In the beginning there was…
We remember films for their iconic scenes, memorable lines of dialog and studies of unusual characters.
God Said Give ‘Em Drum Machines has all that, but what first drew me to it was a photograph.
The photo was captured by Norman “Normski” Anderson more than 30 years ago. It depicts a group of six young Black men hailed in the headline of an accompanying story as “the posse behind the new dance sound of Detroit.”
What brought together Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Eddie Fowlkes, Blake Baxter, Santonio Echols and Derrick May up to the moment the shutter snapped, and what happened after it did, is the subject of this film.
I’ve been writing about God Said Give ‘Em Drum Machines for about four years now. I first heard about it through a Kickstarter campaign in 2018 which indicated writer/producer Jennifer Washington and writer/director Kristian R. Hill had already been “documenting the lives of these seminal artists” for the previous seven years. A rough cut was shown in Chicago about a year later. Then the pandemic ensued, travel shut down and filming became a long-distance endeavor. Funds to finish the film became scarce. And one of the six subjects of the film was accused of sexual assault by at least a dozen women in multiple investigative reports, leading the filmmakers to bring lawyers into the discussion for a film that was at that point a decade in the making.
God Said Give ‘Em Drum Machines has a cast that feels like thousands, but hones in on those six artists in that original Norman Anderson photo. As mentioned, there are a number of incredibly moving scenes as the filmmakers delve into Detroit history. Juan Atkins recalls that at the same moment that marked the beginning of his music career — when the Electrifying Mojo played his record on the radio — his father was being taken away to prison. The late Mike Huckaby, who coined the film’s title, is shown teaching, as he did a whole generation at Youthville. But the film’s narrative arc turns on the stories of people like Blake Baxter and Santonio — stories “worth telling for people who aren’t necessarily house heads or techno heads,” as Washington told me. These were stories that appealed to those “beyond the initiated,” part of what Hill calls a “human story about dance music.”
God Said Give ‘Em Drum Machines debuted at Tribeca Festival this summer, described by associate programmer Dan Hunt as a “vibrant and nostalgic music documentary that showcases the beginnings of techno music and how Detroit, Michigan, was the creative and cultural hub for the creation and development of these beats… A compelling, rarely showcased history of mismanaged success, damaged friendships, ascendant beats, and raw inspiration.”
This is the story of how it was made. Days after its premiere, I spoke to Jennifer Washington and Kristian R. Hill — separately, as we were all in different time zones.
This story has been edited for readability. The amazing artwork for this piece is by Bruno Morphet and is available as a poster at detroittechnomovie.com/merch. —Terry Matthew
Starting With Detroit
Writer/Director Kristian R. Hill and Writer/Director Jennifer Washington hail from Detroit. Decades ago, as youth they establish roots in the city’s underground music scene as techno begins to flourish.
Kristian Hill: I grew up on the west side of Detroit. Juan Atkins’ grandmother lived around the block from me, so I met Juan when I was probably seven or eight years old. Later when I was in eighth grade or ninth grade, my brother had a party at the house and that’s where I met DJs Alan Ester, Steve Dunbar (rest in peace) and also Ray Berry (rest in peace). These early DJs kind of became my mentors as a DJ in the Detroit dance scene as a teenager. Al Ester is a very, very good family friend and he mentored me until I fell out of the game around the time I went to college, when hip hop was coming in. That required a different skill set, you know, and I moved away from DJing.
I went to college in Baltimore, Maryland, and that’s where you had Club Fantasy, you had B-More dancers on the scene and people like Ultra Naté. These were people I was seeing in college that I had no idea who they were. And they hung out at this club called Fantasy.
I moved on to grad school and saw the golden age of hip hop in New York — you know, everything from Biggie Smalls going from ashy to classy to Stretch and Bobbito tapes. So I’d been around music and in music spaces for a long time when I got to California in ’96. I started working in the business and eventually I started editing. And that’s when I did my first film called American Noir in Paris, which was shot in ’99 and was shown in 2002. In 2008 I edited and wrote a film called Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense. It was a four hour miniseries on the state of jazz at that time. And it was around that time that I started to kind of get my eye on DJ culture, and in particular, Detroit dance music.
Jennifer Washington: I grew up in the city listening to Mojo. I would consider myself, I guess, a house head and a club kid, but at the time, when I was listening to Mojo they weren’t really mentioning song titles too much or the names of the artists. I didn’t know who was making this magical music. And I didn’t know where they were from. I just loved the music. And I kept it on my playlist as I grew up and left Detroit and moved to LA.
