Bootsy Holler
Randy Jones, sitting in a tree.
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Born 35 years ago in Madison, Wis., Randy Jones is one of Seattle's premier dance-music figureheads, for his work as a producer and remixer, and for the label he runs. Under the name Caro, Jones has released several acclaimed 12-inches over the past half-decade, and last month dropped his first full CD, The Return of Caro, on his own Orac imprint, which has also put out exceptional records by Bruno Pronsato (Silver Cities) and Strategy ("Super Vamp"). Though techno at heart, Return's eight songs venture pretty far afield for straight-up club music, but you'd never mistake it for any other kind of record. Jones, who studied jazz piano in his late teens, layers on keyboards, string samples, and even vocals in ways that feel tentative at first but strengthen with repetition, particularly on "My Little Pony," a 12-inch club hit from late 2004, and the disc-ending "My Little Castle," which moves from a Latinesque feel to a full-on homage to early, "jacking" Chicago house. Jones sat for the Jukebox in early May at the SW offices.
Hercules: "7 Ways to Jack" (1987) from Chicago Trax (Trax)
Randy Jones: It's some Italo type of thing, or something derived from it. [vocal comes in] Oh, it's Hercules. This is an amazing track, one of my favorites.
Seattle Weekly: On the last track on The Return of Caro, "My Little Castle" . . .
Jones: Yeah, there's a little jack interlude on there.
SW: I totally noticed that. When did you first hear this record?
Jones: I think it was actually after I started doing Caro stuff. I was interested in some Chicago house. I had heard some of the [Chicago label] Dance Mania stuff at that point, but I had never heard [this] track. There's a [12-inch] I did called "Città alla Notte," which is me singing in Italian, and it is almost an electro-disco kind of vibe—like, there were lyrics about walking in the street at night, like, you want to dance, but you have nobody to dance with. My friend David in San Francisco said, "Oh, you have to check out Hercules." It would have been right after "Città alla Notte" came out, 2000 or 2001.
SW: So you kind of came to Chicago house in a firsthand way or a secondhand way?
Jones: Well definitely not firsthand. I wasn't at [legendary Chicago house club] the Music Box in 1985. I started to get back into dance music through electro and then kind of found my way back to this stuff more recently. You know—we were dancing, but it was when we were dancing in Madison to some of the more out there DJs, they were into, you know, like [Detroit techno label] Plus 8 stuff and the more interesting acid strains of English house that is ripping off this stuff. But I hadn't really heard of the original Chicago stuff, even when I started doing dancing in Chicago a little bit. I wasn't to the point of identifying individual tracks then, I was kind of more caught up in the music and the scene, you know.
SW: Who were the big DJs at the time in Madison?
Jones: Nick Nice had a residency at the Cardinal Bar, which was the dance hangout for people at the University [of Wisconsin at Madison], and even though the university has 50,000 kids or something, it's like the U of M [Minnesota, in Minneapolis/St. Paul]. There were probably the 100 or 150 people who were really into what became [rave] music crammed into the Cardinal Bar every Saturday.
SW: Were you from Madison, or did you just go to college there?
Jones: I was from Madison. Actually, in '91 I just finished going to school in Minneapolis for a couple years and returned to Madison.
SW: I'm from Minneapolis. What were you studying?
Jones: I was studying art and computer science.
SW: When you're not doing music, do you work with computers?
Jones: I do some intersection of art and computer science, basically. It's visual music. It bleeds over into my job. I'm programming this thing called Jitter with [a] company in San Francisco that Kit Clayton works for, and also Safety Scissors.
SW: Were you already into dance music before college?
Jones: Yeah. I always liked the intersection of electronic stuff with beats. I remember one of the very first things that you could call dance music was Wendy Carlos' beats—that really stuck in my mind. It's called "Geodesic Dance," and it was some weird experiment because most of her music was classical, or classically derived and flowing in that tradition. This is more like a dance piece in 7/4 time or something. I remember just listening to it over and over because it had really weird, tortured analog sounds and pretty striking beats. That was when I was probably 10 or something. There were just a few records that really stuck out.
SW: Were you already thinking that you wanted to make music, or were you more of a fan at that time? Being 10, had you had any musical training?
Jones: Well, my mom was a belly dancer, so she would do Middle Eastern dance, and there'd be guys playing drums and stuff. So we had one of these Middle Eastern drums in the back of our house, and I was actually making tapes where I would play that, and then take this program I had written with a joystick. It was like an audio video game; you could control the tone that was playing in the loop by moving the joystick up or down. But I didn't think of it as making music, really. I didn't think that I was going to be putting records out someday.
