

James Amato, Joe Shanahan and Frankie Knuckles

In our world, small and seemingly unremarkable rooms can become pivotal staging grounds for music history. smartbar, a 400-capacity venue on North Clark street, is one of those places. From the bartenders to the resident DJs (which include local legend Derrick Carter), this downstairs club and its wooden dance floor exist to preserve the traditions formed at The Warehouse and The Power Plant. This has made smartbar a second home for the artists who helped build the city's house music legacy and their modern-day acolytes.Marea Stamper (AKA The Black Madonna) grew up in Kentucky listening to mixes recorded in this wooden room, before becoming an integral part of the club's recent history. Her protégé, Jason Garden, who produces and DJs as Olin, says he moved from Kansas to be closer to the music, initially heading out to smartbar alone and dancing alongside the people who would become his friends. He says at smartbar, "you start out going as an individual and get absorbed into a community." smartbar remains, she says, the "biggest little room in the city."smartbar founder Joe Shanahan, like thousands of others, had his Damascus moment dancing to Frankie Knuckles. "I jumped into a cab with a couple of waiters from the club I worked in and headed for The Warehouse," he said in a eulogy written for Knuckles. "The bouncer at the door gave me a little grief… but I wanted to see the maestro, so I made my way through the dancers, back to the booth. When I got there, it looked more like a band should be playing than a DJ. There was a reel-to-reel, a drum machine, three turntables, an echo effect box, wires running everywhere and one man making it all work together: Frankie." Shanahan's 30-year friendship with Knuckles began that night. He credits that party, along with experiences at the Paradise Garage, Mudd Club and Danceteria during a stint in NYC, as crucial to helping him find his calling.Shanahan began to host loft parties, and when he came across the former Swedish community center at 3730 N. Clark St., "the writing was on the wall." Opened in 1982, smartbar was originally housed in the fourth floor penthouse, accessible by stairs or a tiny elevator, where he and the iconic drag queen Divine once got trapped. A few months after smartbar opened, Shanahan built a rock club called Metro on the second floor, which opened with a concert from a then-little known band called R.E.M. He also placed ads for smartbar in the UK youth culture bible—Chicago house was a building block for European rave culture, so why shouldn't English devotees go back to its roots?Shanahan is frank about club's demographics during the early days. "The other clubs were racist," he says. smartbar on the other hand, was for gay, straight, black, white and Latino audiences, and the DJs played music accordingly. "It was to our advantage musically to not get stuck into something that would dictate one kind of clubgoer... That's something I learned from The Warehouse." Frankie Knuckles was the first DJ to play smartbar besides Shanahan, and he held a residency there until his death in 2014, 30 years later.After a few years of narrow stairs and dodgy elevator rides, smartbar moved into the basement. This was partly because parties outgrew the space, which only held around 200 people, but Shanahan also liked the idea of a dance club that was literally underground. "I just liked the idea of going below ground, giving smartbar that subterranean feel. I put the most intense soundsystem I could afford down there."By now the club had a strong cast of resident DJs, with legends like Knuckles and Joe Smooth clearing a path for talented newcomers. This era also saw strange cross-pollination with the thriving rock club upstairs. Sonic Youth recorded a live album at smartbar in 1985; around this time Tom Waits played an unannounced DJ set. As the '90s loomed, smartbar began to bring in out-of-town talent. The first big booking was Massive Attack in 1991. The club started moving away from the EBM, Italo and industrial influence of its early days and more towards straight-up house music. Mark Farina, DJ Heather (who Stamper cites as one of her earliest role models), Kaskade, DJ Colette and Miles Maeda all cut their teeth in the smartbar booth."smartbar is almost all dance floor," Stamper says. "The space is extremely simple, it's square with wood floors and a four-point Funktion One soundsystem. The DJ is at eye level, and until very recently, anyone could walk into the booth." The DJs who excel there, she finds, are the ones willing to bring down the wall between dancers and performers."As Chicago's a city with a rich DJ history, lots of talent has come from here," Garden says. "Many of our DJs should be world-famous but will probably never get the chance. We've seen these people work their ass off to be good, and if we ask them to do something out of their comfort zone, they'll surprise us every time."As the '00s charged on, the club balanced the residents with more out-of-town bookings. Shanahan puts creative control fully in the hands of his talent buyers, which, over the past few years, has included current Windish Agency agent Brad Owen, DJs like James Amato and Nate Seider, as well as Stamper and Garden. "Everyone that's been a buyer there has also been a DJ," Stamper explains. Michael Serafini, who runs the popular weekly party QUEEN! and the legendary Chicago record shop Gramaphone, says this approach helps bookers "balance the old-school mentality with the new school.""These days, you need to advertise and bring in headliners to make money," he says. "But at the same time, if you're a regular at smartbar, they'll give you a discount on drinks. The old-school way of clubbing isn't so much about watching the DJ, it's a place to let go and hang out with people you know and have a good time."For Serafini, the DJ is part of a non-hierarchical team that includes the hosts, the bartenders and the night manager, all of whom work together towards a consistent feel. He says QUEEN! is popular because "they know what it's gonna be like." This simplicity has made smartbar one of America's most beloved clubs for decades. Garden moved to Chicago 25 years after the club opened, but he's steeped in its history and the resident culture that Stamper sought to maintain (before her touring schedule made full-time work at the club impossible). It's easy to understand why these characters feel so attached to smartbar—in the city where house music began, there's still a club where people know your name.