"I never worked a day in my life, I just laid back and let the big beat lead me" The Jungle Brothers

To Start
Could it be that Kermit was wrong? No matter how heart-felt, disarming and historic his words may have been, and no matter how many kids - through this creature's infamous song - learned about morale, ethics, love, and all that good stuff, can it be that ultimately his tear jerking punch line "It's not easy being green" is a lie? Is it really that hard being green?

The fact that this question enters my head in the midst of a busy and turbulent career, supports this slightly controversial point, if not proves it. Sure, my life consists of odd hours, little sleep and an ever decreasing hearing capacity, but it never seems to outweigh the fun. Because I have so much laptop-time on airplanes, I recapped the chain of events that led to my Remixer Of 2003 award—at the risk of having to check myself in at “Narcissists Anonymous”—just to explain why The Scumfrog story so far has been exciting and relatively smooth. It’s quite the read, and I’m sure it puts many to sleep, so consider this your Tylenol PM equivalent.
 
Pre-Frog
Before I was green, I was plain Jesse Houk, living in my native Amsterdam, the aspiring DJ at my high school soirees who couldn't leave the 45s alone after graduation. At 19, most of my fellow students at the Vossius Gymnasium went on to pursue serious academic studies around the world while I lacked any drive to extend my education beyond the point of bare necessity. Undecided whether I wanted to be a starving artist or a hustling music executive I started exploring the incestuous corners of the music industry. I stumbled from one job to another, shifting from A&R dude into radio personality and program director, all whilst staying true to my one passion, controlling a crowd with a stack of vinyl.

At 25 I decided to bite the bullet and focus all my attention on DJing, producing, songwriting, and other music related activities that notoriously lead to multiple roommates and disapproving parents. To make the leap from paycheck to unemployment even more radical I picked New York City as my new home. I had never been in New York City before, there was no job waiting for me there, I had not saved any money, but I was not alone. In Amsterdam, I had a summer-romance-turned-serious-affair with a New York belle. When she had to go back home at the end of her year in Europe, she invited me to come to New York to live on her turf for awhile. Her invitation and my dual citizenship were too tempting a combination to stay in Amsterdam. I quit whatever job I had, gave up my apartment, and left to start a new life on the other side of the Atlantic.

The moment I set foot on the mythical rock called Manhattan I was in its grip, and as the romance with my girlfriend blossomed, so intensified my affair with the Big Apple. Shortly before I left Holland I had started collaborating with Dutch producer/engineer Sjaak Sperwer which had resulted in an album deal with BMG. Our project was called Resonance, a slightly over-prestigious mix of Electronica, Pop, and Rock, and it required me to shuttle between my new and my old home to support its release with music videos and promotion. Since I had no contacts in New York's recording industry yet, I took my productions (made in the kitchen of our upper eastside apartment) to Holland whenever I went back, and sold them to labels over there. One of these productions was The Watersong.

In that period I had several aliases. Some were with Jake (Resonance, Barbarus, Jake and Jesse) and some were solo projects (DJ Jesse, Dapa Doosa) but for The Watersong—courtesy of contractual crap—I needed to adopt just one more. Don't forget that all these projects typically didn't sell more than 500 to 1000 copies, so it didn't really matter what they were called. This indifference caused me to submit the ridiculous name that would bless me with success, curse me with its longevity, and cover me in green...The Scumfrog.

Lucky Break
Fast-forward two years; my beautiful girlfriend had become my lovely wife, Resonance was released but had bombed, and I had told the ever-so-local music business in Holland goodbye. The revenue from all previous projects was spent on Manhattan rent, a fantastic wedding, and a luxurious honeymoon, and I was scrambling for $100 DJ gigs in East Village lounges to get by. Out of the blue I received a congratulatory email on having two cuts on Danny Tenaglia's Global Underground (Athens) compilation, one of which was The Scumfrog's The Watersong. Go figure, two years after its insignificant release on a small Dutch label (600 of the 1000 first copies were still rotting away in an Amsterdam warehouse), this song, through the compilation, had become my first production with an actual public demand.
 
