Okay, so that DJ Pierre mix (Parts 1 and 2) that I spotted on the Toronto Mixtape Archive was surprisingly poor. Pierre never hit a memorable groove, a couple of times it seemed someone bumped the tables, and worse there were a few beat matching train-wrecks. That being said, his mix incorporated a few high quality tracks that I hadn’t heard in a long time. One was What is House Muzik?, a DJ Pierre classic.
Another was Green Velvet’s The Preacher Man off of the Velvet Tracks EP. At the time The Preacher Man was startling in that Curtis A. Jones basically ripped of some (probably South Side Chicago) preacher’s sermon and threw it over really hardcore pounding Acid beats and tweaks. And still the most popular game we play…is house!. Whatever, it worked. You can still throw that in a mix today, 16 years after its release, and get people on the floor to scream.
I’m holding on to the somewhat rare transparent green vinyl 12” edition, keeping it in storage. And I’ve got memories of hitting the SF club scene with Cajmere in the early 90’s. We were both grad students at Cal Berkeley and into the burgeoning San Francisco House/Techno scene of the time. He was in Chemical Engineering and bailed out after his master’s to pursue a music career. Turns out to have been a pretty good choice.