Moods 72: Sam Hooker
Detroit-based label manager, record slinger, and musician Sam Hooker builds a mix that brings us a brighter day.
Our 72nd Moods mix comes from Sam Hooker, co-manager of Two Rooms Records and staff at the beloved People’s Records on Gratiot Avenue in the heart of Detroit. Sam’s mix calls back to his suburban younger years searching for the rare, weird, and out-of-place. Local radio spun the legends before us, whispering to him the underground ethos on CDs, tapes, and records. This mix is an ode to them: the people committed to digging, discovering, and redefining the sound of today; or, the “Midwest Freaks.”
I recorded this at home in Highland Park with a bunch of (mostly) old albums and a couple 45's. It's all music from at least a few decades ago, but some songs are fairly new to me and some are tracks I've been listening to since I was a teenager. Most of them have some sort of Michigan connection, but the rest I just wanted to listen to at the time. It's made for zoning out at home in the evening, but I don't think I ended up playing anything that will get you fired or ostracized if you feel like listening in public. That's for another mix. I like to think that most of the songs here evoke images of a better world alongside the joy and hazards of escaping the present one. Maybe they mean something else to you. Thanks for checking it out.
Where, geographically, did you grow up? Was it a single place or many places?
I lived in Macomb County until I was about 19, always west of Gratiot and east of Woodward. Typical American suburban sprawl zone that excels at producing degenerate teenagers and reactionary psychos. Luckily, I became the former.
There, you can tune in to radio from both Detroit and Windsor. It’s great. You'll spend most of your day there driving anyway. I went to Cousino High School in Warren and got involved in their radio program "WPHS" led by Ms. J. Stanczyk, one of the best teachers a young weirdo could ever hope to have. WPHS is pretty much a "College Radio" station embedded in a public high school that has somehow escaped defunding, largely through their own pledge drives. That program changed so many people's lives, every high school should get rid of their football team and start a radio station. Now, I live about a block west of Woodward.
Can you pick one song in the mix and explain where you first listened to it?
As a young teen I was trying to get into the weirdest music I could find, if a CD or tape looked like it had no place in society I'd try it. I liked tons of "hardcore" punk, Crass, Public Enemy, and eventually stuff like Peter Brotzmann's "Machine Gun" and Coltrane's "Ascension." I was drawn to loud, aggressive music that felt like it could push the world away. I was searching around on music forums and chat rooms online and eventually heard Jackie McLean's "Destination... Out!" which completely blew my mind. The opening track "Love And Hate," which is featured on this mix, was slow, patient, and never over the top, but still stayed tense, spaced out, and psychedelic the entire time. It really expanded my idea of what "extreme" music could be and helped me realize the power of space and silence—all while sitting at the computer in my dad's basement.
Who "introduced" you to these songs? Was it a person, a radio station, a CD?
Much of what I know about music comes from being lucky enough to work at Peoples Records. Brad Hales played me "Space Travelin" by Robert Starks and the Geniuses not long after I started working at the shop on Woodward. I'm constantly learning new things from my coworkers and the people that come through the shop. My mind gets blown every day. I've spent my entire adult life involved in underground music and surrounded by obsessive weirdos and record collectors who are always excited to talk about stuff that I never would have heard of on my own. I heard "Ask The Ages" by Sonny Sharrock for the first time riding around in Crazy Jim's truck looking for firewood in the winter. Alex Moskos played "Lawrence of Newark" at the MUG, a DIY spot I used to help with. Almost everything comes from other people, but I still try to check out any strange looking recording I see.
Where and when did you first hear techno? Who did it sound like it was for?
I had no idea what it was, but I heard techno for the first time on mix shows on WJLB. I thought it was "fast hip hop" or something and the fact that you could actually go buy these records didn't occur to me until a few years later. I didn't know anybody who was into it. Being 13 and hearing a live broadcast from a club in Detroit where people were freaking out to the "Godzilla" theme made my sci-fi obsessed brain explode. How could that be happening just a 15 minute drive away? If this is on the radio, what else is out there? It felt like there was this whole other "secret" world, and obviously, there was.
You've got the microphone. What do you want to say to the techno community?
Stay underground and keep your ears, mind and heart open. Make sure that what you're doing exists in the real world, make a tape, CD, zine, record, whatever. You can't trust any corporate platform, and there's a good chance they'll turn off the internet in our lifetimes. The object you make could be some young person's portal into an entirely different existence. You have to make sure they can find it.
Underground music should be radicalizing people against racial, corporate, and gendered power structures, not acting as the minor leagues for the "industry." Don’t do the CIA’s job for free. One version of success is finding recognition on platforms built to destroy and decontextualize culture, another is knowing that you let these so-called "tech" freaks take as little as they can from you. No matter who you are, you can really do it on your own and with your friends. Look out for older and younger people and learn from everyone you can. Free Palestine and abolish prisons and the police.
Tracklist
Robert Starks & The Geniuses "Space Travelin" Parts 1 & 2 (Big Star)
Joe Henderson "Black Narcissus" (Milestone)
The Real ShooBeeDoo "Reminiscing" (Weha)
Toquinho & Vinicius " Como e Duro Trabalhar" (Philips)
T2 "J.L.T." (London)
Larry Young "Saudia" (Perception"
Harold McKinney "In The Moog" (Tribe)
Cold Sun "Here in the Year" (World In Sound)
Eddie Hazel "Frantic Moment" (Warner Bros)
Joni Mitchell "Cold Blue Steel" (Asylum)
Sun Ra and his Myth Science Arkestra "Moon Dance" (Thoth)
The Visitors "Kimball" (Muse)
Sweet Maya "Illusion" (self released)
Sonny Sharrock "Who Does She Hope To Be?" (Axiom)
Jackie McLean "Love and Hate" (Blue Note)
Yusef Lateef "Love and Humor" (Prestige)
Meltdown "Take It Over" (Stranger Than Fission)
Kathy Smith "Fly Off with the Wind" (Stormy Forest)
John Sase "Only A Play" (self released)
Fred Scott "Journey Within" (Fafana)
Sam Sanders & Visions "Fantasy" (That African Lady Productions)
Pairing
We’ve paired Sam’s mix with a still from Sky Hopinka’s film Fainting Spells. Sam and Sky both have a dedicated practice to understanding context, history, and topographies—visible or invisible, singular or multiple, Detroit or Indigenous. We think listening to Sam’s mix in between watching Sky’s films is a strong audiovisual pairing.
For more on Sky, head to his website to see the full Fainting Spells: https://www.skyhopinka.com/fainting-spells
And for more on Sam, head to his Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/tarpit-michigan
<3 from the Moods Team <3