Sunshine is working on an artist album.

How A Hippie Rave-Child Turned The Music Industry On Its Ear

By Brian O’Connor
Published in the October 2005 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 18 - Number 10

How easy is it being Tommie Sunshine? Well, for starters, his rise to tastemaker status in the music business has been unimpeded by hard knocks—some Ramen noodles, but no hard knocks. In Sunshine’s tale of relative riches, and few rags, there’s something about Lady Luck. She’s been at his side, like a trusty lighting jock, shining a laser effect around him.

Of course, Sunshine’s quirky ear, knack for being ahead of the curve and an enthusiasm bordering on obsession for music can’t be understated. He’s a combination of Rob Fleming, the record store owner/pop-culture savant in High Fidelity, and Wavy Gravy, the ’60s hippie icon who let his freak flag fly for nearly five decades.

The Sunshine story begins in Naperville, Illinois, 40 miles outside Chicago, where Tom Lorello grew up with a crew of older siblings—one disco queen, one punk rocker and a new waver—who made the household seem like freeform radio. It proved to be the roots of his eclectic taste, and by the time he was 12, Tommie knew his shit, musically—perfect qualifications to be an ace record store manager, rave DJ, Felix Da Housecat’s studio muse, or producer whose taste is consulted frequently by A&R types on a few continents.

The record store was in Atlanta, the raves were in the Midwest, the Felix Da Housecat project was a byproduct of classic Sunshine Serendipity (Tommie’s the co-writer on Kittenz and Thee Glitz’ “Silver Screen Shower Scene” and “Happy Hour”), and the producer status, well, if it were a stock, even Jim Cramer would be bullish on the brand, and for good reason. Sunshine and his partner Mark Verbos are the go-to remixers in America, crafters of quirky mixes that aren’t really house or rock, nor are they really electro. Need big-room house mixes of Sarah Connor or Andy Hunter? Check. How about a rock-house hybrid for The Stills? Got it. Gary Glitter shuffle-beat for Good Charlotte? Not a problem. And let’s not get started on the weird quirky techno.

All of this is leading Sunshine somewhere, perhaps as a producer with a platinum record on his wall. Currently, he’s producing the new Kill Hannah record, so the dream may be within his grasp.

DJ Times met with Tommie in the outer reaches of Brooklyn, in a leafy neighborhood he’s called home since last year. The discussion went something like this….

DJ Times: Tell us about the roots of your eclecticism. When did you first get turned on to house music?
Tommie Sunshine: I was kind of there at the entry point of house music. I first got turned on to house music in 1986. I was pretty much a rock kid, very much into sleeping out for concerts for tickets. My parents would drive two cars with me to the record store, they’d leave one car overnight so I could sleep in one. By the time I graduated high school I had seen 400 or 500 concerts—Kiss, INXS, you name it—and it was because I worked in record stores and I got free tickets to see everything, and I never turned down an opportunity to see anybody live. So, six months before “Let Love Rule” came out I saw Lenny Kravitz play with a 13-piece band in front of 50 people at Metro in Chicago.

DJ Times: Was it obvious to you how successful he was going to be?
Sunshine: More than obvious. What was great was not only did I get the front end of getting to see bands, but I got the back end of going backstage after the show and getting to know these people. The next time they came around I was a familiar face, meeting these people at their earliest junctures, and it was really cool. I became pals with a lot of bands, and I’d pick their brains about how they made their record and who they worked with. I didn’t have any sights at that time of being a producer. I was just a music lover. While I was in to all this rock stuff—Guns N’ Roses were just coming out from the L.A. metal scene—to me, I always felt that the best rock music was dance music. At these rock shows, I danced. It was my natural knee-jerk reaction to that music.

