Extract from House Music – The Real Story

Vince Lawrence and I had become friends: we started working together instead of against each other. One day, Vince brought a song into The Playground that he had written and performed himself, and then had pressed into a record. Vince’s father owned a small independent label, called Mitchbal Records, that released records for local Blues artists, and Vince had convinced his Dad to release the record, a New Wave song which he called (I Like To Do It In) Fast Cars. This was the first time I had ever really known someone who had made a record and, although it wasn’t very good, I mixed it into my sets and set the ball in motion to break the record. After all, I still felt a little guilty about the day I’d stolen his nights at Sauer’s.

At The Playground I discovered my signature song and began all of my sets with it. When the tune came on, everybody knew it was time for Jesse Saunders to bring the House. I had found it on the B-side of a pre-mixed record that everyone else had been playing on its A-side and I was able to turn it into a real hit on the dance floor. My imagination was peaking, but I was becoming anxious as to what my next move would be to further myself in the music industry. Then it hit me, I figured that if Vince could make a record, so could I.

While attending broadcasting school that fall, I dreamt about what a great feeling it would be to put my very own song onto the turntables and hear it come out of the speakers. I drew upon all of my knowledge from my years as a musician and even went to my mother to ask her advice on how it would be best to go about writing the song.

In January of 1983, I sat down at the piano and hacked out the melody and bass lines of songs that I had been playing in the club that had proven most popular. I then took each of the samples and modified them with my own personal touch in order to make them my own. After a while, I finally had the basis of something and sat down to write the lyrics. The deeper I got into the process, the more excited I became. I could almost taste it, the day that all of this would come together perfectly and fill the ears of those around me.

The song was called Fantasy. It was about following your dreams. It took me about a month to finalize and to make sure the arrangements fit together exactly the way they should. Then, once I had arranged everything, I needed to find a band to play it all together.

I went to a talent show at my old high school and looked for a band that I thought might be pretty good, luckily enough there was a great one just as I entered the room. They ended up winning the show, and to their surprise, I went straight back stage afterwards to talk to them about producing a record with me in the studio.

I had never been to a recording studio before, but one of the members of the band had done this sort of thing in the past and taught me about how to go about it. The guy’s name was Rob Johnson, and he was heavily into the production of what would incidentally become the highest selling album of all time, Thriller—the Michael Jackson classic produced by the legendary Quincy Jones. I met the members of the band and began rehearsal in one of the vocalist’s basement that March.

The vocalist was Tracey Buckner, whose step-father produced commercial jingles, so he didn’t mind us using the house at all. I also found out, to my very great surprise, that he was also the president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences! The National Academy, also known as N.A.R.A.S., is the body that nominates artists for the Grammy awards each year and then determines the winner.

Her father would hang out and listen every once in a while, more than happy to allow some young musicians to play around in his basement. I didn’t really understand what the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences was, but her father explained that it was a foundation to promote the art of music, quality music. You needed to be commercially produced musician or songwriter to join, meaning that your records had to have been distributed to record stores and not just produced on cassette tape and given to friends. Producers and engineers could join too, but these technical people needed to be on at least five or so commercial records in order to join. It served as the ultimate bridgepoint between amateurs and industry professionals.

Besides Tracey, the band consisted of Rob, Dee, Duane Grant and Lorie Hord. I served as writer, producer and arranger. After we had rehearsed the song to death, I called a friend of mine, Kevin Richards, who was studying sound engineering at Solid Sound studios in a suburb of Chicago known as Hoffman Estates. He worked out a deal with his instructor to allow him to record us in the studio as his final exam, and we were all set. At the end of March, in the snow and cold, we packed up our equipment and headed into the studio. Things, though, did not go exactly as planned. I was going to have the guitar player, Dee, sing the vocals, but we needed a synchronized instrumental recording and the drummer, Rob, just couldn’t keep his tempo consistent. He was playing way too fast.

We even tried to use a click track, a kind of metronome that musicians can hear through headphones that keeps them playing along at a certain tempo, to try and make his timing more consistent. We worked through the song again and again; the vocalist was waiting in the corner as we tried to get it right. But eventually we just ran out of time, and had to go with what we had. I was still excited when we left the studio, I had just recorded my first song, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. After months of preparation, things just didn’t work out at the final stage. I didn’t get the vocals recorded at all, not even once. So I revised my plan.

