Making you dance to a beat that’s pumping,
And once on the floor, spinnin’ and trippin’,
He’s flying up and down the stairs at the Cubby Bear, this skinny dude everyone knows as Vince, racing from the dressing room to the stage and back again, trying to get the damn show on the road. The first act hasn’t arrived yet. Well, it has, but the backup tracks aren’t here, and let’s face it, these days you can’t go on without a show tape.
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Vince is primed. Back in the dressing room, he’s running around slapping high fives, repeating “Yo, dude, man.” He’s got to duck to avoid head-butting a ceiling pipe, this lank Jimmy Walker look-alike in his stone-washed jeans and black leather jacket. He passes out receipts and announces news of more work, if you can call it that. Seems a record company wants them to put together an all-female version of 2 Live Crew. “We’re going to the Shelter to find us some hot girls,” he says. “Then we’re going to take ’em back to the studio and write some slamming music.”
Try to reach Vince the next day at noon, and somebody on the line says, “He’s out cold.” Come by at six, and he’s just getting cranking. He’ll be mixing in the studio most of the night.
The studio, not even a year old, is the creation of Vince and Evelyn Camp, who used to play with him in a duet called Bang Orchestra and is now his business partner. Evi, as she prefers to be called, takes care of the nuts and bolts of their production company, playing resident house mother to these rapping bachelors. (“My entire day was trying to get the dryer functioning, fixing the doorbell, and organizing the contracts that the guys mixed in a drawer with their porno mags and hobby cars.”) She’s a versatile singer-songwriter with Deborah Harry sex appeal, and she’s currently negotiating an album deal with Smash. Vince, on the other hand, is content to play producer.
House music, most recall, got its name from a south-side club called the Warehouse, where DJ Frankie Knuckles was doing a similar thing, altering and remixing disco music right on his console. But it was Vince and his friends who were making records. The original pair soon expanded to three, with Duane Buford, today an independent producer working out of Vince’s basement, playing keyboards. The trio paid Sherman $300 to press their first 12-inch single, called “On and On,” recorded on a four-track cassette deck and etched on a cheap lacquer disc. Blasting it at their parties and taking it on blitzkriegs to underground record stores, they brought in the cash they needed to make more records.
