"Oh", McWilliams said with an squirrely grin, "I hope you're okay with this but I told them I was doing your article for About." I shook my head and had to laugh at the harmless hick who just wanted some pictures with some girls.
The next day, we stopped in for a quick visit to the Standard Hotel & Spa for Om Records' Chilled @ Miambient event. While DJ's Chill Rob G and DJ Fluid spun downtempo grooves to everyone on couches shaking off the night before, I got to visit with Om's Lindsay Fagan and Garwin Lu, both of which I had corresponded with when I had my own record shop, so it was great to put faces with the voices. Lindsay was quite the charmer in spite of being up the night before being wowed by Oakenfold's performance with the Florida Symphony.
The man credited as birthing house music, Jesse Saunders, premiered his latest film in the early Wednesday evening, an experimental 'mixumentary' called "House... The Real Story" at the Miami Beach Cinema. The film, visually, is a stream of photographs, archival footage, and screen saver-type graphics, whilst a steady flow of text proceeds to tell the history of House music and all its musical offshoots. The debut of 'On and On,' the Warehouse Club, Marshall Jefferson, Frankie Knuckles, the 'Disco sucks' rally and record demolition- they're all in there. Audibly, 'House... The Real Story' is a continuous house mix featuring tracks that coincide with the story Saunders is trying to tell. In other words, an educational film you can dance to.
After the viewing, Saunders explained at a Q&A to keep in mind that several perspectives on the history of House had already been told but the film (along with his book of the same title) was his simply his perspective. Between some of the questions fielded, I learned that there had been several claims by music journalists and even other DJs about how certain events unfolded and who were responsible for particular 'firsts.' While I think everyone got the sense that it was very important for Jesse to correct what were some errors on the parts of others (he was right in the middle of all the history being made, after all), he also had a sense of grace with countering points of view and said several times that more or less no one knew that House was going blow up like it did and thus no one was writing anything down.
