Music
Meet Detroit Underground Legend Delano Smith
Meet Detroit Underground Legend Delano Smith
The veteran DJ-producer on the origins of techno, his self-imposed musical exile, and the music he’s making today
Delano Smith
© Delano Smith
When it comes to techno music, few people can offer the insights, eyewitness reports, and considered criticism that Delano Smith can. This is a man who was at Ground Zero for techno: Detroit in the late Seventies. His friends and peers, many of whom cite Smith as an inspiration, include Juan Atkins (the man most commonly credited as the ‘inventor’ of techno), Eddie Fowlkes, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, Jeff Mills, Norm Talley, Mike ‘Agent X’ Clarke, and more. All Detroit icons who helped establish the city as the birthplace and creative home of techno music.
The techno scene, Smith says, “was born out of the electronic sounds of disco: Giorgio Moroder, Kraftwerk, Gino Soccio – a lot of Italian disco. That sound had a very large influence on techno”.
“And during this time,” he continues, “everybody that was black in Detroit was listening to The Electrifying Mojo on 7.5 WGPR in Detroit. He came on every night at about 11, he was on for about three or four hours, and it was the dopest radio show ever; he played a lot of things that other radio stations wouldn’t play. He had that space-age imagery and electronic sounds the techno producers went for – he started all of his radio shows like he was in the mothership landing on Earth. It was just crazy, man. Mojo had a lot of influence on young minds back then. It was the greatest radio show. There’s been nothing like it since.”
Perhaps the biggest influence on Smith and his peers, though, was a DJ called Ken Collier. “Had it not been for Ken Collier, I don’t know if there would be such a thing as techno or whatever, because he had so much influence over everyone – myself, Derek, Juan… everybody that was young and up-coming in Detroit back then,” Smith says. Collier was a disco DJ, wildly popular in Detroit’s gay community in the late Seventies, “but it was when he started playing the straight gigs that the masses got to see and hear him,” Smith explains. “And it changed nightlife in Detroit.”
Before Collier arrived on the scene, club DJs would sit down while they played their sets, dropping one record after another, often with clunky gaps in between. “Nobody really cared about how the sound was or anything. The way DJs got people hyped back then was by talking. They just talked shit while the music was going, or in between records. Maybe if they had a mixer, they’d just let the record fade out and they’d fade the next one in. Basic shit. We didn’t know any better.”
Not until they’d seen Ken Collier, anyway.
“Ken Collier introduced DJ mixing to all of us. He was the first one to DJ the way that we see DJing now,” Smith says. “He stood up, dancing while he played, mixing ¬– blending two records together, taking bass out of records, stuff like that. We were, like, ‘What the hell?’ Once we saw him, everyone wanted to DJ like that. We learned how to mix and everything. He was an influence on a whole generation of up-and-coming DJs.”
Smith’s first residency – in 1981 at a club called Luomo – at age 18, brought him closer to Collier, who would play directly after him. The two had met before: Smith had hired Collier to play at some high-school functions. “He charged us $200 to play,” he says. “That was a fortune back in 1980.” For Smith as a young DJ, though, watching Collier perform was priceless: “I picked up a lot of pointers from him.”
Not long after Delano Smith established himself in Detroit’s burgeoning techno scene, though, he decided he’d had enough. Around 1985, after Collier had pretty much quit the straight scene and opened his own club, Heaven, Smith decided it was time to go back to school. Collier’s absence was one of the reasons. Another was that “the game just got completely saturated”.
Delano Smith
© Delano Smith
“When I was coming up, it was only me and maybe three or four other guys,” Smith says. “Five years later, everybody’s a freakin’ DJ. So all of a sudden, there’s no money in it. Nobody’s getting paid. And by that time I’d been out of high school for a few years and I got left behind by my peers. So I was like, ‘I’ve got to get back in school, I gotta get a job, I gotta get serious about life.’ So that’s what I did.”
Putting music aside completely, Smith went to Kalamazoo, Michigan, and studied computers and technology. “For most of my adult working career, that’s what I did: Some type of network administration or helpdesk support,” he says. “I just left music alone.”
