Barney got the idea to start a dance label, and in 1986 he shared that interest with his friend Duane Buford, who played keyboards for house progenitor Jesse Saunders. “He told me he would give me the first track for the record label I was starting,” Barney says. When Barney asked Buford to help christen the new label, Buford suggested Dance Mania—the name he and Saunders had attached to “What’s That,” a 12-inch single they’d released as the Browns in ’85. The existence of “What’s That” has led many people to assume that Saunders started Dance Mania—in fact Saunders makes that claim himself—but it’s not in dispute that Barney took over the name after that Browns release. Dance Mania—or at least Barney’s Dance Mania—debuted in ’86 with a record from Buford, Hardcore Jazz by Duane & Co. Because the label was a relatively small part of an established business, Barney had a lot of freedom to run it how he liked.
In the early days I was just interested in putting out music and being fair with people; it wasn’t making money or anything,” he says. With that attitude, Barney had no trouble taking chances on producers such as Mitchell, whom he’d met in 1987 through Vince Lawrence, a key figure at Larry Sherman’s foundational house label, Trax Records; Mitchell had been in a disco group but was unknown in the house scene at the time. Now 49, he’d gotten hooked on dance music in his early teens, when disco was at its peak (“That was my era,” he says). He’d had no luck breaking into house, though: when he met Barney, a deal with Trax to release “You Can’t Fight My Love,” a single he’d recorded as Victor Romeo, had just fallen through. He was about to pull the plug on his dance career, but in ’87 Barney issued the record via a resuscitated imprint his father had founded, Bright Star. Soon Mitchell was working for Barney’s distro operation too.