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This is a podcast about house music. I'm thatpodcastgirl, C-Dub—and I want to thank all of you for helping us hit over 200 downloads in just three and a half months, across 11 episodes. JohnJohn guess what? We did it!

This episode is called: The Record Store.

Picture this: It’s the early '90s. Somewhere between grit and gold chains. Between big dreams and dirty sneakers. And on both coasts—if you wanted to find a sound, you walked into a record store.

Let’s start with Chicago.

Gramaphone Records: it wasn’t big. Tucked into a narrow space on Clark Street, its walls were crowded with bins and bins of vinyl. The floor had the signature black and white checkered tile. It smelled like plastic and cardboard and gum stuck to a sneaker. Flyers were shoved under the glass of the counter. The lighting was harsh and honest. But it was church.

DJs walked in like they had a mission. They’d flip through crates with the reverence of a surgeon in the middle of a procedure. Customers would clear out of the way if someone serious walked in. Because the booth in the back? That was sacred ground.

Behind the glass, a selector would listen to your picks. The staff could tell if you knew what you were doing by the second record you previewed. “If you played the wrong thing too loud, they’d cut the sound. You’d feel it before you even noticed.”

Gramaphone didn’t sell records. It passed on secrets. There were codes in the track listings. White labels with no names. You’d find the record someone played at 3AM that melted your brain—and it wouldn’t be there next week. You either knew when to come, or you didn’t and missed out.

Frankie Knuckles was a regular. So was Derrick Carter. But even if you weren’t a name, you could be a witness. One customer remembered watching Derrick build an entire set in the store over two hours—testing tracks, building tension, then walking out without a word.

“Gramaphone was like a dojo,” one woman said. “You didn’t go there to buy. You went to train.”

Over in New York—it was different.

Downtown, you had places like Vinylmania, Dance Tracks, and Satellite. Tucked behind basements. No two stores were the same. Some were dark and sleek, others crowded and chaotic. But all of them had a pulse.

Dance Tracks, on East 3rd Street, had tall racks and endless stacks, plus a community board with handwritten ads—DJ needed. Roommate wanted. One wall had stickers from clubs that no longer existed. Another had a memorial photo of someone from the scene, framed with scribbled tributes.

This is where Joe Claussell got his start. Where François K would come through in his sunglasses. Where a new DJ might overhear a conversation that would change everything.

One regular recalled being handed a record and told, “Don’t play this unless you mean it.” Another described the joy of walking in hungover, digging through wax, and finding a beat so perfect it made you cry.

At Vinylmania, there were whispers. About a rare Japanese pressing. About a reel from a closing party. About a limited promo that came in through someone’s cousin in Detroit. It wasn’t about the money. It was about the mythology.

These stores weren’t commercial. They were coded. You had to dress the part, or dress in defiance of it. Some people came in gender-blurred—baggy pants, nail polish, stubble and gloss—because in those four walls, there was no wrong way to be. In fact, dressing ambiguously sometimes gave you more space. People didn’t know how to categorize you, so they left you alone.

One woman recalls she never got called out for being a woman in the DJ booth because she wore oversized hoodies and kept her voice low. “If I didn’t speak

Copyright 2025. “This is a Podcast About House Music, Sometimes” hosted by C-Dub

Send us a text if you like it and want more of it.

This is a podcast about house music. I’m thatpodcastgirl, C Dub, and I’m here to guide us through the untold stories behind the house music. This season, we’re remembering what was almost lost—what pulsed in the basslines and lived in the corners. Stories that stayed alive only because someone danced them into memory. Picture this:

It’s 2024, and you’re in Berlin. A DJ pulls out a vinyl with no label and no sleeve. Just black wax and instinct. She drops it. It’s from Shelter. A remix from decades ago. The crowd roars. But most people in the room don’t know that track was once played in protest. They don’t know about the night the beat was an act of defiance.

In the early 1980s, a virus began to spread. And for far too long, the world stayed quiet.

The clubs that gave people freedom—places like the Warehouse, the Paradise Garage, the Power Plant—became spaces of mourning. Dancers disappeared every week. DJs lost their friends. Party flyers became obituaries.

The government wasn’t naming it. So the music did.

Michael Roberson is a scholar, a father of the House of Garcón, and a Black queer activist. He’s often spoken about the ballroom floor as a sacred place during the AIDS epidemic.

“We were losing people every week. So we danced with them, for them, through them.”

For Michael and so many others, house wasn’t just escape. It was church and it was ritual. It was where you could scream into the bass and still be held.

At the Paradise Garage, DJ Larry Levan began playing extended versions of tracks with long breakdowns and pauses. Sometimes he left full seconds of silence.

Club historian Tim Lawrence says:

“People would stand still, or scream, or weep. The music gave them space to grieve.”

