John Benitez was born in South Bronx, New York city, back in 1959. The family lived in an apartment on Burnside Avenue in the Bronx, and his sister Debbie was the one who gave him his nickname - Jellybean.
Already as a child he used to entertain
his family and friends by playing them different records on the turntable. This
was the time when songs like "Don't
leave me this way" by Thelma Houston was among
the hottest songs in the charts. It was back then he first started to collect
records and he soon learned, during his home sessions, that he could get the
"audience" in different moods depending on what song he played...
He always thought of a DJ as a guy playing records on the radio, but when he
entered the Sanctuary nightclub in Manhattan in the late seventies his life
changed forever... When he heard the DJ mixing two songs together he definatly
know he wanted to become a professional Discoteque DJ !
Jellybean started his DJ career in a club
in the Bronx, called Charlie's. But he really wanted to go further...
he wanted to work in the famous Manhattan clubs. He got a gig at a club called
Experiment 4 and by getting the right contacts he came to play at the trendy
Xenon.
In 1976, Jellybean was spinnin' here. Francois Kevorkian replaced him for an
evening.
This was Francois K's debut as a DJ.
This was really a break-through for his
career...
During 1978 to 1981 all the hottest clubs, like Electric Circus and the
legendary Studio 54, all wanted to hire Jellybean to play in
their club.
From april 1981 'til june 1984 he was the resident DJ of the Manhattan club
Fun House.
It was during his sessions at this club the well known phrase "Jellybean
Rocks the House" was founded !
The crowd at the Fun House were very musically aware and Jellybean got
total freedom to explore dance music and examine the break beats, instrumental
fills and all the other components of the 12-inch extended mixes. His style
was so popular that he were asked to host a weekend dance show in America's
No.1 radio station - WKTU.
Many new upcoming bands and artists got a break thanks to John playing their
songs at the Clubs and/or in his radio show. Already back in 1980 he's included
in the Special Thanks section of the
Invisible Man's Bands self-titled album, which include the awesome Disco
song "All night thing".
John had achieved his DJ goals and he now
wanted to go on to remixing singles. His first remix was "the
Bubble Bunch" by Jimmy Spicer, soon followed
by the classics "Walking on Sunshine"
by Rockers Revenge and Africa Bambaataa's "Planet
Rock".
Greg Bowes writes: " . . . this discotheque opened up in a converted German Baptist church in the Hell's Kitchen area of New York in 1969 and was probably the first nightclub. The altar was the deejay box."
Francis Grosso, Steve D'Aquisto and Michael Capello played their part. This was before the arrival of the 12inch record.
Peter Braunstein in the Village Voice:
Some say the first gay disco was the Ice Palace on Fire Island; others insist it was the Manhattan restaurant-discotheque Aux Puces, or a place that towers over all others in sheer notoriety: the Sanctuary.
"It was supposed to be a secret," recalls Leigh Lee, a Mapplethorpe model who visited the Sanctuary when it first opened in 1969, "but I don't know how secret it could have been when faggots and lesbians can come out of a church from midnight till sunrise." Located on West 43rd Street in a former German Baptist church, the Sanctuary evolved from a straight disco for white celebrities to a bacchanalian palace populated almost entirely by gay men. From his booth at the altar, DJ Francis Grosso administered a thumping sacrament to legions of adoring parishioners, who celebrated his mastery of slip-cueing by showering him with Quaaludes while dancing the original, gay version of the Bump.
The Sanctuary epitomized the post-Stonewall era, when gay men had won the right to dance intimately together without worrying about the police. But the early gay discos were not only pleasure palaces, they were also sites of liberation free from the prying eyes of the suspect straight world. Steve Sukman, who ran the club Private Eyes in the '80s, remarked that "pleasure and being around your own people was the gay metaphor for disco; simple pleasure was its straight application."
The gay club owners of the underground disco years soon faced the dilemma of all new cultural movements: whether to exclude the masses or attempt to convert them.A major issue in early gay disco was whether to allow straights to enter the sanctuary. Ultimately, most owners proved ecumenical, if only because any straight incursion into the disco scene occurred on terms set by its gay founders. And for its part, the straight party world seemed to acknowledge gays as the indispensable ingredient of disco. The most valuable commodity for a start-up club in the '70s was a gay mailing list.