"I used to pass the Warehouse after school, on my way to work, late in the evening and I wondered why there were so many people hanging out in the street," Chicago producer Larry Heard told XLR8R back in 1995, admitting he had never once set foot in the birthplace of house music. "I guess I was pretty naive." By the time Frankie Knuckles moved over to the Powerplant in 1985, Heard finally checked him out. And while still not the biggest fan of house music, he shared Knuckles’ tastes, a zealotry for both '70s R&B and Moroder-style Eurodisco. Heard, the drummer for a Yes cover band and multi-instrumentalist, began making his own productions as Mr. Fingers soon after, which brought things full circle; "Mystery of Love" and "Washing Machine" became both the urtext for house music and staples of Frankie’s sets.
Heard’s productions remain the gold standard for dance music. While he’s not as prolific in the 21st century, Heard’s still the person acts like Lana Del Rey and Disclosure tap for cred-boosting remixes. But finding and hearing Heard’s albums has never been easy, even in 1988, when he released two of house music’s finest full-lengths: Ammnesia (credited to Mr. Fingers) and Another Side, his sterling collaboration with vocalists Robert Owens and Ron Wilson as Fingers Inc. Both are beacons of American dance music, and ironically neither album was ever released stateside.
Nearly 30 years later, Another Side finally gets reissued on Heard’s Alleviated label, remastered and spread across three pieces of vinyl (it's also available digitally). Another Side might sound unfamiliar to modern EDM listeners, who might wonder where the incessant wallop and insipid vocals signifying "deep house" in 2016 went. The album opens with the shimmering keys and by-turns gritty and gentle soul vocals of Owens on "Decision," Heard’s programmed drums swinging around but never quite settling into a four-four. The downtempo rhythmic figures, silken pads, and whispers of "Bye Bye" only reinforce the anecdote that in 1992 Sade Adu personally approached Heard about producing her band's album, a collaboration that sadly never came to pass.
But while we may never hear the man in conjunction with Ms. Adu, Heard found a singular vocalist in Robert Owens. Forceful enough to growl over an 808 and smooth enough to slot into adult contemporary, Owens’ formidable talents are still not appreciated today. While his fellow Chicagoans were overt in their influences, be it Jamie Principle’s Prince obsession or Darryl Pandy’s Teddy Pendergrass impression, Owens balances between those two giants of R&B without ever being beholden to either. It’s a voice that conveys emotions rarely found in dance music these days: grace, gratitude, giddiness, forlornness, estrangement, defiance.
All those emotions can be not just heard, but felt on songs like the title track, "I’m Strong," and "Bring Down the Walls." "Be strong," Owens and backing vocalist Ron Wilson advise on "Another Side," hopeful for a better tomorrow, repeating as mantra: "Someway/ Someday/ Somehow/ (Carry on)." Whether you hear "I’m Strong" and "Bring Down the Walls" as a resilient call to arms for gay men, for the impoverished, for inner-city African-Americans, for South Africans under apartheid, or just for all the oppressed people seeking solace on a darkened dancefloor, they still resonate as that rare breed, elegant yet body-jacking songs of protest. Not bad for a song like "Walls," which Owens admitted to writing on toilet paper during his break at the hospital.
For all the sophistication, smooth jazz chords, and political undertones of the album, it's important to note that it still knocks. The programming of tracks like "Distant Planet," "Music Take Me Up," and "I’m Strong" still define dance music and elevate the room at peak hour. You could just as easily retitle the latter half of the album House Music’s Greatest Hits, as it’s filled with seismic tracks like "Mystery of Love," "Feelin’ Sleazy," "Bring Down the Walls," and "Can You Feel It."
While "deep house" now means certain club-friendly clichés to a generation of YouTube commenters and Boiler Room attendees, an album like Another Side has only had its title grow in meanings over the intervening decades. It suggests that at its inception, "house" was not a simple square but instead polygonal. Or as one of Heard’s devotees, Todd Terry, would put it a few years on, "house is a feeling." Another Side showcased Larry Heard’s myriad other sides, be it tropical ambient, grown-ass R&B, deft jazz chops, island rhythms, and even prog-rock’s embrace of early synthesizer technology. But ultimately, the music that Heard and Owens rendered back then was a way to make cheap synths and cast-off drum machines emote and express the tumult of human emotions that could arise after a long night at the Warehouse, or anywhere else. In hindisght, it sounds now like the path not traveled by the masses.
