Mike Clark in the Mix

Born on the North-end of downtown Detroit to an energetic mother and an electrician, and raised on the West side off the infamous 7 Mile Road, surrounded by the electrifying energy of the Funk and Disco era, Mike “Agent X” Clark served his time during the late 1970s in the gang-riddled 7 Mile / 8 Mile youth environment that was West Detroit. He spent much time shadowing his father on various electrical jobs, as well as installing sound systems in local bars, including one where his father also DJ’d during the 1960s.

The 1980s dawned and Clark’s older brother began sneaking him into the hottest local dance clubs, soon becoming a regular at legendary discotheques such as L’Uomo, Cheeks, Studio 54, and the Park Avenue Club. This is when Clark first saw three of his models, Ken Collier, Darryl Shannon and Delano Smith, spin. These three jocks can lay claim to selling Agent X on his life’s mission. To this day, he specifically remembers that Detroit’s earliest DJs such as Dwayne Montgomery, Kevin Dysard, and the iconic Ken Collier, never ceased to amaze him with their skill, craft, and showmanship. It was the competitive nature of this era of DJing that influenced Mike the most.

High School for Clark meant several months of longing – longing to belong to the popular new youth subculture phenomenon of DJ crews – opposing teams of turntable masters. At this time there were three main crews; the now world-renown “Deep Space,” “Direct Drive” (eventually Clark’s crew), and “Audio Crew” (home to UR member, Buzz Goree). From then on there was no turning back – DD founder, Todd Johnson, along with members Hassan, Darryl Shannon, Al Heath, Kevin Dysard, and Dwayne Montgomery welcomed their newest addition, Mike Clark. He was now playing with the best… in Clark’s eyes.

Mike notes that joining Direct Drive, or any of these prime DJ crews, came with a benefits package – instant popularity. During these late high school years, and those immediately following, Clark spent much time playing backyard parties and underground club gigs – battling his peers in full-on exhibitionist turntablist showcases (the athletic, quick-limbed DJ style Terrence Parker and the like are still known for today) – all the time wearing the prized DJ crew jacket, a mid-1980s ticket to celebrity status. Everyone wanted to be down, yet only a select few made the cut. Eventually, Clark landed a residency at club Cheeks – his first favorite residency to date – and later at Studio 54 (now known as the City Club / Labrynth).

For Clark though, channeling his abundant supply of energy into the turntables, through the speakers, and onto the dancefloor replaced his turbulent junior high years in a field of gang violence and fulfilled his yen for a challenge. Yet, the discovery of the magic and mystery of the maestro of the dancefloor had an even greater, arguably more profound, impact in changing his life – not only did music and club life, alongside a strong tie to martial arts, literally save him from the dangerous and risky world of gang life around him, but it opened is eyes to the amazingly endless and enigmatic nature of the human race. He saw people and their possibilities for the first time as this powerful force.

Ever since, seeking to connect with people through the dancefloor has proven, at least for Clark, to be one solid path to a universal communication – one without the rigid lines of class, color, creed, or gender.

Today, Mike has been dubbed Detroit’s “Ambassador” among the city’s underground music community and those that know him well. This is exactly what makes the Agent the essential DJ. His level of understanding, appreciation, and child-like interest in people in general places him at an immediate advantage on the dancefloor – one could say that Clark is the anthropologist of the dancefloor.

Clark spent the rest of the mid-1980s studying Detroit’s legendary “1st DJ,” Ken Collier, and two of New York’s icons, Tony Humphries and Timmy Regisford – all the while traveling back and forth to Chicago with friends, discovering the famed club “The Warehouse” and building a strong bridge with the Windy City’s influential HotMix 5 (of which Farley was one of Clark’s favorites). It was Humphries and Farley that Clark cites as a permanent influence on his spinning goals in that “they would hit an ultimate funky roots level that no one has touched thus far.” Clark will still tell you today that the level these two icons reached on the dancefloor is something that no one has really, truly arrived at yet, and may never – but Agent X is surely going to try.

Chicago was not the only northeastern metropolis that received frequent visits from Clark and crew – the Big Apple also found Clark, Mike Banks, Norm Talley, Terrance Parker, Billy Love, and Q running rampant amidst her busy streets, seeking the funkiest club nights and attending the New Music Seminar (the annual dance music conference pre-WMC). They were on a quest – a mission to investigate and absorb what was developing simultaneously in the dance music world among Detroit’s sister cities. Clark can still recall when he first discovered Chicago’s South-side and its infamous Music Box club where Ron Hardy played, and the Armitage Hall where he met the HotMix 5.

