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Whatever Happened to Chicago Summer Dance DJ Series ?????

Back in the summer of 2004 June 23 Wednesday to be exact. Chicago began it’s Summer Dance DJ Music series downtown in the park off of Balbo and Michigan. Aaaahhhh what a spectacle and a delight to behold! It was great to see the onlookers from blocks away come over join in and get down to the sound. I was one of the chosen few who was fortunate enough to be there that opening day and to witness and celebrate Wednesdays in the summer in Chicago at Summer Dance!! Our version of Woodstock for the househeads you understand. The DJ’s that played were Ron Carroll, Steve ”Silk” Hurley, Mark Grant, Frankie Knuckles and a host of others. Imagine hearing house music by some of Chicago’s most respected DJ’s being played in the park with a holy union of hundreds of people hanging on to every record. The local legends spun to the initiated crowd and baptized us with pure musical ecstasy. You would see every ethnicity of all ages, shapes and sizes dancing to house music. It was incredible. This  event was organized by Brian Keigher a coordinator for the department of Cultural Affairs and local DJ. Big ups to Brian  for organizing such a great event for the recognition of house music to be presented in our own backyard. Hell on August 24th of that year the mayor and the city gave major props to the Godfather of house music Frankie Knuckles by naming the street after him on Jefferson near Adams where the original warehouse reigned from 77-83. It was a great year. A year later Mayor Daley even declared August 10th as House Unity Day. Finally some major  props from the city in which House music was born.

But in the summer of 2006 the Outdoor DJ Series was cancelled and shuffled around to different venues throughout the city  which made it a major headache trying to get to any of them. It was a serious blow to the unity in which the mayor so proudly proclaimed the city to have for house music a year earlier. So what happened Mr. Mayor??? I remember on the last day of that series Derrick Carter and Cajmere spun outside at the Grant Park Petrillo Band Shell where they both tore it up and beat the music! But what was totally unexpected was to see the arrival of police outside the band shell sporting full riot gear. What they hell did they expect us to do tear up the place? It was a slap in the face. And it spoke volumes about the ignorance of a city council that would allow such a cool event to take place yet treat it like a public nuisance. Where’s the police in riot gear at the Taste of Chicago, Blues Fest or other outdoor events that happen around the city in the summer months????

Why would you give us such a wonderful and joyous celebration of dance music in the city and then take it away? I believe that the beginning of the unraveling of our festival happened at the start of the 2006 DJ series which was featuring a techno DJ that day when an idiot decided to start a fight at the event which was staged at the Daley Center across from City Hall downtown. That event was cancelled in minutes. Was it because now that with the integration of techno plus other electronic genres of music into the series outside of house that a different vibe appeared? I knew it would be only a matter of time before the series would be scrapped because of such an incident. I believe with the introduction of techno and other electronic genres of music to the series caused it’s unraveling and eventual elimination of the DJ series from Summer Dance. Techno brings a young breed of people to a festival which is populated by househeads  therefore creating a mixed multitude. Househeads love  the spirituality and celebration of good music. When we’re up there dancing it’s like being in church and the DJ is delivering the sermon through the music.  The second reason could be crowd control. In the beginning in the Winter Garden on Balbo you had a few hundred people attending this event but before the first summer event was over there was easily over 1,500  people crammed into the park and spilling along the side walk and some in the street listening to house music and soaking up the vibe. But with that came the mixed multitude.

The mixed multitude were the taggers, ravers, so called wanna be hipsters, and a lot of young folks, you know the 14 and 15 year olds that can’t even get into a club. They would come in bunches of five and fifteen not dance but stand around with their friends smoking weed and drinking beer stumbling into bushes. You see they weren’t there for the music. They were there just there. Hanging out, tagging port o’ potties and pissing in the bushes and doing a whole lot of counter productive shit that’s not even part of our scene. Hell a lot of them don’t even know what house music is. So they shouldn’t have  been there in the first place. Then you have the ravers. You know the ones that think it’s cool to get in the middle of the dance floor with some fucking glow sticks and multicolored  flags and twirl them around and up in the air all damn night long while their I don’t have a clue friends are on the side of them in a huddle playing hackey sac and pop locking. Since when and how in the hell did pop locking and breaking get associated with house music???? Damn do you think that car commercial that came out some years back with that white chick pop locking to dance music while riding in a car have anything to do with that? Go figure.

Frankie Knuckles

New York native Frankie Knuckles was the Dj from 1977 to 1982 at the Warehouse. It is widely accepted that his style of DJing and his selection and the appeal of the Warehouse gave house music its name, although in the beginning, the word house was used only in Chicago to denote something which would become cool, hip, fresh or bad, depending on place and time. Frankie Knuckles had been long time friends with Larry Levan, they had had their musical upbringing together from going to clubs like Loft and the Gallery Frankie Knuckles moved was born in the South Bronx of New York City on the 18th January 1955. He got into DJing after being offered a job by Tee Scott, who he sees as one of the legendary DJs, and was further prompted into it by Larry Levan when they used to work together back in 1972/73 at a New York club called The Gallery which was owned by Nicky Siano.

Frankie recalls the good old days: "The first club I ever went to was The Loft (David Mancuso's now-legendary private party); the first time I went there I wasn't sure what kind of crowd it was: at times it looked very straight, at others, very gay. At that point (in the mid Seventies), sexuality didn't mean a thing

TIMEWARP: Chicago, 1978. The Windy City is not exactly a dance music mecca. Like the majority of American cities still are today, Chicago was a rock and blues town. Plenty of live music and beer swilling bars, but not much in the way of dancing or clubs. A young DJ, newly arrived from New York, opens a club named The Warehouse, and will unwittingly change the lives of thousands of people in the late 80's and early '90s. That DJ was Frankie Knuckles. Says Frankie: "When we first opened in '78, I was playing a lot of the East Coast records, the Philly stuff, Salsoul. By '80/81, when that stuff was all over with, I started working a lot of the soul that was coming out. I had to re-construct the records to work for my dancefloor, to keep the dancefloor happy, as there was no dance music coming out! I'd take the existing songs, change the tempo, layer different bits of percussion over them, to make them more conductive for the dancefloor."

Electronic Mail & Guardian magazine, from a longer article on Frankie when he was touring South Africa:

"Born in New York's Bronx more than four decades ago, Frankie Knuckles has done his time - and done it in some of clubland's most mythical spaces, including New York's Roxy and Sound Factory. He first took to the turntables in the late Seventies, mixing up disco and funky soul at gay venues like Better Days and the Continental Baths, before moving to Chicago in the late Seventies for a residency at the Warehouse, where modern dance music reached a crucial turning point.

The rumour that the term "house" music is derived from the name of this venue is probably not far from the truth, for it's almost certain that this is where - under throbbing strobes and among sweaty bare-chested men and the faintest whiff of amyl-nitrate - the trend found its feet. "The term 'House Music' is derived from the club that the music stems from, 'The WareHouse', in Chicago. Between 1977 and 1983 it was presided over by DJ Frankie Knuckles [he moved there from New York City in 1977], where he played a mixture of underground Disco, Funk, Soul and classic Philly sounds to a loyal following of predominantly black, gay clubbers.

To enhance the music, and create new sounds, innovative ideas were employed such as playing a Roland 909 drum machine under old Philly records - thus emphasising the beats. He would also blend in rhythm tracks that he'd created on reel-to-reel tape recorders to link and boost the music"

Article from www.globaldarkness.com

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