Happily for music fans, that situation didn’t last. In the early Nineties, Smith reconnected with an old school friend who’d recently returned to Detroit. “I ran into him and we met at his house for a few drinks,” Smith recalls. “We went down to his basement, and I saw he had all this DJ equipment set up. We got to talking about the old days and I was, like, ‘Yeah man, I used to be pretty good at this. I wonder if I can still mix?’ I hadn’t touched turntables for maybe five years – the music scene was still going, but I just had no interest in even going out, let alone DJing. But as soon as I started playing, my skills had not diminished, amazingly. I just fell in love with it all over again.”
If anything, this time around, Smith fell even harder. He went to his mother’s house and recovered all his old records, plunged back into his old record diving habits, bought some new turntables and started getting back into the scene. “I got back in full-on,” he says with a laugh. “Both feet. I just jumped right in.”
But the lot of a Detroit DJ hadn’t really improved in the time he was away. There was still very little money in it, and still numerous DJs (of varying talent) fighting for gigs. “By this time, too, all my friends that were DJs after me – Jeff Mills, Derrick May – all these guys were travelling the world. And I’m, like, ‘I’m getting shit gigs here in Detroit – still for no money…’”
What set Mills, May and others apart from the DJ crowd was the fact they were now producers too. “So,” Smith says, “The next thing for me was to start producing my own music.”
Delano Smith
© Delano Smith
Originally, he says, “I did it just so I could get better gigs in Europe. But the more I got into production, the more seriously I started taking it. Then it became more about building something – I don’t know what, but building something – and being looked at as more than just a DJ: being looked at as an artist.”
It’s another ambition Smith has achieved. His two albums on Berlin label Sushitech – An Odyssey and Twilight – dropped to critical acclaim (he’s currently working on a double album of outtakes from those records, The Lost Tapes, due out in December), and it’s safe to say Smith is now looked at “as an artist”. But his original plan for his own productions – to get gigs overseas – panned out pretty well too. This week, he visits Dubai (again) to perform at BE. – a new monthly beach party presented by Analog Room and JK58.co. And he’s looking forward to his UAE return.
“I love going there. The crowd’s amazing. It’s always packed and the kids always seem genuinely excited to hear me. I don’t know if there’s anyone else besides Mehdi [Ansari, Analog Room founder] that’s really doing the deep house and techno in the realm that I do it. And Mehdi’s a stickler for the sound, so when you go there, you don’t have to worry. It’s like a DJ’s dream, basically. It’s one of my favourite places to go in the world and perform.”
Just don’t expect a “live” set. It’s something Smith experimented with a few years ago. But he ended up feeling like kind of a fraud.
“I was performing live in the sense of using Ableton and a controller to launch clips. But looking back, I don’t really see how that’s ‘live’. I felt that not only was I cheating myself, I was cheating the people that I was so-called ‘performing’ for, because it was, like, ‘I don’t even produce like this at home.’ You know what I mean? So how could I take that out on the road and justify to people that ‘This is a live performance’ when really I was just pressing buttons and launching clips? Yes, I made the loops I was launching and tailored the sound and everything, but, to me, live performing means you’re actually programming the machine right there. Or you’re playing solos. Or a synth bassline. Some part of it not to be pre-recorded, where someone’s actually playing. So until I can get it perfected to that stage, I probably won’t be doing anymore live shows.”
What Smith will be doing is what he’s been doing for 30-something years and counting: Sharing his impeccable music taste with a crowd. His sets, he says, are usually a mixture of off-the-cuff choices and carefully curated tracks.
“I like for my sets to flow. To tell some type of story,” he says. “So I’m not just dropping tracks that have no relationship to the track before or the track after. I don’t just play anything. So I’d say for the first half-hour, a lot of my sets are very scripted, because I know what goes with what. I like to flow like that. I like to be seamless. And I like to be able to trick the dancefloor sometimes, like, ‘OK… Where did that end and this one begin?’”
That only lasts so long though. “It’s usually only for about the first half-hour,” Smith admits. “After I get a couple of shots in me, it’s like, ‘Let’s do this.’”
Delano Smith plays BE. at The Sailing Club, DIMC, on Friday Oct 21. BE.’s doors open at 1PM. Admission for couples and mixed groups is free till 7pm. From 7pm till 11pm, entry is AED 120.