DJ Times: OK, when was your epiphany?
Sunshine: Waiting out for tickets one night I was flipping the dial and I came across WBMX, the station in Chicago that played commercial-free hour blocks of Farley Jackmaster Funk, Mickey “Mixin’” Oliver, Bad Boy Bill, Armando and Steve “Silk” Hurley—this music blew my mind. I felt this music was the future. I really felt this was ground zero of a huge music movement. I was a hippie kid. I grew up listening to CSN, Jefferson Airplane, The Dead, so I heard this music, and I thought to myself, “This could be my generation’s revolution. This could be what we give to the history of music.” And it really excited me. And then I began the quest of where I could hear this music, because it wasn’t popular. So the first taste I got of it was at a club in Chicago called Medusa that leaned heavily toward the industrial side of things, but they played everything. They had no problem playing Fast Eddie in between Pailhead and Revolting Cocks, and then on the other side Young MC and Madonna, something more commercial, and then they’d play something like “Houseman” by Voyou, some huge underground European dance record. So coming into this music with such a diverse taste, and by being first exposed to it by DJs who had totally eclectic programming, like Teri Bristol, it was a really exciting moment. I think that’s where I get my eclecticism. In Medusa, on one floor there was a live room where bands would play, usually punk, and upstairs from that they’d have a video room where everybody danced while they played The Smiths and Bauhaus, and newer stuff like A Split Second, and Revco and the Wax Trax kind of sound. As far as I was concerned, there were never any rules.

DJ Times: From Medusa you graduated to the rave scene?
Sunshine: Yeah, Medusa kind of segued into the rave scene for me. I had already been buying every compilation CD available, I’d run to Reckless Records and buy up these crazy “Rave 1991, Vol. 12” of The Prodigy, Joey Beltram, and I was so excited by it. Coming out of Medusa, which was just as much industrial as it was Nu Beat as it was Acid House as it was everything else, the rave scene seemed like it was focused. This was gonna be the real corker—and to a certain extent it did, certainly to the extent we wanted it to, as long as we had something to do every Saturday night. The rave scene had a huge influence on me, in every way, really. It influenced the social framework of my life in that decade. It certainly was responsible for me not remembering much of the ’90s.

DJ Times: How did you parlay this experience into DJing?
Sunshine: In 1992, I got asked by [DJ/rave promoter] Woody McBride if I’d consider spinning in the side room of one of his parties. And that was preposterous to me, because I had thought of the DJ as having “The Force.” I wasn’t worthy of such Jedi antics. I had no idea why anybody wanted me to play records. But then I thought about it for a little bit, and I was like, “Well, I can probably present this in a pretty fresh perspective, and do it in a way that nobody else does it.” The way that I thought about it, well, if I’m gonna do this, I have to be authentic to me. I have to play all across the board, because otherwise it wouldn’t be me. So I would play Miss Nicky Trax, “Acid in the House,” a Nu Beat record, then play Public Enemy “Night of the Living Baseheads,” and then go right into “The Only One I Know” by The Charlatans and then into Flock of Seagulls, and to me that seemed totally reasonable.

DJ Times: And you weren’t mixing?
Sunshine: Hell, no. I was finding a lot of clever segues, and a lot of songs that had big dramatic endings, and I found these records that really segued together well.

DJ Times: Did it ever feel like work to you?
Sunshine: It never did and it never has felt like work for me. Ever. [DJing] has made me feel a lot of different things, but one thing that it’s never made me feel was that I was working. I think I’m kind of blessed in that way. It always felt like such an enjoyable process. That kind of shenanigan DJing went on for a few years, and then I moved to Atlanta.

DJ Times: What prompted you to move to Atlanta?
Sunshine: Hmmm, how can I eloquently say this? If I had remained in the Midwest, I may not have survived the early part of the ’90s. I had reached a point where I was such a rave character that kind of the whole part of the Saturday-night process was being handed all sorts of things, by everybody, to ingest. I had to distance myself from it. I was emotionally pretty close to a breakdown, and I really just felt like if I was going to do anything with my life, it wasn’t going to happen there.