You want to make a movie. And then God’s got a movie for you as well. When you put “God” in the title of your film, you just know He’s going to be in the edit bay. But there are moments where I feel like Frankie Knuckles has been in the edit bay. Larry Levan. I know Huckaby has been in the edit bay.
I came back to Detroit for my high school reunion (I went to Cass Tech). A friend of mine told me I should check out Submerge and Exhibit 3000 on Grand Boulevard. They sent me to the museum, and I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was going or what the building was. It was totally nondescript. But when they took me in, I started to see… I saw showcases on the walls and all this vinyl and these magazine articles and photos, and they start to explain to me that techno music is from Detroit, and that this music that I had fallen in love with in my teen years was actually considered techno. And that was something that was new to my ears. I did know “Cosmic Cars,” that was an easy title to remember, and when I saw “Cosmic Cars” in the showcase I was like, “Wait a second, what’s this? And it’s made by these guys from Detroit?” And that was just such a revelation to me that even to this day, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I think about it.
That was in 2010 when I made that first visit there. And I ran into Kristian, I think that night or the next day. That’s when we started the conversation. And I knew right then and there that this was a story worth telling.
Kristian: I can remember being in college, and hearing “Big Fun” in Baltimore and telling people that this record was from Detroit, and it was Detroit techno, and people had no idea what I was talking about, nor did they care. So for years, I carried this story with me. And then moving to LA, people can be kind of — let’s say “dismissive” — of anything they don’t know. Over the years, people would be like, “What is this dude talking about as a filmmaker? Techno is from Germany, you know.”
I would keep that fire. You know what I mean?
I was telling somebody today about the time we interviewed Black Coffee. Black Coffee said to me in no uncertain terms: Hey, there’s no music more popular than your Motown music. There’s nothing in terms of dance music that you guys have done that’s as big as what we’re doing. And you know, at the time, I just let Black Coffee say that. But I knew I had to make a film for people like him and others that had no idea about the impact that not only Juan, Derrick, Kevin, Eddie, Blake and Santonio have had, but the impact that this music has had on the world.
So this film is my dissertation of sorts, to let people know that this is how I understand how the music came about.
The Way Out is Through
Filming begins as early as 2010 as Hill and Washington work to develop a film around a compelling narrative rather than a Wikipedia-style timeline — what Hill calls “a resumé with a soundtrack.” Several short films are spawned from the footage while the filmmakers try to shape this “human film about dance music.” Mike Huckaby acts as critic and muse, baptizing the film with its title and encouraging them to include a storyline about Blake Baxter that struck a new chord for audiences.
Kristian: We started filming… well I filmed Alan Ester at the end of 2010.
Jennifer: I don’t think I anticipated it would take this long. I really thought we would just do a new version of what had been seen before, you know. I thought we would have a more authentic approach to telling a story about techno music and its true birthplace.
Kristian: While making this film, we actually made about four or five shorts, one of them being Electric Roots. Electric Roots got put into the Cannes Film Festival in 2014 where I have Black Coffee and Richie Hawtin talking about how Detroit techno connected to South African house — you know, just kind of those parallels. Another was a short on Al Ester. I made a short on Delano Smith — like all these little micro-films we made while shooting the film.
We did our first Movement [Festival] in 2011. I think 2012, 2013, I had some of my best footage out of Movement.
Just in telling this story for years, we were trying to tell everybody’s story, right? Now when I say everybody, I mean everybody. I tried to tell Delano’s story as it related to him coming up under Ken Collier. I tried to tell the story of the early dance music scene that Todd Johnson is a kind of a steward and anchor for. I tried to tell his story. And Darryl Shannon, who is another unsung hero. But then I was listening to Eddie Fowlkes, who basically introduced us to Kevin, Santonio, Blake, Thomas Barnett, Mike James… And man, that’s when I started hearing about a side of this music I had no idea about. That’s kind of the human side, the personal side that almost had PTSD triggers in it.
Through this process I was trying to figure out how to make a human film about dance music. Because a lot of times these films really don’t deal with the human aspect. It’s almost like a resumé with a soundtrack. Someone did this, then this, then someone did this, and so on.
Jennifer: We had been shooting Juan and Eddie, and then Eddie introduced us to Blake. And when we interviewed Blake for the first time, he really gave us a whole different perspective. He gave us some emotion and heart that we hadn’t seen up until that point. It kind of blew us away to the point where we realized that we could keep going down this pathway and really make it more of a human story. And that’s when our direction changed. You know, we’d been filming performances, from Amsterdam and South Africa and all that stuff, which is awesome. But once we got with Blake, that’s when we were able to find something that a larger audience could relate to.
