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In the 80's, Chicago had Monster DJ's! Ron Hardy @ The Music Box, Frankie Knuckles @ The Power Plant, Farley Keith @ The Playground, Steve Silk Hurley @ Sauers, Leonard Rroy @ The Rink Zone. It was a great time in Chicago and the beginning of what is known today as House Music!Me in June 1975 on the 1's & 2's. Peep out my mans Greg green Chucks. A lot of what ya'll do now - we been there & done that! Other than that stupid shit like shooting up schools & frontin like we are hard. We were real bout all our Shit!Chip E. (Excerpt) from 5 Magazine Interview.CHIP: We did a whole section on Andre with clips from SummerDance. Andre is definitely one of the unspoken heroes of House music. Leonard Remix Rroy - he's another big name. He's one of the guys that was starting to do early House music, but then he joined the army. He signed up to serve his country when the music was taking off, so he never got the fame and recognition he deserved. Leonard was definitely House. Farley said Leonard was the first person he ever heard use the term "House music". Leonard would sometimes take cartoon music like Inspector Gadget and throw beats behind it and remix it and play it at The Playground or The Candy Store (the same venue, but a different name). He also played at a club called the Rink Zone on 87th Street. It was a skating rink and on certain nights they'd turn it into a dance club. Leonard gave me a lot of my first opportunities to DJ at that club. He was incredibly creative, especially with creating music and doing tricks on the turntables. A lot of DJs were doing what's called "triples" where you can make something go by three times. Leonard was making "eights" - he could make something go by eight times. Before the Farley Jackmaster Funks of the world, there was Leonard Remix Rroy doing his remixes and his scratching. Just an incredible guy.Farley Jackmaster Funk (Excerpt) from 5 Magazine Interview.Leonard Rroy, one of the southside’s best DJs, came to me and said, “Hey Farley, I’m going to start playing a new brand of music. It’s called House Music.†So I’m on the radio, I’m a major guy in the city, and he told me, “I’m going to be playing House Music in my club.†So I drove straight to WBMX and said, “I’ve got a new thing called House Music!†I went to my club every week and said, “We play House, we play House!†Maybe it derived from Leonard Rroy being at the Warehouse and that’s where he got it from, but I only heard Leonard say “Houseâ€. I took it from there and said “We’re doing House Music.†So this brand, this label, has gone from this one guy, Leonard, saying something to me about House Music, to the New Music Seminar, then back to the Playground which was the biggest club in the Midwest, then to the radio station where an average of three million people tuned into us every Friday then another three million on Saturday... Are you starting to get my point? From here we’re seeing it spread to all of these different places...........Mike Dunn (Excerpt) from 5 Magazine Interview.See, before there was a Farley for me, there was a Leonard Rroy. A lot of people credit Farley and rightfully so, but my introduction was Leonard "Remix" Rroy. I used to go and get tapes from him – Leonard didn’t even know my name. I remember it clear as day. I would sit in Greg and Otto Hines' basement in amazement. Leonard was the trick master back then. He would do shit with turntables that you'd say, "How the fuck is he doing that?" When Leonard speaks about his history in House Music, I feel him. He wasn’t downtown in a central location. He was in the hood, down on 89th. He still had a packed house, though. He was my first true "DJ god". Then came Farley, then came Ron, then came Frankie.
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