Liquid Pop Eric Interview
This is an interview I did with LPEric back in 2004 for a site that is now defunct.
How did you get into electronic music?
I first got into electronic music like anybody else. Electronic drum machines and synthesizers just started making their way into pop music. Disco was always electronic, but it was more of an underground gay thing. It wasn’t really accepted. The backlash towards it in the late 70s and early 80s (“Disco sucks!”) was more of a political vehicle because it was gay music. Gay society wasn’t accepted, and not that I’m gay, but being older now and seeing it for what it was, it was a huge backlash.
Dance music sort of fell off, but the instruments stayed. The drum machines, the synthesizers, that all stayed. People started making music. Blondie came out with “Rapture” using a drum machine. Things started going in that direction.
Then, of course, in the mid 80s, out of Chicago came house music. Then techno music comes out of Detroit, and from there it started moving its way into pop culture. I’d listen to MTV for hours trying to find music that I liked.
My first true experience with electronic music was so hokey at the time. When “James Brown is Dead” made it on the radio, that had already been being played for like a year and a half. I heard it and was like, “Yeah, yeah, this is kind of what I like.”
So I go start looking for stuff, and I found the Lords of Acid, and Praga Khan and all these sorts of rave acts. Technically, when they first started out, they were rave acts, but they started crossing over. You started hearing their songs on the radio, like every night. I forgot what the radio station was in New York. It’s 103.5 now, but back when I was growing up, it was something else [Ed. note: the radio station was The Beat of New York 103.5 WKTU]. But at midnight, they used to start playing house music, dance music, and that’s when I started getting into it.
I should actually back up. In 8th grade, freestyle was big, and that was a lot of drum machines and synthesizers. I liked that, that was danceable. Eighth grade, I used to go out to clubs and see everybody doing all the club dances, Roger Rabbit and other stuff, and that’s when I really started liking electronic music.
Then high school was a really weird time for me. I was going through shit with my family and my friends, just a lot of stuff going on in my life. I never really had anybody to hang out with until I met these people who were into electronic music and they took me out to the Limelight. This was around ’94, and it was already over its peak in a way, on its way down. I wasn’t able to go out every weekend. Sneaking out back then wasn’t exactly easy.
Were these the same people that took you to your first party?
No, this was high school. My first real party was down here and wasn’t in a club. It was actually in a venue. I didn’t start hanging out with those people until the end of my junior year and my senior year. They were hardcore party people. Back then, eh, drugs were cool, but it wasn’t really my thing. I didn’t like partying like that, but you just get wrapped into it and there’s nothing you can do about it.
So after high school, I really had no direction. I joined the military in February of my senior year, went off to the Navy, but I still liked electronic music. When I was down in Memphis, TN going through school for 8 months, I started going out in Memphis to this one club called 616 and this one club called St. Mongo’s Planet. This guy, his last name was Mongo, for some reason he tried running for mayor of Memphis. He was a real wackjob, but the club was cool. They played rave music, electronic music, so we used to go there and it was off-limits. We weren’t allowed there, and we almost got busted a couple of times.
But, at 616 after midnight, this room downstairs used to open and that’s where they used to play real electronic music. That’s where I heard the song that to this day still defines me going out, because when I heard it, I used to dance so hard that I couldn’t walk up stairs the next day. It wasn’t even organized dancing, it was just moving my body to the music. It was “Plastic Dreams” by Jaydee. I used to love that song. That to me defines a huge part of my life, because when I hear the constant synths, it’s like, “Yeah, this is what I’m into.”
So we went every Saturday until we graduated, and then I got stationed in Philly. I went out with the people to find clubs, and they took me to Outback Jack’s, which was this club up in the Northeast. On Sunday nights, they used to have electronic music. This guy Robbie Tronco was spinning there. He’s a big producer now, but back then he was just a regular run-of-the-mill club DJ. I met this girl named Chrissy, who eventually got me into liquid. Her crew and the people I started hanging out with took me to my first party called Do It, December 15, 1995, in the middle of a blizzard and there was like ten feet of snow. Awesome party.
