Minimal Wave Records

The first band that made house music. Jesse Saunders speaks about it in an interview from ‘94:

You see, my mother is a music major, 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, DJing 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 drum 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 it, and that’s when I wrote this song called ‘Fantasy’, which basically was a concoction of the bassline from the ‘Space Invaders’-‘On & On’ thing and the bridge from one of 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 & 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’ and all the other stuff that we recorded at Jes Say Records.

Anyway, I was getting ahead of 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 Thompson (who had the finance) 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 a group that was renting Sauer’s prior to Craig monopolising this deal, and he 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 that it was a bad record. 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 and 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 side-tracked 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 had made ‘Fast Cars’ 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.