I was watching TV one day and saw an advertisement for this toy drum machine and decided to pick one up in order to get a better feel for the drums myself. It was one of those “Synsonic” drum machines from Mattel. Eventually, I upgraded to a more professional setup after seeing what I could do with the toy. A musical instrument company named Roland had just come out with an advanced system, called the TB-303, which simulated the sound of a bass player, and its counterpart, the TR-606, that could do the job of any drummer and nearly replace the human drummer altogether. These two machines worked hand in hand with each other to create the perfect illusion, so that the songwriter or producer could just work at the keyboards and simulate a jam session complete with a drummer and bass player. They even had a synchronization cable that allowed the two to play in time with each other. This led me to rearrange the song again, so that it was driven by the strength and feel of this mechanical duo rhythm section.

I called up Vince Lawrence for consultation about how to go about the whole thing in a better way, as he had done this before. Vince showed me how to use a new form of keyboard, called a Moog synthesizer, which simulated the sounds of strings, wind instruments and a whole menagerie of way out sounds. Using this, I expanded upon what I already had for my song Fantasy. I liked the synthesizer so much that I convinced Mom to help me invest in a better keyboard than Vince’s, and she bought me a Korg Poly 61. This keyboard had polyphonic sound, which meant that I could play more than one note at a time. Chords could be played and this particular keyboard had preset sounds from the factory, so you didn’t have to figure out how to make professional sounds on your own. With this addition, I began to really fill out the sound. Vince’s Moog, as innovative as it was, was only able to play one key at a time and mine could simulate an entire orchestra all at once.

These meetings with Vince led him to develop his own bright ideas. He had a band called Z Factor which he was trying to promote around Chicago, so he told his father about how great Fantasy was and how great it would be to get onto vinyl as Z Factor’s new song. His dad approached me soon afterward about recording the song with the Vince’s group, and I quickly jumped at the chance. This would be my second chance to have the song recorded for free. As an official member of Z Factor, we became the first group in Chicago to use purely synthesized music in accompaniment to the guitar.

The other members of Z Factor were Carlos – our guitar player – and Fred on the keyboards. That summer found us rehearsing in Vince’s garage on the far southside of Chicago and all the neighborhood kids would come around to watch and listen. The inspiration of this new environment spurred me to write even more songs. We eventually recorded an entire album of songs in July of 1983 including Fantasy, Thorns and I’m The DJ, a song which I had written prior to joining Z Factor, and which was slated as the second single behind Fantasy.

The crowds at our concerts got larger and larger, all of the sudden we needed a seated venue just to fit everybody inside. Vince, always the promoter, even called in ABC television to do a story on us. He figured that since the media was always doing stories on the bad things going on with kids in the inner-city, that it must be time to get a ‘feel good’ story in there to show people that we weren’t all bad. Disappointingly, ABC declined the interview. A key ingredient to the reincarnation of Fantasy turned out to be a girl named Screaming Rachel, Vince’s dad approached us about using her on the Fantasy track, and it turned out that she was a great rock vocalist with tons of street credibility. She sung the vocals and I did a talking part in the middle of the song that went, “Hold onto your dreams, because your dreams will take you beyond the stars, to find out who you
really are.”

I’d even upgraded my TR-606 to a TR-808, Roland’s next generation drum machine, which would revolutionize the recording industry, in order to record the song with a less synthetic feel. All in all we ended up with a great product.

Not only was I happy with my new version of Fantasy, which became the first House single ever recorded, but I was finding solace in my life’s direction. My return from LA seemed to be the right move. Soon after the record came out, I joined the National Academy following the advice of its president, and I was officially an industry professional. All the while, things were going very well at The Playground. I had started to incorporate my drum machines into my DJ set to shake things up a bit and was moving into the next phase of my career. I was finally comfortable with my forseeable destiny. Then, one day, I walked up to the booth and my jaw dropped. As I searched for my signature record, there was nothing in the slip. Someone had stolen my records, I had nothing to play and the crowd was getting hyped. I didn’t know what to do. I had never been so frustrated. Never been so scared.

The track I had used as my signature song (off the B-side of one of the stolen records) was called On & On. I was lost without it. However, instead of curling up into a little ball, I decided to take action. After the evening was over I set about the process of finding my records again at the store, but eventually came up with an even better idea. Maybe this was a sign, I thought, that I was meant to create my own music and not just play around with the music of others. I would make my own version of On & On.

