3/2/2024 0 Comments Wax trax industrial accident![]() Sarah was a Neo regular before she began working there, as were many of the DJs I spoke to for this piece. Depending on the night, you could hear industrial, house, hip-hop, or grunge Scary Lady Sarah, the DJ and Chicago goth eminence who cofounded the long-running series Nocturna at Neo in 1988, recalls DJs spinning “Smells Like Teen Spirit” twice in a single set at the song’s peak. In the 1990s, Neo earned a reputation as a dyed-in-the-wool goth cave, but by that point the club had already hosted DJs whose expansive tastes included any style of music that could be called “alternative” (which, while never an especially precise category, did at least indicate a degree of subcultural affiliation in the 90s). A capacity crowd gathered to say farewell to Neo. It outlasted almost every alternative club of its era, in part because future DJs were able to expand on Shelton’s work. It endured for 36 years, finally closing in July 2015. (Fortis didn’t respond to my messages, so I’m not sure if he had any partners in the purchase.) But Neo kept its doors open for decades after new wave’s days as a hot trend ended. She left in 1982, after Cal Fortis, future cofounder of Big Time Productions, bought the club from Acciari and Larson. Shelton’s vision for Neo lasted only a few years. By the end of the summer, they’d settled on the Latin for “new”: Neo. “We wanted it to be new and different, but ‘new’ is kind of a dumb name,” she says. The place needed a new name, and Shelton and her friends drew up a list of possibilities. I was in the DJ booth freaking out-I had, like, 30 records.”Īcciari and Larson were impressed enough to give Shelton carte blanche to transform Hoots into a new-wave club. “It was so packed that tables got ripped out of the floor,” Shelton says. After the show, hundreds of Blondie fans walked over. Her sisters, Mary and Julie, and Julie’s boyfriend Bob Felsenthal handed out flyers outside Park West for a new-wave party at Hoots-it was about half a mile north, down an alley at 2350 N. Shelton kicked off her experiment on July 25, the same night as a Blondie concert at Park West. They gave her three weeks to prove it could work. In July 1979, she pitched the owners of Hoots, Larry Acciari and Eric Larson, on her new-wave concept. She even had a venue chosen-in fact she already worked there. The men’s room-we all probably needed typhoid shots from going in there.” She had a hunch she could launch her own club devoted to punk rock’s arty sibling, and make it a place where she wouldn’t have to hold her pee to hang out. “The ladies’ room was out of order for six months, and they were not interested at all in fixing that. “To this day there are some songs, I can close my eyes and I’m on the O’Banion’s dance floor,” she says.Īs much as Shelton loved those songs- the Ramones’ “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker,” Ultravox’s “Someone Else’s Clothes,” Roxy Music’s “Dance Away”-the state of O’Banion’s itself put her off. But the music that Rapchak and her fellow DJs played at O’Banion’s was another matter. Shelton didn’t care much for disco, and it didn’t help that she had to spin its commercialized hits over and over for work. Shelton had been DJing at a failing Lincoln Park disco called Hoots, but she spent all her free nights at O’Banion’s, a run-down gay bar in River North that DJ Nancy Rapchak had turned punk the previous summer. She had two priorities: it had to play lots of new wave, and it needed clean bathrooms. In summer 1979, Suzanne Shelton hatched a dream to open a punk dance club. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.Click here to join the Reader Membership Community today! Close
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