This crew Clark ran with was serious… yet, it is a wonder if they really knew the history they were making during the late 1980s and early 1990s, as this is when they formed the now-celebrated “Members of the House” group – the first alias of Underground Resistance. Members of the House clearly stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Ten City as one of the first two “House” music groups in history. They began producing records in 1988 on the labels “Vibe” and “Shockwave” before establishing their own imprints, UR and Happy Records in 1990, then Night Groove/Griswold Music in 1993, alongside the onset of Submerge. And all of this while these guys were still in their early 20s…

Clark played an integral role in setting up UR’s first studio and programming the drums on most of their early tracks. Then, when a mild split in musical style surfaced within the larger group, he gravitated to the Happy Records side of the UR panel, and eventually off on his own. This is also when Clark took up his “Agent X” moniker. He soon became frustrated with the politics and in-fighting within the music industry once the money started flowing into it, and disappeared into the background shadows of Motown.

Already on hiatus from actively DJing for a couple of years, Clark had been seriously training and teaching in Asian and African martial arts during this time in the early 1990s, as well as working full-time as an aggressive hair-dresser, though still producing music with UR, when a disadvantageous eye injury ended his formal martial arts career. Dance music fiends around the world would soon be giddy though, as Agent X “got bit by the bug again” and turned back to music to fulfill his demanding energy and competitive edge.

1995 offered Clark a founding residency at the new Motor Lounge – a swanky club in the humble Hamtramck neighborhood that would soon put Detroit on the club-land map where peers such as DJ Minx, DJ Bone, and John Acquaviva all shared some residential time – the one Detroit club where ALL the DJs spun through. A second residency soon followed at the also-legendary soulful after-hours dance club, Better Days. These would become two of Mike’s favorite residencies, some of his best memories in his dancefloor history. The following three years would involve a hey-day in electronic music for Detroit, with the whole rave thing at its peak and then fizzling out, but underground gallery parties filling whatever void Motor left on the club scene for new quality music.

The women behind much of Motor’s success at the time were Linda G and the late Laura Gavoor of May’s Transmat Records and her own booking and PR agency, Yin-Sight. Beyond the opportunities Gavoor lent DJs at home, she also sent many abroad – including Clark, who’s first international booking took place during this time in South America in place of Juan Atkins.

This era inspired Clark to begin really producing again, and he issued work with Glenn Underground of Chicago’s Nite Life Collective and Brett Dancer’s Atlanta-based TrackMode imprint. This was then the epoch of Carl Craig and his Planet e empire, and as he recruited the best in the business – the soldiers with the most innovative soul – his ear came upon Clark’s current work. The result of this would be the smash hit EP “In the Morning,” out on Planet e in 1999/2000, which would catapult Agent X across the Atlantic into Europe and as far as Japan in dancefloor playlists and DJ bookings.

However, it is the immediate follow-up commission from Craig that speaks volumes about Clark’s true talent and first love. When Craig was preparing to release the second compilation (“Geology” Vol.2) in his series of choice tracks from fresh Detroit electronic artists, he knew who the perfect person for the mixing job was – Mike Clark, the quintessential DJ. If anyone could seamlessly blend a group of distinct tracks together into a perfect journey, it was Agent X. There it was – DJ first, producer second.

The turn of the century also found Clark hanging with local fusion Acid-Jazz gurus, JazzHead, on a regular basis picking up skills and learning some chords. He would then remix their tune “Hailstorm” off their 2001 LP “Ancestors.” Though never released officially, this remix would mark the beginning of a long-standing musical relationship with good friends and JazzHead members Phil Hale, Jeremy Ellis, John Arnold, Trent Mitchell, and Johnny Trudell. Though JazzHead is fairly dissolved today, each member has gone on to produce solo albums and other works steadily pushing them into the realm of superstar, yet collaborates with these old music pals all the time.

Like any full-blooded DJ, radio also played an important part in Agent X’s career, beginning his airwave experience with the most sought-after mystery man of radio, the legendary MOJO, during the mid-1980s on the still-operating [though under a much-different Rap and R&B format] FM98 WJLB. Mojo would accept mixtapes from local jocks such as Clark, Terrence Parker, and others and he would play them on the air during his show. Then, Mojo would take all of these “guest DJs” on a “tour” of the hottest local clubs, landing them many of their prized gigs. Clark next joined host DJ Billy T on Detroit’s FM WGPR shortly after participating in Mojo’s show and mixed some of Detroit radio’s first “Hip-House” shows from 1985-1990, when Hip-Hop was giving way to House. Then after his brief hiatus, during the Motor Lounge’s peak, he participated in a weekly mix show on sister-city Windsor’s 91.5FM CJAM college station from 1997-1998. You can still catch local House DJs in the mix, live, on WJLB each and every Saturday night between 2am and 4am with host Kim James.

