The story of an '80s club anthem many consider to be the first house record.
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Rewind is a review series that dips into electronic music's archives to dust off music from decades past.
During his formative years in Chicago in the late '70s, Jesse Saunders would blast his homemade remixes on a boombox on the school bus. His friends were agog—they had never heard anything like Saunders' creations, which he made using a tape deck to alter intros and outros, extend breakdowns or add new sections to songs. It was a DIY process with a lot of trial and error, something many DJs around the world were also trying to figure out around the same time.
By the time he was a successful DJ and resident at Playground in the early '80s, Saunders had a secret weapon. It was called "On And On," originally the forgotten B-side to a 12-inch by Mach, a mysterious artist no one really knew anything about. The only thing people knew was that the A-side was a dance floor bomb: a seven-minute oddity called "Funky Mix," with snippets from artists like Michael Jackson, Lipps Inc., Kano and The Manhattan Transfer. It was an early take on the mash-up.
"Funky Mix" was a prized possession for Saunders and DJs like Ron Hardy, who would play it when he needed a bathroom break. Somehow, though, the B-side went completely overlooked. One time, sitting at home, Saunders played it out of curiosity and found something even better: a cheeky, barebones jam built out of Playback's "Space Invaders," Donna Summer's "Bad Girls" and a song by the Giorgio Moroder band Munich Machine (among a few other bits). It was a pure rhythm track you could drop with a wink and a smile, a dance-pop hit reduced to its skeleton.
Once Jesse Saunders started playing it out, "On And On" became an anthem. He called it his "theme song." Then, one day, he turned up to Playground, where he stored his records, and realized someone had stolen it. He was so frustrated he decided to make a new one from scratch.
Saunders built a barebones version that sounds like the recording equivalent of someone trying to draw from memory. There was no internet to cross-reference back then, so what resulted was a squirrelly track built with an imitation of that "Space Invaders" bassline, some goofy vocals and not much else. It was like hollowed-out hi-NRG, reduced Italo, a spacious and raw sound that would quickly become synonymous with Chicago's dance music scene.
Is Saunders' "On And On" truly the first house record? The closest thing to a consensus opinion is that Saunders' record, made in 1983 and released at the beginning of 1984, kicked off a global movement. Sure, there were extended dance remixes and DJ records before it—records by the group Omni and beat track compilations, which Saunders knew and loved—but there was hardly anything quite like "On And On" or its B-side, full of raw, rowdy jacking percussion tracks.
Saunders' history with dance music goes further back than house. He was a rock kid who fell in love with the four-on-the-floor pulse at a teen disco in the mid-'70s. The sheer power of Donna Summer's "Spring Affair" bowled him over. From then on he was hooked on kick drums.
"I started noticing what else was going on," he told me on the phone from Los Angeles, where he now lives. "There was this stuff with a heavy kick drum and a more rhythmic pulse, like a heartbeat. Classic rock doesn't have that rumbling bass or that steady kick drum. It triggered something in me and I wanted to study it. Then I broke it down into a simple format, figuring out what would make people want to dance better, harder, longer."
This is where Saunders' tinkering began, with what he called his "pause button remixes." He was obsessed with breakdowns, trying to reproduce the right sound at the right moment in time to keep people moving. Pretty much everywhere he went served as a practice dance floor, from the school bus to the cafeteria, where his fellow students would dance around his boombox.
Saunders' stepbrother Wayne Williams, who the founder of the Chosen Few DJs, took him under his wing and invited him into the collective. It was then that Saunders learned how to use turntables, at which point he flew the coop to become a successful solo DJ.
Saunders' DJing started to take off, though at that time it wasn't seen as a viable "career" as such. In his own words, he was an "aspiring tennis professional," and his mother insisted he go to college. He figured it had to be right then or it would never happen, so he moved to Los Angeles to attend USC, where he would eventually meet fellow Chicagoan Ron Hardy. Saunders didn't like the music scene in LA at first—he said it was two years behind the Midwest—and he only lasted a year at school. It was his friendship with Hardy that would prove much more significant.
