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- [00:11]
A
In 1988, when an interviewer asked Frankie Knuckles to define the significance of the Warehouse, he believed it was far more about his audience than his music. It's the feeling he remembered, it's the attitude. It was something that people on dance floor created for themselves. It's something they adapted and they made their own. All those nights that all of us spent up in the club, no matter what the song was playing, nine times out of ten there was an inspirational message there. And there'd be all different kinds of people in the room making all different kinds of noises. You know, it just took the whole thing a step further. Music meant the world to Frankie Knuckles, but the vibrant scene he helped foster in Chicago really began in 1970s New York, where Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles had been friends since their teenage years and both grew up with the DJ craft. In 1976, Chicago called promoter Robert Williams searched New York City to fill the new DJ booth at the Warehouse, a club he had helped open and a former factory located in the West Loop in New York. Williams first offered the post to Larry Levan. However, by that time, Larry Van had started his own club, the first of several, including the Paradise Garage. At Levan's recommendation, Williams offered the position to Knuckles. At that point I realized I had to think about what I wanted to do, knuckles recalled. I figured, what the hell, I gave myself five years that I could always come back home to New York. Knuckles arrived in Chicago in March 1977, moving into an ad hoc living quarter at 206 South Jefferson street, the Warehouse. Within a five month period he set for himself, Knuckles became the godfather of house music. The Warehouse became the cradle of a revolutionary new sound combining disco, electronic, soul and gospel musics. In the aftermath of Steve Doll's proclamation of disco's death with a bonfire at Comiskey Park, Knuckles described the music he mixed at the Warehouse as disco's revenge. I'm Ryan Purcell.
- [02:01]
B
And I'm Christy Soares and this is Soundscapes.
- [02:16]
A
Soundscapes NYC is a bi monthly podcast, but the sounds of the 70s that have shaped New York City history. In the eighth episode, we talk with Micah Salkind, but the life and times of DJ Frankie Knuckles. Dr. Micah Salkind is the director of civic and cultural life at the Rhode Island Foundation. Prior in his roles at the City of Providence Department of Art, Culture and Tourism, he has managed public arts initiatives for the city, collaborating with nonprofit cultural institutions as well as emerging artists, designers and creative entrepreneurs. He is also a deejay and throws quarterly dollar disco parties in an Ongoing collaboration with Chicago's Honeypot Performance Collective. A dj, sound designer and curator, Sal Kyan is also the author of do youo Remember a House? Chicago's Queer of Color Undergrounds, released by Oxford University Press, and is an A list scholar on the subject of house music and DJ Frankie Knuckles. Hey, Christy, how you doing today?
- [03:06]
B
Hey, Ryan. Doing really well. Excited to talk about our convo with Micah Salkind.
- [03:12]
A
Me too. In a way, this conversation with Micah Salkind reminds me of our conversation with Lulu Ve in the way that Michael Salkind is doing multiple different things at once. On the one hand, he's working as a civil servant, working with nonprofit and cultural institutions, and on the other, he's also an academic and a DJ on top of that.
- [03:29]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So we talked to him a little bit about his work in Providence, and he kind of related that to what he's seeing as the rise of house music in Chicago. And in that, we spoke to him a lot about Frankie Knuckles.
- [03:41]
A
Yeah, Frankie Knuckles is a really key figure here. And we follow Frankie Knuckles on his journey from New York City to Chicago, where he becomes associated with a venue called Warehouse, which is a kind of extension of the conversations that we've had around dance music in New York City.
- [03:56]
B
Yeah, in some ways, this whole season has been following Frankie Knuckles trajectory. So he gets his start at the Continental Baths with Larry Levan. And we've heard about that in our episode with Lucas Hildebrand. And then of course, he comes to work for Nikki Siano at the gallery. And when he eventually moves to Chicago, he is credited with being one of the founders of house music at the Warehouse. And as we learn in this episode, he says the famous phrase house music is disco's revenge.
- [04:22]
A
Disco's revenge. So this conversation is really picking up on a previous conversation that we had with Gillian Frank in which we focused on the Disco Demolition night in Comiskey park in Chicago. And so Frankie Knuckles concept of house music as disco's revenge is really speaking against that anti disco sentiment in America in the late 1970s.
- [04:43]
B
Yes. And Frankie himself being a black gay DJ is really speaking to the way Disco Demolition night had racist undertones and was taking place, as we learned from from our conversation in White Sox Stadium, which is on the south side of Chicago, a historically black neighborhood. So his form of music is kind of pushing back against this racist anti disco sentiment.
- [05:04]
A
So in this conversation, we've made a choice to highlight the ways in which the music that we've explored in New York are really expanding beyond the boundaries of the New York of New York City to include other venues such as the Warehouse in Chicago.
- [05:17]
B
Yeah. I'm excited to hear more about these resonances beyond New York. Should we get into it?
- [05:22]
A
Let's go, Christy. Micah Salkheim, thank you so much for joining us today. I wanted to invite you on to talk about Frankie Knuckles and the trajectory of house music in Chicago and the relationship between Chicago and New York during the 70s and 80s. How are you doing today?
- [05:54]
C
I'm doing great. No one's sick in my household. It's a good day.
- [05:58]
A
Excellent. I'm so glad to hear it.
- [05:59]
C
It's that time of year.
