Growing Up With Chicago House Music

It was during my second month in high school, I began to hear people talk about what was called “House Music.” I also heard someone say; “they play House Music on Sundays at the Candy Store.” The Candy Store was an all-city teenage juice bar that was once called the Playground. My sister was going to the Playground not long before she graduated from eighth grade. She would go with Toni Harrison, and a guy named Poncho who lived across the railroad tracks from us on Kilbourn & Grenshaw. My sister would go faithfully every Saturday Night. One evening my sister’s best friend, Shaunda Jackson didn’t want to be left out and decided against her better judgement to go to the Playground with my sister, Toni and Faye Harrison. Shaunda, and I had an interesting history. My sister was an outgoing and very likeable girl that most people wanted to be friends with. To my detriment, if I met a chick who liked me and she met my sister, we miraculously became “family” I hated that shit! I had so ...

I believe the term was dubbing that guys in L.A. used to describe how people would edit popular songs, and extend them longer than the original recording. I don't remember which songs got such treatment, just a vague recollection of a friend mentioning the process. The year was 1981: I was twelve years old, in a new city, and just happy to experience some level of normal child life. My Mom moved us out to Los Angeles with no real plan for how she would establish a life for us, and we spent a month, maybe two living with no home. I am the youngest of my mother’s four children. I had a sister who was murdered before I was born, and from what I was told, the killer was never caught. My Mother’s life slowly unraveled. No one, especially a child should experience walking through a neighborhood, looking into homes, but you have no place to call home; a television going in the living room, the glare of light on the outside, and you're walking by wondering what it's like to li...

Sam Collins, Gilles Brown and Gerard were my hip hop high school freshman homies. Gilles, Gerard and I were in the same home room, and Sam was in Blythe’s Room. We lived in different parts of the city also: Gilles lived near Sox Park, in a small row house development. I wasn’t exactly sure where Gerard lived, Sam was on the North side, and I lived on the West side of Chicago.   I was a girl-crazy freshman if there ever was one, but I was far from a Cassanova: I attempted, and failed miserably at getting to know Kelly Bellford. Kelly was a short, studious girl who wore glasses that weren’t exactly bifocals, but thick enough to make her eyes look small. She wasn’t the most stylish girl on campus, she wore mostly skirts and off brand tennis shoes, but she had a great future behind her! She hung out with a tall, skinny Asian girl named Pria-she was cute but built like a twelve year old boy. They both lived north near Edgewater, I believe. Kelly wasn’t rude to me, but I don’t remember...

         Musically speaking, I remember FM radio dance mix shows like the WBMX Hot Mix 5 Chicago Dance Party, WGCI's show, and the underground house scene a la the Muzic Box being different in nature. Much of the material that I heard at the Box like "The House Music Anthem (Move Your Body,")  "We're Rockin' Down the House," and "Acid Tracks" wasn't commercially available when Ron Hardy would debut it. People would take their music to Ron Hardy specifically because he was brave enough to play it first; afterwards, labels like DJ International, or Trax would pick it up. Before I was able to go out to parties, I would listen faithfully to WBMX because that was my source to the music.      I was a kid with no nightlife experience whatsoever in 1982, so WBMX and the Hot Mix 5 were the shit to me until I learned how to technically execute mixing, and most importantly, until I heard Ron Hardy, and Frankie Knuckles. I'll try to explain the...

I was fourteen when I entered the world of high school. The Chicago High School for Metropolitan Studies was located at 33 East Congress on the southwest corner of Congress and Wabash, diagonally across the street from Roosevelt University, and two blocks away from Columbia College Chicago and a block north of Jones Commercial high School, a two year college prep public school that required students to wear business attire on campus.  Metro was located just outside of the downtown area of the city, not far from what is now commonly referred to as the South Loop. There were several downtown apartment buildings nearby, but the area was also populated with homeless folk. Pacific Gardens Mission was situated next to Printing House Row, Dearborn Park Apartments and Two East Eighth, a luxury high rise that is now a co-ed student dorm. Being a Metro student meant that you were in the middle of everything socially speaking, from yuppies, to seedy characters who hung out around the corne...