DJ Times: It was delaying certain things?
Sunshine: Sure, and this is the first time I’ve talked about this in a really long time. My first kind of plan to get into music was with two friends of mine, Mike and Jeff, and we moved to Atlanta together. And Mike was very much into hip hop, and he turned me onto Organized Konfusion and Wu-Tang and Jeru [Tha Damaja]—these guys who were making hip hop, but coming at it from a totally sideways perspective. Jeru’s “Come Clean” I still think is one of the best records of the last 20 years, as far as being so sonically off the wall, and coming out of nowhere and really spinning the genre upside down. We were moving to Atlanta to make hip hop. How ironic is that now? Now Atlanta is such a bastion of hip hop, and at that time it certainly wasn’t—this is pre-L.A. Reid, Jermaine Dupree. My brother was down there, and he got us all jobs parking cars. It was a great idea, but the studio never got set up, and the discipline just wasn’t there.

DJ Times: So you moved to Atlanta to make hip hop, and it’s not happening….
Sunshine: And then I heard that Scott Richmond and Jonathan Kadish were going to open a Satellite Records store in Atlanta. I found Scott’s pager number, and left a message: “My name is Tommie Sunshine, and I’m from Chicago. I don’t know who you have to run this record store, but you should fire them and hire me, because I’m the only person who lives down here that has a broad enough spectrum of electronic music that could really run the record store.” He was so impressed by the amount of balls that I had to leave a message like that, that he hired me. Mind you, I had never beat-matched a record in my life, and I was about to run one of the biggest record stores in the south. Three weeks later, I got asked to open for the Chemical Brothers at The Masquerade. I was petrified. I was like, “I don’t know if I’m the right guy to do this, I’m not ready for this.” But I got up there, and I played a lot of acid house, Fast Eddie “Acid Thunder” into Armando’s “151,” and I don’t think people down there were used to hearing stuff like that. But they flipped out because it sounded so new and so fresh, which is hilarious to think that in 1995 anybody thought that acid was the new sound. And I was horribly train wrecking in and out of these records, but nobody seemed to care.

DJ Times: Nobody cared about your train-wrecks?
Sunshine: There was a guy who was opening up a new club called Sol, Richard Leslie, and he offered me Friday nights. And I was like, “But I can’t mix. Why am I on this unreal trajectory of events where I don’t know what I’m doing?” He didn’t care. So, I took the gig, and these poor kids for two years listened to me learn how to mix, but nobody told me I was bad. So I just assumed it was OK—there are a few old tapes that have since been destroyed. Even through the bad mixes, I was playing so ahead of the curve, if there was a relevant drum-n-bass record that came out that week I played it. Photek put out a record that was mind-blowing and the production was unreal, I’d throw it into the middle of my set—fearlessly. And a lot of people admired that, because they were used to these guys that would get up there and play two hours of seamlessly beat-matched, boring music. I came at it from a punk-rock perspective and mashing things up in different ways.

DJ Times: So you were less concerned about rotating the floor.
Sunshine: I always approached it as a party—just a party. And I know when I go to parties, I want there to be moments of drama, and things that are loud, and things that are a little laid-back, and I want to feel that push and pull. That’s what excites me, so that’s what I did. If I were in the middle of this dancefloor, what would I want to hear next? That’s the way I thought, and I started to get booked at a lot of raves and doing a lot of traveling, and then all of a sudden came the biggest influence in my life. It was a quiet day at Satellite, and there I was with my tennis ball sneakers, my Misfits T-shirt and my cowboy hat at 3:30 in the afternoon. And in strolls this guy, and he didn’t look like someone who shopped in our store, and the next thing I know he’s asking me, “You’re definitely not from the South.” “No I’m not,” I tell him, “I’m from Chicago.” He says, “I’m from Chicago.” I say, “My name’s Tommie, nice to meet you.” He says, “My name’s Felix Da Housecat.” I’m like, “Get out of here!” I was such a huge fan of his music, because I always thought he came at things a little sideways, too. He had a little bit of Detroit, a little bit of Chicago, a little bit of New Wave, a little bit of disco, all kind of jammed into one tiny place. Within five minutes, he says, “I’m working on a new record right now called Thee Maddkatt Courtship. You’re madcap, and I want you in my group. I have to figure out a way to make you a part of this.” And we had met five minutes before.

