Cement Shoes

I conducted this interview with Jeffee last summer. For a brief bit of context, Jeffee was probably the preeminent US Junglist of the 1990s. Today, people likely know him for his Jungle Spliff tape, which was uploaded to YouTube a number of years ago and has since acquired somewhat of a cult following (Jungle Spliff by DJ Jeffee (DJ Mix, Ragga Jungle): Reviews, Ratings, Credits, Song list – Rate Your Music).

However, in the mid-1990s, Jeffee was pivotal in connecting the US scene with his fanzine Junglized. Along with C.H.A (Chicago Hardcore Authority), Jeffee helped lay the foundations of the scene that still exists today.

In speaking to Jeffee, I hoped to cover everything one would want to know about this legendary figure, whilst also addressing broader topics that seemed pertinent to his experiences within the scene, such as the influence of the Internet and zine culture. Junglized emerged within a fascinating juncture in history, as print media found itself at odds with the rise of the Internet and web culture. I wanted to chat to him to understand his take on these events ,but also, because there isn’t much info about the man out there. Anyway, as you shall hopefully see, Jeffee is a wonderful dude. He can be found today making some wonderful Dream Pop under the name Shampoo Tears (https://soundcloud.com/shampootears).

How did you get into the music in the first place?

Jeffee: I moved to Florida in 1994, but before that, I had come from Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is very close to a town called Cleveland. One time in Cleveland, around 1990, a guy named Mike Philly did a ‘Manchester’ night in this club where you had to ride this cool freight elevator to get up there. I was on the elevator for another occasion, and he was there – he had an Adamski record, and I said something about Adamski. He responds, “That’s cool… I do this night… and I also help my other friend, Rob Sherwood. I DJ for him sometimes when he takes a break”. I went to one of these events once, and he had all these early Reinforced records, Manix, and stuff like that. I heard that and went, “holy hell, that’s different from what I’ve been listening to,” and got into it there.

This Sherwood guy also said, “Since I’m a DJ, I’m on this record list, and I can get all these records that come over from the UK. If you want any of these things, just give me some money, and I’ll get them on the next delivery”, so I started doing that. And then I got these two old Numark turntables and started learning how to DJ. I just fell in love with it from there. Soon it was Production house. Suburban Base, too. With these turntables, back then, you could mix any kind of stuff around; you could mix a house record with a breakbeat record – there were no categories, really. It was just all ‘techno’. So, I got enough records together. My first gig was in Pittsburgh at this pool hall after it had closed, and everybody was dancing between the pool table, but I played the set and thought it was terrible. But everybody thought it was great, so I said “I’m gonna go home and practice even harder”, and man, it just took off.

What made you want to move to Florida?

JEFFEE: Well, I had heard of this guy… Somebody I knew went on tour with the Prodigy, and he brought back a tape of this guy called AK1200 down in Florida. This guy scratches and stuff like that, but he’s playing the same things we are. I had never thought of moving to Orlando; this is ’93. And then, I moved to Orlando in ’94. When I moved down here, I thought because AK was here, it was a Jungle mecca of some kind… nope, it was breakbeat, but Florida breaks only go so fast, and then they stop. That early Rachel Wallace Suburban Base kind of speed, and they never went any faster.

I thought I was going to make the most of this. And so, I took my tape into a local record store, and the tape had a fully printed cover, as I had always worked in Graphic design and print shops. It was special; it was a full-colour print, and everyone else’s was TDk90 handwritten or whatever. That’s where AK got my number.

What made you want to start Junglized?

JEFFEE: Well, I took the money from when I had moved… I had a 401k, the thing where they save money for your retirement, and I bought a Macintosh with it. I said, “I’m going to make a magazine”, like a fanzine, because we keep hearing of all these artists across the country. I had heard of a guy out in New Mexico playing Breakbeat Jungle, a guy in Los Angeles, and a guy in Toronto called Ruffneck. He [Ruffneck] would play all these M-Beat records +45, all the way, as fast as possible… I really liked that stuff.

But also, when I was up in Pittsburgh and Cleveland, you had to order a pizza to find out the location of a rave. When I got down here, raves were advertised on the radio. It was all commercial down here already. It was definitely a fight to get a gig, and that’s sort of why I started Junglized. The first issue of Junglized is basically all about Florida. It was tough, but that magazine helped me… people started recognizing me, and AK even wrote a couple record reviews.

AK also worked at Airborne Express – an early FedEx that went out of business – and he could ship out the magazines for free. I would get them printed, type ’em out, and ship him boxes and boxes of them. He would get all the addresses to the UK record stores and all the American record stores, and we shipped them out for free. That was good distribution for us, so people were always calling us like… “Can I run an ad?”…. “I can give you a scene report.”

