Of course, nobody can dance to 120 beats a minute, so you make things up to find a beat–you got loose and very creative.”Īlthough the clubs were popular, they virtually disappeared in the mid-80s. “Dancing to house is called ‘jacking,’ or ‘jack the body.’ It means to make it better, to pump it up. “Of course, there’s a sexual overtone to how you dance it,” says Randy Duncan, who’s now the artistic director of the Joseph Holmes Dance Theatre, and who remembers some of the smaller old clubs on 63rd Street, Stony Island, Lower Wacker, and other out-of-the-way places. And the music never stopped–songs melted into each other in one marathon play. That’s why they call it house music.” The beat was often pumped to a startling 120 per minute. The house DJ makes the difference, gives it personality.
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Rather, you take existing songs, and you make ’em yours by dubbing, redubbing, slowing ’em down, or speeding ’em up, or just putting more and more rhythm tracks on them. “But it’s the mix that does it, because it’s not like there are ‘new’ songs. “House music is basically three things–a drum machine, a bass guitar, and a keyboard,” Harris explains. The music was characterized by a new approach pioneered by Frankie Knuckles, a DJ at the Warehouse. “And basically, it was the music that kept you there.” “You’d go out dancing at night, and you wouldn’t get home until noon the next day,” says Tony Harris, who used to frequent the “houses” and is now a DJ at Club La Ray, one of the few black gay bars on the north side.
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At the Warehouse, it wasn’t unusual for dancers to shed nearly all their clothing as the hours wore on. Leather and lace parties were popular there. “It was hot, it was loud, and it was wild.”Īt 178–which was also west of the Loop and which alternated between all-male dances on Fridays and all-female dances on Saturdays–the music officially started at 8, but no one would show up until after midnight. “The first time I went, my friend and I were the only thing that looked remotely white in the place,” says Linda Rodgers, who now owns Paris Dance, an upscale women’s club in Uptown. It was this moist heat, and it was otherworldly–netherworldly, really. And you were immediately hit by the heat. “You had to walk up a flight of stairs, then down through a trapdoor to get to the dance floor. “The Warehouse was in an industrial area. The large dance clubs didn’t serve alcohol, and they were sometimes open only one day a week–but that day was a round-the-clock dance marathon. I think that was one of the main things that contributed to the immediate popularity of a lot of these underground after-hours clubs.” “Even if you could get in the bars, sometimes having to go through all that heavy carding and hassle at the door–well, it’d just put you in a bad mood. “Back then, there was a lot of discrimination at some of the north-side gay bars,” says Anthony Thomas, who wrote a recent cover story on house music for Outlook, a national lesbian and gay quarterly. Large-scale dance palaces packing in as many as 3,000 revelers on any given night, these were loud, steamy clubs frequented by black youths, many of them gay, in the late 70s and early 80s. Those roots are buried deep in now-defunct Chicago clubs such as the Warehouse, the Glass House, and 178 (also known as Harriet’s). “They were showing scenes from clubs in New York, but nowhere–nowhere at all–did they talk about house music’s real roots.” “It was one of those ‘info-tainment’ syndicated shows,” she says.
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Sommelier Series (paid sponsored content)Ī few weeks ago Rhonda Craven found herself laughing at a TV report on a new dance craze, house music.Donate now! I'm not interested right now.