Chris Brown
Long before Red Melon existed, there was a phone line between a record shop in Los Angeles and a kid in Idaho. In 1991 Chris Brown was working the counter at Prime Cuts Records in LA, and Dano, calling from Idaho, would ring up to hear the hottest new records, which Chris played down the phone. When Dano liked what he heard, Chris mailed the records out. That is how Dano bought his first batch of vinyl. Few label stories have a more direct origin, and few artists on the roster can claim to have literally put the first records in the founder's hands.
Chris, known on the label copy as Brownie and to dancefloors as DJ Brownie, made his name in Los Angeles. A California vacation in 1986, as one Rampant release note tells it, turned into a life on the West Coast. His own bio places the start of his career more than thirty years ago in the city's original "dark and dirty" underground and after-hours spots, the warehouse rooms where LA's house and rave culture took shape. Those nights opened the way to years of bookings across the United States, Mexico and Canada.
Working behind a shop counter in that era meant more than ringing up sales. Record-store staff were tastemakers, the people who decided which import got played to whom, and Chris clearly had the ear. In the early '90s he moved into production with his longtime friend Paul Grogan, and the two worked through a run of names and alter egos: Gorilla Pimp, Immigrant, Faithealer, Mr Funkster, Brownie and DJ Brownie. The parade of aliases says something about the spirit of the work: playful, restless and unconcerned with building a single brand.
Together with Paul Grogan and DJ Doran he set up Rampant Records, which became an early part of America's breakbeat scene in the early and mid '90s, with releases under Immigrant, The Coffee Boys, Mr Funkster and Gorilla Pimp. It was a time when breaks, house and techno were still being mixed freely in the same rooms, and Rampant's records reflected that open-minded energy.
He has never stopped. His bio describes him as constantly refining his skills and style, and these days he is dropping dancefloor weapons on breaks and bass labels while also writing and producing music for television, film, video games and commercials. The through-line from those after-hours rooms is a love of records that move bodies, whatever the genre happens to be called that year.
On Red Melon he teamed up with Dano as Trakshun for "Slipped Disk," one of the label's very first records, released in 1997. It is a bouncing slice of West Coast jackin' house, and on the flip Dano's Acid Mix rides 303 filter work from start to finish. Coming from the man who sold Dano his first records, it made a fitting early chapter for the label.
More than three decades on, the friendship that began over a shop telephone is still part of the Red Melon story, and Brownie remains one of the people without whom the label might never have started at all.
