SYNC: Paul Johnson - Jive Turkey (2012)

We've been searching for a proper way to post all this stuff from 5 Mag's 18 years of history that slipped through the cracks. This series, SYNC, is our way to revisit that history in a respectful way and not just dump a bunch of content back on the internet without context. We could think of no better way to start than with this lost mix from the great Paul Johnson.

There was never a time that we asked Paul Johnson for a favor and he turned us away. You could hit him up at 5am for a mix, an interview, a booking, a DJ chart, a free track or to sit for several hours for a video interview, as he did for our 5 year anniversary project. He was usually still up, and he almost always complied. He wasn't just a brilliant artist — maybe the best house music DJ and creator that Chicago ever produced. The guy gave of himself and his time like no one else.

This was not an original 5 Mag mix. Paul used to post mixes to SoundCloud almost weekly and delete them when they reached 100 downloads. This one he called "Jive Turkey," and it was posted just prior to Thanksgiving weekend in 2012. We embedded this mix for a shortlived feature called "ChicagoCast," highlighting new mixes from figures in the Chicago house scene. Paul later deleted it, and when I asked about it he sent it over for us to repost. It seems to have fallen completely off the map since then; according to Google it's not available anywhere and this might be the only copy, or at least the only one we could find.