BILL LASWELL : Well, I mean the first record was Future Shock so the music scene was changing pretty drastically as we did those three records. But the first one being Future Shock was sort of the beginning, a little bit the initiation of hip-hop culture into the mainstream and that influence was quite strong in the concept of Future Shock. The other records a lot of electronic music and hip-hop had begun to evolve so it was becoming sort of part of the flow.
BOB BELDEN: I remember when I first got here, there were break-dancers and there were these guys who were making drum sounds with their mouths.
BILL LASWELL : Human beat boxes.
BOB BELDEN : And I always thought that was very hip.
BILL LASWELL : Absolutely. And I did too. Right after Herbie and I did a record for Sly & Robbie where we hired a guy who was then unknown who became known later as Doug E. Fresh. So I thought that was always a great rhythm idea.
BOB BELDEN : Were there places to play? I mean in New York at the time?
BILL LASWELL : Not really. When we put those records together, we used to go a lot of the time to the Roxy which was I think on 18th or 19th Street on the West Side.So I would go there a lot and the head DJ there was Afrika Bambaataa and he had a disciple called Africa Islam. And inside of that crew was also a person called DST and Grand Master Flash and everybody would work there, and do their thing. And we would go there every night and just absorb what was happening with that particular culture, I remember even before we did the track, the initial two tracks with Herbie, we took Herbie to the Roxy. And Bambaataa was DJ-ing and I don’t think he pays a lot of attention to what was going on with the music, but he was in the environment where it was all sort of happening.
BOB BELDEN : It was a social scene.
BILL LASWELL : Yeah, that's right. And a lot of people were gravitating towards it. It seemed like something new was happening again in music.
BOB BELDEN : Because the '70s were kind of – the fusion era peaked in about '75 or '76.
BILL LASWELL : '75, yeah.
BOB BELDEN : And then it got predictable. Everybody was playing sambas.
BILL LASWELL : Yeah, it got really dull.
BOB BELDEN : Tell me your early history.
BILL LASWELL : I was born in Illinois and I grew up in Michigan, and I came to New York from Michigan. I really came from smaller towns. I was in and out of Detroit for the experience, but I lived in Ann Arbor and Lansing and different small towns. I never spent a great deal of time living in Detroit.
BOB BELDEN : So what part of Illinois are you from?
BILL LASWELL : Salem, Illinois. It's south of Chicago and in Michigan I lived in Albion and Jackson and Ann Arbor and Lansing.
BOB BELDEN : Ann Arbor is a hip town.
BILL LASWELL : That's where I learned a lot of stuff. And then I came from Lansing, which was a college town, to New York in '76 or '77, and that's when I first arrived in New York – from Michigan.
BOB BELDEN : So you started hanging out with a circle of players that have sort of become famous now.
BILL LASWELL : In New York. Yeah, I mean gradually. I mean I came to New York and I wanted to meet musicians to play with and I would just basically – we had a loft on 30th Street, which we didn't realize when we moved in. I was with a guitar player and a roadie. And we kind of moved in and we didn’t even know that that was a rehearsal block. So everybody was there. So in our building was Steve Gadd and the Ramones and all kinds of different music – Crown Heights Affair. There was even a night when Tony Williams' "Lifetime" rehearsed there. And we started to meet people by being on the street. And gradually that developed into meeting people that managed bands and booked clubs and they just sort of evolved into the experience that is still going on. I met people like Arto Lindsay and James Chance and gradually from different connections met Ornette Coleman and Blood Ulmer and people. And it all just evolved very quickly.
BOB BELDEN : So when the opportunity came to work on the Herbie Hancock record, was it one of these things where he called you up and said, "Hey, let’s do it?"
BILL LASWELL : No, it was a guy called Tony Meilandt.
BOB BELDEN : Oh yes, the legend.
BILL LASWELL : The legend of Tony Meilandt….and he's still alive. But Tony knew I had worked with Brian Eno and people like that. And he connected that with also the kind of street scene that I was working with. At the time, we had kind of a floating band that would play clubs and we would play in lofts. It was with like Philip Wilson and Olu Dara and Henry Threadgill, and we would just put together groups and play in clubs and lofts. And Tony made the connection between that and the fact I had just worked with Brian Eno and David Byrne on a record called My Life In the Bush of Ghosts. And he thought that was very hip and he came to New York and I was working with a guy called Roger Trilling who at the time was managing Blood Ulmer. And Tony came in and he wanted to make Herbie's next thing very radically hip and he thought that I could help. And he looked up the possibility of doing two tracks for Herbie s next record. And he met us in a club and we said, "Okay, we agree." It all happened very quickly.