We continued on our journey, putting one foot in front of the other, finding more time with Blake and getting more from Juan. And then Eddie then introduces us to Kevin and Santonio. Santonio had that too — he had a story and he’s come full circle, and he has these life lessons. These are stories worth telling for people who aren’t necessarily house heads or techno heads. We had something to offer an audience beyond the initiated, the folks that already know the scene.
Kristian: Mike Huckaby is somebody I met as a 16, 17 year old DJ in Detroit. There’s a mixtape floating around of me and Mike DJing at Michigan State. After he passed, I heard from my archivist, Lanier Covington, who’s in Johannesburg, South Africa. After Huckaby died, he sent me the tape that had been around since April of 1987.
Huckaby would come to New York when I lived in New York, and we would hang out and stuff like that. He was somebody I truly adored and trusted. His truthfulness and his connection to the next and future waves of Detroit techno was something that I gravitated to, and I wanted to keep it in the film no matter what. Seth Troxler really helped narrate that section to really make it resonate.
Huckaby was somebody who, throughout the process, I consulted and interviewed. He would always say to me, “Point that THANG over here, point that THANG at me.” And I would film him and I started showing him early cuts. And he would be like, “Bro, I don’t know what you’re doing…” Know what I mean? At the time, I was trying to figure it out. And the one thing I do remember him saying to me and which stayed with me — he was like, “Man, keep that emotional stuff from Blake in the movie.” That was almost like a note that I kept. Despite that being an area of dissension about who said what or who believes what, I kept that in the film based on my conversations with Huckaby.
Blake’s story just resonated with everybody from the first time they saw it, because he was the human side of it. We really don’t hear the story of Santonio, or of Blake or of Eddie. You might hear some from Eddie, because Eddie gets the opportunity to be the fourth guy, because he fights for that position, right? But Blake and Santonio don’t necessarily do that. And I’m trying to figure out a way to bring them up because their music is as impactful as any of those guys. You know what I mean? Blake’s catalog is banging. Santonio’s catalog as “Reese & Santonio” is banging and his current catalog is ongoing and developing too. So, yeah, man, I’m just trying to figure out a way to concentrate on these six guys. And that picture taken by Norman Anderson gave me that opportunity.
You want to make a movie. And then God’s got a movie for you as well. When you put “God” in the title of your film, you just know He’s going to be in the edit bay. But there are moments where I feel like Frankie Knuckles has been in the edit bay. Larry Levan. I know Huckaby has been in the edit bay. It’s like the spirits of dance music. I’ve definitely had moments where I felt like I was able to connect with them and listen to how their story mattered to our story.
Pandemic Cinema
The film is shown as a rough cut and appears to be nearing completion in 2019 and 2020 when the pandemic shuts everything down. While financing dries up and finishing funds are sought, more scenes are shot, including a pivotal visual sequence with Blake Baxter & Derrick May.
Jennifer: Yeah, that happened. We had just joined forces with a new documentary development studio in Los Angeles. They connected us with some financiers. But they really got cold feet once quarantine started and the financiers pulled out. All of a sudden, we were without finishing funds. We had a rough cut at the time, but we didn’t have what we needed to properly finish. And so we had to wait it out, like everybody else who was on hold. And finally, we were able to — they were able to raise more money for us to finish once things got back to normal. And that was last year. So it took us another year.
Kristian: During the pandemic, we shot Normski (the photographer, Norman Anderson), we shot Richie Hawtin — all virtual, just over the internet with crews at those locations.
Jennifer: Once we got the last round of funding, it took us another year to really pull in the extra people that we needed, like Doug Blush who is also from Michigan. He is an Oscar-winning editor. He was our consulting editor. He also worked on 20 Feet from Stardom, an Oscar-winning music documentary. He was like our Obi Wan Kenobi guiding us through the homestretch. We were really able to finish the film with the proper graphics and color and everything that makes it a real Hollywood production.