- [06:01]
A
This recording is part of a larger series. We're talking about house music and the history of house music. We'd like to focus on Frankie Knuckles because he seems like such a transitional figure within this larger history. And I loved your book do youo Remember House Music? Chicago's Queer of Color Undergrounds. And I'd like to get to that, talk about that. But before we get into some of that detail in the history, I'd like to talk about your current role as the Deputy Director at the City of Providence Department of Art, Culture and Tourism. I thought this is fascinating and I really want to know more about what you're doing in this role and whether or not your academic background is connected to the kind of present work that you're doing now.
- [06:40]
C
Totally, yeah. So I finished my doctoral work in 2016 and did a little bit of adjuncting that fall, but then started a full time grant funded role at the City of Providence working on a couple different big projects in December of 2016. So I've been here at the city for about eight years or so, maybe a little less than that. And I use my training as a performance studies scholar, American studies scholar, like public historian all the time, just, you know, in terms of every interaction I have as a arts administrator working with public artists, it's all ethnography to me. And you know, to be in relationship to a city with a long storied history of cultural, you know, efflorescence, like it, all the work that I did thinking about that, that stuff in Chicago is directly applicable to, you know, what I do on the ground to support artists and artist communities here in Providence. So it's a really, it's a real privilege work for the city. You know, I take public service super seriously. It's like it's an unsung part of how the sausage gets made in terms of cultural life, especially in the US where like on a federal level it's you know, vulnerable and non existent at the best of times and you know, under siege and almost invisibilized in the worst as we're seeing right now. So I'm just really grateful that we have such a department and that I get to steward the work for at least a time. But yeah, the portfolio is like public art and commemorative works. A big project right now funded by the Mellon foundation with nine artists and artist teams developing new commemorative works for the city, kind of modeled on the Philly Monument Lab. And yeah, a lot of stuff with just making money move through a public procurement processes here.
- [08:39]
A
Yeah, I think that's a fantastic position. It sounds like you're just doing, you're doing stuff and you're making stuff happen. We really appreciate using history to kind of propel that motive, propel that trajectory as well.
- [08:49]
B
Micah, is there a dance music scene over there in Providence? And if so, how might we trace it to the histories we're going to be looking at today?
- [08:56]
C
That's a great question. Yeah, there is a, you know, I think like any major city there's, I mean you get enough people together they're going to want to dance. And even in small cities I think people still want to come together and party. So Providence does have like a kind of really beautiful little underground scene and kind of had its own rave moment probably in the 90s and the early aughts, but now is sort of more based in clubs and bars and, and informal spaces. So I've been DJing here semi professionally since 2006 and you know, as a middle aged parent with young kids that gets harder and harder to touch. But I do get, keep my like, you know, one little pinky on the pulse of what, what people who are in that square, like you know, 18 to 35 year old demo who go out much more than I do what they're doing and it's really exciting and to me it's really connected to, you know, the thinking that I have done about house music and what's possible when you bring people with different musical traditions and, and cultural traditions together to make new things. So you know, we have a big immigrant population in our city in our, in our general kind of like urban core of the state. And we have this amazing community of young artists and creatives who are like kids of immigrants who party together and they much more listen to hip hop than house. But you know, house is a part of the musical lexicon too. And you know, Afrobeat is really big. There's a lot of kids of like West African immigrants. There's a huge Cape Verdean population here. So there's like this whole Cape Verdean music scene that's amazing, that touches all of that. I kind of used to be a part of more of a kind of deep house scene that's maybe kind of gotten a little bit smaller as all of us have gotten older and you know, music has changed and the way people listen to music has changed, so. But I think that underground dance music will always be like, kind of like coming up and changing and evolving in places like Providence. Even though I think it's much more like the center of it as you think about its development on a transnational stage. Like it's the big cities where it really flourishes in part because they have the critical mass of people and in many cases this kinds of spaces and, and legal structures that enable people to party in different ways.
- [11:25]
A
So to kick things off, I was wondering if you can kind of outline in the broadest terms this chronology of what we're calling house music today. When does this name house become fixed to the dance music that listeners know it as now, today?
- [11:40]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think there's two questions in your question. One is about the nomenclature, right? Like, so when we start to understand like a genre or a mess of different genres as house music. So that I think probably you can trace to the late 70s in Chicago or you can trace it to the late 70s when the warehouse starts to be called. The warehouse is one origin point. And I think also when the kind of widely understood first house music record is released in Chicago by Jesse SAUNDERS, which is 1984, that's another kind of origin point. And I think there's also a great case to be made for people like Leonard Remix Roy putting a sign in a window at a juice bar that says we play house music. And you know, he has a kind of great narrative in his, his like self published memoir about that. And then also like imports, etc. Which is a really important house music like record store in Chicago. They used that as like a way to, to codify like the, the playlisting that was happening at the Warehouse and other underground juice bars. Like those are all like important kind of converging moments and spaces where like the name house music begins to coalesce. But I think if we want to think about the soundscape of house, which is really diverse and you know, grows out of funk and R and B, but also the technological influences of like the Rolands, like TR 303 and the, the 808, like, that goes all the way back to the, like, earliest great migrations to Chicago of, like, people bringing blues traditions and other black music to the city, you know, and beyond. Like, it's like that origin point goes and goes and goes. So it's like this. I think it's really helpful to understand, like, when people ask why Chicago? It's like, well, Chicago has this particular cultural and industrial musical base in it and a club scene that, you know, facilitated a certain kind of. A certain like, spectrum of musical interactions that came to be understood as house music.
