Mike Huckaby

Detroit legend Mike Huckaby passed away this weekend. It’s hard to really say anything about what he meant to so many other DJs and fans without sounding trite, so I’m going to just speak a little bit about some of my own experiences with him.

I was into deeper house and techno music starting in 1998 or so, but at that point I was just an 18 year old kid who had only recently acquired turntables and started DJing. Some of my friends here knew guys from Detroit like Shake and Dan Bell, but they still seemed to me to be impossibly big time legends in the game. It wasn’t until 2004 when I first really got to start going to Detroit over festival weekend in a way where I could meet people and go record shopping. By that time I had been buying records like a fiend, trying to hunt down these underground vinyl releases that were damn near impossible to find in some cases. Going to the source and hitting spots like Record Time and Vibes was like hitting the lottery. Even better was the fact that people who I had built up in my head to be these untouchable legends of music were in fact just regular people who worked in record shops and loved music.

Three of the first people I met that weekend were Mike Huckaby, Rick Wilhite, and Marcellus Pittman. These guys were so incredibly nice and giving, helping me find interesting new music, hooking me up with their own records, and generally taking me seriously despite me being a younger dude with no name or anything like that, just because I was a music head. Meeting Mike was particularly funny because I went to Record Time with Jwan and the guy working there was just giving me recommendations and they were really good and I had no idea until Jwan introduced me a few minutes later that this was in fact Mike Huckaby! And the crazy thing is that every time I saw him after that he remembered my name and said what’s up. For that to happen to me felt so cool, and I greatly appreciated that about him.

Of course I also bought some of his music that day, most importantly his Roland King record on M3. I did a little primer on Mike’s music for 5 Magazine which I will post here when it goes up, so I’m not going to dwell on it too much here. But that record and his early catalog especially was so influential to me thanks to its raw, DIY nature and it’s soulful minimalism.

A few years later, I was booked to open up for Huck here in Pittsburgh at AVA Lounge. Of course he killed it, and it was fun just hanging out talking about music at the club. He had some time the next day so he came over to my house and brought his little portable reel to reel with him. We didn’t have a ton of time but we were just messing around with some things in the studio which was also super cool.

He recorded a few bits off my some of my synths, playing (I believe it was the Sox Trak) through my tape echo and he recorded the results to his reel to reel. The idea we had was to do a little sample pack giveaway here on infinitestatemachine. He went back to Detroit and a couple weeks later I got an email from him with two of the things that turned out good. I can’t find any more of our conversation and the decade since then has wiped my memory of what happened that kept us from proceeding and finishing this little project, but obviously it never came to fruition.

So today, in memory of the man and his love of helping people, I’m uploading these two chord hit samples for everybody to use. I only ask that if you happen to release the music you make with them, give Huck a shout out and thank you on the label art, sleeve, or in the release notes if it is digital only.

Mike Huckaby – Pittsburgh Sample 1

Mike Huckaby – Pittsburgh Sample 2