how to fit these sounds… I can see what you’re saying. You could play a tone that’s been covered by the other musicians. I’m sure that a number of these guys had been playing for ten years or more with this group. Were there people in the group who had played with James Brown?

Amp Fiddler

Yes, there was Maceo Parker, the saxophonist. He was main person who had played with James Brown and he was the band leader, the one to yell at you, to tell you either to stop playing or…

Brendan M Gillen

How did he communicate that on stage? Did he have a special kind of nod or something?

Amp Fiddler

He was the MD, the musical director, at the time. Once you fucked up, he would look at you with this real ugly face. So you would stop playing or play something different.

Brendan M Gillen

I always heard that James Brown was the world’s most evil musical director of all time [both laugh].

Amp Fiddler

I heard that same thing.

Brendan M Gillen

So that’s like a birth by fire.

Amp Fiddler

Yeah, it was. It brought me a long way and I learned a lot from it. I always thought it would be an education, a schooling, but I learned how to arrange a band, and how to make things work within a band in terms of business, as far as tour management, moving around on a bus, marketing.

Brendan M Gillen

After Parliament, what other musical stuff did you do?

Amp Fiddler

I did a Seal album, I did a Maxwell album. The thing that I was always keen on as an artist was to leave my ego at home. I left the ego at home. So whenever I was out on the street, as [it was with] Maxwell, I was walking on the street and these kids said, “Yo man, we saw you at the Parliament show last night, are you Amp Fiddler?” I said, “Yeah.” They said, “Damn, you probably don’t wanna do it, but we’d like you to play on our demo from this artist.” So I said, “Give me your number, call me tomorrow at this hotel and I may come over if I have time.” They called me, I came over, I played on the Maxwell demo. There was no money, I just did it ‘cos they seemed like cool guys, I didn’t really care. I went home, the next year he called me back and said he wanted me to play on his album. I think that humility, having that sense of just being there for people and giving, is what got me more into getting more. I was giving a lot.

Brendan M Gillen

That’s a thing that a lot of people don’t know – is that you have to give to get.

Audience member

Kenny Dixon Jr., or Moodymann, is a mythical figure in Detroit. How did your association come about with him? I feel house has been a pretty boring genre the last couple of years, but the stuff you guys have done is pretty interesting. How did that come about?

Amp Fiddler

That’s interesting, because he’s one of those persons that I was doing sessions for and my record company kept saying [affecting English accent] “Do you know this bloke Moodymann?” And I kept saying, “No, I don’t know him, but I’ve been doing sessions with some cool cats that make house music lately.” A week later, [Kenny] gave me his record and I said, “Oh, shit. This is Moodymann.” [Laughter] I’ve been working with him all this time and didn’t know it. That’s how our relationship started.

Brendan M Gillen

Just think about that story, that’s how low-key that gentleman is. [Amp Fiddler] was working with him, and he had to get his record to know that he was Moodymann.

Amp Fiddler

Exactly, I just work and I do things. And I think a lot of us in Detroit do things for each other in a way. We give a lot to each other without a lot of expectations and there’s not a lot of ego involved. Because we can all have that from our experiences and our positive things that have happened to us in our careers can create that “I’m the shit” thing. We don’t have that. Some of us do but the majority of us, who I’m involved with, do not have that and it enables us to give to each other. Like actually, I’m helping [Academy participant] Monica with a project and we borrowed her in a sense, she’s helping me with my website and I help her produce.

The same thing with Carl Craig and with other producers like Kevin Saunderson and Eddie Fowlkes. It’s a basic set-up with keyboards and drum machines. A lot of times there’s a track already done and they need something to fill up that space to create the mood they want to create. It wasn’t easy for me at first because I had to go back and listen to so many different genres of music on the dancefloor to understand what was may be needed as far as the colour. Because I could add something that could be totally too dark, or I could add something totally too bright, as far as tonality in a record. And it’s important that I had to learn different things rhythmically. Some things need chords that lay down, some things need chords that are rhythmic, some songs need basslines. I had to learn to think less about playing and think more about adding to the track something that it needed, as opposed to something that I wanted to play because it felt good and I’m a musician and I like to play. So it made me think economical in the way that I had to go back and listen to all of this music. A lot of music that I’m listening to is tracks that people like you probably make, that are not proficient, or who are proficient. A lot of things that are done in a simple way that are just so sweet that work together when it’s all put together in a puzzle.

Brendan M Gillen

Talk about working with Slum Village a little bit more, I love them.

Amp Fiddler

Jay Dee was the kid that created all those tracks. He came in and played them for me and he had created them with cassette players. He just kept dubbing from one cassette to another until he got the track done. And I said, “Damn, if you can do that, then I can show you how to use an MPC, take those same samples and make a track.” So I watched him as I showed him how to use the machine. After hearing the same tracks, he took the same pieces that he had put together and put them into the MPC and collaged them into the same tracks. Just to see the look on his face was so amazing. He was just so excited by hearing them in the way he always wanted to hear them. It was exciting to hear that.

I had an 8-track tape player at the time, so we after put the music to the tape they did all the vocals. It was just sweet to see the cats fulfil their dreams as far as having their demo done, because they had the tracks, but they didn’t have the facility to put the vocals on, to see what they were gonna sound like. The big part of making records is to have that ability to have the freedom to create different vocal nuances and see what your vocal sounds like [makes cartoonish vocal sounds]. You can just create the character that you want.

Brendan M Gillen

It goes to show how in Detroit, you know, he’s talking about Jay Dee making beats with two cassette machines… I know many people from Detroit who learned to mix with just one turntable you couldn’t change the pitch on and one cassette player you could change the pitch on. It’s a town full of people who won’t take no for an answer. You can make music in any way possible.

Amp Fiddler

Yeah, he took cassette players and learned how to make beat tapes. He’s got the title track on my album. The interesting part of this song is that I introduced him to Q-Tip and made the introduction so that Slum Village could get on and that he could get his production available. After that he got successful and produced so many records.

Brendan M Gillen

Which track is it?

Amp Fiddler

“Waltz Of A Ghetto Fly,” the title track of my album.

(music: Amp Fiddler - “Waltz Of A Ghetto Fly”)