BOB BELDEN : So around this particular time, it seemed like what they called the jazz community hated this kind of music.
BILL LASWELL : I don't know what is the jazz community, but I assume that everyone – the kind of music that we ended up doing was more based on influences from Kratwerk and Mantronix and electronic music mixed with funk music. And I don’t imagine anyone with any respectable jazz background could possibly tolerate it. We knew that but we were trying to do what we thought – at the time, we thought it was just experimental. We had no idea of the commerciality of it.
BOB BELDEN : But do you believe that at the basic core of music is rhythm and soul?
BILL LASWELL : Well, the basic core of a particular kind of sensibility is that. And then there are other people who are here, more ethereal or melodic kind of textures. But yes, rhythm if it hits somebody a certain way is undeniable. And we were dealing with a very stiff approach to rhythm coming out of – for lack of a better word – a black music concept. But we approached it much more in the way of sequencing and repetition in the way of Kraftwerk and later what Mantronix did. But it was a contrast to the feel and then to the persistent repetition. But we were conscious of a feel. Like even in a track like "Rockit", it's a repetition of sequencers, but it's also Daniel Ponce who plays the bata. It's coming from a Cuban background and then the bass line that I used was based on a melody from a record of Pharoah Sanders named Tauhid. So it's a big kind of fusion. It wasn’t just meant to be a stiff record. It was a conscious contrasting fusion.
BOB BELDEN : I'm from a hard core, straight ahead jazz background, but man, when I first started hearing this, I said, "This is the sound of the future." Because I also studied out of a Schoenberg and Berg and Henze school of modern classical composers. And they were really experimenting with sound.
BILL LASWELL : Of course.
BOB BELDEN : It's got to be interesting. And so to me, it had more interest than doing straight-ahead stuff.
BILL LASWELL : Again, a lot went into it. It wasn't just the manipulation of technology as in sequence. There was a lot of cross referencing and there was a lot of contrast, as in the Daniel Ponce vs. a programmed congo or the references that come from Pharoah and different people. I mean when creating "Rockit", the references were a couple of hip-hop tracks that existed with vocal phrases, using vocoders and a little bit of Manu DiBango in terms of phrasing.
BOB BELDEN : You told me an interesting story of how you realized that "Rockit" was on its way.
BILL LASWELL : Right.
BOB BELDEN : Would you care to repeat that?
BILL LASWELL : You mean when we were leaving California?
BOB BELDEN : You said you played it in a music store.
BILL LASWELL : Yeah, it actually was a store that sold stereo equipment. We had mixed the record very quickly and we mixed "Rockit" in about an hour and a half, and we were leaving California and we stopped at some friend’s places on the way out. We had no conscious idea that we had done anything of any value. We were just doing what we did daily. We had a cassette and we did stop on the way to the airport. We stopped at a store that sold sort of high-end stereo equipment. We were just at that point starting to make money. So we were looking to buy stereo equipment. I was very curious about speakers and amplifiers. And we had some time. So we stopped along the way. And in the store we said we were interested in these speakers. And the guy would play like a Kansas record. And I would say, "I can't tell from that. We need to hear something that we know about." So I said, "Play this cassette." He played two tracks that we had just mixed. It was one called "Rockit" and one called "Earth Beat". And they played them and as they were playing them, there was kind of a chilling experience and I turned around and there were like literally fifty kids in the store just demanding to know what that was. And then we had this feeling that we had done something. Something had happened. It was confirmed at that moment. We had no question at that moment that we had done something that would translate. Doesn't mean it’s good, or innovative or whatever, just it would translate.
BOB BELDEN : It was, in a sense, innovative in that it shocked everybody who first heard it. And people loved the thing. Everybody talked about that record.
BILL LASWELL : It was the timing. It was really good timing.
BOB BELDEN : Because I know rock 'n roll had just passed through the demise of the punk era.
BILL LASWELL : Right. That's true.
BOB BELDEN : Had you heard Herbie's R&B record prior to "Rockit"?
BILL LASWELL : I had heard everything prior to that. Yeah.
BOB BELDEN : And do you know Light Me Up or Magic Window?
BILL LASWELL : Magic Window, and I think they even tried a little bit on Magic Window to reach out – Tony Meilandt again – I think they had corralled Adrian Belew maybe, and some other people. It was based on probably Tony listening to Talking Heads or something. He was making an effort to reach out a little bit. The video helped a great deal to push it over.
interview from July 29, 1999