DJ Times: Within five minutes of meeting you, Felix wanted to hire you?
Sunshine: It’s not too hard after spending five minutes with me to see how much I love music. It’s my life. So I went up to Chicago with all these early disco records, and they became the bulk of Thee Maddkatt Courtship—old Gino Soccio records, and Caress “Catch the Rhythm of the World,” and all these disco classics and Munich Machine, which became “Cosmic Pop,” which was the first song that we produced together, which went on to be a huge anthem in Germany and appeared on a Love Parade CD. This was the first thing I ever did, and I’d never seen a recording studio before.

DJ Times: At the time, you’re still DJing raves?
Sunshine: I started to travel and DJing raves, yeah, and not afraid to start my set with Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock. When I played raves I played psychedelic records, and by that I mean I played records that did weird things and had weird sounds. Having an entire record store to pull records from, my crate was usually pretty good. It got to a point with Satellite Records where I was doing so much traveling, that Scott put it out there, “You’re going to have to make a choice: you’re either going to run this record store and stop traveling, or you’re gonna have to grab your balls and quit and go do this DJ thing—which is certainly what you should do.” And they were the ones, I owe them a great amount of thanks for that, because they really kicked me in the ass and made me get serious. I went back to Chicago, and I knew I could mobilize my resources to start to make my own music. My cost of living was definitely very low, a lot of Ramen noodles and a lot of going to sleep with my fingers crossed at night, but I started getting serious.

DJ Times: How did you hook up with your partner Mark Verbos?
Sunshine: I met him when I was a wacked-out raver. He and his friends sold smart drinks at the Drop Bass parties, and I was the guy who wore funny clothes who danced too close to the speaker. Ten years later we got to talking, and I was like, “Would you consider collaborating on some music with me?” He was like, sure, and effortlessly we started to make music. What’s funny is that stuff that we first did in 1999 we’re now going back and doing re-edits and some more production on and we’re about to release them in Europe because they were so ahead of their time. They sound current—and it was us trying to make house music, but because he was a techno guy and I was coming at it from 17 different perspectives, it came out all wacked-out. And in ’99 it sounded, like, who would ever play something like this? When in reality it sounds like everything that’s now coming out of Berlin, this space-age-disco-bastard strain of house music, and we thought of it as a botched attempt.

DJ Times: You’ve had a crazy summer of traveling and DJ gigs…
Sunshine: I’ve been in Lima, Peru, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Montreal, and it’s given me so much hope for music when I go to these places and play this music and look out at 3 p.m. on a Sunday in a park and people are dancing, it’s crucial. That can’t happen in the U.S. right now. Everything used to be so free in the States, open and innovative and special, from the rave scene through the ’90s and then the hammer fell and they took it all away. It’s hard to party now in the States. Although I think the music now is the best it’s ever been, with the production technology available and the options, it’s all about tomorrow, all about what we can turn tomorrow into. I think you have to be future-forward like that. Somehow these Play Station-playing, text-messaging zombies have to get off their ass and reinvent the wheel, because it’s their turn—they have to do it. I can’t do it.

DJ Times: What’s your programming secret?
Sunshine: To me, there’s nothing more freeing and nothing more special than to be on a dancefloor at 3 in the morning and have the hi-hat pattern of a record get to the center of your head and have it put a smile on your face, that you’re sharing with nobody else. Every time I play, I see at least one person that reaches that, and as long as I see that, I know that what I’m doing, I’m doing right.