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

• "Anyway, after about nine or ten months, we had an incident at The Playground where someone broke in and stole some of my records, and 'On And On' was one or them that they stole. I was so pissed off 'cause now I didn't have my signature record and I couldn't make the crowd go wild the way I used to when I came on. So I was like, 'Well I'm gonna make one myself’.

  "You see, my mother is music major, she's a music teacher, so I had taken music lessons all through my life. She started me off playing piano. I had flute lessons, trumpet lessons, guitar lessons, drum lessons, the whole nine yards. So basically, DJ'ing to me at that time was just playing records and breaking records, I hadn't really associated the fact that someone actually writes a song, goes in the studio, records it and then presses it on a record-that never really occurred to me at that time. But by the time I got a drum machine I was thinking maybe I can do a record, because I knew I could play.

  That was when those Mattel synsonic drurn machines came out. When I heard about those, that was the first thing I went out and got, so that I could make a beat and do some things with, and that's when I wrote this song called 'Fantasy', which basically was a concoction of the bass line from the Space Invaders 'On And On' thing, the bridge from one or Ronnie Griffith's songs, the lyrics 'were all original, and I did the string arrangements at home on the piano. I got my mother to go out and get a Korg Poly 61 keyboard-and I just kinda used the feel from a lot of the songs and records that I played that were hits to kinda concoct them and embrace them into this one thing-'Fantasy'.

  I just used to sit up in my den and create songs and different things, and that's when 'On And On' was done, on that Korg poly 61 keyboard, an 808 drum machine and a TB 303 bassline machine. All of this was recorded on a four track cassette recorder, the same as the original 'Fantasy', 'Funk-U-Up' and all the rest of that stuff that we recorded at Jes Say records.

  "Anyway, I was getting ahead or myself-that was the time that I ran into Vince Lawrence. Actually, I had known Vince prior to this from back in the days at Sauer's when Craig and I were promoting parties there. Because Sauer's was becoming the hot spot, Craig had somehow formulated a deal with the owner and had booked up every Friday and Saturday there for a year. Now, how I met Vince was when he came up to me and told me that he was part of group that was renting Sauer's prior to Craig monopolising this deal, he had said to me, 'yeah, you all were slick booking up that place-now no one can get in there'. That was our first encounter. After Craig and I had our stint at Sauer's and we went on to running The Playground, Vince started coming there.

  This was about the time that Vince had his 'Fast Cars' record. He'd hangout at first, and then he'd try and get me to play his record but it wouldn't fit, it just wasn't the kind of record that I could play, not to say it was a bad record but it wasn't a great record, it was okay. I mean it was the first record that he had ever made so naturally a lot of things were loose, but overall for a first attempt it was good, it just couldn't stand up to the records that we were playing basically, although I still worked it and tried to get it into the set and help promote it and the whole nine yards.

  Then Vince came to talk to me about this and that and how to make a record, he just had all this knowledge of, like, making records because his father Mitch, had a record company and had already pressed some other Blues type records and things, before he'd even put out 'Fast Cars', so Vince knew about the independent record company thing. And like I said, I wanted to kinda make a record myself, so I was kinda pickin' his brain to find out what it took to do that. I thought it was like this big involved process, but he's like, No, no maan, it's easy-you just do this, there's a pressing plant over here, you do that, you do the labels and...' so on and so forth. So I was trying to find out through Vince how I could do that, but I got kinda sidetracked in the interim because he had heard 'Fantasy' and he was like, 'This is the stuff that I've always wanted to do but I don't know how to do it'.

  "Now Vince is one of these nerdy type of guys, but he's pretty smart, he knows how to finagle his way into situations, and to this day he never ceases to amaze me in the things that he gets himself into. I mean, this guy could talk his way into the presidency and everyone will be asking, How did he get there?'--That's the kind of guy he is. "So because he had the group Z Factor and he knew I had written 'Fantasy', he was like, 'Would you be interested in being a part of Z-Factor?' At first I was like, 'No, I'm not interested', because they made 'Fast Car's' and that wasn't something that I wanted to do. But as I thought more about it, I was like, 'Well, maybe this is the way that I can get his father to put out 'Fantasy", because his father had the record company. So then I was like, 'okay, I'll try it and we'll see'.

  When I joined Mitch, he was ecstatic about 'Fantasy' too because he knew, first off, I was like the man in town--the big DJ--that I was playing it in the clubs, that I gave Frankie Knuckles a tape of it before the record came out, and he was actually playing the reel to reel tape. The Warehouse and everybody knew the record, so it was almost like he had a built-in promotion network and all he had to do was press it and sell it. But what happened was, it took him a long time to actually press the record and get it out.

