by Leor Galil for the Chicago Reader, June 2021 –
In February 2021, dance-music site Selector republished a list of 100 important house records taken from a 1992 issue of a short-lived Chicago zine called Crossfade.
“Chicago’s House: A Checklist” originally ran in November of that year as part of a story package about house history, sandwiched between a brief but trenchant essay by copublisher and editor Terry Martin on the birth and evolution of Chicago’s underground dance culture and a six-page interview Martin had conducted with the godfather of house, Frankie Knuckles.
Robert Ford and Trent Adkins originally published “Chicago’s House: A Checklist” as the “House Top 100” two years previously in Thing, a zine they’d cofounded in 1989 with their friend Lawrence Warren. The best-remembered fanzines from that era document underground punk, so Thing’s emphasis on house tracks and artists would have set it apart all on its own.
DJ and producer Daniel Wang, who founded Balihu Records in 1993, discovered Thing because of its “House Top 100” list. During a 2006 Red Bull Music Academy lecture in Melbourne, Wang held up a photocopy of the Thing list while explaining its significance: “I was living in San Francisco; it was about 1991. My friend said, ‘You’ve gotta see this magazine. There are these two gay Black guys from Chicago who put out a big list of all the records that were “house” records for them, up until about 1987.’ Which was already amazing.”
Wang tracked down as many of the list’s records as he could find, though his roommate slowed him down by accidentally disposing of his back issues of Thing. Wang sent Ford and Adkins a $17 check for replacements, along with a two-page handwritten note filled with glowing praise of their work. He also told them he’d be moving to Chicago six weeks later: “I am sure you can imagine my excitement,” he wrote. “Meanwhile, I need your list of house’s greatest 100 hits so that I can clear out SF’s used record shops before I leave.”
I found Wang’s letter in one of the 21 boxes in the Chicago History Museum’s Thing magazine archives. All the material in the collection—letters, postcards, subscription cards from readers, photo negatives, meeting notes, faxed drafts from contributors, unpublished essays, newspaper clippings, press releases, VHS tapes, cassette recordings—previously belonged to Ford.