That was my first party, and from then on, I hung out with them until they pretty much got out of the scene for whatever reason—for working, for drug problems, or whatever. That was the thing about the scene, man. I mean yeah, it was happy go-lucky, but you partied, man, and you had to know how to party. Some people just have no concept of moderation, and that was the biggest thing. You start doing all this crazy shit, and rumors get out about the parties. The local government gets involved because somebody’s kid OD’d or wrapped their car around something after a party, and he happens to be one of the commissioner’s sons or daughters. “Oh daddy, I’m sorry! Raving is bad.” That pretty much, in my opinion, is the catalyst that started the whole crackdown. People’s kids were doing it, including people’s kids whose parents were in power. It’s like picking up a rock watching all the bugs take off. It was something they didn’t know was there. Yeah, you see a rock, but you don’t know what’s going on underneath it, you know what I mean? They open it up and it’s like, “whoa.” And after that man…
How was your dancing right before you did liquid?
My dancing was a combination of what came naturally to me, what was comfortable to me. Certain steps that I saw, like, I never saw any popping. I’d seen body waves on TV, you know, Wild Style and stuff like that, but I couldn’t do any of that. It was dancing at its most raw, basic form, like moving your body to music. I was able to stay on beat, and I knew how to do some of the club dances, but it was raw. It wasn’t refined.
Then I found liquid, and yeesh, you shoulda seen me. That and the rave skip. Ravers were really big into that, and really good at it. That was one of the first rave dances that I learned, the rave skip. They called it the running man, you know, the Nordic Track, but it wasn’t even as gay as the Nordic Track. It was different, these kids moved their feet—left, right, out—and there was a kick you had to do with it. There was a hop to it when you did it. It wasn’t just like running in place like the Nordic track; you actually kick your feet. I still do some of it now. It really taught me how to control my weight from bouncing around because you gotta maintain your balance, or else you’ll fall forward or fall back. That was probably the first real rave dance that I learned, the party skip. Doing liquid real basic with the hands, I used to try and do it at the same time.
Yeah, man, it was something that just totally consumed my life. I was just doing it everywhere, driving in the car, etc. It just looked so unreal, how can I do that? From there, slowly people just started falling off. This person wouldn’t come out anymore, and that person wouldn’t come out anymore. Eventually, I was off by myself, and I met a whole other group of people from this other club called Bill’s in the Northeast. It was the biggest, guido, hoochie-momma club. Not hoochie-momma like we have today, I can’t explain it, but if you’re from the Northeast Philadelphia area between ’95 and ’98, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Big-ass hoop ear-rings, straight Northeast, I can’t even explain it. But everybody used to go there, and they played freestyle, hip-hop, rave music, everything. I think that was the first time I heard Josh Wink’s “Higher State of Consciousness” when it first came out, it was crazy. That’s where we used to go every Saturday, because there wasn’t always a party. It isn’t like now, where there’s rave music in clubs. It wasn’t accepted, as far as the club scene.
But eventually, there were clubs that opened up in Philly, 14 or 15. Yo Man parties were very famous. Fever, the old Fever on Walnut Street downstairs, dirty as hell on a Thursday night, where they actually played the real deal music. Then there was Skyline. I never really went in there just because it was a real bad crack den. Egypt finally got on the bandwagon. They had a Wednesday night party called Pulse, I think, but they actually played really good music. In the back room, we had the crew man. We always used to go on Wednesday night, you were there with the crew. I used to dance all night. All I did was dance. I didn’t go to socialize. I didn’t go to be seen. My whole point was to go out and dance. I guess it was my release from being in the Navy, in a way.
Who else around you did liquid after you lost touch with Chrissy and that group?
Nobody, heh. I was by myself for a really long time. People danced, but they played with their hands. They don’t really do liquid, you know what I mean? We would go to parties and see people who did it, like we would get together. See, at the time it was just liquid, it was nothing to be good at. It was just liquid. You did it because you found it interesting. Everybody had their own little way of doing it, and some people had a better understanding of how it worked than other people. Some people were really bad, some people were really basic; it wasn’t anything special. It was just liquid, just something you did. Every once in a while, you’d run across a guy that would now throw the most butt-est, worst wave you’ve ever seen, but back then you’d be like “Oh, what is that? That’s ill! That’s sick!” But still, it wasn’t anything to be good at. It was just liquid. You did it because you wanted to. Nobody forced you to be better at it. It was just something you did. Something, I don’t know why, like I said, it consumed my life. I just wanted to figure out what I could do with it.
