This excerpt was taken from an interview in 1994 and later was published in Jonathan Fleming's book "What Kind Of House Party Is This?" It is the summarizing feature in the book as related by the originator and founder of what we know as "House Music"
Jesse Saunders

• Still fifty yards apart, a smile came across his face, and we knew then who each other was.

  At talking distance: 'I thought you were joking when you told me onthe phone'. He was looking at my ankle, the one I had broken on mysecond day in Chicago. 'If I had known, I would have brought my wife's car, It's bigger than my Pontiac sports. Oh well, it's good to meet you Jonathan. I've been waiting for this day to happen'. 'Me too', I replied. Don't worry about the car I'm young and I'm relatively healthy'.

  We got into the car and we were off, cutting through the breeze,watching the blue sky, listening to old Disco, enjoying the day, and lapping up the sunshine. This was it. Yes boy. California dreamin'beautiful women, fancy cars, gorgeous houses and earthquake damage.They'd recently hit 6.8 on the Richter scale, and I was witnessing some of the worst hit areas on our way to his home. The interview started routinely. Jesse told me he was born on the south side of Chicago on the 10th ,March 1962. He went to Kenwood High School and then the University or Southern Calirornia. There, he tried a varietyof subjects--first, oceanography because he did a lot of scubadiving, then communications-before he finally discovered there was aRecording Arts course where he could study sound engineering.
  

• He told me how he got into DJ'ing when he was still at high school.

  "I guess it was the summer after my freshman year (first year). I was about fifteen at the time, we used to have this place called Mendell High School where everyone went every Saturday night to listen to Kirk Townsend who was the DJ there. Well, my step brother Wayne Williams used to go up and pester him about DJ'ing, because he had gotten a little taste of it by doing house basement parties and things like that with a guy by the name of Ewert Abner, who was my sister's boyfriend at the time. Now Mendell held about twenty five hundred people every Saturday; and Wayne wanted to get up on the big stage and try to do his DJ thing, but Kirk wouldn't let him. Then we found out Kirk happened to be a distant relative of ours, so Wayne convinced Kirk's mother,our aunt, to tell Kirk to let him get up there and DJ, and from that I guess he made his debut, because people started seeing Wayne as a DJ. After that debut, Wayne got a call from a group by the name of The Doctors to DJ at one of their parties at the Burning Spear, and he just calledme up and said, 'Hey maan, get an your records together, we're DJ'ing at a party'. Now, ever since I was seven or eight years old I collected records. I always kinda, like, liked to entertain everybody with the best records, and be the one whenever we went on trips that made all the tapes, so I guess from then I was becoming a DJ. Anyway, I had never DJed at a party in my life before and I'm sitting there thinking like 'DJ at a party? In front of people?'. You know, then I was kinda shy, but that first time we DJ'ed, we turned out to be a pretty big hit. At that time, even before remixes were done, I used to make tapes that were remixes or songs. I extended the album version of 'One Nation Under A Groove' long before the 12" extended version had come out, and did that on a little cassette deck that I used to do all my pause button mixes and splices on, but when I played it at that party, people went crazy and were wondering what it was. From there, we started DJing at everyone's party all over the place, places like The Burning Spear on the south side, then a lot of the high schools like St. Albes, my high school Kenwood, and we did a lot or homecomings at Whitney Young High School. In the next couple of years, we started doing places like the Blue Gargoyle, The Loft which was really the first straight place, like a straight Warehouse-The Tree Of Life,. which was far south side, then we did Sauer's, which was a hot spot, First Impressions, which was another hot spot, and the Mansion In Hyde Park. Then Craig Thompson, who had the finance, who was always on the cutting edge of the club scene, myself, and I guess you could say Farley  ("Jackmaster" Funk) to a certain degree, although he was really hired to be a DJ more so than he was to be apart of the entity of running this place, opened a place called The Playground, that was a big success, and that went on to become the Candy Store. Then the clubs just went on and on, and there were a lotor places that led up to the whole origin of this thing, but The Loft is were it all started.

• During my interviews I had learned that Ron Hardy had been in town DJ'ing it a place called "Den One"-again, a place that this Craig Thompson used to run some time before Frankie Knuckles had got to the Warehouse. I asked Jesse why he hadn't mentioned it in his list of important events.

