Jesse Saunders - Funk You Up

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1984 Chicago House Classic
"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 used to go up and pester him about DJing, 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, and he just called me up and said, 'Hey maan, get all your records together, we're DJing 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 DJed, 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 of 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 of 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 Thomson, who had the finance, who was always on the cutting edge of the club scene, myself, and I guess you could say Farley to a certain degree, although he was really hired to be a DJ more so than he was to be a part 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 lot of places that led up to the whole origin of this thing, but The Loft is were it all started."