- [13:50]
A
I would love to get to the political and economic context a little bit later on this, on this conversation, but I'd like to start where your book begins, which is 1979, the Disco Demolition night. It really begins with a blast. Could you talk about that night and why it's significant for the history of house music?
- [14:07]
C
Yeah, and I think Disco Demolition has, like, been, I would say, like, over publicized in kind of popular music studies as this, like, you know, really important moment. But I wanted to reread it not only as a moment of like, a racist rejection of black music, which it had been written about as previously, but also as a homophobic rejection of gay music. And, you know, disco as a place where queer, brown and black people were making music together, you know, of all races, but primarily black and Latino folks. That event was held by a shock jock radio DJ named Steve Dahl who was doing kind of like a kind of shtick on a rock radio station that kind of had a core listener base in the western Chicago suburbs, but also all over Chicagoland. You're doing this whole thing where he would blow up disco records on the air, you know, make these like, sound effects of like, and, you know, we're gonna like, kill Rod Stewart and you know what, this very weird, like, sonic destruction kind of like, thing. But then doing this like in person live promotion at the White Sox stadium, where he, like, had people bring records to as a kind of promotion that would then actually be blown up on the ball field. So during halftime, you know, ultimately like, causing the game against the Tigers to be canceled and fans all rushed this field. And it was like a big melee, like kind of gross Orwellian celebration of cultural destruction. Like you're imagining like a book burning, like people are burning black music in the middle of a. A baseball field, which is like in the south side of Chicago. It doesn't get much more symbolic than that. You don't have to draw a lot of conclusions. But at the same time, this is the Moment where house music is really becoming important to a younger cohort of mostly straight Chicago teens who are sneaking into the juice bars where mostly black gay men are having their own kind of private parties. And they're bringing that sound that they're experiencing there, which is seamlessly mixed, kind of like arc of rare funkin disco and kind of new wave and other kind of danceable sounds from all over. They're bringing that to their own spaces in the south side of Chicago where they're starting their own juice bar parties. So it's like this very transitional, crepuscular moment in the house music scene where people like Jesse Saunders are talking about throwing parties, but also the original warehouse is, like, going strong. And then, you know, this very mainstream cultural moment where really, like, you know, radio listeners are burning black music at a ball field is happening as well. So it was a really. It was an important moment to kind of trace in the book because it is so well known in pop culture and I think, but could be understood with like, some more layers of complexity with respect to the kind of emplaced cultures of the black south side in Chicago and that neighbor, the specific neighborhood's histories.
- [17:31]
B
Micah, I wonder if we could talk here for a moment about the sort of. What I see anyway as a rupture point, this disco demolition night, between the way that the music would continue to evolve in Chicago versus New York. And I wonder if you could speak to that. What I'm referring to is this idea of disco demolition night, as you said, this performative sort of moment that in some ways didn't change what people were listening to from one day to the next, but in another way it did affect the way the record industry operated. Right. And so I'm wondering if you see that working differently in Chicago versus New York. Meaning does the way that disco music evolves after that day in 1979 go in a different direction in New York than in Chicago?
- [18:14]
C
That's a good question. You know, I'm not an expert on what happens in New York at that moment. I don't know it as intimately, but my sense is that. My sense is that. That, you know, it is a rupture. But it's also like, the record labels were already disinvesting from disco music at that time. So there's still, you know, New York had this amazing cadre of, like, independent labels like West End and Prelude that were, like, really, like, putting out a ton of amazing material that was feeding dance floors. But when you think about, like, the big record labels and who were like had contracts with like Sigma studio in Philadelphia where like you had this amazing production value, like the kind of Leonard Bell, like the kind of like having French horns and strings on your Elton John record or whatever that would be produced in this really like florid disco moment. Like that kind of is already coming to a close. Like there's already this feeling in the record industry that oops, we over invested in disco. And that I think is also like you kind of see the decline after like Saturday Night. Saturday Night Fever is kind of like the biggest moment of like that soundtrack. And it's like popularity like which is around the same time. I don't know the exact moment. And Alice Echols, who's an amazing cultural historian, does a great analysis of that movie and this moment at the same, you know, at this moment we're thinking of in the late 70s before like the rise of house music and like high energy dance music. But my sense about Chicago and New York as like places where the music is developing in like related but different ways is that New York was so much closer to major label cultures. Like you know, the studio musicians, the studios. There was a lot more of that there. Whereas Chicago had this dying. I don't want to say dying, but like this, this, the bottom had already fallen out of the independent black music industry. So like when disco becomes really big and the major labels are all like clamoring to get those disco artists. Like they're also going through this process of creaming talent from labels in Chicago and other small black, like black labels across the country to get like, you know, if you, if you're putting out a record by the Emotions in Chicago and it's like actually on like national radio and you're getting like your band is getting a ton of traction and then like Atlantic or whoever signed them like comes in and takes that band, it like messes with your whole economic model. You don't have that stable like you know, artists that you know is successful to then support your experimentation with a lot of younger newer talent. So it like messed up the whole industry in Chicago, which I think created the opening for the producers who were then going to like try to emulate those sounds using new technologies. Whereas I think there were more record labels still putting out like more music in New York at that time. So it was just a different kind of pace maybe. Does that make sense?