Before this, I was a punk rock kid in high school; I wrote scene reports in Pittsburgh for all the punk bands and crap when I was 14, 15, and 16. And then I went through a psychedelic phase, and by ’88, ’89, Acid House came out, and I said, “well, I’m listening to all this psychedelic stuff from ’67”, and I saw how Acid House tied this together. When I heard the wobwobwobwob, I was like, “I’m buying into it”. That helped a lot in getting me into the music… but also in making me want to start Junglized.

At that time, how closely were you able to follow the scene in the UK?

JEFFEE: It always came from England, but we [the US scene] were close right there. Shut Up ‘n’ Dance… we had those records and played them pretty much at the same time. But it was a case that some people would love them, and others would be like, “Ehhhhhh, what the hell was that?!?!”.

Around 1995, AK even got in touch with Dan Donelly from Suburban Base and suggested that they should come over to Florida… Dan wanted to bring the whole crew out to the US anyway. Dan said, “Can you just set up a rave for us?”. We did it at this Metro Skating Rink and called the event Junglized.

When Dan Donnely came over, was that the first-time you had met someone from the UK scene?

JEFFEE: Yeah, it was. But we really struck it off good with Marvellous Cain. Marvin used to come all the time, and we used to get him shows in Florida because he’d want to go shopping all the time, but he is another way I got promos and stuff. By ‘97, all those guys wanted to come over here so badly. I think Nautica and Tommy Hilfiger cost a lot of money over in the UK, so I would go to the mall here and buy a bunch of Tommy Hilfiger, I’d ask them what size they were – everything was oversized – and then they’d ship me boxes and boxes of promos. Ash – all those guys would send me promos. Because I sorted them out with clothing. It was a good trade initially, and it got me to have records nobody else had, and then I’d put out a mixtape, and the mixtape would go crazy. It wasn’t like a plan of any kind; it was just all happy accidents, you know. And, just trying to meet these guys I would read about in Prestige magazine. Atmosphere – Jay Frenzic. He came over here and played a show, too. Anybody who wanted to come over could stay at my house, or if they wanted to get a hotel, that’s fine whatever. You know it was fun, man. I think back to those days.

Did you ever go to the UK?

JEFFEE: No, I never did; I always wanted to. AK did a few times, and my little brother [Kingsize] went over a couple times. I always had a whole bunch of cats at my house. I also had a day job, and I spent all my vacation time skipping out on a Friday or something like that to go to a gig, so I never had much vacation time. Now, I kind of regret it because my little brother lives over there, and I still don’t go over there. I have two dogs and ten cats. And I have to coordinate with my girlfriend, stuff like that, Sooner or later that will change.

I feel like I know it, just from knowing everybody and talking to Marvellous Cain’s mom on the phone. I’d answer the phone, and he’d say, “Muuuuuuum” because he lived at home forever. I remember he was like, “Hold on, hold on, Jeffee… ‘yeah, Mum, I’ll have two sausages’”. It was just funny. Super nice people. Everybody was super cool. I mean, SS used to come over here all the time. We used to trade clothes right off our backs. He’d be like, “Hey, that’s a cool DKNY shirt”, and I’d say “that’s a cool jacket” and we’d trade. I felt like I knew what was going on. I think, early on, we got a VHS cassette tape in ’92 of some rave over there, and we must have watched that like 900 times. It was Mickey Finn DJing. I mean, I knew about all those guys doing early raves out in the field and stuff and getting arrested. Before that, I was really into UK pop bands in the 80s, so I’d buy all the NMEs and Melody Maker magazines like that.

Was it always ragga Jungle for you?

JEFFEE: I always stuck to the ragga side of things. I was a massive fan of The Scientist, and those early records of him, and then dub records and all this stuff just came together at the right time, and I was like,” Man, I know that sample.” I knew where it came from because I had all the same records. The funny thing is, all the reggae guys over here in Orlando really loved Jungle because they were all British Jamaican – they would come over and live in Florida… and it was because of this I managed to see rudeboi Rodigan over here…

Likewise, when I was in Pittsburgh, I grew up with Dieselboy. He would play all those early raves, too, but he played all the dark stuff, and I played all the ragga stuff. So, he got ragga ones that he didn’t like, and he would give them to me, and I would get some scary Reinforced record and give it to him, and we’d trade back or forth all the time.

In a similar vein, the way in which I found out about you was through your Jungle Spliff tape, which is a bit an of extravaganza in ragga Jungle.

JEFFEE: Right, that had a lot of tracks in it, man. I was getting worn out by the end, you could tell there was a little bit of dragging at the end right. [On YouTube] I see it and go ‘damn man’, I remember I had to have 30 seconds of every song and if you saw me play at a rave back then, you almost saw me do the same thing. I tried to keep myself entertained by going from drop to drop to drop. It was kind of my thing. So, when I was done DJing, I would have a stack of records like this [gestures splayed records]. And I didn’t have time to put them back in their sleeves, so I had to put them all back at the end of the night. They all played, and sometimes I would find a scratch on them. Sometimes, I’d see DJ smoking a cig, drinking a beer, and talking to somebody. I was more like I wanted to put on a show.

