And I was always into the girls too, so I was always smilin’ and talkin’.ĭid your brother ever do any professional DJing? I loved DJing, I loved the microphone, anything that had anything to do with radio. I was just an energetic, talkative kid, I was always excited. She was like “why’d they have to say that?!” or whatever. Yeah, that was funny because my mother heard that and she was upset. What was your on-air persona like? I remember one of the KKC announcers said you had a big mouth. I wanna say I was sixteen, I got a chance to DJ one of those. I take that back, I DJed a club in Chicago, but they had college night.
I didn’t start doing clubs until I went to Europe, and that was when I was eighteen. And then, you know, I’m doin’ high school parties, I had a residency at a skating rink, neighborhood parties. I’m DJing house parties, backyard parties, basements, grammar school gym room sock hops, things like that up until about high school.
So that was my first show, but no, there was no clubs. I wanna say the first record I blended was Lil Louis “ French Kiss,” and the crowd was going wild looking at this kid mix. The program director took me up to the party, I wasn’t on the lineup but they got me on there anyway. My very first show was actually a party with a few WKKC DJs, on the South Side of Chicago. Once you had a reputation, were you able to play in clubs and stuff despite your age?
But the program director gave me the freedom to learn how to mix live on the air. So from then on I basically practiced live on the air, because I wasn’t that good yet.
So the program director and a couple of the DJs that were a little older than me helped me get tight with using the 1200s and gettin’ my blends down. That was my first time consistently being on 1200s, so I had to learn how to use pitch control, counting the bars, knowing the records. But at the radio station they had Technics 1200s and a professional Numark mixer. So I had to learn from a turntable that we had at home and blend with the radio station from the tuner.
I’d had equipment at home from my brother, he was older than me, but I didn’t really have a full set-up. So I did, this was literally three days after my tenth birthday. So she took me up there, told the program director that I was starting to DJ, that I’d gotten it a little bit from watching my brother, and asked them could I audition? My mother heard that they were auditioning for DJs, so one day she told me, you know, “put some records in the bag, you’re coming with me.” I was wondering what she was talking about. So they put together a young team of radio announcers, board operators, and DJs to bring the whole radio element to a young audience. I wanna say that him and the president of the college, Kevin Brown, these two guys wanted to do something for the youth. The Young People’s Radio Network was a show that was put together by James Kelly, he was the program director at the radio station. Thinking specifically of the KKC upload, what was The Young People’s Radio Network? I’d done DJ mixes from the radio, underground mixes that I made when I had started duplicatin’ mixtapes myself to sell at school, and then I finally made what we would call a colored mixtape, where we’d go to a duplication company and get it ready for mass distribution at stores. Checkin’ out where I was at when I first got started. I just decided to go through them one day, maybe in the last year or two, checkin’ out old history. Yeah, a lot of those mixes I kept - well, actually, my mother kept ‘em around.
I just saw that WKKC mix from when you were 10 that you put up on Mixcloud, you’ve got the whole archive up there. He’s best known for his contributions to ghetto house (as the scene’s youngest participant, releasing an EP on Dance Mania at age 15), juke (as a collaborator of DJ Puncho, whose track “Juke It” popularized the name), and footwork (as a member of the Ghettoteknitianz crew, later renamed Teklife). Gant Garrard, is a producer and DJ from Chicago, Illinois.