- [21:21]
B
Absolutely. So really other than the. Of course there are racial economic factors that we'll talk about, but a major difference in the evolution after Disco Demolition Night is industry is the relationship between each city and industry.
- [21:36]
C
100%. Couldn't agree more.
- [21:38]
A
Well, that's a very useful outline to understand both the spatial dynamics here that apply between these two big cities, but also the professional dynamics as well between the indie labels and the major, major labels basically harvesting the talent from the, from the smaller labels and, and leaving basic what seems like windows of opportunity for innovators to come in. And maybe this is a great time to bring in the story of Frankie Knuckles, this transitional figure. Could you talk a little bit about the story of Frankie Knuckles and basically what propels Frankie Knuckles to move from New York City to Chicago and what he ends up doing as a result?
- [22:16]
C
Yeah, so Frankie Knuckles is often referred to as the godfather of house music and he was the, the resident DJ at the Warehouse which was a party thrown. It was actually a party thrown originally by. It kind of came out of a party by a group of promoters that called themselves US Studios Incorporated as a non profit. But the kind of main promoter that stayed on with the project when the, when there was a split in that group was Robert Williams, who is still alive today. So like Robert as the promoter who was, you know, had been in New York for many years and partied there. I mean Chicago's house music cultures are like so indebted to New York's disco cultures. Not just because of, you know, Frankie, who was born and raised in New York and came to Chicago with, you know, Robert at Robert's request. You know, Robert actually went try to get T. Scott who was playing Better Days party in New York or you know, Larry Levan who famously famously played as the resident DJ at the Paradise Garage. But Frankie was really like known, you know, according to the, the legend as like just a friend of Larry's in New York. And he, but he did have, he was steeped in the same disco culture as, as Larry Levan and, and did bring a lot of the musical kind of thinking that would be foundational to house music culture in Chicago with him when he moved to the city to, to work with Robert. So it's this like late 70s, they begin throwing these parties in a venue on at 206South Jefferson, which is like a kind of an old, the building is like really like a three story small. It's like, like a small house, it's not super big. And what's so fascinating about the way that people relate to that space, which is now a local landmark in the city after many years of advocacy, you know, so many people say they were there, people who would never have been old enough or approximate enough socially. You know, it's like there's this desire to, like, connect to that origin space and to connect to Frankie and what his increasingly, like, symbolically rich relationship to the beginning of the culture is. But, yeah, Frankie played sets at what came to be called the Warehouse, and the party continued through the early 80s. And then Frankie and Robert parted ways and he started a party at a venue called the Power Plant, which was his own. His own project. And he brought in a lot of younger collaborators, nurtured a lot of talent, people like Mike Winston and Craig Loftus and many others who would throw parties at the Clubhouse and other kind of legendary black queer house music spaces in Chicago. So Frankie really, till the mid-80s, was a driving force along with. And Robert Williams began throwing his own parties separately from Frankie under the. The Music Box kind of brand. And that became the residency where Ron Hardy became, like, one of the. In Chicago, perhaps even more influential than Frankie. And had he lived. You know, Frankie lived till 2014, so he had a lot longer to make his mark. But Ron Hardy was, like, hugely popular and remains hugely beloved and popular in the city as well. So they had these kind of, like, friendly competition between the Power Plant and the Music Box for, like, who would be the premier house music venue once the Warehouse closed.
- [26:01]
B
Yeah. I'm sort of reminded when you say, Micah, that everyone claims to have been at the Warehouse, despite the fact that they're 22 years old and, you know, 2025. And Paradise Garage is absolutely the same thing. Right. Everybody and their mother and their mother's mother saw Larry the Van DJ at Paradise Garage, even though it was invitation only, even though you had to have a membership. Right. It simply cannot be. So. Yeah. So I am thinking about also the sort of how these. These particular spaces live large in the cultural imaginary as well.
- [26:32]
C
Yeah, Yeah. I think that there's. I try not to be super dismissive of it because I think it speaks to the reparative way that people want to connect to the culture. Like, it's. The Paradise Garage also was a bigger space. Right. So it's like, you know, it physically was bigger. So I think that there's likely. And, you know, there may have been more people that actually touched that particular space than the original Warehouse. But it's like, at the end of the day, when you think about how people re. You know, a lot of my work is about memory cultures and, like, how people think about their relationships to these origin stories. You know, they want to connect, they want to have been A part of it. They want to use these authoritative figures and spaces to kind of verify their, their, their relationship to these cultures, which is interesting.
- [27:21]
A
You talk about memory in a big way in this book. And I'm wondering if you can tell for our listeners who haven't read the book yet, how do you think that house music is somehow misremembered in your book and this seems to be something that you're writing against.
