DALLAS AUSTIN'S
PIONEERING ATL VIBE

Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told, a recent documentary about the Atlanta-based street party that helped establish the city’s importance to young Black America, brought Gen X viewers back to a time many of them experienced firsthand. When the infamous event’s reputation started preceding it in the late ’80s, the New Jack Swing sound of Bobby Brown’s Don’t Be Cruel and the sampling sonic collages of Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet dominated dorm rooms and Freaknik’s ground zero. Though the party took place in the ATL every April, let’s look back specifically to the weeks following the 1989 show.

On Saturday (5/6) Morehouse and Spelman college students with memories of that year’s Freaknik bacchanalia might have tuned in that morning for their weekly fix of Soul Train. On that particular episode, host Don Cornelius introduced go-go band E.U., R&B singer Grady Harrell and former Klymaxx bassist Joyce “Fenderella” Irby—singing her solo hit “Mr. D.J.” with guest rapper Doug E. Fresh. Browse YouTube and you’ll find a full-fledged band onstage for the lip-synched performance, including a kid in a Batman T-shirt (and matching cap) playing a very ’80s keytar. Quietly, that 18-year-old had co-produced the whole song. He’d soon go on to shape the course of pop music (through hits by TLC, Madonna, Michael Jackson, P!NK and more) right from his own recording studio in uptown Atlanta.

His name was Dallas Austin.

Born in Columbus, Georgia, the youngest of three brothers, Austin grew up near The Party Club, a nightclub/restaurant owned by his parents. Though his biological dad was murdered when Austin was a toddler, his mother soon married legendary James Brown guitarist Jimmy “Chank” Nolen (who had perfected funk’s signature chicken-scratch sound of choking a guitar’s neck while percussively strumming its strings). Austin became mesmerized by music at a young age, learning to play guitar and Roland keyboards financed by his mom beginning in third grade—teaching himself by mimicking the synthesizer lines of hits by The Time (“Cool” and “Get It Up”) and others. By the age of 7, Austin had also experienced life on the road with his stepfather and The J.B.’s.

Superstars of the ’70s regularly visited The Party Club on tour, passing through for soul food like gumbo, fried chicken, turnip greens and yams. As a tweener, young Austin rubbed shoulders with the likes of Zapp, Earth, Wind & Fire, Natalie Cole, Commodores and Parliament Funkadelic—some of whom (Lionel Richie and George Clinton) he’d later work with as an adult. As adjacent to famous musicians and singer-songwriters as a tweenage Michael Jackson or Stevie Wonder, Austin decided early on that he’d one day join the musical universe of heroes featured on favorite album covers like Cosmic Slop.

Following an incident where a sibling smashed his keyboard over a household-chores argument, Austin decided to move 100 miles away to Atlanta. Even at the age of 13, he was already aware of R&B radio acts like Peabo Bryson, Cameo, Brick and the S.O.S Band—all of whom made the nearby ATL a more likely locale than Columbus to realize his dreams. Matriarch Dianna Austin persuaded her son to return from the Greyhound bus station with the promise that she’d uproot their lives and figure out how to make the move work for them all. Within a year, she’d sold The Party Club and they were living in Atlanta-adjacent College Park.

Teenaged Austin spent the years between leaving Columbus and his first big break practicing keyboards, mastering sampling machines, attending high school and roller-skating at southwest Atlanta’s Jellybeans rink. Immortalized in the 2006 Warner Bros. dramedy ATL—co-produced by Austin—the roller rink attracted Jermaine Dupri, Goodie Mob, TLC’s Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins, USHER, Devyne Stephens and Outkast before fame and fortune found any of them (though Dupri, two years younger, had already toured as a backup dancer with hip-hop’s Whodini).

Come 1988, Austin’s manager, William Burke, connected his client with Joyce Irby, who signed him to her Diva One Productions company as a songwriter and producer. Soon signed to Motown for her Maximum Thrust solo album, Irby enlisted him to produce three songs. The lead single, “Mr. D.J.,” reached #2 on Billboard’s R&B chart in ’89; Austin was on his way.

The Recording Academy started awarding Best Rap/Sung Collaboration Grammys over two decades ago, honoring rappers and singers uniting on record. But at the time of Fenderella’s “Mr. D.J.,” with its heavy assist by Doug E. Fresh, mashups of R&B and hip-hop were rare. Notwithstanding Melle Mel’s appearance on Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You” in 1984, rap accents in R&B songs weren’t yet welcome on urban radio (nor was the majority of rap music itself).

Outliers like Prince’s “Alphabet St.” existed, but Austin came of age at just the right time to help usher in this revolution in Black music. At different points in 1989, Al B. Sure! released a remix for “If I’m Not Your Lover,” featuring Slick Rick; Jody Watley dropped “Friends,” featuring Rakim; and Joyce Irby centered Doug E. Fresh on the Austin-produced “Mr. D.J.”

Soon, pop powerhouses like Michael and Janet Jackson were inviting Heavy D to rap on their singles and Prince’s New Power Generation band boasted a resident rapper in Tony M. They all opened the floodgates for a melding of genres that eventually resulted in Billboard changing its Hot R&B Singles chart into the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart in 1999. Dropping out of high school, Austin kept leading the charge—first as producer behind kiddie rap group Another Bad Creation and soon thereafter as a force behind a fledgling new boy band from Philadelphia by the name of Boyz II Men.

By then, Austin had cut his teeth perfecting his sample-heavy funk pastiche sound with acts like Glasswurk and Troop. Then the juggernaut R&B quartet Boyz II Men sold more than nine million copies of their spring ’91 Cooleyhighharmony debut, primarily produced by Austin. Signed to Motown as the protégé act of New Edition member Michael Bivins, the group blanketed seamless vocal harmony à la Take 6 over beats from Austin. Those beats often banged like the Bomb Squad (who had recently produced some of New Edition offshoot trio Bell Biv DeVoe’s debut) and Teddy Riley’s New Jack Swing (a major component on the breakthrough album of former New Edition star Bobby Brown).

