Some people have said there was quite a merging of the alternative, punk scene

Not with what we were doing. When punk came about they had other clubs like Neo’s, places like that where those punk kids went to.

Chicago, believe me, it was very segregated, very much like it is now. The white kids didn’t party with the black kids. What really tripped me out was when I first moved there... growing up in New York City, all kinds of people grow up around each other, it’s pretty much like you see it, to me here it’s not that big of a deal; race and colour is not that big of a deal. There, when I got there, it was. You had the black folks living on the South side of Chicago, and on the
immediate west of the city. And the only place where you find people who were different coloured people living together, was on the north side of Chicago like Newtown, that type of area, which is where I lived at. It bothered me at first, when I didn’t see enough white or other races on the dancefloor at the beginning, and then I realised I had my job cut out for me because I had to set out and try and change that.

And then when I found that the black gay kids didn’t want to party with the white gay kids, and the white gay kids weren’t gonna let the black gay kids hang out in their clubs, I was like, everybody’s rocking in the same boat but nobody wants to... everybody wants to play this game and it made no sense to me. we’re all living the same lifestyle here. we’re rocking in the same boat but you don’t want me playing in your clubs because you don’t want my crowd following me in. It made no sense to me.

When you go out in the gay clubs in Chicago now, it’s changed a lot. But while I was there it didn’t change at all.

What were the drugs that were driving the scene at the time?

Probably a lot of acid. A lot of acid.

What was the club scene like when you arrived in Chicago?

By the time I got to Chicago the disco craze had pretty much already kicked in. the difference between what was happening with music then and music now is that songs lasted a lot longer then than they do now. I don’t mean as far as length wise, but songs lived in people’s consciousness a lot longer than they do now. So a lot of the stuff that came out in the early ’70s on Philly International. I was playing a lot of stuff like that, that was still working pretty strong, in ’77 when I moved to Chicago. And a lot of the popular RnB club stuff and dance stuff that was, disco records that were coming out then. Salsoul stuff, Philly International.

When did you start doing edits?

I didn’t actually start doing things like that until like 1980, ’81. A lot of the stuff I was doing early on I didn’t even bother playing in the club, becasuse I was busy trying to get my feet wet and just learn the craft. But by ’81 when they had declared that disco is dead, all the record labels were getting rid of their dance departments, or their disco departments, so there was no more uptempo dance records, everything was downtempo. That’s when I realised I had to start changing certain things in order to keep feeding my dancefloor. Or else we would have had to end up closing the club. So Iwould take different records like Walk The Night by the Skatt Brothers or...stuff like A Little Bit Of Jazz by Nick Straker, Double Journey and things like that, and just completely re-edit them. To make them work better for my dancefloor. Even stuff like I’m Every Woman by Chaka Khan, and Ain’t Nobody, just things like that, completely re-edit them, to give my dancefloor an extra boost. I’d re-arrange them, extend them and re-arrange them.

Was that a revolutionary thing to do?

No, I’m sure there was other people that was doing it, but to my audience it was revolutionary. But it had been done. It was already being done, before I moved to Chicago. When I was still here [NY] there were people that were doing it here. It was just a matter of time before I could learn how to do it myself.