Hardy's experimental and forward-thinking style gelled with Saunders' approach. They each became known for sets full of extended breakdowns, long sections of percussion and turntable trickery. Saunders brought that sound back to Chicago in 1982, where he worked as a resident across several venues before finding a regular home at Playground, the important Chicago club that often gets overlooked in favour of other myth-making rooms like The Warehouse or The Music Box.
"Playground brought all sides together," Saunders said. "It enabled me, with my diverse background of music and understanding. New Wave was becoming popular, reggae and disco were always there, and this new style of electronic disco coming from Italy was infiltrating, too. This groovy, downtempo, electronic sound. People didn't know how to mix between these sounds, especially with the pitch control on the turntables. There just wasn't enough pitch control. So I would create beats and tracks to segue, and I could control the tempo on the 808, to create one long experience instead of slamming or fading between songs. That was the foundation of what I played, the sound of the Playground. People started asking what they were, because I played a lot of rhythm tracks. Sometimes I would bring keyboards and play them over the tracks too. It started to take shape, as what became known as Chicago Trax kind of records, as early as '82."
By that time, Saunders had learned to distil his approach to DJing down to the fundamentals of what would make people dance: breakdowns, the pulse of a drum machine, the occasional splash of keyboard for melody. He didn't need anything else, and he was basically creating his own tracks on the fly, which allowed him to jump between tempos and genres without resorting to abrupt transitions or cuts.
Eventually he was known more for his barebones improvisations than the actual records he was playing. Saunders was part of a record pool at Importes, Etc., where the buyer Frank Sells would give him records to test out and "break" at Playground. People would come to the store every week to pick up what they heard at the club the weekend before. But Saunders' jack tracks eluded their grasp, until finally he made a tape of one of his sets and a customer identified one of his homemade tunes, saying he wanted a copy of it. The clerk said, "If you can get your hands on this record, we can sell a lot of copies."
By this time, Saunders was good friends with Vince Lawrence, an artist whose father had a label called Mitchbal Records. Lawrence would bring his own records to Saunders when he saw him DJ at Playground, and Saunders saw an opportunity in collaborating with someone with that kind of experience and access. First Saunders recorded a track called "Fantasy" under the name Z-Factor, which later became a full-fledged album. But Z-Factor wasn't the project that would make history for Saunders.
After speaking with Lawrence about pressing house tracks, Lawrence and Saunders teamed up with Larry Sherman, who owned "the only pressing plant" in town, as Saunders told RBMA. The trio put out On And On in 1984 via a new joint vanity label called Jes Say Records. (Later, Sherman would go on to start foundational house label Trax Records, whose first release, "Wanna Dance," came from Saunders under his Le' Noiz alias, further boosting his credentials as a house originator.)
So, is "On And On" the first house record? Taken by itself, the A-side is debatable. It still carries vestiges of the post-disco hi-NRG that ruled clubland in the early '80s, though its stripped-down nature was strikingly different from the norm. But the B-side is what clinches it. These tracks—with titles like "5A," "1A" and "I'm The DJ," all clocking in at exactly three minutes each, functional and utilitarian dance floor tools—still sound like a rush, the joy of the house music dance floor in sculpted blocks of sound.
"The record was the first of its kind," Saunders insisted. "At this time, this was my heyday—I was playing at the biggest club in the city, every Friday and Saturday. I'm breaking new music. Everybody looked at me. There was no competition and everyone wanted to be a part of the movement. There was a great reaction. It was what inspired everyone else to make their tracks. Jackmaster Funk came to me and I took him into the studio. Steve Hurley did the same thing. I started a whole snowball effect."
After "On And On," Saunders had a hand in many early house music hits. He co-produced Farley "Jackmaster" Funk's "Love Can't Turn Around," which famously became a top-ten hit in the UK in 1986, kicking off Britain's love affair with house music. Saunders even had mild chart success back home in the US with "Funk-U-Up," another record whose jacking B-side tracks found favour with legendary DJs like Ron Hardy. "On And On" might not have the recognition of the more famous Chicago house tracks that followed it, but it was clear that it started a movement, one that goes on and on today.
TracklistA1 On And On
B1 119
B2 5A
B3 1A
B4 4A & B
B5 Im The D. J.