  "Well Den One was on the north side and that was like a gay club. The north side is where all the gay clubs were, including the Warehouse, although it was nearer to downtown. But the people I'm talking about were the straight crowd from the south side. After wehad been DJ'ing for maybe a year or so, Craig Thompson had thrown some parties down at the Warehouse where Frankie Knuckles played, and Wayne had gone to them. Frankie used to play a kind of music that was Disco from labels such as Prelude, West End and Salsoul, but itwasn't your traditional Disco like Donna Summer or that kinda thing,it was really R&B. For instance, Heatwave was a classic example, it was the R&B sound of Heatwave, but with that driving beat. Wayne had never heard anything like it before, and he came back and said, 'You gotta go to this place and check this stuff out'. Now, Wayne is two years older than me. I was sixteen at the time and you had to be eighteen to get in the club, but I got in because the party was puton by Bob Peters, a member of The Doctors group, and I was like,'Wow'-I had never heard music like that before. To get those records, Wayne used to go to a record shop on the north side called 'Sounds Good', because there wasn't but maybe one or two stores in the entire city where you could go to get this stuff, so Sounds Good was like the premier spot to go. At the time, this was say the fall of '77, it was so funny because they only had like a little section with this music, but everyone would be in it trying to find all this stuff. Well, Wayne would come back with it and play it, but people at the time were into the commercial stuff like Cameo, Heatwave, James Brown, and it was hard trying to get them to listen to it even though it was a good music-you know how hard it is when you're trying to introduce something new to the people and they're not used to it,they're like, "Whoa, what's this?' Well, we cleared the dance floor for a while, but we were like, 'No, we know that this is gonna be thesound and we're gonna be the ones to break it', so we just stayed with it and stayed with it and got a couple of people like Arthur Bailey, who was like the comedian that comes on to warm up the show before the main act comes on, he would be the guy to get everyone going. He would take his shirt off when the music came on and he'd just Jump around and shout, 'yeah heh', but when everybody saw how good a time he was having, they were like, 'Hey, this is kinda cool,we can be free', you know, kinda like how Rock 'n' Roll set everyone free, it was the same kinda vibe, because the music just, like, entranced you and took you to a diferent level once you were open enough to let it in. A few people started catching on, then more and more, until it became like a fad, like the in thing to be with this crowd and listen to this music. All of a sudden, you saw people coming from all the private schools around the city, because the people that were supporting these parties, who were really instrumental in grasping that whole Disco sound, they were more ofthe upper middle class--sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers,who had their own little cliques and things-these were the type of people that went to Mendell and they were called the Guedies. So when the word got out, it started off a whole new clique, and people would open their mansion homes and we'd go in and DJ that stuff, and it was great. We even had parties right next door to Muhammad Ali's place. So we grew from Mendell where we started, into the Burning Spear with, like, three hundred people, and that was only because of the Doctors and their following, but by the time we established ourselves as DJ's in '78 and started doing our own parties like McClendons in this little room at an apartment complex called South Commons, we were only playing for seventy five people. Those people were the ones that were into the music at the time and it was jammin-we knew those people were gonna be there from the time that we opened to the time that we closed, and that they were gonna have a great time.

  'Then maybe a year later in '79, we went to a bigger room in South Commons, a rooms that would hold say two hundred people. In that same year, we went to the Loft with maybe two hundred, two fifty, but it was a different location. First Impressions was the same thing. Then by the end of 1980, Sauer's was the place. By this time we were up to seven or eight hundred people. Then I went off to study in California. and by the time I got back in June '81, it was the Mansion with six or seven hundred people, Sauer's still the same thing, but this time it was like if you didn't get there before ten o'clock there'd be lines around the corner and you didn't get in. Eventually we moved to The P1ayground which held fifteen hundred to two thousand people, and from that point on I only played for, like, thousands of people at a time. So that is actually how the sound and the music was embraced. Then what would happen is our parties would have to end by like two o'clock, and after our party everyone would go to the Warehouse-by this time everyone was just about old enough to get in. Even if you were younger, you could still pretty much get in: most of those people had a fake ID or they went with someone who knew the doormen, the people that owned the place or whatever. And if they couldn't get in, they'd just hang outside because the music blasted so loud you could litereily have a party outside."

• Continued..... Don't leave now there's more to explore
  (It ain't over)