I’m glad people like that [The Jungle Spliff YouTube tape]. Ruffneck in Toronto was my inspiration because he would play an M-beat record, bring it in, and then bring another record in and then back to the M-beat record. I just liked it. I knew all those samples from the M-beat records because I was into dancehall and ragga. And I was all about the samples. I think that was what really intrigued me about all that stuff. And the secrets behind it. Shut Up ‘n’ Dance was really good at that. But we used to try to squeeze out as much sampling time as we could for all those E-mu samples we used to have. If you look up the ‘Heavy Stompin’’ EP, it has two guys from Mortal Kombat fighting each other. I did the label. But that was the same with the samples.

Did you feel that futurism when you first heard it?

JEFFEE: Yeah, I felt like it was something new, and the sounds they were using were different. You could get away with anything, and I felt that was a challenge.

Speaking of futurism, and YouTube, what was your first experience with the early web or internet in general?

JEFFEE: Well, I lucked out. I went to Penn State University and dropped out. But my younger brother [Kingsize], who lives in Brighton, was going to Youngstown State in Ohio, and he had the early version of the Internet where it was all just text, where all you could use was chatrooms really [USENET] – the early version. I mean, before the Internet, it was obviously different. It would be handwritten flyers with Dieselboy on them, and he misspelled my name as Jeff-ee. It was just all happy accidents, man. Somebody would run into somebody else, and we’d figure it out because there was no internet to find out about anything.

I mean I used to cold-call record stores and ask what their jungle selection was. I would do that and order from England all the time because I worked at a hardware store, and they didn’t keep track of the phone bill, so I could call England when nobody was looking and order the records right. I was doing that all the time – I was on the phone listening to records when they sat the phone down by the needle so you could hear it. It’s so funny, man, because I think about when they got that bill – “Who the hell is calling England all the time?!?!?!?” because that was back when an international call was ridiculous, right man. I remember my phone bill was 600/700 dollars a month because I’d call Marvellous Cain and cut back and forth.

But getting on to the Internet properly… I was in the graphic design world, so many people would come in and say, “Hey, man, can you design me a website?”. Nobody knew a lot about it, but there was Adobe Pagemill, and I figured it out. So, I started doing websites for people. I want to say maybe ’95. But because I was still in the print world, Junglized got printed. I’d pay the money and get it printed, stuff like that. When the Internet finally came around properly, it was crazy, I remember saying there’s no real sense of me doing this [Junglized] anymore because the Internet – you could just put it all up there. It’s there forever, you know.

In my graphic design day job, about ’97 to about 2000 or so, my boss was drunk all the time; he would drink at lunch and go pass out on the couch, so I was on the Internet doing my website, booking shows, like all afternoon man. I had my own office, so nobody really knew what I was doing. I got all my work done in the morning, and then I just booked shows all afternoon. Since I was the guy who did the websites at that job, I had access to the Internet, and nobody else did. I had the dial, and you could hear me getting on the Internet, you know, like the really loud thing, and the boss didn’t stand up or do anything because he’d say, “he’s the internet guy, he needs to be on the Internet”.

I never got around to typing up the old stuff and putting it up there, and so I just made a history of Jungle based on my experience and put it on the website, starting with Shut Up ‘n’ Dance and how it evolved from there. At that same time, this magazine called Synergy from Tampa (this was the late ‘90s [1996]), said, “Hey man, since you do Junglized would you wanna just incorporate it into our magazine” and I said yeah. And it worked out well for me – I no longer had to pay for printing. Then there was that history of Jungle thing that I transcribed from the Internet, and then there was a picture of Rudeboy Monty. So, I started doing it there, which was much more manageable. I still had to do a lot of the work and interview everybody, but they got it printed, looked nice, and came out in a shiny magazine.

When people ask me what Junglized was, I say it was like a little fanzine that connected people before the Internet, and then once the Internet came, we all knew everybody. We could call each other, get on there, and chat with everybody.  Back then, [the Internet] was like a new coming into the… to me, it felt like more of an information age thing, but you know, it’s been taken over by advertisements. It’s the only way to advertise; nobody prints anymore. In music, you don’t print a record hardly anymore. I feel like I was really interested in having a website so people could book me, and that was the thing I remember when I first…. “I gotta get a website, I gotta get a website”. You know I put up some pictures, but I never thought of advertising of any kind. Even when advertising in Junglized, I gave everybody their ads for free. I think that was probably my downfall in general, I should have had a manager. I booked everything myself. If the show was a flop, ‘just give me 50 bucks’. That was my problem. But I wasn’t doing it for the money at all….