Marcus “Mixx” Shannon has been making house music since the mid-80s, when the style was the beating heart of Chicago nightlife. In 1987, Farley “Jackmaster” Funk of the famous Hot Mix 5 played Shannon’s very first release, the 12-inch single “I Wanna House!,” on one of the crew’s hugely influential WBMX radio shows. Original copies of Shannon’s early records now provoke bitter squabbles among hard-core collectors—a compilation he made in 1989 has sold for as much as $500—but none of the money changing hands makes it to him.

He met his $3,000 goal in two weeks, and so far 125 people have donated. He hopes to find a place for $500 a month—just a room where he can stash his cameras and computer, sleep, and do work. “I’m really looking for something with all utilities, and if it had a shared bathroom—I don’t really need a stove or anything,” he says. “I just really need a little space.”

“One day this black kid comes in and says, ‘Hey, do you do house?’ I was like, ‘Well, this is a loft, dude,’” Gallegos says. “I didn’t know what house was.”

  • Let’s Pet Puppies reissued the 1988 track “Psychousic” in 2007.

Most of those tracks never saw the light of day, but what Shannon and Gallegos decided to release they’d send to Dixie Record Pressing in Nashville. “It was cheap as hell,” Gallegos says. “Seventy-five cents a record or something ridiculously cheap.” They’d press a few hundred, and Shannon would distribute most of them to local shops—notably South Loop house-scene hub Importes Etc. He also enlisted Ray Barney, owner of the Dance Mania label and crucial west-side store and distro Barney’s Records, to help get copies into retailers outside Chicago.

Oakes pitched the pair on reissuing their old music. “They didn’t really understand,” he says. “They’re like, ‘Oh, this is really cool, but why do you give a shit?’” Oakes convinced Shannon and Gallegos to transfer the rights to their music to him—he made an up-front payment, and he agreed to give Shannon all the proceeds from any releases. Most of the recordings that Shannon and Gallegos made were never issued in any form, however, and much of that unreleased material is unaccounted for. “They gave me this list: ‘Oh yeah, here’s two or three hundred songs that we wrote,’” Oakes says. “I realized that 60 percent of it’s missing still. That just kills me—that it was just thrown away or something, ’cause nobody thought it was important.”

  • This cut was recorded at Head Studios in 1987 and reissued by Let’s Pet Puppies in 2010.

Shannon discovered house music in the early 80s by listening to WBMX and the Hot Mix 5—their Friday-night program hit him like a thunderbolt. “Sometimes I actually avoided it, ’cause I loved it so much,” he says. “I’m like, ‘This is outstanding, how could they do this?’” While still a student at Morgan Park High School (he graduated in 1984), he’d weasel his way into fly-by-night clubs that he was too young to enter legally by offering to carry record crates for DJs. “Frankie [Knuckles], the first time I met him—’If you break my records, I’ma have to beat your bootie,’” Shannon says. “I didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘I won’t break them, Frankie, I promise.’”

Marcus Mixx on TV Broadcast on CAN TV channel 19. Sat 3/2, Sat 3/9, Sat 3/16, and Sat 3/23, each night at 11 PM.