The Larry Tee Party: Mark Murphy Interviews The Godfather Of Electroclash!
It was a movement as valid as house or techno and was the first to herald the return of the 80s...and how funny that it was dance music that brought that era back!
The man who sits himself firmly at the throne as the Godfather of Electroclash is Larry Tee. He was the man who invented the name and even trademarked it. He has also seen it all from the heady Club Kids days of the late eighties though the drug-hazed 90s to the electroclash boom in early 2000.
On the way, he became one of the biggest DJs in New York (one of his parties featured in the movie Party Monster) and he went on to co-write the worldwide smash hit single 'Supermodel (You Better Work)' for close friend RuPaul.
Tee has also just released his debut long-player called 'Club Badd' on Ultra records which features some interesting collaborations with gossip queen Perez Hilton, Princess Superstar, Princess Julia, Christopher Just and others.
He's definitely had a life. This is just some of it.
You’ve been around nearly as long as house music. Has clubland always been your second home away from home? Tell us about your first clubbing experience?
Well I have been around BEFORE house music, I am afraid to say. I totally chose the profession of DJ/songwriter because I wanted the best access to music, drugs and boys...and that was that. However, after being clean for 12 years, deciding boys are too much trouble, music remains my connecting point for staying in clubs. My first clubbing experience was probably Big Daddy's in 'Hotlanta', Georgia when I was 16 or so when I would dance around to pre-disco funk groups like Cameo, Wild Cherry and Brick - a little Rolling Stones and Hot Stuff thrown in for good measure...there was even some dancey-southern-boogie-rock-stuff that I enjoyed. I would drink Black Russians until I couldn't see, but would somehow drive home afterward...lucky I'm alive.
Tell us your musical history. What were you listening to in your bedroom when your voice started to break?
Disco arrived as puberty arrived in the Tee household and I remember when KC & The Sunshine Band album came out and every party you would go to, they would play one side, flip it over and then play the other side...and repeat all night. It was the only music that sounded like this and everybody loved it! But I have to admit, I also had a soft spot for Elton John when my voice was breaking. But I would get all the disco and rap 12"s from a postal salvage shop for about $1 each and would dance around my living room like a madman...I would die to have a video of that NOW! (hehehehehe).
But my history was to enjoy something until it was tired, then move on to the next dance sound. After 'Menergy' by Patrick Cowley (white HINRG) took over the gay discos, I headed over to the new wave club 688 and saw live acts like Iggy Pop and the Psychedelic Furs and danced to Pylon and the B-52s (which the band I was in at the time had produced...no, I did NOT produce it!! I was 18 at the time) (Footnote: there are a lot bad info online that actually says Larry produced the band). Then it was new wave and house and running my own club called the Celebrity Club which was Atlanta's version of the legendary Pyramid Club in NYC...trashy, wild and musically progressive. We had the Black Crowes, The Butthole Surfers and every Athens band that was sick and twisted at that time...then, I moved to NYC...
The Club Kids questions probably always come up. Were you part of the inner circle when you established yourself in NYC or was that scene imploding? Your thoughts on Michael Alig? Was the whole downward spiral specifically based around drugs?
Well, the name Disco 2000 was actually made up by me, as opposed to the script of the Party Monster movie and I was the MC and co-founder with Michael Alig. Michael didn't take drugs when I first met him, and even though he was annoying, he was in no way a killer. I have sympathy for Michael because it was the addiction that took him to such a dark place. But I also have no interest in re-creating Disco 2000 or doing parties with him again. I hope he gets out and does something good with his energy.
What is your favourite impression of him?
I loved the time he rented a big blowup jumping tube for kids during one of his birthday parties and let everyone jump around on it. His mother got on it and after the first bounce, her tube dress was rolled up around her waist with her tits out for the world to see. She had a hard time getting them back in and rolling the dress back out and of course, we did laugh when he put dog food out on a buffet table at one of his parties But the laughter stopped when you got a swig of his piss-champagne. I can only imagine what was in his urine....eeeek!
You did Disco 2000 with him. These are crazy times. How crazy did it get?
Well, the craziest was when a 250LB woman got naked in the hot body contest and a little cowboy got up on her back and started riding her around. It was funny until she got to the edge of the stage and nearly fell into the crowd. They dispersed faster than you can say 'James St James' to avoid being crushed to death. That was pretty normal come to think of it.
Will you catch up when he gets out of prison?
I have written to him and I know what he is up to. I will probably run into him if he is ever released.
Was Love Machine before or after Disco 2000? Tell us a bit about that?
Love Machine was BEFORE Disco 2000 and it was a weekly I did with RuPaul, Lady Bunny and Kenny Kenny. Every week we had an amazing live performance that was dreadful but always memorable, like maybe Angie Bowie singing a high energy song or a Russian socialite doing a US/Soviet dance routine with some trashy 'voguers'. It was probably the first mainstream night to really embrace the 'voguers' and it was the time when ecstasy arrived. God, I can remember some amazing Almodovar after-screening parties where Linda, Christy and Naomi would all stand in a supermodel cluster and that's maybe where I got the idea for the 'Supermodel' song I wrote for RuPaul. Each week New Order, Sinead O'Connor, Tom Hanks or someone weird was there. There really wasn't that many parties in NYC to go to at that time because AIDS had wiped out a whole generation of club people and promoters and DJs.
Drugs has always been the evil twin sister of dance music. You talk about it openly. What are your impressions of the late 90s after the Club Kids dissolved?
