Mike Clark was only 12 years old when he attended his first social club party in 1978 and met Direct Drive’s Todd Johnson. Clark’s older brother Gilbert threw parties with a group called Gentlemen of the ’80s, and his mother often asked him to bring Mike along. “I’ll never forget – the first record I heard was ‘Rapture’ by Blondie,” Mike recalls. “It was interesting because it was that post, end of the disco era, so you still had light beacons, a disco ball, flashes and fog going on, everybody dressed up all crazy.”

The event Clark experienced became a more frequent occurrence as the teenage party scene grew through the early ’80s. “We had this spot called the Park Avenue Club, right across from the [now] Bucharest Grill,” he says. “At the time it was a hotel and it had two banquet rooms, and we used to have parties at both. Back then you had one party a week, so a lot of people went (over 1,000). No matter where they [the parties] were, they were always packed.”

He continues, “Around ’81, we started getting other DJ groups coming in [such as Deep Space]. Kevin Dysard, Ray Berry [and others] were the second generation of Direct Drive – Direct Drive DJs that came in after ’82. I was brewing myself to step into the next lane, but in the meantime, while all that stuff was going on, Deep Space [Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May, Eddie Fowlkes] came in. They were the new cats on the block but they came in way left, on the industrial side… more catered to the suburban audience [because they were from Belleville].”1

The scene that was developing post-disco and pre-techno in Detroit was wildly diverse musically. “When you take kids that have never been in a party atmosphere, they’re so happy to go out that you can beat them senseless with [music] stuff they don’t know,” says Howard. “Ken [Collier] and [others including] myself took advantage of that because we were playing high school parties where the kids had no idea what we were playing (because the radio was limited).

“So we got these kids that are anxious and want to dance. The harder we played, the more they danced. They were coming up with routines, dance steps, dance groups and lived to dance – ain’t nothin’ else to do! They didn’t have video games back then. All you did was either rollerskate, or dance... All of those kids, teenagers… they were coming out [to party] and trying to find themselves. They didn’t know who they were or who they wanted to be, but at that point in time, they just wanted to party – and party hard.”