How did you get the acid sound out there? I can’t give enough credit to Ron Hardy because once we finished it we were trying to figure out who would play this. We thought about all the DJs in Chicago that might be open to it and we could only come up with one, and that was Ron Hardy. He was the guy we listened to; we knew he played a lot of different sounds. Like, Frankie Knuckles—amazing DJ but he was strictly house, strictly piano, strings. So we took it to Ron, and Ron said he liked it and then, as the story goes, he dropped it four times. The first two times, people were like “What the heck is this?” The third time people were like, “Okay, this sounds alright, I guess.” Then the fourth time, people went crazy. So he literally broke the record. He could have played it twice and been like, forget it, these people don’t get it. But he got it, and he had the vision that it was something. So really, he’s very important. Almost as important as we are in the creation of acid and acid house, because he broke it and he made it a sound that the whole city of Chicago was singing.

The people named it: “Ron Hardy has this acid track." Everyone would be buzzing, asking what it was, including ourselves because it wasn’t called “Acid Tracks” when we gave it to him. So we were like clamoring to find out what was this new track. One day my friend said “I got a copy, I got a copy of Ron Hardy’s acid track!” And I said, “Let me hear it!” and when I heard it, I said, “That’s not Ron Hardy’s track! That’s our track! We made that track!” And he was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me! You didn’t make this track, this is Ron Hardy’s track.” I pulled out my cassette tape, I said, “I’ll prove it to you!” I always had my cassette tape with me, and I put it in, and then we played it and he heard the track from the beginning and he realized that we made it. I said, since everybody knows that’s the acid track, we’re just going to change the title to just “Acid Tracks”. And so that’s how that came about. And that was in ’85, but it didn’t come out until like ’86 or something. It was buzzing in the clubs for a while, but we didn’t know how to make a record, how to put it out at that time; we didn’t know anything about those things. Marshall Jefferson was performing “Move Your Body” at the Power House [in Chicago] and I wrote a note on a piece of paper—we were in the front of the stage—and I reached my hand up and I’m yelling for Marshall. He didn’t hear me, but [house producer] Curtis McClain was near the stage and he came over and grabbed the paper from me. It said: My name is DJ Pierre, I’m with the group called Phuture, and we made track called “Acid Tracks.” Can you help us get a record deal? [Laughs] I wrote my phone number on there. I kid you not, the very next day Marshall called me. There was a note on the fridge saying Marshall Jefferson called—my mom would put notes on the fridge—and I was thinking, who’s kidding around with me? But when I called, of course it was Marshall Jefferson and the rest is history in that regard.

How did the acid name come about? The reason I thought it was called acid was because I’d heard of acid jazz before and I'd heard of acid rock. I tend to have a very innocent way of looking at things, like sometimes things will go right over my head. I was like, acid makes a gritty sound. Like you know, you have battery acid, you’d always see the sign “acid” and then they show somebody pouring something out of a tube onto metal and be melting it. And I thought, okay, this thing is gritty. It’s like acidic! It’s a tough sound! So that’s what I thought. I was never exposed to drugs, I don’t drink, I don’t do any of that stuff, you know. So, I didn’t think of it as a drug. I didn’t even know there was a drug called acid. So, when I heard why it was really called that, I immediately wrote a track called “Your Only Friend,” to put on that same record, to kind of dispel the fact that Phuture is in support of the drug culture like that. I know you’ve heard that song, it went, I can make you cry for me, I can make you fight for me, I’ll make you steal for me, I can make you kill for me, and in the end I can be your only friend. Basically I was saying, listen, you’re doing this stuff and eventually your life will be torn down and all you’ll have is yourself and that drug. At the end of that song, I go, Take a whiff of me you’ll feel high, take a sniff of me, you’ll feel fine, a shot of me, I’ll make you fly, too much of me, I’ll make you die. I was just trying to explain something. But it didn’t even get across like that, people literally, in Chicago, would go get their drugs when that song came on. And I was thinking, Oh crap, you guys, I’m trying to tell you something.



