Intuitive Music

Tee Scott

Born Marc Allen Scott on 17th September 1948 in New york’s Bronx, Tee Scott was one of the fathers of the New York’s garage scene.

Tee Scott was the second of five children born to Ernest and Dorothea Scott. He was raised in the South Bronx and in the Northeast Bronx, and he later went to George Westinghouse high school. During his childhood Scott grew his passion for music after listening music from his father, who used to be a piano player, including classical music, and singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone. Scott won scholarship to Wilberforce College but he never used it. In the late 60’s, he started becoming involved in the music scene and at the age of 21 he was one of the first people to experiment with soul.

In May 1972, Tee Scott got his first DJ gig at the Candy Store club almost by chance, where he stayed for a couple of months. Scott recalled the curious story about how he got the job: “I went in and I heard this guy mixing music -I was very creative- I said wow, this is exciting, so I thought of going there a little more often. Not quite that often, because at that time I still wasn’t a clubgoer. Then one time, I went down there, and they had somebody else. And I noticed that this guy was not as exciting as the original guy; that’s when I found out that there’s a definite difference in how people mix music. I couldn’t even tell you what I didn’t like about it, it was completely like the other guy’s, but it didn’t have the same flair at all. After a couple of 151 and cokes, I got up the nerve -I was very shy- there was this rumor that they were trying to oust the other guy on some stupid technicality. Don’t even know the guy, don’t even know anything about him, just wanted to help him out by getting his job back. So I went up to the manager and told him, you know, I don’t want to say anything bad about this guy’s playing, but I’m sorry, he’s just not the same as the guy that you had before. So he said “Oh really? Why don’t you come up and tell my boss that?”. And I said, “Uh oh”. It was going to go this far. So I went upstairs, and after about 5 minutes he says, “Do you play music?” and I don’t know where that answer came from, but I said “Yeah!” I had the nerve, I had never mixed or anything before in my life, so he says, “Why don’t you come for an audition?” At that time I didn’t have a lot of records – only from my personal collection. This was like early ‘72, so I went down 3 weeks in a row for this audition, and every time I went down there was always some reason I couldn’t get on. The final time, I went down, I waited around, and he says: “I can’t put you on tonight, so why don’t you go to the bar and get a couple of drinks?”. By this time I was pissed and I said, I didn’t really want to do it anyway, I was being pushed into it by my cousin. We were getting ready to leave, and I said to hell with it, let me go drink up this man’s liquor! So I got behind the bar and got a couple of drinks. All this is like fate, because while we were sitting at the bar, this guy who was the manager came up and tapped me on the shoulder and says, “My boss wants to talk to you”, he sent me out to see if you were still here. So I went, and he said, “Can you still do that thing? I can get you on tonight for about 15 minutes”. So my heart started pounding, and he showed me to the deejay booth. It had a real, real old-fashioned mixer, and the only thing I knew about that mixer was Phono 1 and Phono 2. No headphones – I didn’t know where to put them. But see, I’d done electronic engineering in trade school, so figuring it out was no problem for me. In 5 minutes I figured out how it operated; I just didn’t have any skill in operating it. I saw the word Cue, and I realized this is how you pre-cue. Believe it or not, I had about a handful of albums and about three or four 45’s. And about 10 minutes left. I started playing, and it caused such a reaction downstairs – the deejay booth was upstairs — that people came running up to find out who this guy was. I ended up playing 45 minutes that night instead of the 15, and the manager said to me: “I’ll be in touch with you.” (Daniel Wang, July 14,1994)

