Describe walking into the Warehouse
Frankie Knuckles
Anyone with even a passing knowledge of dancefloor history knows Frankie Knuckles respectfully as the ‘Godfather of House’. Together with his childhood friend Larry Levan he ran wild on the early disco scene: his first job was spiking the punch at Nicky Siano’s Gallery. Transplanted to Chicago after a residency at the bacchanal of New York’s Continental Baths, it was Frankie’s sets of ballsy older disco at the Warehouse that ignited this polite midwestern city and gave house music its name. This interview was conducted just after the shock closure of New York’s Sound Factory, another great room that Mr Nicholls had (briefly) made his own.
Where did you start DJing?
I started spinning at the Continental baths in July 1972. As well as the club area, there was an olympic size swimming pool and a TV room at the very end. Alongside the pool was a sauna and a shower room, then there was like boutiques and restaurants and bars, and back into an area where there was apartments and private rooms.
I was scheduled to play Mondays and Tuesdays, and Larry played from Wednesday to Sunday and on the nights he played I found myself playing at the beginning of the evening, or playing before he woke up... IF he woke up. I mean Fridays and Saturdays he was generally OK, but Wednesdays and Thursdays he wouldn’t get started till very late, so...
I played different other clubs around the city, this one after-hours called Tomorrow. Larry eventually left Continental and went to work at a club called Soho, which was owned by Richard Long, who was the premier sound engineer, he was the one who taught us everything about
sound.
The Continental went bankrupt and closed in ’76. I worked a couple of other places here in the city, but I was looking for something a little bit more than just a job. I figured I’d already put five years in one club and it had gone bankrupt, so if I was to go and work at a particular club at this point I wanted more of an incentive. If you give me a piece of what’s going on then I wouldn’t have a problem applying myself and working hard to make everything work. Or else to me it just wasn’t worth it. To just go and play records and collect a pay
cheque.
Originally they wanted Larry in Chicago, but Larry didn’t want to leave New York, and besides, the club Soho was beginning to take off – no, as a matter of fact, he had left Soho and they were already at Reade Street which was what Paradise garage came from. They were already building that and he didn’t see himself leaving. They had pretty much already had their ideas for what they wanted to do with that. He had no intention of leaving the city, so they came to me second and asked me to do it. I went out to play for the opening and stuff and I was there for about two weeks, and I really liked the city a lot. I only played twice because the club was only open one day a week: on a Saturday. But on both those nights it worked really really well.
They offered me the job at that particular point and I gave them my terms, how I felt about it. They offered me a piece of the business. So at that point I realised I had to think about what I wanted to do. If I really wanted to uproot from New York City and move there. Then actually when I looked at it I didn’t have anything holding me here. I figured what the hell. I gave myself five years and if I couldn’t make it in five years then I could always come back home.
Describe walking into the Warehouse
It’s such a long time ago. I look at a lot of different parties and stuff that I play for, when we go out on the road like the Def Mix tour, playing over in England and things like that, and I look at the energy of the crowd and the stuff like that, and the energy is the same. The energy is most definitely the same. The feeling, the feedback that you get from the room, from the people in the room, is very very spiritual. The Warehouse was a lot like that. For most of the people that went there it was church for them. It only happened one day a week: Saturday night, Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon.
Was that the first time you’d experienced that sort of energy?
No, because it was the same thing here. I mean you know a lot of these kids that are hanging out and doing all these parties and running around all these different clubs in England — not so much here in the United States because it’s a much more surefire thing in England I guess it’s pop so that’s the reason why — A lot of them think what they’re doing and the type of fun they’re having in clubs is something new. It’s not. I’m here to tell them that it’s not. This is something that’s been going on a very long time. What they’re doing is actually nothing new, what they’re doing is carrying on a tradition. Which I think is great.
The Warehouse: It was predominantly black, predominantly gay, age probably between 18 and maybe 35. Very soulful, very spiritual, very... which is amazing in the mid-west because you have those corn-fed mid-western folk that are very down to earth. Their hearts are always in the right place, even though their minds might not always be. Their hearts are definitely in the right place. And I think those type of parties we were having at The Warehouse, I know they were something completely new to them, and they didn’t know exactly what to expect. So it took them a few minutes to grow into it, but once they latched onto it it spread like wildfire through the city.
And in the early days of between ’77 and ’80, ’81 the parties were very intense — they were always intense — but the feeling that was going on, I think, was very pure. And a lot of that changed between ’82 and ’83, which is why I left there. There was a lot more hard-edged straight kids that were trying to infiltrate what was going on there, and for the most part they didn’t have any respect for what was going
on.
So it was a black gay scene?
yes
Who else was involved?
Just a lot of outsiders.