Well, the drugs got ugly. It went from free drugs at Limelight (NYC club) to people scavenging for heroin to replace their Ketamine that dried up in the John Gotti Jr bust...to overdoses and clubs not wanting any messed-up people coming in. However, there was still so many drugs going on at the big clubs, but everyone tried really hard to make it look like that wasn't the case.
I love how dance music re-invents itself every decade. That’s why it’s exciting and that’s why electroclash was exciting. What was your first experience of it and why did you need to be involved?
Well, at the end of the 90s, I had just gotten clean and needed to find music that still inspired me. I was playing the bad gay house of the Cher, Madonna, Amber era and hated it! So I started investigating in the underground record shops...remember them? (That's us, Larry). They were like the blogs of the late 90s...anyways, I was dragged to a Fischerpooner show by a friend in recovery and was blown away by the dance spectacle that was staged all around the crowd at the Gavin Brown Gallery. Afterward, everyone pushed me towards Casey Spooner and the FS crew to see if there was something I could do to help them get attention, which at the time seemed pretty ludicrous to me because I was just struggling to stay clean and get my life back together. But after they did a show for me at my party at the Pyramid Club, I took Landmark Education and decided to do the Electroclash Festival as my course project. It was two weeks after 9-11 so I lost $80,000 on it...but everyone came, and my party blew up in Brooklyn which allowed me to pay off my loan, and it was the start of a new life...a big beautiful disaster...hehehe. The early Fischerpooner dance performances were so beautiful they would make me cry.
You’re famous for inventing the word. How did you come up with it?
As I mentioned, I was going to put on a festival as a Landmark Education project featuring all the alternative style electronic acts that I had recently started to enjoy and I needed a name for it. We toyed with names like 'electro-wave'...too 80s, and 'electroclash'...so I asked Cindy Green from Fischerspooner which one of those two would she choose...and Electroclash it was. We both agreed that it was a clash of different sounds and that it sounded new and exciting put together in that way.
What are your thoughts on its historical spot in dance music and are you looking forward to playing the Electroclash 4000 Festivals in ten years time? (Whoever’s putting them on, you’ll be the first DJ they go for! You can charge a fortune!)
Its historical spot will probably be a more respected spot than it was given at the time, seeing as the artists have all kept going pretty strongly with their franchises like Peaches, Tiga, Kittin, Hell, Felix, Ladytron, Fischerpooner, etc...all still doing the business.
Also, could you imagine a Gaga without electroclash? I will gladly DJ at the Electroclash Festival, but I suspect I will have to throw it like I did the previous ones...and I never had time to DJ because I was so busy making everyone happy. Maybe I will just skip it and do the EU festie circuit instead!! ;)
Now onto your music. 'Club Badd' is out. I can’t believe this is your first long-player. Why?
Yeah, it's my debut long-player under my name, though I did an album with WIT and tons of songs like Avenue D's 'Do I Look Like A Slut', 'Supermodel' by RuPaul (which has sold 4 million copies), and songs for tons of other artists from Little Annie to Shontelle. I couldn't help but notice that the artists with the name on the record got paid and I have to start thinking about that! I made a lot of money for other people and was not being acknowledged for my contributions financially. Though, OK, I haven't done badly.
Listening to the disc, electro is still firmly at the core. How would you explain your music?
Well, certainly electro is still in the mix, but to me everything has to continue to change for dance music to survive. I think this is a lot funkier than electroclash or electro, so to speak and having the help of Herve, Bart B More and Afrojack hasn't really hurt the project either. I am a lucky man.
Amanda Lepore guests (she just led the Mardi Gras here) amongst others. Are they all friends?
Are who all friends? Amanda is lovely and is friendly with everyone, but I am not sure everyone on my album knows everyone else. I do like to think they would all get along beautifully. But I purposefully chose people from around the world to do different things on my album and not sure whether the straight bad-boy dubsteppy grime scene producer, Herve, or the equally serious str8 dude Afrojack, would really LOVE to spend much time with Amanda Lepore and Tobell von Cartier. Though I should definitely try to get them all together to see...hehehehehe. I don't care either way, really. I want everyone involved on my CDs.
Perez Hilton seems like a logical choice to guest on ‘My Penis’. How did that happen?
Perez Hilton emailed me to get an mp3 of Amanda's 'My Pussy' and then suggested that we try to do a track together. He kept singing 'My Pussy My Pussy My Pussy' over and over so I suggested he do a version called 'My Penis'...and it turned out hysterical! Watch the cartoon video if you get a change made my Michael Mooris, one of my favorite video makers ever.
What’s the next big sound in dance music?
Predicting the next big thing in electronic music is impossible and if I tried, I would get beaten with the electroclash stick again, I'm afraid. But I like things that sound super dirty and surprising and shredded, but has a warm bottom-end that doesn't take your head off in a large night club soundsystem. With the internet to distribute the music quicker, there is so many opportunities for visionary new producers to start something new and exciting overnight!
Finally, will Larry Tee be clubbing when he’s 80?
Yes, I will still be out looking at what the kids are doing when I am 80, but who knows if there will be any nightclubs as we know them by then. We might all be dancing to individual headphones each with different music sets on the same dancefloor...in a mall somewhere...or on an air-space floating hangar...yeah, I will be there...
So will I Larry. So will I.
Murphy.
DO I LOOK LIKE A SLUT, the song. The lirics and the music is by mikey lamar no LARRY T
Posted by: ANDREA D | March 21, 2010 at 02:36 PM
Hey Andrea. As far as I can see after some research online, he did have something to do with it, co-composing and producing it. These are his exact words in the interview and I don't think he actually says he wrote the track.
But thank you for the comments. It does make us double check everything.
Mark.
Posted by: Mark | March 22, 2010 at 02:02 PM