RIP DJ Spank-Spank – your music changed the way people dance

Once you hear certain sounds – really hear them as they’re intended to be heard – they seem to rewire your mind and body. Jimi Hendrix’s guitar, Aretha Franklin’s voice, James Brown’s locked grooves: their effects aren’t just aesthetic or hedonistic, they physically alter listeners who surrender to them, change their stance, attitudes and actions for good. Never was this more true than for the churning modulations of the Roland TB-303 bass line synthesiser, when locked into the relentless four-to-the-floor patterns of acid house. In thousands of dark, strobe-lit basements, millions of people have given themselves up entirely to the sound, and been irrevocably altered by it. And when people change, the world changes, for better or worse. All of which is to say that the music made by Earl Smith Jr, AKA Spanky or DJ Spank-Spank – whose death was announced by Phuture on Wednesday – is among the most important ever made.

As he tells it, his breakthrough came, perhaps appropriately, in the small hours. Speaking on a panel at the Amsterdam Dance Event conference in 2010, Smith described how in 1986 he and DJ Pierre had been playing around with the TB-303 he had bought on Pierre’s recommendation. They found themselves frustrated and unable to get to grips with it, and eventually Pierre went home to bed while Smith kept tinkering. It had reached 4am that night, he explained, when “it just came out of nowhere. One minute I was just fooling around, trying to understand this damn machine, the next this unbelievable noise came out of it.” He rang Pierre, who apparently was spectacularly grumpy about being woken up, but did eventually come over, and the rest is music history. From this “unbelievable noise”, together with Herbert “Herb J” Jackson, they created the tune Acid Tracks, had it mixed by Marshall Jefferson, gave it to Ron Hardy to play at his Music Box club, became Phuture, and changed the world through acid house.

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It’s vitally important to note, though, that for all his modest talk of “fooling around” and “coming out of nowhere”, this wasn’t the simple happenstance that music legend would have it. As Pierre is very keen on emphasising, acid house wasn’t an accident: Phuture weren’t dumb kids, they were skilled musicians who loved the house music of their home city and spotted that the 303 could add something to it. It was Pierre’s judgement in spotting the machine’s possibilities and Smith’s tenacity in working out how to misuse it that realised the potential and birthed an entire genre. Smith was also the rhythmic virtuoso of the trio: “Spanky on the drum machine was an absolute master,” Pierre told Ransom Note recently. “[He] did all the drum programming on our tracks.”

You only have to listen to the track Spank Spank, essentially a Smith solo piece, from the 1988 12-inch We Are Phuture, to understand his sophistication and restraint. There’s no “acid line” or synthesiser of any sort, no buildups or breakdowns, just a drum machine and a couple of tiny vocal snippets repeated relentlessly, yet just shifting enough to warp minds and bodies and cause complete dancefloor meltdowns. It’s the sound of Chicago house at its rawest, simplest and cleverest, and remains a jaw-droppingly beautiful piece of sonic design to this day.

Smith’s death is a tragedy. While so many of the black and Latino pioneers of house music have been forgotten as white Europeans make sizable fortunes from stealing their work, Phuture at least continued working. As well as making dozens of great records by himself as Spank Spank, Smith was the one constant in a shifting lineup that included Pierre again shortly before his death. He toured globally as a DJ and with Phuture’s live shows. He was much beloved in the dance music community, and well known for his generosity and good humour, as well as his enduring love for the music that he did more than almost anyone else to invent. We often say people can live on through their creations, but there can’t be as many people whose work is hardwired into the bodies and lives of as many people as his. The legacy of Earl Smith Jr and Phuture, 30 years on from his 4am discovery, is as vital and fertile now as it has ever been.