I never really had a goal for it. It was just something I did when I went out, but eventually it just became my dance. I did liquid, and I danced around.
What years were you sort of alone on liquid?
Well, I used the word alone to say all these people I went out with were never really serious about it. So I guess that the people that I rolled with that were serious about dancing, probably between ’97 and ’99. My first guy that I went out with when he was my best friend in the world now, Richard Corona. He was from Cali, and we met in the Navy. He put me up on real house music. He was the guy who was the introduction to me to real house music. Before, I was into hard techno, like the hard stuff. I didn’t want no vocals, no horns. I wanted hard fast music, so I could do liquid to it, but he started rounding out my tastes, showing me, “OK, this is real house music.” You know, the Junior Sanchez, Little Louie Vega, Masters at Work, all the people who at the time were making “real” house music. There was a lot of garbage out there.
But we started going out every night, and that’s when we started making the switch. He wasn’t really big into parties. He used to go in the beginning, but he wasn’t really into parties like I was. He was more of a house head and not a raver, if that makes any sense. You like house music, but you’re not a raver. So, we used to compromise and go out to club nights, listen to house, and he would come to a party with me. He was a really good house dancer and expanded my feet a little bit, because he just had a different way of looking at dance. He was another big influence in where I got some of my flavor from, because he put my brain on a different way of thinking about it.
So starting from ’99, who did you run into?
’98 to ’99, I met my boy Aaron Kingsbury [Ed note: Aaron Kingsbury passed in 2007 in an unfortunate motorcycle accident]. Funny guy, I wish I was still in contact with him. I’m not. But he was the first person I ever taught how to do liquid. Richard Corona didn’t want to learn. He was like, “Nah man that’s your thing.” He didn’t even want to try. I started taking Aaron, his boy Jeremy, and this girl Cindy. They were all in the Navy together. It was like this little clique we had, this dirty little secret. There would be like ten of us. This was back when you didn’t want people to know you’re going to raves and shit. I was in the Navy from ’95 to ’99.
So, he was the first person I ever taught how to do liquid, and I started taking him out with me and showing him the ropes. We would come back after a party, and I’d work with him on stuff. He got really, really good. He was like me, but in his own way. He was able to dance with it. I taught him the scissor kick, how to flow with the scissor kick. He could totally do it. Then he broke his leg, and I got out of the Navy. After that, he really didn’t have an outlet to go with anybody anymore between work, and he sort of fell off. Then he ended up getting orders and he moved, so we just drifted apart.
Aaron was the first person I ever taught how to do it. He was probably the only person I ever really taught that I can actually say, “Yeah, I taught him.” Like yeah, OK, I’ve put videos up on the Internet, but it’s different when you formally teach. You know, it wasn’t even formal. It was like one friend teaching another friend how to do it. For a while man, we were partners. That’s when we came up with the photon lights and throwing them back and forth. That was a whole other trip. We had so many routines, because that’s all we did. We worked together. We worked in the same shop, so we would go out at night and bug out. We used to bug out a lot.
Tell me about Motion.
To tell you about Motion, I’ve got to tell you about Space, and to tell you about Space, I’ve got to tell you about Lee Jones.
Lee Jones, my introduction to lounge-y house music in Philadelphia. Flamboyant, possibly gay, I’m not really sure. Biggest drama queen you’ll ever meet, but been in the music for a long time, DJ’d for years. You know, he’s older, an older gentleman. There’s this scene in Philly that’s this lounge-y, bourgeois, hipster scene that used to be around back a couple years ago. Now it’s turned into this guido trance-head, but there was this club called the Black Banana. It’s closed now, but it was famous for raised-pinky house music and drinking sort of partying.
Another thing I wanted to add about Do It was that Shannon [Editor’s note: Eric’s wife] was there, too. I never met her. She went to the party, but she couldn’t get into the club. I didn’t know her, but she was there. Crazy, right? I had a lot of experiences like that where I was in the same place at the same time with people, and just like five years down the road I met them. That’s how the scene is, man. It’s cliquey.