- [27:35]
C
Yeah, I mean, in my book, I'm sure, like the way that I am relating to it super individualistically, it's my own and I try to own this as much as I can. Like, you know, everybody who's, who participates in house music culture is in some way kind of authoring their own kind of story and relationship to it, as is probably true of most music cultures. And I think that what I found, you know, why the project seemed necessary and I would say urgent, is that when I started it, there we were in this particular moment in popular culture where EDM had become super big again. You know, like whatever the moment of dance music, there's always these ebbs and flows in the charts of whether dance music is popular or not. And it was this particular moment with EDM where the biggest earning artists were so clearly white and European and there was just no space in a cultural conversation about dance music where Chicago or New York or black folks or queer folks were being mentioned. So I originally envisioned my research project to be about, you know, artists like Paul Oakenfold, who taped New York City Mix Radio by artists like Tony Humphries and like, brought it back to the UK and used it to influence their parties that then became blueprints for this like wider European diffusion of dance music. But like, that project assumes people already know all the other stuff about what's happening in the US prior to that. And I think it was like this realization I had one of my mentors, Dr. Maida McNeil, who was the person who brought me to the Chosen Few Old School reunion picnic the first time I went, she was like, yeah, that's like a cool project, but, but like, you should probably come to Chicago and see how we party and like what is actually going on before you like start this like media studies project about radio DJs take, you know, taping mixes and you know, being influenced in this transnational flow of musical cultures. So that was in the back of my mind and this moment in EDM kind of popularity and just needing to sort of course correct, because with dance music that's not super logocentric, so like hip hop, it's like so much of the sound moves attached to bodies in terms of the way that you hear the voice. But with dance music, it can often just be like, unremarked and that, you know, the. The race identity, other characteristics of the artists who produce it are like, invisibilized when you have the record and you don't see them on the front of it necessarily. So just like, how do we, like, rewrite them into the story? How do we understand the, like, incredible creative capacities of DJs who don't make records? But. And at this time, you know, don't have like, recorded boilerplate room sets that you're gonna like that are gonna circulate and make them famous. You know, like, you have some amazingly bad sounding, like, tape recordings of these, like, music box sets and like, other kind of like, radio sets and things. But the project has really been about, like, making. Making a scholarly kind of attempt to set the terms of that debate so that the queer color progenitors of the cultures aren't ignored. Because it had been done really well by music journalists in a lot of cases. I mean, I think that they've focused, you know, as. As journalists are what to do on the kind of biggest hits and heroes like Frankie Knuckles, but which is still important. And I thought that with this book project, we could, like, maybe even go like a few layers deeper to see how the social and cultural worlds of Chicago teens and queer people of color were interacting with punk cultures and other kind of, you know, industrial antecedents in these really innovative ways.
- [31:36]
A
All right, let's take a step back and explore the soundscape that we've been illustrating. Check out the intense driving rhythm behind Baby Wants to Ride, a track that Knuckles frequently spun in the warehouse in the late 70s, but released as part of the Track Records compilation Frankie Knuckles Presents in 1989.
- [31:51]
C
Baby wants to ride Baby wants to ride so high Baby wants to ride for love Here we go.
- [32:04]
A
Now here's Frankie Knuckles talking about the warehouse in a documentary on house music presented by WTTW Chicago in 2024.
- [32:11]
C
You're sitting in a church, you know, and the pastor is giving you just the right sermon that it takes you from one extreme to the next, and you walk out feeling good. That's pretty much what the warehouse did. Did we think we were making history? Absolutely not. We were just busy having a good time. You know, everyone likes to be a part of some kind of club or something.
- [32:32]
A
And finally, vibe with the melodic electronic sounds in the Whistle Song, the iconic Track that set the stage for early 1990s house. Alright, let's get back to our conversation. I mean, your book is fantastic. And there's one quote that comes out in your introduction from DJ Craig Cannon, who calls house music. House music is Chicago's musical Stonewall. What do you think he means by that? And maybe that leads to your broader frameworks in this book.
- [33:30]
C
The late great Craig Cannon, who passed away a few years ago, when he and I talked about house and his. His amazing trajectory as a house DJ in Chicago, he really was adamant that house culture was extremely political for the gay black men who participated in it. Especially at the beginning when they were excluded systematically from white discotheques. Right. So Chicago had a pretty vibrant gay, like, gay scene with bars and clubs on the near north side. And they were. They basically had racial quotas in a lot of cases. So gay black men were creating their own culture because they couldn't fully participate in the cultures, the gay cultures that were more mainstream and, you know, established in the city. So I think for him, when he says musical Stonewall, he's saying like, you know, it was resistive. It was, it was kind of a. In some ways, I think, you know, you. We can think about it not just as like something that was in response to white gay disco text, but also something that was like, not in response to them and was like kind of doing its own thing elsewhere. Like, I think there was this really robust Craig played as a DJ on this, like, you know, private party scene in South Shore, even prior to Robert coming back to the city and starting the warehouse. So there was this audience that was partying together that already had this, like, you know, proto this disco culture. Maybe they weren't necessarily listening to records mixed the way that Frankie was mixing them, but like Craig was making these mixed reel to reel tapes that they would listen to at these house parties in these big horseshoe apartments in South Shore. So he's really like asserting that it has political value. I think a lot of times people get exhausted by the idea that like, well, house is not political because it doesn't have lyrics or its lyrics are only about love. And I'm like, there's nothing more political than being like a doubly marginalized person and insisting that love be like, foregrounded in the lives of the people you care about.
- [35:49]
B
Part of the way that disco gets narrativized in the story of New York is through colorblind discourse. And what I'm hearing you say Micah is different. And I wonder if you could kind of touch on that a little bit. So what we hear in our interviews time and time again and the work that's been done on disco is, you know, David Mancuse is the Loft. It was this place, peace, love and music and everyone of all races and all class. Okay. But we know actually there were significant divisions, class divisions and race divisions in terms of who could and could not get into each club in New York. And what I'm hearing you say, if I'm understanding you correctly, is that perhaps the Chicago house scene is a bit more self aware of that fact and less invested in obscuring it. For a vision of the music culture as somehow solving all of society's ills.
