Windy City Soul Club

Established November, 2008. The best Rare Soul DJs in Chicago come together to create the best party this city has ever seen. The big bang of Windy City Soul Club took place on Jan. 3, 2009, when some 350 people crammed into a tiny Lincoln Park loft on the fourth floor called Heart of Gold. As they danced all night to old vinyl soul singles from Detroit and Chicago, DJ Aret Sakalian was pretty sure something wasn't right. “I don't know what term to use — it wasn't legit. They didn't have licensing. They did have a stage, and they had a fully stocked bar but no liquor license. Everything illegal,” he recalls. “And I wonder about capacity, because, man, we had that place packed. But you live and you learn.” Although the Heart of Gold shut down after Chicago magazine published photos of the illegal night of northern soul music, WCSC went word-of-mouth viral. Suddenly in high demand, the DJs struggled to find a new stage, working nights at the Viaduct Theatre, Liar's Club, and others, until alt-rock fixture Empty Bottle took them on in December 2009. Sakalian, 43, and his four fellow DJs in WCSC have since perfected northern soul dancing. “The night flows on its own,” he says. The DJs follow a network of British music fans who, beginning in the early '70s, picked up rare, independent, not-quite-slick-enough-for-Motown singles and turned them into a casino-and-nightclub dance craze. The Chicago group starts with midtempo songs, builds to crescendos using familiar hits, and then cools down with slower obscurities like Otis Brown's “Southside Chicago.” “We've tried schedules — ‘half an hour, your time's up' — and it just hasn't worked. The next (DJ) kind of comes up and I'll say, ‘OK, I got four records, and you can come on,' ” Sakalian says. The roots of WCSC, which includes R&B expert Jason Berry, mid-'60s specialist Xavier Velez, and Detroit aficionado Nick Soule, were in place long before the explosive night at Heart of Gold. Born in Istanbul, Sakalian and his Armenian parents moved to Chicago in 1981 to live with cousins, aunts, and uncles. As a teen, he was a punk rock fan who used music to explore “this venture of subcultures” — from ska to reggae to northern soul, after a friend visited Germany, took in the scene, and returned with CDs. At the same time, Sakalian was interested in Chicago's mod scene, a nostalgic culture of kids who liked The Jam and The Who and “Quadrophenia” and drove scooters as if they lived in '60s London. He began buying records from U.K. collectors, then sought out rare singles at local record stores. He built a collection of 45-rpm singles — he keeps more than 1,000 on a large Ikea bookshelf — and studied a family friend obsessed with dance music. The friend's mixes inspired Sakalian to make his own, and he first DJed in 1991. “My parents were always saying, ‘Don't waste your money on those records — save your money,' ” he says. “Now they're saying, ‘How many people came to your night?' ” In 1999, Sakalian met a fellow DJ, Ben Pirani, who had similar musical tastes, and they formed a duo. By 2008 they'd encountered the other like-minded DJs and played a wedding that led to a regular gig. Later that year, now WCSC, they did the first of two nights at the Heart of Gold, which drew 50 people. “No elevator,” Sakalian says. “Four flights of stairs to carry records and turntables.” It was the second Heart of Gold night that earned a huge crowd and put Windy City Social Club on the Chicago dance night map for nearly eight years. The DJs mostly focus on obscure material, in the northern soul tradition, but they throw in Curtis Mayfield's “Move On Up” or Martha and the Vandellas' “Nowhere to Run” to keep crowds happy. “You can't have a successful party and just play 8th Wonders of the World all night. You have to throw them a doughnut once in a while.”