Francis Grasso
A Brooklyn go-go dancer turned DJ almost by accident, Francis Grasso took over a friend's booth at Salvation Too in 1968 and never left, inventing slip-cueing and beatmatching at the legendary Sanctuary and effectively becoming the first DJ to read a crowd and answer it song by song. He never released a record of his own, but nearly every technique that defines modern DJing — blending two records into one continuous flow — traces back to him.
Grasso literally inherited Terry Noel's DJ booth at Salvation Too in 1968 when Noel, the club's regular DJ, no-showed a shift. Grasso built directly on the idea Noel had already pioneered at the club Arthur — that a DJ could blend records into a continuous flow rather than just playing songs back to back.
listen forNo recording of Noel's own sets survives, but the very idea Grasso ran with — treat the whole night as one long mix, not a stack of singles — is Noel's invention first.