Inspired by the “hip-hop smoothed out on the R&B tip with a pop feel appeal to it” of Bell Biv DeVoe, Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes and Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas came together in 1990 as a tomboyish hip-hop feminist trio called TLC. Now the best-selling American girl group of all time, TLC launched their career with Austin-produced singles like “Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg,” “What About Your Friends” and “Hat 2 da Back” on their multiplatinum 1992 debut, Ooooooohhh... On the TLC Tip. (He’d later have a son with Chilli, Tron Austin, in 1997.)

Thanks to other Austin-produced standouts like “Sunshine & the Rain” by Joi, his reputation as a producer rose in tandem with those of some other young twentysomethings: his old skate buddies Jermaine Dupri and Organized Noize, as well as Sean “Diddy” Combs up north. LaFace Records cofounder L.A. Reid pooled all their talents for TLC’s monster follow-up album,
CrazySexyCool, reportedly isolating them from each other in order to foster competition among them. The young trio of producers lived the same lifestyle as their artists and audience in a way that Teddy Riley, Babyface and Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis—though still hot producers—didn’t. Tracks like TLC’s Austin-produced smashes “Creep” and “Unpretty” proved it.

Equally influenced by the sounds of Funkadelic, Public Enemy and Prince (TLC covered Prince-written songs like “Get It Up” and “If I Was Your Girlfriend”), Austin proved that the aesthetic sentiments of B-boys and Black bohemians were never as divergent as many believed. Throughout the ’90s, Austin was just as likely to produce a Black rock band like Fishbone (see Chim Chim’s Badass Revenge) or remix a Lenny Kravitz single (“If You Can’t Say No”). In a real way, Austin’s sensibilities were Afropunk before the aesthetic had a name.

By 21, Austin had opened his own recording studio, DARP (Dallas Austin Recording Projects), located at 582 Trabert Avenue in Atlanta’s affluent Buckhead neighborhood. Like Jermaine Dupri’s So So Def and Diddy’s Bad Boy Entertainment, Austin’s record labels were also in the offing by then. He founded Rowdy Records in 1992—home to young R&B songstress Monica, kiddie hip-hop duo Illegal and Fishbone. Limp Records followed in 1993, issuing Joi’s influential debut, The Pendulum Vibe. Lastly, Freeworld Entertainment signed the short-lived teen singer Sammie. Even a Rowdy Clothing line launched in 1992.

As a label head, Austin may not have been as successful as his peers. But The Pendulum Vibe (entirely produced by Austin, except for two tracks) famously changed the direction of Madonna’s Bedtime Stories and influenced a neo-soul movement on the horizon. Recorded by Nashville native Joi Gilliam upon moving to Atlanta, the album is a distillation of Austin’s eclectic aesthetic (R&B, funk, psychedelic soul) as filtered through Joi, who commanded an angelic voice and freewheeling ideas of her own. Though not a commercial success, her album circulated among fans of early alternative R&B, including Madonna, who in ’94 immediately enlisted Austin to write and/or produce Bedtime Stories tracks like “Survival,” “Sanctuary” and its lead single, “Secret.”

Due to the multiplatinum success of Boyz II Men, TLC and other projects, Austin suddenly loomed large in the pantheon of music mavericks who made the ATL known as the New York of the South. Production team L.A. Reid and Babyface established LaFace Records in Atlanta in 1989, signing local acts like TLC, Outkast and Usher. Native son Jermaine Dupri (son of record executive Michael Mauldin) founded the So So Def label in 1993, bringing Kris Kross, Da Brat, Xscape and others to R&B radio. The ATL-based production team of Organized Noize—Rico Wade, Sleepy Brown and Ray Murray—soon made its impact through work with Goodie Mob, Outkast, En Vogue and others.

As the 1996 Summer Olympics were broadcast internationally from stadiums in Atlanta, there was no doubt that the Southern city had transitioned into a Black-centered cosmopolis displayed on a world stage. Austin and all the music he touched helped bring about that perception.

Some years back, Frank Ocean published a list of his all-time favorite movies in a limited-edition zine. The singer-producer cinephile mentioned movies by Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman and Werner Herzog, but he also cited the 2006 coming-of-age dramedy ATL at the very top. Screenwriter Antwone Fisher based this urban cult classic on material from Austin, who produced the film alongside T-Boz and Will Smith.

A time capsule of growing up on Atlanta’s south side in the early ’90s, ATL is easily paired with 2002’s Drumline—another Atlanta-based teenage dramedy. Also co-produced by Austin, the film follows a marching-band drummer through his coming of age at the fictional Atlanta A&T University, falling in love with a drumline dancer. ATL and Drumline, greenlit mainly because of Austin’s overall involvement, grossed over $70 million and helped raise the city’s profile even higher—both play like Cooley High for a millennial audience.

Austin’s attempts to introduce brand new artists into the world’s collective playlist didn’t always meet with success: Groups like Highland Place Mobsters and Y’all So Stupid never reached the heights of TLC. But by his 30s, the multiple Grammy winner was also lending his talents to established superstars, producing artists from Michael and Janet Jackson to Duran Duran and Santana.

Dallas Austin supplanted established record producers of the 1990s to become the establishment himself, writing the official theme song for Atlanta (“The ATL”) at the request of former Mayor Shirley Franklin in 2005. From a humble start in Columbus idolizing the music associates of his stepfather “Chank” Nolen and woodshedding on Casio synths, Austin undeniably made his own mark on modern music that continues to reverberate.