Kristian: As soon as the pandemic started closing, I filmed at Charivari in 2021. I was actually in Detroit to film Santonio at his house. And after filming Santonio, I asked Eric Jackson, my co-producer, “Should we go film Blake?” and he was like, “Bro, you here, why not?” And as soon we walk up to the tent, there’s Derrick May behind Blake Baxter, holding court. That shot was just happenstance. But that shot was key to everything that I had been doing up to that point. It was a matter of getting that footage and allowing that footage to breathe, so you can almost see this lack of communication and the impact it’s had over 30 years. You know, the impact that it’s had on his music, and part of the reason we don’t know who they are, is because of some of the human interactions they had over the years.
You know everybody has a point of view. But I’ve tried to do my best given all the facts that are floating around. Or the “non-facts,” the myths. All the stuff that floats around this music.
Jennifer: We’re the ones who have been in the trenches for the longest time, but we do have a team of people who have gotten us to this point. We did not do it alone. There are other producers and executive producers that have joined the team in recent years, and as well as a team of folks who’ve been helping us to store archives, archival photos, pictures, and help us with our graphics. A film like this becomes a village. That’s what it takes to bring together something like this. And our support team is an international team: our graphics guy lives in South Africa. Our associate producer is in Ireland. And we have an archival producer in New York, and another one in Detroit. And Kristian and I are in Los Angeles. We had to figure out how to have a master Zoom to finish the process.
Allegations Against Derrick May
God Said Give ‘Em Drum Machines had been filming for nearly a decade when investigations are published in late 2020 in which multiple women accuse Derrick May of sexual assault. May has a key role in the documentary, as he has a key role in the history of Detroit techno; having seen the film, I thought that removing him would have seriously deformed the narrative. Toward the end of the film, GSGEDM reproduces the headlines from DJ Mag and Resident Advisor from the investigations along with a lawyerly statement that May denies wrongdoing and has not been charged with a crime.
Jennifer: When the news first broke about it we were scared to death. Honestly. We didn’t know where this is gonna go. And we had invested so much at that point. And we knew we had to deal with this in a sensitive manner. It was a delicate situation and we debated and debated and debated about it. We also had to pull in our lawyers to kind of hold our hands through this process. So we had guidance, and we just followed their guidance. You hope you make the right decision.
From Detroit to Tribeca. . .
In June 2022, God Said Give ‘Em Drum Machines makes its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival — probably the most auspicious debut for any of the dozens of electronic music documentaries that have emerged in the last twenty years.
Jennifer: It was phenomenal. It was so exciting. We had a packed house. And everybody was so happy. I knew everybody would like it, but what I didn’t anticipate was the “love fest” that ensued. Everybody was so thrilled, they were dancing on their seats. They stayed all night. It reminded me of like a Black Woodstock. Everybody was so thrilled and so happy. It couldn’t have been better.
Kristian: It was sold out. Standing room only. Just to hear the audience react to things that I’ve been in a room editing since 2015 — just to hear their reaction was overwhelming. There was a two minute standing ovation at the end. It was weird! How do you process that? Those are great things.
Jennifer: We’ve been getting offers from all over the world, so it’s very exciting. But we have to be very strategic. And I anticipate being very busy with these film festivals and music festivals for the rest of the year.
. . . and Beyond
In the end, God Said Give ‘Em Drum Machines is a quintessentially American story — with everything that implies. It’s a story about the journey of a group of Black artists from their youth to middle age in the city with the 3rd largest Black population in America. It shines a spotlight on the Black roots of techno and draws immediate parallels with other genres whose Black founders have too often been written out of the history of the music they created.
Jennifer: The artists have recognition overseas, but it’s important for them to be supported and embraced at home. We all need to be learning their names and know their faces. It’s a story that needs to be taught during Black History Month. The Detroit artists deserve to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It’s happened over and over again with these genres — blues and jazz, rock and roll — where it starts off with these amazing, talented Black artists. And then it turns into something else.
There was a movie called Hidden Figures about the Black women who were part of the space race. When I saw that film, we were still making this one. But it was so empowering for us to know that Black women have something to do with the space race. Never were we aware that we had anything to do with going to the Moon. We had such a sense of pride, and that’s what I wanted this film to be able to do as well.
Kristian: I went to The Met the other day. You see the Egyptian exhibits and all of these relics. But the faces have been blown off — they’ve been blown off the tombs and these Egyptian sculptures. I feel that what I’ve been trying to do is to put these faces back together, as they relate to techno. And I hope I accomplished just a portion of that. I’m trying to serve the city and trying to serve Detroit dance music and Chicago house and New York house. Like this whole kind of Black dance music — I’m trying to make sure that we don’t forget about it in this age of EDM. We need to give deference to those originators. And that’s what I’m hoping that this film does in some small way.
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