Carl Craig’s Mother’s Pride

Detroit techno pioneer Carl Craig chatted about the secrets of his success to the Independent this week and attributed his longevity to listening to the ‘just say no’ advice of his mother.

“My mum is the person that had the most impact on me because she can see situations, analyse them and see the negative and the positive. And that’s part of her whole thing,” the 40 something Planet E veteran explained.

“She told me at a young age, and I tell a lot of people this: ‘Don’t do drugs. And you know why you don’t wanna do drugs? Because it takes all your money and you don’t wanna lose money, do you’,” Carl recalled.

’I didn’t start drinking until I was 25,” he added. (Independent: http://ind.pn/sRU6Kg )

The importance of parental support was also emphasized by Richie Hawtin’s mother in his 2007 DVD documentary Richie Hawtin: Pioneers of Electronic Music, Vol. 1 in which she recounted him keeping her awake night after night, working on ‘the same old beats, the same old beats’.

She also helped out the then unknown young producer doing the door at some of his first parties, reputedly turning away gatecrashers who pretended to be cousins, earning eternal gratitude from her nowadays multi-millionaire son.

“My parents are really cool,” Hawtin told Digboston.com in September, when he was asked when his parents finally realized what he was doing ‘wasn’t just a funny hobby’.

“They realized quite early on, but in around 2001 we had this huge festival in Detroit called the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. And I headlined and closed the stage at the very first festival and it was like 50,000 people, downtown Detroit,” he recalled.

“And my mom and dad were up there and I think they were like wow, what the fuck. That was really on point,” said Hawtin.

German DJ Sven Vath also named his mother as being one of the key architects of his success, in an interview with Australian newspaper the Sunshine Coast Daily in 2008.

“She always comes when I play here in Frankfurt and she is always here dancing next to me for four to six hours in a night. She is 64 years old and in such good shape,” the Cocoon chief explained.

“She is such a wonderful woman and she was giving me all she had and was filling my life with this and probably this is why I love to share so much because she was feeding me with love,” said Sven
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