We're proud to welcome at Soulcom one of the all times best House artists, Jere McAllister, who, with simplicity, give us his own vision about one side of the House music history.

“I had heard that my neighborhood was once a very nice, mostly Jewish, community, but once the Black folks started moving in … you know what happened next. Then there was the flight of the “well-to-do” Blacks to the suburbs as the promises of integration and a better life wooed them away, leaving behind the people that couldn’t afford, for various reasons, to get out. The results were the kind of conditions that inspired some of the best, Hip Hop artists, such as Public Enemy, to speak out about the marginalization of people in these, circumstantially created, “ghettos”. However, early Hip Hop (and now the direction the new is taking), before PE, Tribe, etc, was very unappealing to those of us that were of the “making it out” mentality. It may have been very entertaining to a lot of people who were not really a part of the culture (suburbanites, etc), or had no dreams of elevation, but when you grew up in it, and you wanted better, you recognized the characters that they were portraying, and glamorizing, and you knew that in reality these weren’t not really positive or glamorous images. It was too much like moving backwards to the “Blaxploitation” that we had just gotten wise to and moved away from. When you grew up in these neighborhoods, if you had any ambition, or a “good” family, you didn’t want to be a “thug” (or street-minded), that was the way to end up being stuck in these conditions. You were trying to get out. The House music scene was my first, deeply moving, experience with the idea, and hope, of escaping, of getting out.

I got my first taste of the House scene through some of the older “club kids”, in my neighborhood that had started going to an underground club, downtown, originally called US Studios, but known by most as the Warehouse, or “The House” for short. One of these people was Lono Brazil. Lono was one of the “flyest” brothers in the neighborhood. Always well dressed, in an urban preppie style, similar to what Kanye tries to sport now. Wearing the polo style shirts, jeans, sweaters, etc, and always with the scent of Polo cologne preceding and following him, all of which was very urban chic, at the time (funny how things come and go around). He was known to hang with the “Downtown” crowd of models, actors, artist, and generally sophisticated people that were the types to frequent clubs like the Warehouse, in those days. It wasn’t uncommon for him to have some beautiful, model looking, woman picking him up or dropping him off in the hood. A sight which made us younger male hood citizens say, yes that’s what I want to be like.

Something else that Lono always had was the infamous “Frankie Tapes”. Mix tapes, a lot of times recorded live at the Warehouse, from the Godfather of House himself, Frankie Knuckles, whom he had become friends with. He could always be counted on to be rocking them whenever he was in the hood (sometimes even letting us borrow them to make copies). This would cause us to stop, as we passed his house, to listen to the music and hear stories of his adventures in this glamorous world that we had yet to experience, the world outside the hood.

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