DJ Ron Slomowicz: What is your source; where do you get your energy from?
Screamin’ Rachael: A lot of people look at me because I’ve got so much go. I’m so non-stop that people can’t believe it’s not drug-related. But it’s not. It’s all about the spirit of the music, because I’ve dedicated my life to house music. It’s knowing that if I don’t go out there, keep piping it and doing the things that I do, then things won’t happen the way I want them to.
RS: It’s funny you should mention drugs because the album promotion “Screamin’ Rachel drops Ecstasy” seems to be in contrast to this whole movement to separate clubbing from drug use.
Screamin’ Rachael: Oh that I know. Do you know much about my past? I guess the reason why I chose to use that title, even though it doesn’t really apply anymore, was the whole Party Monster phase.
RS: Ah when you were partying with Michael Alig in New York...
Screamin’ Rachael: When you read the liner notes to the album, you see that it represents the survival of the party monster. I think I was really lucky in the sense that all the other people that I came up with back in those days, my really good friends in New York, some of them died or got really addicted to drugs. I can’t say that I was the cleanest person in the Limelight back in those days, but I can say that whatever was my formula that kept me from really going down the toilet seems to have worked. I was able to keep my head above water and never really become heavily addicted to any drugs, thank God. Luckily for me, it’s not a drug thing anymore.
RS: Talking about Party Monster, how close to real life do you think the movie captures the scene?
Screamin’ Rachael: You could never really capture the scene. I do think that the best person to play Michael Alig certainly was Macaulay Culkin. We used to think that one day a movie would be made of our lives because we kind of knew that it was a special time and we really had a mission. Michael always envisioned that Macaulay would play him. I don’t think the movie comes close to capturing the scene. I love James St James, but he wrote it from his perspective and I didn’t really go for his perspective that much. There were a lot of things that could have been said about the scene which would have been better. There were a lot of really great creative people that came out of the scene; RuPaul, Lady Bunny, John Leguizamo, myself, but the movie gives you the sense that it was just a bunch of drugged-out losers, and I don’t think that that’s really what it was about.
RS: What was your wake-up call to leave New York and go back to your roots in Chicago?
Screamin’ Rachael: Well there were a couple of things that happened along the way but I think the final thing was really seeing the shadow of himself that Michael had become. I’ve written a screenplay called Got To Have House, which outlines a couple of the things that happened. I remember the last time I saw Angel, kicking and screaming as they were carrying him out of the Limelight and it was a very negative image for me.
I also remember when I invited Grandmaster Melle Mel to come to the club for one of my parties and they didn’t let him in because there was some racism going on, which I really hate. My mentors are people like Afrika Bambaataa and Melle Mel and even though I grew-up in house music with people like Farley and Maurice Joshua, the hip-hop people have always showed me a lot of love. Those were some of the final straws – the racism and the over the top drug use that began happening. It didn’t start like that, it became like that.
