When you listen to a Larry Heard track, the first thing that hits you is the bassline: elastic, erotic, condemned to endlessly repeat itself. It may dart distractedly from place to place, climb upwards only to fall back to where it started, and always sound sad and fraught, but it presses doggedly on. It’s an existential crisis you can dance to.
The cosmic bassline on the 1986 smash Can You Feel It helped open acid house’s spiritual dimension; on 1987’s Bring Down the Walls, the bassline chafes against the kick drums to create claustrophobia amid a song of freedom. Last year, fellow Chicagoan Kanye West slowed down the bassline of Heard’s Mystery of Love for his track Fade, in thrall to its nagging power.
These are some of dance music’s greatest statements, but Heard, down the line from his home in Memphis and preparing for a summer of festival dates, couldn’t be more self-effacing, crediting the designers of his electronic hardware instead of himself. “It was the guys at Moog, Arp, Sequential Circuits; I was just on the consumer side of it. All I knew is I had a new gadget, it had knobs, and it sounded great; it wasn’t as deep as everyone wanted to believe it was!”
He was born in 1960 in Chatham, a working-class part of Chicago, to parents in love with big bands and soul. The young Heard was enthralled though with the interstitial music played between Saturday B-movies on TV. “I tended to be out of sync with what was popular with kids my own age. I’d record this music on to tape and join everyone at the record store with their tapes saying: what is this?” It turned out to be prog and jazz fusion bands such as Yes and Return to Forever; he started learning the drums and attempting their challenging time signatures. “No one just jumps in with a paintbrush and becomes Rembrandt, just because you feel like it. You have to pay your dues. It’s like flight hours with pilots: I got a tonne of flight hours playing instruments.”
Playing in bands as a teenager, but frustrated by not composing the music, he made the jump to electronics. “You’d see pictures on album covers with their gear setups: ‘Ooh, what’s that?’ And go into music stores and dream.” But by the late 70s, with his parents separated, Heard had to work rather than join the nascent Chicago nightclub scene. “The household needed to be contributed to. When other folks my age were joining the sports team, I was focused on income.” He worked in McDonald’s, a doughnut shop, and eventually got a civil service job, creating music on the side.
By his own admission, Heard is a reactive rather than proactive musician: just as he was led to house by his hardware, his style was further shaped by the demands of Chicago dancers. “DJs round town heard your track and they might be willing to play it to audiences, so you’d make it friendly for a club DJ. If someone turned up the bass frequency and the people went ‘Yay!’, you knew that people liked bass. I just paid attention. It was supply and demand, like in any other business.”
This jobbing, hustling style of composition was a world away from the multimillion-dollar setups of monied musicians; rather than use a studio or even a four-track, he recorded early tracks with two cassette decks. “You’d do one pass on one machine, then play it back, playing the next line on top of it, over and over. It was downright lo-fi! Guys like Wendy Carlos and Vangelis were doing something more serious [with synths] because they knew what they were doing; I was just experimenting.”
Despite – or perhaps because of – the raw sound of his tracks, his fame grew and he started earning offers of gigs in the UK; at 27, he finally made the jump to music full-time. “It was terrifying to leave a great government job with health benefits and a pension. All music was offering was adventure.”
His most successful alias is Mr Fingers – one third of his group Fingers Inc, with vocalists Robert Owens and Ron Wilson – but there’s also the equally great Gherkin Jerks moniker. “With Mr Fingers, a primary school music teacher would say: ‘Yes, I can hear the notes and the chords.’ With Gherkin Jerks, I don’t think that’s going to happen. I’d get an F.” It’s all equally influential: while his Mr Fingers productions are obvious touchstones for today’s deep house collectives such as Giegling or Innervisions, the gnarly sound of Gherkin Jerks can be heard in the wave of lo-fi hardware jams put out by labels such as the Trilogy Tapes.
But while there will be plenty of pilgrims from both camps at his live shows, this is no nostalgia act cash-in – Heard has been producing music almost constantly since the heyday of Chicago house, occasionally scoring an underground smash like The Sun Can’t Compare (2006) or last year’s Qwazars. Incidentally, such track titles are a staple for Heard, who has also made a concept sci-fi soundtrack called Alien. “I’d name tracks after mountains if that’s what they felt like, but they don’t. They feel like something … out there.”
In between spates of music-making, he still takes day jobs. “I’ve worked at a television station, a place where they made motherboards – a lot of wacky stuff that doesn’t make any sense,” he laughs. His northern accent was an asset after he moved to Memphis and he was hired as the PA to an investment banker. “She knew what she was doing; some people associate the southern drawl with a lack of intelligence.” After 20 years in the city, though, his charmingly modest tones are now laced with that very Tennessee honey.
He moved there after he’d acquired a weird, impoverished kind of fame, where you’re a celebrity in your own scene and unknown to everyone else. “People were always wanting to talk music and have you hear their demos: ‘No, I’m on the way to the library!’ And you don’t enjoy clubs any more. People are in your ear the whole night. That took its toll; I couldn’t live my life freely.”
Without a partner or family, he could just up and leave immediately. “Being married would have changed the dynamic: the kids have to eat, you have the liberty of starving as one individual. But on the other hand, you get a legacy.” He remains single and admits that the life of a dance musician has not been conducive to lasting relationships. “A person who works in a building downtown is running into people every day, before and after work. My work involves going to the airport and to another country. It doesn’t work out in terms of getting to know someone. Then there are people you meet who are more interested in Mr Fingers than Larry Heard: ‘Ooh, he must be rich!’” Another bugbear is the Instagram culture of today’s dancefloors. “Everyone is peering and leering at you, taking pictures and video. It’s awkward, it’s uncomfortable. It’s the opposite of what clubs started out as: a haven away from everything, as opposed to somewhere to expose. I’m not doing an exhibition – I’m trying to release myself.”
Throughout our conversation, I wonder aloud why Heard was drawn to certain sounds or made things in the way he did. He has little time for this. “Thinking isn’t the biggest requirement, it’s more about feeling,” he says. “Because that’s what you want the person on the opposite side of the booth to do, to feel something. Thinking is work; music is something to relax yourself. It’s like a blanket you wrap round yourself, rather than a dictionary you open up.”
In an age of short festival sets and branded Snapchat filters, we should perhaps follow Heard: put our phones away, turn off the inner monologue and feel the music.
Larry Heard plays the Sunfall festival, Brockwell Park, London on 12 August