- [36:35]
C
That'S really well put. I think that the oft mythologized like Loft and other similar parties in New York kind of, I think depending on who's narrating their connection, they're often, you know, imagined to be these racial utopias. Because I think a lot of times white participants in dance music culture want to feel a kind of racial innocence in their, you know, enjoyment, right? So if it's all about peace and love and inclusion and connection and there's not this, like, actually this is coming out of a need for safer spaces apart from from white spaces. Like where maybe there were a few white participants, but they're not multiracial, they're black spaces where there's a few white participants who are there because they're part of the culture. That's a totally different way of understanding the origins of underground dance music in the late 70s and early 80s. And I think we do ourselves a disservice by not understanding that. You know, I say this in the book, that these spaces were necessary and life saving in many cases for people who didn't have other. You know, if you're an African American person who is growing up in Chicago, there's a great likelihood that there's a relationship in your family to the black church. And you know, for folks who on Sunday morning do not feel like they are fully included in culture at the black church, like warehouse really did become a sacred space. And it's like not a secret that it was spiritual. For people like, that was where their spiritual practice as adults when they developed same sex desire or, you know, kind of like began to understand that their gender identity or presentation didn't conform to normative society's expectations. So there's like the side of it from like black culture, black straight culture and also white gay culture. So you have those two things putting pressure on people who then need spaces to express themselves. And they want to bring elements of both of those cultures. Right. They're not saying I'm neither nor. They're saying I'm both. And. And I think house music is about the radical proposition of both and of, like, what is it? And that's why it's, like, generically unstable. Like, why it's actually really hard to market, why it doesn't, like, lend itself to neat packaging. It's like, if you're both and. Or as legendary DJ Dana Powell says, always also, then it means that you're open to a kind of connection and fluidity that, like, isn't actually something that can be bought or sold because it exists beyond that.
- [39:25]
A
I've totally seen that kind of genre trouble, if you will, with punk rock. I mean, like, early punk rock, it's, like, hard to categorize. Like. Like journalism is very kind of nondescript about how, like, it's so many different names and then 76 or 75, it becomes like, the. The magazine comes out and becomes. The music comes, at least in New York, comes fixed to this idea of punk rock, a similar kind of thing. It's. It. Maybe it's hard to categorize in introduction, your book, you do. You. You. And also throughout the book, you kind of make this parallel sometimes between punk and. And house music, really interestingly. But I was wondering if you can talk about the difference between house music and disco music. At what point does it become house music as opposed to disco music? And what are some of the sonic differences in. In that differentiation as well?
- [40:13]
C
Yeah, I mean, I don't really super subscribe to the idea that house and disco have a firewall between them. I think, like, there's a lot of house music that, because of the way it's produced in terms of tempo and quant, like the quantized kind of, like, steady beat that comes to be, like, part of its mainstream sound, like. But it's like all disco strings and horns and kind of, like vocals. So, like, what. What in the 90s becomes, like, disco house, like, that's disco as much as, like, you know, late 70s funk and R and B in my mind, for the most part. But I think when we think about, like, that early, like, the early house records, like, you know, Baby Wants to Ride being, you know, in that first wave of really kind of like. I mean, I would say even, you know, that. That. That moment when Jesse Saunders does On and on, and there's all these, like, covers kind of coming out on. On different Songs and they're kind of covering each other and it's like, you know, I write about in the book the Love Can't Turn around and like the controversy that song created because it, you know, one version of it became so popular and it's like, who. Who was first? But it's like also a cover of Isaac Hayes song. Like, it's really that sound of the, the Synth with the 808, that's like the early house sound. And that's what like eventually just evolves into so many different sub genres and offshoots and whatever, as opposed to like, I think for me that, that peak disco, like Sigma Studios sound with like, you know, the product, the high production value, the. Which isn't even like the majority of what disco, you know, great disco DJs were playing. But it's like, if you want to like be just like very specific about the kind of platonic disco sound or the platonic house sound, like those to me, like maybe are most meaningful, but they're like, they're both not that meaningful when you think about the number. Like the ways that disco DJs played. Like you could get any number, you know, David Mancuso or, or someone like Nikki Siano T. Scott. Like, the way that they played was not just like hard disco, right? It was just the, the full spectrum of danceable music that they could find. And you know, they were like, like disco DJs in New York, house DJs in Chicago love and loved music. And they just wanted to find the most innovative, weird, like off the wall things that they could play. Which is so interesting because when you think about the way that the memory culture of like classic house culture in Chicago has evolved, it's like people just want to hear now what they heard in the early 80s because it's like, it's like nostalgic for them. But the music has evolved, it continues, it's like always evolving.
- [43:12]
B
Let's talk about this phrase, disco's revenge. So I believe Frankie Knuckles coined it, if I'm not mistaken, saying that house music is disco's revenge. I'm wondering what you think he meant by that. Because Frankie Knuckles more than anyone knew, as you said, that there's no distinct sonic wall between disco and house. So when he says it's disco's revenge, what is he pointing toward?