In 1989, ACT UP held a die-in at the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia. That same night, on the floor at a gay club in New York, dancers lay down in silence.

They called it dancing to remember.

There’s also a story about a track that included a voicemail. The voice said:

“I can’t go on.”

Nobody agrees on who made it, and some say it was a real message. Others say it was constructed from memory.

It was played only once. In a small club. Quiet room. Full of people who understood.

Then the beat dropped.

At the door, the ten-dollar cover might be for the DJ—or for someone’s casket. Sometimes it paid for AZT. Sometimes for rent, or a hospital bed.

At the Shelter in New York, one woman came every weekend, in the same shirt. She danced in the same corner.

“I’m here for my brother,” she told the DJ once. “He used to dance here. I still do it for him.”

At certain parties, there was a board behind the DJ booth—names were pinned, and candles lit. It wasn’t advertised because it didn’t need to be - those were friends.

Flyers used coded language: “This one’s for family,” or “bring your breath.” That meant someone had passed. That meant come ready to move through it.

These weren’t just parties. They were vigils on the dance floor.

Frankie Knuckles once said:

“You can play joy. But you can also play mourning. The floor knows the difference.”

The dancefloor didn’t ignore the crisis. It became the memorial.

And for some, it stayed that way. From the early 1980s through the late 1990s—and even into the 2000s in clubs like The Shelter and Body & Soul—these spaces continued to hold grief and memory. Candles continued

Copyright 2025. “This is a Podcast About House Music, Sometimes” hosted by C-Dub

Send us a text if you like it and want more of it.

This is a podcast about house music. I'm thatpodcastgirl, C-Dub, and I'm here to guide us through the untold stories behind the house music. This season, we’re telling the stories that never made the headlines—the quiet ones, the erased ones, the ones still living in the basslines and breakdowns. House music rose out of the wreckage—after disco was declared dead, while AIDS was being ignored, and as Black and queer communities were pushed to the margins. It was protest. It was joy. It was survival. And the people who shaped it weren’t always let in, given credit, or remembered. We’re remembering them now.

In 1977, on the West Loop of Chicago, a man named Robert Williams opened the doors to something rare. A space that would come to mean everything.

It was called The Warehouse.

Williams had moved from New York. He’d spent time at David Mancuso’s Loft and Nicky Siano’s Gallery—spaces where music wasn’t just a soundtrack. It was an offering. A way to hold each other in sound.

When he came to Chicago, he carried that vision with him.

He once said:

"I didn’t want to open a bar. I wanted a house party that never ended."

*(Chicago Tribune, 2014)*

He found a building on South Jefferson—three floors, concrete bones, no signage. Just potential. He called his friend Frankie Knuckles. Frankie didn’t just mix records. He shaped mood. His sets built slowly, tenderly. A gospel chord stretched across a disco break. Synths weaving through soul. He played what the room needed—before the room knew it needed it. There was no shouting into the mic. No interruptions. Just music, steady and intentional. The sound didn’t have a name yet. But it was unmistakable. People started calling it house. A nod to where they heard it first. For many, The Warehouse was more than a club. It was where the weight came off. Where you could exhale.

A dancer once recalled:

"Frankie played like he was watching us—not the other way around. If someone cried in the corner, the next song held them."

*(Chicago House Music Oral History Project)*

But that wasn’t everyone’s experience.

Some people never made it past the door.

There were quiet rules. About how you looked. Who you knew. Whether you matched the room.

One man wrote:

"I stood outside The Warehouse in ’81 and watched the guy in front of me go in. The door shut behind him. I didn’t get in. That rejection stayed with me—but it also made me start something else."

*(Out & Proud Archive, Chicago)*

For those turned away, something else had to be built. New spaces began to open. Not spin-offs. Not alternatives. Their own worlds. Places like the Power Plant. The Bismarck. The Music Box.

Sometimes you heard about the party through a friend. Sometimes it was a flyer taped to a pole, already half torn. A back room. A storage space. A dancefloor that wasn’t trying to impress anyone.

The Music Box, in particular, held something raw. The ceilings dripped with condensation. The walls throbbed. The air was soaked with sweat and smoke.

One dancer said:

"The ceiling would drip. The walls would shake. You couldn’t fake it. You had to move, or leave."

*(Black LGBTQ Archives, Spelman College)*

Another remembered:

"It was the first time I saw a man scream during a breakdown. Not because he was scared—but because he needed to get something out of his body."

*(ACT UP Club Culture Collection, NYC)*

Ron Hardy was at the center. His sets didn’t follow the beat. They followed the feeling. He looped tracks until people broke open. He reversed them. Sometimes it was chaos. But it was the kind of chaos that made sense in your bones. This wasn’t a

Copyright 2025. “This is a Podcast About House Music, Sometimes” hosted by C-Dub