4. Sunny AdeSyncro System Movement
I studied ethnomusicology at University of Texas. Nothing will put you off music like that combination of music and academia – fuck that. Everyone was so square. The only thing halfway avant-garde they could talk about was John Cage. It was always ‘that sounds like Tom Waits, or ‘John Cage’, just those two. I was like, how am I walking into an ethnomusicology department to learn, and I know more shit than you? It drove me nuts. But I got really into African music and King Sunny Ade. I love the cover of this, and the never-ending psychedelia, particularly that track that’s 18-minutes long, and there’s a pedal steel player on this too. Musically, it had such an effect.
Around this time I started going to African clubs in Houston, and I found a great African store selling cassettes, which is where I found out about the African music clubs. The doors to these clubs would open at 10pm, but no one really arrived till 1am, and there were stacks of TV sets playing African music videos in the corner. A year later or something I was spending the night with a friend down in Houston, and for a good five years or so I’d been collecting all these cassettes, and I had them in a bag in the car, hundreds of cassettes. And my car got stolen.
Oh no, not again…
It was found the next day and had been set on fire, completely trashed. And they stole my bag of cassettes. I was devastated.
There was one song by a Congolese group called Extra Musica and they had a song called ‘Etat Major’, it got played a couple of times a night, it was the song that everyone wanted to hear. I noticed a poster for them playing in Dallas, I couldn’t fucking believe it. So I got in contact and I asked if they were going to be coming to Houston. The woman running it was trying to bring over African bands to Texas, specifically Dallas. She said they were not coming to Houston, but she needed an assistant, and hired me to help promote this gig on New Year’s Eve in Dallas. So I started working for her, but I just really wanted to get up to Dallas and hang with the band.
I was so fucking broke around this time, but there was always photographers in classifieds that would pay you like $100 an hour just to photograph you – a little bit of nude modelling. I kept it a secret from my friends and I did a three-hour session before Extra Musica, just to get the cash to stay in the same hotel they were staying in. It was two of the best days ever. This group – about 15 Congolese guys – came over with their entourage, and we went to the Golden Corral, which is like the shittiest cheapest buffet, $10 all you can eat because there were so many of us. And they were obsessed with Dallas, the TV show, so I went with them to where Dallas was filmed, and I took so many photos for them, them lying on the beds from the TV show, and they wanted to go to JR Ewing’s office. And then the music that night was just complete heaven. But the thing that kicked it off was that Sunny Ade.