- [43:34]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think Frankie knew that that moment in the late 70s when the majors rejected disco and, and the, you know, and pop culture in the US started to really turn against disco and, and queerness in Mainstream culture. Right. Like, there was this. It's, you know, it's very much like the moment we're in right now of, like, we need more masculinity. These sissies. What the heck? Like, I think Frankie realized that House and it's like its energy and. And what he. You know, eventually, I think he said that retrospectively. I don't think at the moment he would have necessarily said that, but I think looking back from the 90s at what house was and what it was becoming, like, he saw, oh, yeah, like, the queer and black roots are still like, this is. This is where they went if they couldn't go this way. It's like you just. It's like you're closing one outlet and it's just pushing through and the ground and. Yeah. So that the revenge is like. The revenge part of it is an interesting turn of phrase because it's like, it's not a backlash. It's like. It's like in spite of all the, like, struggle culture, the cultural mainstream, cultural struggle against disco, like, here's House, and it doesn't give a shit. And it's like out here being as gay and black as it is, even though that wasn't always the cultural coding it, like, ended up having when it hit the mainstream. You know, thinking about the moments where, at least in the US it comes back to the, like, pop charts, like, it didn't always look game black, but it was always there right under the surface. If. If not explicitly, then, you know, the open secret was to be acknowledged. So, yeah, that's when I think about that turn of phrase. That's what I think about. It's like, there's. What's that like, you know, axiom? Like, there's no better revenge than, like, doing well or something of that nature. It's like, yeah, we, like, we just kept going. And. Yeah, like, I often think about the idea of, like, maroonage and, like, what it means to be like in cultural spaces, like, always responding to rejection or antagonism versus just, like, doing what you want to do and, like, ignoring it. Like. So I think House is like, a really great example of long, like, black, Black American traditions of, like, maroon cultures where people are like, we're just in our own spaces doing our own thing. And, like, eventually you're going to catch wind of it because we're innovative, but, like, you know, it doesn't. It's not about necessarily being in response or demanding attention from the mainstream and that. That's, like a really cool part of house music's stories like, just like it's separateness. It's like it's a secretness. I guess in a way then that's like very tied to its identity as like an underground cultural expression.
- [46:35]
A
Your response and your entire book is a really great testament to the cultural power that music has within society. Society in which, you know, politics have changed so, so much since that time and the importance of documenting this and interpreting it and preserving it and preserving this knowledge. And I'm curious about the one project that you mentioned in the book, the Chicago House Music Oral History Project. Could you talk a little bit about the story behind that project and where it stands today?
- [47:05]
C
Yeah, I mean, I was trained in my graduate work as a cultural historian to use oral history as a primary source. Primary source. Like when you think about what kind of documental records exist or existed even when I wrote the book there, it's mostly journalistic writing. And I think journalistic writing is great and I use a ton of it. I'm so grateful for all the amazing journalists who like, wrote about their contemporaneous moments. But when you have somebody who lived a culture, like remembering it with you, maybe for the first time, maybe for the 50th time, like when you. When you interview someone like Robert Williams, like, you know, he's got his stories and they're like, well, trodden paths in his mind and they're amazing and funny and. But there's all these other people I got to interview as part of my oral history project. And you know, I called it the Chicago House Music Oral History Project. That was like, what I did. I hope one day it grows. I don't know that, you know, it was a collaboration with the center for Black Music Research at Columbia College, which no longer exists. It was deinstitutionalized. So now that collection is just part of Columbia's online archive. But all of the interviews I did, it was important for me to make them accessible to a broad public so that people could do other interpretive work. Like, the things that are interesting to me are not necessarily, you know, the most important things or the, you know, things that are going to be interesting to the next scholars. So I just wanted to make sure that the primary sources that I created to do my research, we're also going to be accessible going forward to other scholars and artists who want to interpret this material. Yeah. And every once in a while someone is like, using them. And it's really fun to see that they have their own cultural life after me. And it's also a Way for me to like, be like, very transparent about, you know, if you want to see where this quote was made, you can go hunt it down in the oral history, like, you know, giving people a. The breadcrumbs to better, you know, to better verify like, the. The statements I'm making.
- [49:09]
A
Totally. And I'm so grateful for those breadcrumbs. And I'm sure others are as well, though, who are following in your footsteps and picking up on these breadcrumbs and. And interpreting and exploring this music, even. Maybe not even scholars, but people that are just interested in the music as well. So thank you very much for creating that and it's really awesome to that exists.
- [49:29]
B
Maika. Where can people find more of your work and more of what you're doing now?
- [49:34]
C
So I have two forthcoming articles that I've been working on for a couple years, just in edited volumes, and one of them is actually about Frankie Knuckles and kind of public memory and the way that the city of Chicago and dancers in Chicago relate to his. His. His. His memory and cathect with him as a figure. And that's gonna come out in the next year, I believe, on Oxford as part of its handbook on electronic dance music. So I'm really excited about that. And that's a. Something that. That was initiated by the dance studies scholar and philosopher Luis Manuel Garcia and a collaborator of his. And then there's another project that I wrote a piece for an edited volume. It's actually, I think now two books on dance studies in Chicago called Dancing the Third coast. And that is a piece about summer dance. So these were kind of two threads that I didn't get to fully flesh out from the dissertation book project where I was like, I really want to think about, you know, after Frankie passed, the way that his, like this hashtag FK always was circulating and the way that like, you know, Theaster Gates became the steward of his vinyl collection. And the way that, you know, these murals of his face began to crop up around Chicago and people would pose in front of them and, you know, hashtag their posts on social media with FK always like, these were just things that I was like, still interested in. And in the other article, conversely, or the other chapter, conversely, is really looking at summer dance, which is an incredible, like, incredible space where Chicago was able to honor and elevate house music as a local cultural contribution really much earlier than it was doing it in other ways. So really looking at the Chicago summer dance house music program that Brian Keir created in collaboration with the. The D Case, the Department of Cultural affairs in the city. In the. In, I believe, the early aughts. It's like before my time in the city, but I knew about it from my research. So those are two forthcoming writing projects that I'm really, you know, that are related to this project.