Back to Lee Jones. He got some investors to open this super nightclub in Philly that was going to cater to all electronic music. I think it opened September of ’99. The first party they had there was Pangea. It was a three day party for like, 40 bucks, over Labor Day weekend. Afrika Bambaata, TC Islam, Dub Tribe Sound System, Goldie, like every big name you could see for $40 for three days. You pay $40, it was $20 each day, or if you paid $40 you got to go in for all three days. It was awesome. It was what Philly had been waiting for. Then the Russian mob came in and realized you could make a lot of money doing it and muscled the people who were doing it out of the club. Threatening them, I don’t know the specifics of it, but then every other party in Philly, I believe they had inspections, and every rave that wasn’t at Space got busted. Everyone. Every party, every club, that’s what happened.
So, the Russian mob took it over, and they were selling all sorts of drugs out of it. Pretty much, it was an organ grinder. Kids go in there, they would beat the kids up, the bouncer would take their drugs, and sell the drugs back to their dealers in the house. It got shady real fast once organized crime realized how much money would be made at these parties. It’s funny. A couple of years after they left, they ended up all getting busted. That Russian mob that was doing that, it was a big thing in North Philly. The big Russian Mob just got busted selling ecstasy, all sorts of crazy shit.
But yeah, man, I had a couple of altercations with the bouncers. My friend got pulled into a room, but he was selling drugs, so they strip searched him and beat him up. I stopped going there after that.
That was Space. Then it was bought out by this guy named Jim, I think it was, who turned it into Motion. It was good for a while. But then it turned into another organ grinder, where they realized they brought the same five DJs in every other month. It turned out to be just a regular old club after a while. Same people, same faces.
I mean, there were good parties there. We threw an Icebreaker party there. LPC’s first performance ever was at Motion. I mean, dude, we were at a club, we didn’t have to pay, we just walked up, we walked right in. The line could be around the block. Nobody ever said nothin’. Jessica was working the door. She was always searching everybody. We were living high off the hog for a while, dude. The only reason we would go was to see Imri playing, because he was a resident.
We would go out every once in a while. We would go down to DC for a party, up to NYC for a party.
Who’d you dance with around this era?
This era was Aaron. Aaron used to go. Richard used to go to every once in a while. Aaron would go with me to Motion, and he broke his leg skiing that winter. Then I eventually met what would be the LPC that summer at Starscape. So, if he was around, he probably would have been involved in it. He let up for six months, so he didn’t go out. Then I got out of the Navy that summer, so…that was a good summer for partying.
I’d like to get a run down of the LPC’s history, because you, collectively, have had a big impact on liquid and digitz. Especially like when did you meet who, where, etc.
LPC’s history. Well, let’s go back to February of ‘99. Party called I Have a Dream, held at the Amazura Ballroom in Queens, NY. Sean, Dr. Strange, was there, Fu was there, Code Red (Jared) was there, this guy Joe, who was Jared’s boy at the time, was there, who I saw digitz for the first time at that party. Saw some kid doing some basic knuckle rolls and I was amazed by the phat polo jacket he had on. Dude, I was droolin’ over that jacket. But I remember seeing him do some stuff with his fingers, and I was like…I thought liquid was the end-all-be-all until I saw that, and I was like, “What the hell is that?!”
Then I go downstairs, and here’s this guy Joe doing synchs with his fingers, hides, just really basic stuff, but at the time it was like “Oh my God, what the fuck is that?!” Jared actually remembers seeing me there. He can tell me what I was wearing. He didn’t talk to me.
I was pretty much watching Joe all night, and that’s what put me off on digitz. So from then on, it was like, man, digitz, digitz. I was driving doing knuckle rolls trying to copy what I saw. It was so hard stretching out my fingers and getting each finger down. Then that summer, me and Shannon went to Starscape, which was held in June. That night I met Fu, Sami, Sean, Element, and they were all there together. They were wearing all the same Kappa outfit, black and blue Kappa outfit. It was real nice. Couldn’t really dance, Sami couldn’t really dance yet, and it was pretty much Fu. That’s the video that was put out of me and Fu battling back and forth, like it was the first night.
