Green Velvet's Curtis Jones single-handedly brought the creepy monologue back to house in the mid '90s. This Berkeley dropout founded two Chicago labels: Cajual, for effervescent disco cutups (including his own Cajmere releases), and Relief, for cranium-denting beats and drug-noise delirium. Jones first made an impact with 1995's "Flash."

A Profile Artist, DJ and Producer Curtis Jones is the man behind the weird and wonderful Green Velvet. Most recently responsible for taking us all to La La Land, he’s been a player in the Chicago music scene for years. A former Berkely student, Curtis decided the world of Chemical Engineering was not for him and after saving up the proceeds of a summer job, purchased a keyboard, mixer and drum machine he set about engineering his own unique style of music. Working under the Cajmere moniker he experienced success with house album Underground Goodies, and the single Brighter Days (1992), and ran labels, Cajual and Relief, producing the likes of DJ Sneak, Boo Williams and Paul Johnson. But it’s his exploits as the notoriously nutty Green Velvet that have brought him the most recognition of late. An excellent live performer, his funky take on techno has been seen his records in the boxes of every DJ from Pete Tong and Jo Whiley. Released on EMI imprint, Credence, the video to the techy jacks track features Green Velvet in a mental hospital lamenting the effects of the little fellas.

Words: Cyclone

Curtis Alan Jones-aka Green Velvet-sounds pretty sane for a mad genius. He is soft-spoken, polite and gentle-that is, until he laughs. Indeed, Curtis' deep laugh borders on maniacal, but in a vaudeville kind of way.

The Chicago DJ, producer and innovator has always been something of a paradox. Curtis has a reputation for being a party animal but maintains that he's shy. He is an intellectual fascinated by hedonism, almost intellectualizing it. He has a science background but pursued a brilliant artistic career. He hails from Chicago, the spiritual home of house music,yet conjured some of the best techno never to come out of Detroit. If Jones were a Gemini, it would make sense, but he ain't (he's a Taurus).

"I've heard a lot of crazy stories and, at the same time, it's not like I haven't done anything to fuel the fire," Curtis laughs of his party man image within the music industry. "But I think one of the biggest problems that people have in dealing with me, or any sort of celebrity, is that somebody may see me out but that doesn't mean that I'm that way all the time. It's just like you wouldn't judge your own friends based on a one night outing, but that's what happens to celebrities in general all the time.Somebody may see me at a bar and I may be having a good time at that moment and then they'll go around and say I'm just totally wasted all the time, but that may be just like me going to the bar as normal people do. But everything you do as a celebrity is a bit more magnified. I've been in it for a long time so that now it's beyond a point where it does any personal harm or dampens my spirits."


Born in 1968,Curtis was set on a prestigious career as a chemical engineer-even attending graduate school at Berkeley-until he was diverted by house music (Jones has said, "It was like falling in love in a corny sort of way."). Curtis says he grew increasingly disillusioned with his career choice during an internship.It was too restrictive,and he has long been disdainful of corporate culture. "I love it as far as the academics goes," he says of chemical engineering, "but once I got out of that arena,working at chemical plants and things like that, that's when I started to realize that it was something that I really didn't wanna pursue as a full, lifelong career.I could be a professional student forever because that type of stuff intrigues me, but I could not be in the real world where it's all about profit, and optimizing those profits doesn't appeal to me that much."


Making the transition from budding chemical engineer to professional "house head",as Curtis refers to himself,was less difficult than might be imagined.After all,this dude had the hook-ups. "I was really fortunate that I knew people in the industry, and that's the main reason why I was able to become successful, I guess."


Jones started making music just as Chicago's house scene was losing momentum. In 1992 Curtis launched his first label, Cajual, with the single "Brighter Days" (featuring Dajae) and, the next year, introduced the Relief Records offshoot.Jones conceived Cajual as an outlet for traditionally
soulful and funky Chicago house, while Relief was more for experimental tracks-techno, jackin' stuff. Curtis fostered everyone from DJ Sneak to Boo Williams and Glenn Underground to Gemini and Mark Grant.

The moniker Green Velvet first appeared on Relief in 1993 with the fiery "Preacher Man". With Green Velvet, Curtis developed a darker persona-a foil to his DJ personality,Cajmere.He has since disseminated club classics like "Answering Machine," "The Stalker and Flash," all with freaky narratives. Green Velvet freestyles his darkly comic raps over minimal techno tracks recorded with vintage equipment.Jones has likewise developed a theatrical Green Velvet live show,wearing that infamous green wig.


For Curtis, Green Velvet is less an alter-ego than a projection-an abstraction-of his creative self. He reflects, "It's not like I'm Curtis Jones and then all of a sudden Green Velvet just takes over and I'm a totally different person and I don't have anything that separates between the two identity-wise.It's not like that.But I think it's more of an extension of my personality, and it is who I am, but it's sometimes a bit more dramatic in appearance but that what comes with being a musician, you know; that's just a part of being a musician."


Two years after his Green Velvet debut, Constant Chaos, Jones released the follow-up: Whatever. It takes in the current club land favorite "La La Land," on which Curtis sounds very like a techno Eminem. The track is about the dangers of excessive E intake.There are other titles such as "Genedefekt," "Minimum Rage" and "GAT (Great American Tragedy)." "I just don't know why I am the way the I am,but that's because I haven't been to a psychologist," Curtis shrugs, of his bleak humor. "Because if I go there, then I'll figure out why I am the way the I am, but, until then, I can just be undefined,which is not bad." At any rate,the records are his therapy."They're the only things that keep me sane," he says.

Curtis hopes that Whatever shows listeners that there are different forms of electronic music and "everything isn't just as homogeneous as they might think," with "different sounds and textures" within the music.

Jones has created a fluid musical identity. He dubbed Whatever "techno punk." and the album, a hit with the British press, has materialized at a time when techno has been rendered obsolete by those same hacks. For Jones, it's all house. "I'm just a house head. I just love house music.My definition of house is a bit more expansive than the way a lot of other people think.They put a limit to the definition of what house is to them-a lot of times that's what people do, anyway. House is just the music that has that 4/4 beat-and that can be house, it can be techno, it can be whatever, but for me that's just house, 'cause that's how I was introduced to it back in the '80s. It's like back then we had house, but we also listened to what they call industrial or New Wave and, of course, disco, but it was all house to me."

Curtis is quietly industrious. Between albums, he assembled a Green Velvet mixed CD,Techno-Funk, and a Green Velvet 'greatest hits', The Nineties (1993 AD Through 1999 AD), and now he is also rebuilding his labels. A few years ago Curtis suspended operations at Cajual because it had become too difficult to negotiate his many roles.This time he intends to keep things going on a smaller scale. "I'm in the office right now," he says. "The label has been up and running again since last year, but we've just been really organizing.We have put out a few releases, but I think everything will really start picking up at the beginning of next year.But, as of today, we are up and running."