By suggestion of a fan, he contacted Better Days club, which DJ position was vacant after the lesbian deejay Bert refused to play a song by a request of the boss’ wife. This way, Scott was in for a two night weekly residency. During these days, he installed his own sound system and also gave Frankie Knuckles his first DJ job at the club, as well as bringing in Tony Humphries. On an interview Scott remembered how the precarious the old DJ days used to be: “I went into the deejay booth, and it was real, real, crude. I had to climb up onto this thing; it was unbelievable. There was no such thing as a pre-cue. What they had was a Sony amplifier with a Phono 1 and Phono 2 button, and that’s how you switched fram turntable to turntable. No fading, nothing. It was a large dancefloor; the lights were very basic at the time. They had this automatic light panel, and lights over the whole ceiling. You could change it to, like, 6 or 8 different patterns: a red ring, a blue ring, and a green ring, like a bullseye. And there was a big board on the wall inside the deejay booth, but it wasn’t working when I first started working there. I had to cajole the manager and owner into getting somebody in the there to fix that board. It just lit up, but it wouldn’t go through any of the patterns or anything. Talk about primitive. They had a jukebox on in the day, since they opened at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and I would come on at 9 or 10 o’clock at night. I would play from 10 ’til about 4; the bars at that time closed at about 4 o’clock. I thought that I’d gotten the job, but when I came in the next day to play, he said, Nobody told you you were hired! So I struggled through that night with no headphones or anything, and then I went home and designed, and brought in this little amplifier and headphone thing and plugged it in so I could have a pre-cue. And then I started on the light system, and the boss was so cheap he didn’t want to put it in, and I would go and buy the materials with my own money and put it up myself, and eventually he would pay me and do it the right way. You know, the electrical sockets and all that. I was running these with extension chords – I would go buy hundreds and hundreds of feet and put it up on this very high ceiling, and run the wires into the deejay booth, so I could have a flash of light, and a red circuit and blue circuit that would light up the whole room. He didn’t want to spend money for boomers or tweeters, so I went out and made two clusters of tweeters, and ran the wires myself to make the sound better, and eventually I wound up getting Alex Rosner to do it. He was one of the main competitors of Richard Long, although not quite as good. Rosner put in the very first disco sound system; that was at “The Gallery,” with Nicky Siano, back in ‘74 or ‘75. So meanwhile, “The Gallery” was opening, “The Loft” became popular – that was with David Mancuso – and these were after hours clubs that didn’t open until 12 o’clock and didn’t close unitil 7 or 8 in the morning. They had these fabulous sound systems, I had this rinky-dink sound system, and it was a constant tug of war with customers. When people started going to the underground clubs, “Better Days” was a bar-club, and these other clubs were open all night. I had to compete with them, and I had to diligently start improving my sound system and my music: I made it so that when you came into “Better Days,” you started dancing from the time you got in there, and you did not stop until you got out of there. And not only that, but Better Days was known as a gay, black, mililtant club. It was rough – street rough. Or that was the way people looked at it. And there no such thing as a white person, or an Oriental person, or a Spanish person coming down to Better Days. It was known to be black. I endeavored to change that. I started inviting all kinds of people down there and eventually it worked.”

From 1975 to the 80’s, Scott played other clubs like “Clubhouse” in D.C and “L’Uomo” in Detroit. Eventually Tee Scott started doing guest spots at Zanzibar club with his friend Larry Levan and also opened the nights at the Continental Baths. He also worked DJed at Mellon’s club, as he recalled: .”“It was supposed to be gay – all of the clubs in Manhattan were supposed to be gay (laughter) – but some straight people heard about it, and they wanted to be involved so much that you practically couldn’t keep them out. Their clubs weren’t like that and they didn’t have the kind of excitement that the gay clubs had, with the exotic dancing and the mixed music. And once they got into the gay clubs, you couldn’t get rid of them.”.”

During those years, Tee Scott gained a reputation for being the first DJ known to spin with 3 turntables at once. In 1979, he produced his first remix “Love Thang” by First Choice, which became a dance floor classic, being this the start of a successful career as a remixer that gave him credit for appearing in more than 150 tracks, including the ones for the legendary labels Salsoul and West End. Scott produced some of the most classic garage songs, such as “Tee’s happy”, “Jazzy Rhythm” and Russ Brown’s ‘Gotta Find A Way’.

During the early 90’s, Tee Scott worked at the Cheetah Club in New Jersey and later at the Empire Skating Rink, where he started getting sick. After the rumors about AIDS, Scott was finally diagnosed with colon cancer in 1992 and was forced to retire from DJing during his treatments, taking the opportunity to learn more about the last advances in technology for DJing. It was a dark moment in the history of the New York’s dance scene since Scott’s friend and house music pioneer Larry Levan had died from heart problems in November that same year. In 1994, after a recovery period, he toured Japan, Canada and Mexico. Sadly, he died on the 12th of December 1995 at the age of 47. He was single and survived by two sisters and two brothers.