I knew Fu for a while, before we actually started talking. I used to see him out. He always used to be sitting on the side just watching me dance. He never really danced, just kind of sittin’ on the side. The first time I ever even recalled seeing him was at a party in Philly that previous summer of ‘98 called Mango, thrown by Local 13 at Evolution. He was sittin’ off on the side, and that’s the night I met Tony Flow for the second time.
The first time I met Tony Flow was at Whistle. It was a really weird night. I was off on some shit. I was really weirded out by the night. It was a really bad party. Just a really bad party, so we ended up leaving. I had some words with Tony that weren’t good, and I saw him at Mango. He looked at me and was like, “Yo, dude,” and I was like, “Hey, man.” I was like, “You were the guy at Whistle…” and he goes “Yeah,” and I’m like, “Dude, what was up with that?” He goes, “Dude, I don’t know man. I was just trying to talk to you, you were being all weird.” So we pretty much squashed everything right then and there, and it was all good.
That’s the first time I met Carl, Big Carl, a.k.a. Buck. He danced with the Boogie Knightz—Shallow, Fadayz, 3-D—he was a part of the whole clique. He was actually the first one who told me that I had a nice wave, and I was like “What’s a wave?” He’s like “Oh, your liquid looks really nice. You would have a nice wave.” I was like, “Oh.” That was the first time I was shown how to box, how to tut from Tony Flow. Just basic boxes, how it worked. It was a very big learning experience, and the first time I ever recalled Fu sitting off on the side. He didn’t dance, he just stood there. He was doing his hustle thing at the time.
I remember, because he had this Kappa suit on that was perfect. Ghetto gold jewelry on and shit, just, you know, it was Fu. He had a really pretty girl next to him, which was Fu. I can’t explain it any other way. I met him again at Starscape, what I’m going to get back to, and we just kind of looked at each other, and it was kind of like two samurais facing off just looking at each other. He started dancing, and we went back and forth, a couple rounds, then we just started talking. And that was the video that was cut up, where I was wearing my blue and yellow, and he was in his black and white Kappa suit, the one with “Pumpin’.” My “Sweat the Technique” video was from that party, but it was only me. I didn’t put him in it. That was me dancing to him, at that time. And he did the “Pumpin’” one when we got together and we cut up the video, because Element shot one side of it. Actually, that is all Element’s footage, because Shannon shot our footage that night, but my bag and my camera got stolen. So somebody has some straight up golden LPC footage, somewhere, probably taped over it.
That’s when we just started talking, and then from there went up the next weekend, hung out, and started just partying together. We were originally called the FDA, which was taken from a website called NewGrounds.com. It’s like Sami and Sean’s thing. This whole thing was called “Fuckin’ Dat Ass,” but they used to make these Flash animation videos, “Fuck Dat Ass.” Go to NewGrounds.com and put in FDA, and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. But if people used to ask who we were, we just said FDA. We had like 10 million meanings – Fat Dancers Anonymous, Fuckin’ Dat Ass, you know. Whatever was in our head at the time somebody asked us what we were is what we said we were just as a joke. We were being ignorant party kids, you know what I’m sayin’? We were always just havin a good time, bugged out. And for a while, man, it was just us going out partying.
Then that summer, the first time I met Code Red was at Electric Circus in New York at Exit. Probably one of the biggest clubs I’ve ever been to. Ridiculously huge, nice club. That night, I met Code Red for the first time, and we did digitz at a table in the Asian section of a club. The club was so big it had sections, like the guidos and Italians over here, and like Asians waving around tons of glowsticks and shit, and like Asian girls running around in skirts. It’s probably why we were sitting there, but yeah. We danced that night, and we got together with Red, and Red started chillin’ with us.
You know, and then it was just partying. Man, we used to go to the Limelight. The Tunnel wasn’t open anymore. It was right at the closing of the Tunnel. Yeah, we went to the Limelight a couple times, and that’s where we started meeting all the people who were eventually around now, like Lil’ Anthony, people we see out that are like, Dementia, see them just going out at raves in New York, and seeing them. That’s how we met Tiny, all those guys, Tony and Tiny, so it was this one big thing. There’s a little section of like poppers and liquid people that used to go to raves. You didn’t see any funk styles there, it was always the same people.