My fear of having to pursue a day job was instantly crushed by a determination to milk the Global Underground momentum for all it was worth. The Miami winter music conference (WMC) 2000 was coming up and even though I probably couldn’t afford to go, I would make sure that I had a new Scumfrog single to give my DJ friends that did. The single was called Learning to Fly, and I had struck a one-time handshake deal with my favorite Manhattan record store (read: hangout), Beyond Bass Records, to pay for the manufacturing of 500 vinyls. I would get 100 to hand out and they would bet on profiting from potential sales of the other 400, without actually obtaining any rights to the song. Due to the good faith and total lack of legal knowledge between Beyond Bass and me, this deal was a big success and resulted in an early morning phone call from House Music's living legend, Roger Sanchez.

R-Senal
The S-man—as Roger calls himself when he is in full gear—picked up the single for his label R-senal but also signed six other tracks that we planned to release as an album. To support the record and The Scumfrog as a DJ, he had me open for him on parts of his North American tour in early 2001. This was how I learned the ropes of life on the road and particularly exciting because it was my first introduction to the US beyond New York.

As I was finishing up the last tracks in the collection of beats and loops that were to become my album on R-senal, I napstered my way across the 60's Rolling Stones song We Love You. The song’s psychedelic chorus just begged to be remixed, so I downloaded it and cut it up to build a track around it. It instantly had the promise of a great big-room anthem, and although this sound was in stark contrast with the rest of the tracks I had made, I called Roger and played it over the phone. He insisted I not only include it on the album, but also make it the next single. Around the same time, he was working on his own sample-hit Another Chance and he pressed promos with his song on one side, and We Love You on the other side. What better way to be promoted than on the flip side of Another Chance?

We took the promos to Miami for WMC 2001. Another Chance ended up triumphant at number one in the UK pop chart, and We Love You (licensed to Groovalicious in the UK and promoted heavily by BBC Radio 1's Pete Tong), became my first number one in the summer club-charts there. Although the upsides of having a hit record may be obvious, the downside was that the other tracks on my album suddenly paled in comparison and would not match the expectation of a Scumfrog album. I threw away most tracks and started recording new material, which sounded better because I had access to a Protools studio, a considerable upgrade from my kitchen-PC setup that Learning To Fly and The Watersong were made on.

My life was changing, and my wife and I were going through personal changes too. Unfortunately, we both grew in different directions, and after a while it became clear that our marriage would not last the lifetime we had promised each other three years earlier. We separated a few months later and eventually divorced.

Bowie
The commercial release of We Love You had been anticipated and hyped over the summer of 2001, a music video was in the making and everyone involved had high expectations. No one could predict that its release would coincide with the biggest terrorist attack of our generation, which understandably knocked "going out to buy a Scumfrog single" from peoples to-do list that month. In the two weeks that Manhattan was a virtual war zone covered in tragedy, the music business was at a complete standstill. Not knowing what would happen with the world in the weeks to come, I put my album project aside and finally remixed one of my favorite songs of all time, David Bowie’s Loving The Alien. (The song from 1984 is about the taboo surrounding inter-faith relationships between Christians and Muslims, so what better time to start on this than the week after 9/11). When the smoke in downtown Manhattan had cleared and the music industry was resuming its pre-war decline, I sent a copy of the remix to Bowie’s people. Bowie himself liked the mix and its timing. He suggested making an animated video to my mix containing his images from the original video and that year he opened his tour with the song.

Remixes
In Roger I had somebody to pass on my productions to all the top DJs in the world, and I wanted to use that affiliation well. Instead of waiting for a label to call with remix assignments, I started making unsolicited remixes, hoping that it would help promote my name. My mix of Sono’s Keep Control was created from samples off the original record, rather than parts that were sent to me. Nobody had asked me to do the mix, but when a lot of DJs started playing it, S