I replayed the bass line from memory and came up with some original drum tracks that changed every minute or so under the groove. Vince and I added in some vocals and rap lyrics, and On & On was reborn. In the end, the drum track evolved through five different distinct rhythms on the TR-808. I also began to use these new rhythms during the rest of my DJ set as an underlying beat to different songs.

That November, Vince and I gave this kid, Duane Buford, a ride home from The Playground. He was a concession worker for the club, but was always talking about how he was also a musician in his down time. Vince didn’t like Duane much, so he jumped on the subject almost immediately and challenged Duane on how he could call himself a musician. Much to our surprise, the kid had an original Fender Rhodes piano – a classic instrument – back at his place and knew how to play quite well.

Vince’s opinion changed after this, he took a sudden liking to Duane and invited him to a jam session with us. He would later turn out to be another key ingredient to the foundation of House music that I was creating. I was also participating in a record pool at the record store Importes Etc., the major retail outlet for twelve inch dance records in Chicago.

A record pool is a group of DJs that receive new vinyl for free from record companies in order to break the records in their nightclubs. Importes was a good place to pick up new music for my sets. The head sales guy, Frank Sells, was great. He would make sure to point out every new release and give me a little information on the sound to help me decide which ones would fit best into my DJ sets.

Then one day he approached me and asked about one of the records I was playing at The Playground. It turned out that a bunch of people from The Playground were coming in and asking about it, but he had no idea which track they were talking about and couldn’t find it for them. I wasn’t sure which song they were talking about either, so I brought in a recording of my last set and he played the tape in the store so that the patrons could listen through each song. Surprisingly enough, someone recognized one of the rhythm tracks from On & On as the song that people were asking about.

When he found out that the track was an original of mine, he left me with the strong impression that if I could get On & On pressed onto vinyl, he could sell the whole lot. He was getting a lot of requests, and I decided it was time to take my journey with On & On to the next level. In December, I called on Vince and told him about the situation, and let him hear a version of the track that I had recorded on my cassette recorder.

He suggested that I visit another studio owned by the group, Omni, in order to transfer the recording onto mastering tape. I planned to put the five rhythm tracks on the B-side of the record in order to provide the instrumental versions to anyone who might be interested, so we transferred those as well. Vince and I then took the master tape down to the Precision Record Labs, which was a place where you could get your records pressed that was owned and operated by Larry Sherman.

I was uncomfortable with going back to Mitchball records, because they were taking a very long time to press my song Fantasy onto vinyl, so I figured it was time for a change. Precision Record Labs was used to pressing seven inch records for Blues and Polka artists, so Larry wasn’t quite sure what to make of the dance record we wanted pressed. But we had told him about the requests we’d had down at Importes Etc., so Larry sat down and listened to the master in order to be introduced to the sound of House music.

With my last eight hundred dollars, I pressed five hundred copies of On & On. The label was done in black and white, and I decided that it would be sold under the ‘Jes Say Records’ label. The label name being a play on my own name. Vince drew the logo for Jes Say by hand and put it on the cover. We then had them put in white jackets and shrink wrapped for sale.

On & On was officially released in January of 1984 on my upstart record label, Jes Say Records, and became the first original House record ever made for sale. We proceeded to promote my record in the same fashion that we had promoted our parties, with posters on every corner and flyers passed out at the high schools, colleges and various clubs including The Playground. We initially sold 250 copies to Importes Etc., and they managed to sell them all even though the price was about seventy-five percent more than a regular record. We’d made the mistake of selling the records to Importes at $4 per record, forgetting that the store would up the price in order to make a profit as well. At $6.99 a record, (the price Importes sold my record for) my record went for a much higher price than the usual $3.99 other records of its kind sold for. It didn’t matter too much because Importes Etc. soon reordered, and we were back at Precision to press more copies.

Larry Sherman was astonished to find us walking through his door again only a few days after we’d picked up the first five hundred copies. This time I ordered a thousand copies and his eyebrow raised. After hearing our story, he decided to offer me a deal. Instead of paying for the batch of records, he would press them for free and then take the cost of the records out of our profits as well as an extra percentage based on the sales numbers.

On & On became a hit; we even got radio play from the Hot Mix 5 radio show – they were very supportive of the House movement on the local station WBMX – that incidentally now employed Farley. In fact, all of the DJs were friends back in those days. I passed out copies of the record to everyone and soon enough you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing On & On. This unity was one of the major reasons for the early success of House music within the city limits Chicago; we all helped each other out and made sure that no one was left behind.

© Jesse Saunders

reproduced with kind permission

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