- [52:05]
A
Well, that's really cool. Both of those projects sound really cool. And also remember a couple of years ago, Frankie Knuckles is album, vinyl collection touring in galleries and so I think the Gagosian Gallery in New York City. And I'm also curious about, you know, where that is now, where that's going. And you're also a DJ too, so where can people find you and where are you playing?
- [52:30]
C
Well, I have a. My biggest social media Footprint is in SoundCloud probably. So you can find me on SoundCloud. Just Micah Salkind and I post mixes there. But I've been throwing a party with my collaborator, Jackson Morley. We DJ as Micah Jackson and we've been doing a party since before the pandemic, but went on hiatus during the pandemic. It's a quarterly thing we call Dollar Disco, which is actually named after a Chicago party that I thought was really cute. So we hope to still do more of those. Although it's just, you know, it's a. It's a you catch it or you don't kind of thing. You know, like, we. We don't do it very frequently, so it's like, you know, we put it on in a. An informal gallery space and we have a pretty nice email list. But, you know, people can always DM me to get on the email list through SoundCloud if they want.
- [53:23]
A
That's awesome. And I hope. I hope to catch that vibe when I'm next time in Providence. I love Providence.
- [53:27]
C
Come to Providence. We'll host you cool. Or tell you where. I can tell you somewhere else to go and hear good music too. Plenty of other artists that you should listen to.
- [53:36]
A
Well, fantastic. Well, Micah, I don't have many more questions for you. Christy, do you have more questions for Micah?
- [53:43]
B
No, that's it. Is there anything else that you think folks should know, Micah, before we wrap about the history of house music and the ways that you think it could be better remembered?
- [53:54]
C
No, I think we covered a ton of it and the book is there for people as a resource. You know, it's not that I hope that there are 10 more books about house music and people really, like, dig even deeper. I think this thing tends to happen when you, like, are the. I wouldn't say I'm the first person to write about house music in a scholarly way. But I think having this book length monograph about Chicago house specifically, that's written the way I wrote it, as a crossover book for both popular audiences and scholarly audiences, like, I guess the last thing I would leave people with is just, you know, write your own pieces, you know, do the interpretive work, think about the culture in multi dimensional ways and like, you know, be a part of that, that discourse that is, is the thing that I write about as, as the mode of participation in house culture. Like, if you're debating it, you're part of house culture.
- [54:48]
A
Well, if this episode is any testament, your book is quite a conversation starter and I hope to have more, many, many more conversations going forward. Micah, I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time with us and to share your work and part of your life with us and very grateful. So thank you very much.
- [55:05]
C
Thank you both so much for your interest and attention. It's a pleasure.
- [55:08]
A
Cool.
- [55:09]
B
Thanks, Micah.
- [55:10]
A
Great. Okay, bye. Thank you.
- [55:12]
C
By.
- [55:18]
A
That was her conversation with Micah Salcheid. I hope it was as fun for you to listen to as it was to record. Christy, what did you think?
- [55:25]
B
That was such an amazing conversation. It really made me think about the resonances between the Warehouse and Paradise Garage.
- [55:32]
A
Totally. And along with Paradise Garage and Studio 54, New York, the Warehouse kind of functions in the cultural memory of house music in Chicago in a similar way in the sense that, you know, people, you know, whether they are there or not, or even alive at that time, you know, claim to have been at the Warehouse. And there's a desire to claim cultural affinity with this music history.
- [55:54]
B
Yeah. Along those lines, I think there are some names that we've talked less about with regards to this music history. Those of us that study New York, like me and you, we know Frankie Knuckles, but we know less about Ron Hardy, the resident DJ at the Music Box, who's also a tremendously important DJ in the start of house music.
- [56:11]
A
Ron Hardy, also a legendary DJ that, you know, deserves a spotlight in this conversation. One other thing I just want to mention here is that along lines of the paradise garage in Studio 54, the warehouse was also this industrial manufacturing space that in the late 1970s was repurposed for dance music culture. So the story of the Warehouse really fits within the larger narrative that we're constructing within this audio series. Okay, I just want to make a few acknowledgments and shout outs first to the Gotham center for New York City History at the CUNY Graduate center in Midtown Manhattan. Thanks also to the generous support of the Urban History association and to Fordham University Lincoln center, where I teach American Studies.
- [56:49]
B
Thank you also to the Society for American Music and to the University of Colorado Boulder's President's Fund for the Humanities.
- [56:56]
A
Stay tuned to socials to hear about upcoming episodes and events related to the podcast @ Instagram. That's soundscapesnyc@soundscapes NYC. I'm Ryan Purcell.
- [57:06]
B
And I'm Christy Soares.
- [57:07]
A
Till next.