Although, it may be hard to determine Clark’s strong point in the undertow that is now BeatDown. A term synonymous with both a record label and a DJ collective founded by Clark, yet somehow also a form of verbage used among DJs, music heads, and dancefloor aficionados to describe a sound – a particular feel within electronic dance music – something with a healthy dose of soul, but this indescribable, relentless funk drive that sneaks up on you and tosses you around the floor, and, feeling dirty for just a second, sends you right back home… BeatDown has become the genesis of a new genre – a new Detroit sound, understood around the globe, and coined by the Motor City’s own Agent X.

The massive tour Planet e sent Mike and its other released gems of 1999/2000 on (this also being the dawn of the Detroit Electronic Music Festival – the brainchild of Craig and peers) unknowingly played a large part in launching the precursor to the “BeatDown” movement… the slow and scattered, yet steady, emergence of a buzz around the electronic music world about this new sound, “Beatdown” – and what was it? Have you heard it? Who plays it? Who makes it?! People all over were beginning to hear Agent X spin, they were hearing his partners play, they were listening to records from somewhere – there was this distinct sound creeping in, catching on, creating a demand…

Playing at the inaugural DEMF on the infamous CPOP Stage, and then owning the same stage three years later for a day with the 3 Chairs crew at the Movement Festival as the “Beatdown / 3 Chairs” stage in 2003, created quite a bit of momentum for Agent X.

As people struggled to pinpoint and categorize Clark and his partners’ style, not content to simply call it “House,” Mike began using the term “beatdown” in reference to the deep, dark, bass-heavy funky soul that has been known to infect dancers with a supernatural rhythm.

Clark returned from Europe and shortly thereafter had a record deal with London/Tokyo-based label, Third Ear. The label’s London rep had heard the buzz and was going to finance a double album in order to produce the “BeatDown Sound.” Soon, Clark and long-time partner and friend, Norm Talley (of Eddie Fowlkes’ City Boy Records), found themselves producing a comprehensive compilation that would represent probably an even wider spectrum of Detroit dance music than even they had intended, and in 2002, “Detroit Beatdown” Vol.I was released world-wide.

During this time, Clark, in partnership with Talley and Delano Smith, began a super-successful residency at Detroit Midtown venue, Agave, on Sunday nights, which is where you can still get your groove on in order to start your week off right – arguably the best deal in town. “Sunday Night ReHab” has become quite a staple among city-dwellers and is enjoying its third year in the making, attracting a diverse crowd and introducing new music – all under the name of “BeatDown.”

After the release of Vol.I, BeatDown had begun to unify the many solid, yet disparate, elements within dance music coming out of Detroit – logging the Motor City’s soulful roots track by track, set by set, compilation by compilation, remix by remix – proving that Detroit is not just about “Techno” – or rather, that “Detroit Techno” really means “term for how modern, forward Detroiters have embraced and kept their roots from Jazz to Motown to Funk to Today and created a new sound that meshes all of these and spits out Tommorrow.”

That said, the roots to Clark’s “BeatDown” sound are actually quite simple – with a grand love, respect, and appreciation for George Clinton and his Parliament Funkadelic, as well as many other late 1970s Funk masters, he cannot help but insert that undeniable bass into his track selection, or his production. This element rides sidesaddle with great Jazz influences for Clark, such as George Duke, Herbie Hancock, and Kaidi Tatham – producing complex keys in which the DJ’s story is told. And that chronic energy? That endless heartbeat behind it all? Percussive roots – the rhythm of martial arts and the canvas of dance. This has been the down-tempo groove winning dancefloors over across the globe for Agent X.

Currently, this comprehensive, all-encompassing mantra is being executed back home for Clark as he prepares for “Detroit Beatdown” Vol.II, and upcoming releases for the debut of his own new label, Strictly Beatdown, in working steadily in-studio with both icons and prodigies alike. Reading the fine print on these tracks (not to mention those recently released) will yield guest appearances from a beautiful array of Detroit’s truly talented musicians including Jazz keyboardists, the solid Phil Hale and the innovative Jovant; man of the moment, bassist Paul Randolph, Motown’s legendary son James Jamerson Jr; the finally famous Amp Fiddler; and the very green poet, Diamondancer. Expect B-sides and remixes from some (oh-so-pleasant) surprise producers now on the rise, and much, much more…