I asked him to give me his interpretation
of how House Music started. 'Well there are two
ways to translate that. If you wanna speak of House as the movement, the sounds and
the music that we know today, we're talking about 1983. If you're talking about what
was the catalyst to make it grow to what it finally grew into in 1983, then you've got
to go back to the Disco days. But see, there's a very thin line there between what
was Disco and truly what House is today. So starting from the beginning, it all
transcended from the Warehouse basically, because if Wayne hadn't have gone there and
heard that music, in turn he would never have taken me there, and we wouldn't have been
able to grow as a company and as a force to forge this music on people and make them
listen and believe in it. All I did in 1983 was actually embellish that whole thing and
kinda put it together, kinda like a basketball team-- if you don't have Michael Jordan, or
you don't have your guards, your forwards or your center making up the team, then they
don't win the championship. What we did was gather all the right ingredients, and
luckily I was just fortunate enough to be able to take all of that and make it into the
sound we know today as House. I mean, I had to have a vision in order to make
something, but really what I was doing was just taking a little o' this and a little o'
that, a little creativity, and making that one sound that became the first record, which
was 'On And On'. But I can't take credit for the ingredients, you know, it's just
like making a recipe--you can't take credit for basil or salt and pepper because they have
always been there, you're just using them to make create your recipe, and that's exactly
what I did with Disco to make my 'On And On' besides the original 'On And On' record that
there was.
"We're at 1983, I'm at The Playground DJ'ing, and I mean we open at nine o'clock
and we don't close until the last person leaves which sometimes was seven, eight, nine
o'clock in the morning, and when you're playing that long, you get into a groove but it's
kinda redundant, because there's only so many things that you can play and you have to
kinda keep it going. So what I would do is I would take different kinds of rhythm
tracks that I made at home with my 808 drum machine, and basically I would put other
records on top of 'em. A lot of the time I would take the drum machine to the club and
just leave it playing the same beat the whole time and just mix things in and out, so it
was always constantly the same beat underneath to keep the crowd going, but I would play a
different song on top. There was one record in particular that I used to do this with a
lot, which was the original 'On And On', which was basically this bootleg record that
someone had taken the bass line from 'Space Invaders', the 'toot toot hey beep beep' loop
of Donna Summer's 'Bad Girls', and the little horn thing In 'Funky Town', and looped
them all together to make a constant loop for a whole record. This was the B side of the
record. The A side was a big mega mix of 'Don't Stop Until You Get Enough' by Michael
Jackson, Sergio Mendez and all these different records, but that was the side that
everyone played.
"Now people like Frankie Knuckles, although he had the keenest ear for music and
could break records that way, in the terms of a real DJ, he couldn't mix really. His
mixing was kinda all over the place. But it wasn't about the mix with him, it was about
the records that he played. For us, or me especially, because Wayne became more so the
kinda DJ that Frankie was 'cause he was about the music too. I mean, he could get the mix
going smoothly into the next song, but he wasn't into the actual DJ'ing, you know. I
was all about doing stuff backwards, cutting' and scratchin' and the whole nine yards,
so basically I was mixing and re-editing records right on the turntables without using
tapes and things like that. What I was doing basically was taking the music to a whole
different level and a whole new experience of experiencing three or four things at one
time rather than just one song.
"Anyway, like I was saying, everyone was playing the A side of this record and I
just happened to flip it over wondering what was on the B side, and when I listened to it,
it was like "doom doom doom dibi doom doom doom doom--doom doom doom dibi doom doom
doom doom' and I was like, 'Ahh damn, that's a nice groove'. So I was like, 'okay cool
this is cool. I'm gonna try this cut on my crowd', and when I put it on, they didn't clear
the floor--everybody kinda got into the groove. Then I played it again a little later and
more people got on the floor, then I played it again and people started requesting it, so
I was like, 'cool'. So I had a drum machine going, 'On And On' going on one turntable, and
I'd be bringing in another record like 'Planet Rock' when that came out on the other
turntable; By this time, I'm doing a lot of guest spots, an hour here, an hour there, and
so on and so forth, and also doing like a mix show on WGCI with Herb Kent who got
me on the show to begin with. So whenever I played, my first record on the turntable would
be this bootleg 'On And On' record because that was like my signature tune. 'When I put
that on, everybody knew that I was in the place because nobody else was playing that side
but me, no one even knew what it was, and I wouldn't tell anybody, even though there were
a few people that had it. When I would go up on stage I would make sure that security
cleared it so that no one would know what it was that I as playing. It was just amazing to
me that they hadn't flipped that record over and found it themselves. Through time, after
you play a mix record for so long, you get tired of it and you don't play it any more, so
I guess they got tired of the mix side without ever knowing what was on the other side.
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