Dave Chamberlain

Flashback to Wicker Park in the early and mid-nineties:

There are few clubs with turntables, DJ culture essentially stands for house-music culture, and throughout the city clubs are opening and closing as fast as you can say drum 'n' bass.

But suddenly there's a shift in indie-rock dominated Wicker Park--a shift that occurs because three DJs take over Sunday nights at the Empty Bottle and start spinning the music that's dominating London's nightclubs and cultural landscape. The Deadly Dragon Sound System starts small, luring in few but the bar's regulars, but quickly becomes one of the premier club nights in the city, in spite of the fact that the Empty Bottle's confines hardly fit the flashy expectations of club culture.

Spinning a three-headed monster of reggae, hip-hop and drum 'n' bass, the Deadly Dragon Sound System consisted of DJs Rik Shaw, Jeremy Freeman and John Herndon, functioning as--at least in the beginning--a forum for the three to play records for each other.

The idea for Deadly Dragon was Shaw's, who was bitten by the reggae bug during a trip to London in 1993. "When I was there," he recalls, "I checked out a bunch of Sound Systems--and I was always interested in reggae music, which was why I was checking it out. But I was just blown away by the atmosphere and by how vibrant and alive the music was."

Specifically, Shaw became enamoured by the Jah Shaka Sound System, the outlet created by Shaka himself to play deep dub and spiritual reggae. "Man, it was massive," says Shaw with a sense of awe. "And Jah Shaka was just one turntable, an echo box and a microphone--the room was bubbling. I was there from the beginning of the night until like five in the morning, but it felt like five minutes. And I thought, man, I have to do this."

When he returned to the States, Shaw did just that, teaming up with Herndon and Freeman to form the Deadly Dragon Sound System, each taking turns spinning platters of the three--now somewhat disparate--musical genres. "At that point," Shaw explains, "things hadn't sort of split off the way they have now. There was cohesiveness between the genres; things hadn't become too defined yet. A lot of the drum 'n' bass we were playing was like the Congo Natty sort of jump-up style that's heavily reggae influenced, before the whole intelligent dance-music bullshit happened. And there was a cohesiveness that was there, and the people that I was friends with, we all sort of had our specific interests, so it was like a Three Musketeers kind of thing."

Throughout the approximately four-year existence of the Sound System (roughly from 1994-1998), the three were aided by numerous locals who were also interested in the music. Counted among them were Casey Rice, Bundy K. Brown, Daniel Givens and Shon Dervis. Eventually, however, the founders of DDSS gravitated away from one another: Freeman moved to New York, Herndon was spending more time concentrating on his part in Tortoise, and Shaw and his wife moved to Hawaii. The Deadly Dragon Sound System dissolved.

That doesn't mean, however, that it would never come back. After Shaw moved back to Chicago, he decided to reform the DDSS, though instead of mixing the genres, Shaw opted to devote the night entirely to his real musical love, reggae. Having recently secured a consistent night (the last Saturday off the month at Subterranean, with its next appearance May 31), Shaw and Freeman (who flies in for the night) are attempting to nurture the power of the Jah Shaka Sound System in Chicago. Unfortunately, Chicago has hardly embraced reggae, especially by either the underground dance crowd or independent music crowd, which seems to paint the genre with a stereotyped, only-Bob-Marley brush.

"That's a funny thing," says Shaw, who also boasts of minor indie-rock fame for his role as one-third of Rome, "because reggae as a genre is as deep as jazz. The reality of it is, in the late sixties, guys in Jamaica were rapping over rhythms--it predates hip-hop by almost twenty years. Also, the genre itself has everything, from the most sublime to the hardest hitting rhythms."

Regardless, Shaw and Freeman are building on the momentum they started more than ten years ago and crowds--again--are slowly coming to see the Deadly Dragon Sound System. And despite the fact that Shaw remains proud of having been the first in Chicago to develop such a unique night, he believes that the current DDSS is even better.

"At this juncture, my juggling and selector skills, as well as Jeremy's, are light years ahead of back then. If people come out, they're not going to be disappointed. We bring the real vibe."

The Deadly Dragon Sound System comes May 31 to the Subterranean, 2001 West North, (773)278-6600; additionally, Shaw hosts Rik Shaw's Dub Tomahawk, every Sunday at Sonotheque, 1444 West Chicago, (312)226-7600.

(2003-05-28)

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