  In the meantime I was playing all over the place and I had been playing my own 'On And On' track now, and because I had gotten so frustrated with Mitch taking so long to get 'Fantasy' out' I was like, 'Well shoot, I'm gonna put out my own 'On And On' thing and make some money off of that'. Another reason I wanted to put that out so fast was that we were getting requests from the record pool I belonged to called IRS that was a part of Importes Etc., although it was in a different building. Whatever I would play at The Playground that night, people would run to Importes Etc. the next day trying to find it, and this is one of the ways the record pool gets its information on what the buzz is on a record from the streets. The original "On And On' they couldn't find, because that was a bootleg. Then when I was playing my version, they couldn't find that either because it wasn't even a record yet. But the people knew who was playing it, because I was the only one who had it, so when I went to the record pool the guys there said, 'People are requesting something we don't know anything about--why don't you make a tape so we can hear It?" So I made a tape, they played it, and sure enough someone said, 'Yeah, that's it', and they're like, "'What is it?" And I said, 'Well, that's my track, that's On And On'. Then they were like, 'Maan, if you can get your hands on two or three hundred copies of this, we can sell 'em in the store like that', and I was like seeing money lighting up in my head.

  All of a sudden I thought back to Vince again, because he could get the record pressed. I went downtown to a little studio that the group called Omni had, that's where it was recorded to a quarter inch tape for mastering, and then we pressed the record at Larry Sherman's place on Jes Say Records label which vince named and did the logo for. I took the last thousand dollars I had to my name and invested it into pressing these records 'cause I knew I was gonna be able to sell them already.

  Within ten days I had five hundred records and we sold them for four dollars when the actual rate back then was only two dollars and fifty cents, so Importes Etc. was selling them for six ninety nine. We used a hundred for promotion, I made six hundred dollars profit off of the first batch and Importes wanted two or three hundred more records, so we went back to Larry to press some more, but by this time places like Loop records and all these other places were calling, saying they wanted the record because they heard it was selling like hot cakes. So I was like, 'Well shoot, we need to press a thousand this time', so we went in and pressed a thousand, and those were gone in like a week, and it just like started snowballing.

  'On And On' actually came out in January of 1984, beating Mitch out with 'Fantasy' because his didn't come out until a month or so later, but he capitalised off of that whole thing. 'Fantasy' got on the radio on WGCI and he ended up selling records that way, which to this day I have never seen royalties, publishing or anything for that record", but it really wasn't a big deal either because I was making all my money from my own label, so I really didn't care so much at that point. Through the first year and a half that I was into it, we put out "On And On ,directly afterwards I put out 'Funk-U-Up', then Wayne's record Dr. Derelict 'Undercover', the Les Noiz stuff, the Lillian, Dum Dum and all that kind of stuff just back to back. I'd have seven of eight different records out at any given time all under different names and different labels, there was just money rolling in' from everywhere. So it was no big deal for me.

  "Not to get off on a tangent, but one of the things we were talking about when I picked you up from the airport was the fact that how everyone was like fighting against each other and there was this dissension in everybody. Well, I've probably been the only one throughout the whole thing that's never been like that, and that was the reason why I got up out of Chicago and left, because I didn't want to be a part of that any more, You'd have people like Larry Sherman who, when he saw the kind of money 'we were making from the records--you know he's a smart guy, he sees these kids come in with this record, they press up five hundred copies, they come back three days later asking for more and on an independent label, he starts thinking 'what's going on here?' So he got with us and financed a lot of the things for free and put some things out on his Trax label. I mean, he'd give us a bone here and some money there just to keep us happy, but it got to the point where we felt he was trying to keep too much of the money. B

  By this time, we had set up our own distribution network with all these stores, and we're like, 'just give us some records and we'll sell 'em ourselves'. Look at it this way, I just figured out an alternate means to get paid and still accomplish the same thing. I thought to myself, 'Well, it costs him about twenty five cents to make a record, if that, so why not give me five hundred records which costs him 'bout a hundred and fifty dollars, we'll sell 'em and Jes Say records would make its fifteen hundred dollars directly from the sales we made when we picked up the cash from the record stores. Then neither one of us really loses. So that's how we started working our relationship. But the only problem with that was he took it upon himself to think that since he was doing my records for free that if he happened to get an order from sornebody who asked if he had any "On And On' records, he'd go, 'Oh no, but I'll press some up and get them over to you', you know what I mean? He thought that that was okay too. That's where' we started to have our falling out.

  "But getting back to the subject at hand, started thinking, 'If that happens with just like a track, I wonder what would happen if I do a real song', and that's when we wrote 'Funk-U-Up'. That came about because Duane Buford was having problems with his girlfriend, and he was like, 'Maan, I ain't never going out with no more pretty girls, they'll just fuck you up', and we're like, 'Hey, that's the name of a song', but we couldn't use 'fuck' so we used 'Funk' instead. That was the first song that was recorded on twenty four track. When we put that out, that became an instant hit, because back in those days Farley was the man on the radio, he was like the leader of the hot mix five and if he played your record, it wan a hit. So the whole hot mix five embraced 'Funk-U-Up' and it just became this big mega hit. Then I did 'Real Love' and that did ten times better than 'Funk-U-Up' did. In between those, I was dong Wayne's record 'Undercover' which was like a huge underground hit that was probably one of the first records to expand us out of the Chicago area, because we started getting calls from Detroit, so we went up to Detroit to see what the club scene was like and they just embraced us. Then we went to Milwaukee, Indianapolis, then New York started getting our records and we were getting orders from there. The next thing we knew, guys from England were coming in wanting to license our product, and that's how it all started."

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