GrooveOut by Chris Sill

The Drag Queen in My Inner Eye
Chatting with remix diva Barry Harris

Barry Harris is half of dance music's dynamic remixing duo known as Thunderpuss. Together with studio partner Chris Cox, they've taken over America's club scene and topped the charts with their galvanizing remixes of Whitney Houston, Amber, Jennifer Lopez, and Enrique Iglesias, just to name a few. Barry Harris returns to Houston in November for the first time in over 10 years. GrooveOut recently caught up with this in-demand producer/remixer/DJ and asked him about his first trip to the Bayou City, gays and divas, and his splashing solo hit "Dive in the Pool."

GrooveOut: Back in the late 1980s you were half of the group Kon Kan and had a big hit with "I Beg Your Pardon." Did you perform in Houston?
Barry Harris: Absolutely! Houston is the city where it all started. Our very first gig was [with] New Kids on the Block at a club called Karz. Kon Kan was bigger than they [New Kids on the Block] were in Houston, so they opened for us! Little did we know that three months later they would become huge.

Do you still have ties to Houston?
Not really, but Bruce Godwin at Record Rack holds a special place in my heart. He was the first person who faxed us [Kon Kan] and said you've got a big record that's breaking out of here. That was a very early sign that my life was about to change.

How did you and Chris Cox come together as Thunderpuss?
We met in a studio in New York in 1991 when I was working on the second Kon Kan album. Later he moved to L.A. and I returned home to Toronto. We kept in touch and became friends over the years by telephone. Eventually we decided to experiment and see if we could work together, and by 1997 we did our first mix for Priority Records. We enjoyed working together and that's when I decided to take the whole step of getting all the work visas and return to the states and actually team up.

And the rest is history...
Well, kind of. We were just doing what we loved and it felt right. Now everything's just exploded.

You both have done so many fabulous remixes, do you have a favorite?
My favorite-and it took me a year to realize it-was "Body Rock" by Louchi Lou and Meechie One. I had forgotten it and then I heard someone play it at a club in New York, and I thought, gee, this sounds like us. It got better and better and I said to myself, I hope this is us 'cause I really like this! Hearing it from a different perspective a year later, I realized everything production-wise was very good. I'm my own worst critic and there's always something I can do better, but with that record there's nothing.

Thunderpuss is very popular with the gay crowd. Why do you think that is?
We like drama! There's one thing that's never gone out of style with the gay crowd and that's divas. For some reason gays love drama divas and so do we. While we're making the records we often see a drag queen doing the song in our minds. Sometimes it's kind of hard not to! [Laughs]

[Laughing] Well, that leads me right to my next question. You have a big hit record out that you did with vocalist Pepper Mashay, called "Dive in the Pool." It's total drama and diva. Where did you come up with the words?
A lot of it is just ideas I get from hanging out at a club. We've worked with Pepper Mashay for a couple years and this was kind of written for her. I wanted her to record the vocals as if she was onstage talking to the crowd and expecting a response. It fits her personality and I felt it would be something that record DJs could use to communicate with their crowd. When she asks, How y'all feeling out there? and the crowd responds, it's really communication between the DJ and the crowd. Plus it's just a fun party record.

Are there any plans for a Barry Harris solo album?
No, just a lot of singles for now. I've got a lot of ideas in my head but I haven't had the time to get them out. "Dive in the Pool" I've had in my head for a year. I already know what the follow-up is, but I'm not telling anyone!

Barry Harris will bring the Thunderpuss sound to Rich's on Sunday, November 12.

Chris Sill spins tunes at Rich's and can be reached at csill@infohwy.com.