As a DJ and a music director, Teri Bristol powered the upper echelon of Chicago nightclubs for decades. Her tenures at Medusa’s, Crobar, and Shelter were particularly significant, but rather than let success go to her head, Bristol consistently showed the sort of kindness and generosity that made her not just influential but also widely beloved. She passed away of kidney failure September 25, 2023, in Beechgrove, Tennessee, at the age of 66.
Teresa Kaye Bristol was born in Joliet and grew up in Justice, Illinois, after a brief time in Tennessee. When I interviewed her in 2012, she described her deep love of music. “If you tell me something, I won’t remember it,” she said. “If you sing it to me, I’ll never forget it.”
Bristol started DJing in 1982 at the Celebrity Club, a lesbian bar in Rosemont. “I used to be a cocktail waitress at the Celebrity Club, and I would ride into work with the manager, who lived right in the neighborhood I lived in,” Bristol said. “One day I started fooling around with the sound system, so he showed me how to turn the turntables on and how to use the mixer. I would go and play around until [the DJ] came in.”
One Saturday night, the DJ didn’t show—he was incensed that the bar had denied his request for a raise. Bristol’s boss told her she had a choice: DJ or get fired. “I really needed the job, so I said, All right!” she recalled. “I had a ball watching everybody dancing. I thought it was fun! They liked what I did so much that they fired him and they hired me, and that’s how I got started DJing.”
At that point Bristol had already met her friend Valerie Scheinpflug, later known as DJ Psycho-Bitch, at the Celebrity Club. Scheinpflug jokes that the circumstances mirrored the lyrics to the Human League song “Don’t You Want Me.” They became lifelong DJ partners, first spinning together in 1985 at Medusa’s, a famous after-hours teen club on Chicago’s north side.
“Teri and I had an unspoken connection,” Scheinpflug explains. “We really complemented each other. It wasn’t about either one of us; it was about the good of the night, all the years that we did our residencies together. It was about programming for the entire night, not just each of us playing. People used to say they didn’t know when one stopped and one started.”
Bristol and Scheinpflug were both influenced by Medusa’s DJ Mark Stephens, who had a knack for mixing together different styles of music—industrial, pop, hip-hop. “The DJs that did their homework were the ones that really stood out and the ones that people followed,” Bristol said. She spent hours in record stores each week listening to new music, “trying to find that one special record that really blew up your dance floor.”
Bristol and Scheinpflug lived in a small apartment inside Medusa’s, right next to the stage, which had been painted red for use as Divine’s dressing room. Bristol’s signature records during that era included “I Will Refuse” by Pailhead, “Every Day Is Halloween” by Ministry, “Our Darkness” by Anne Clark, “Watch the Closing Doors” by IRT, and “Hypnotic Tango” by My Mine. She also kept Depeche Mode, Erasure, Front 242, and Nitzer Ebb in heavy rotation.
In the late 1980s, Bristol spun at Limelight, the Orbit Room, Smart Bar, and InnExile. For eight years, she worked as musical director at Cairo, where she booked Ralphi Rosario of the Hot Mix 5 to fill in for her and convinced him to return to the music business. Bristol submitted charts as a Billboard reporter—she told me that only around 30 DJs nationwide did so—and cowrote a music-scene column for Gay Chicago in 1989 and ’90. She’d also won the magazine’s award for best DJ in 1987.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Bristol and Scheinpflug spun together at many of Chicago’s biggest and most important clubs, including Shelter, Cairo, Crobar, Vortex, Roscoe’s Tavern, Spin, Transit, the Mission, Karma, Ka-boom!, and Hydrate. From 1995 to 2002, they had a night together at Crobar called Interactive Saturdays that drew 2,000 to 3,000 people each week, yet retained a communal feeling.
“We called our Saturday-night parties ‘Interactive’ because we were always a part of the crowd,” Scheinpflug recalls. “We always talked to everybody. You could point out a regular in the crowd, and we’d be able to tell you their first and last name, if they were single or dating.”
Bristol was Crobar’s musical director for 12 years. She oversaw 15 DJs in three different areas of the club and in 1993 founded the influential Sunday LGBTQ+ night GLEE Club, which stood for “Gay, Lesbian, Everyone’s Equal.”
Bristol and Scheinpflug played Crobar’s opening in December 1992, then came back to play its closing night in April 2010. The last song they spun was Bristol’s hard-house take on the Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” the 2002 single “Teenage Wasteland.”
Between 1988 and 2010, Bristol and Scheinpflug also periodically organized a stage show in which they played six turntables. The original event in Chicago featured a live keyboardist and drummer, and later Bristol and Scheinpflug took their turntables on the road, performing in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Switzerland.
“Teri orchestrated everything,” says Scheinpflug. “We were all wired through her mixer, so she could put any one of us in or out. We all had different things that we were good at, different tricks. I might be playing with the EQ or doing drop-ins of records, and she’d be over there dueling and scratching over everything everyone else was doing, so it was almost like doing remixes of records on the fly. There was so much going on, but it always sounded good.”
Bristol’s close friend Jenny LaPorte, who used to serve drinks from a beer tub at Crobar, recalls an even more sensational stunt that Bristol pulled off at the turntables. “She held a record in the air, and then she cracked it over her knee and put half on one table and half on the other, and she was scratching on both halves,” LaPorte says. “Then she launched the pieces into the crowd!”
In 1992, Bristol formed a production and remix partnership with DJ Mark Picchiotti. Their first remixes were of techno and rave cuts by the likes of Rozalla, the Lords of Acid, and the Prodigy. The two of them also collaborated with Scheinpflug on a dueling-banjos-inspired techno track under the name Pood, Bhud ’n’ Pflug.
Later Bristol and Picchiotti focused on a more house-focused sound, remixing major-label artists such as Madonna, k.d. lang, the Pet Shop Boys, and Meshell Ndegeocello. In 1994, Bristol and Picchiotti produced a single for Strictly Rhythm as Nightman.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Bristol released a couple of original singles on the labels Metalworks and Live, plus a pair of DJ mix CDs with Scheinpflug on Master Dance Tones. Bristol continued to DJ in the 2010s, playing at Cocktail, Scarlet, Parlour, and Smart Bar. She spun at the Wavefront Music Festival, Taste of Randolph, and Milwaukee’s Pride celebration.
Bristol kept DJing for a while after she moved to Tennessee in 2017 to be with her parents, returning occasionally for gigs, but health problems soon slowed her down. In January 2020 she was briefly hospitalized for kidney failure, and her loved ones set up a GoFundMe to help with her bills. On September 26 of this year, Scheinpflug set up another GoFundMe, this time to help with Bristol’s funeral expenses.
Bristol was a trailblazer in a field that, like much of the music industry, is dominated by men. Early in her career she doubted her own abilities, so Scheinpflug sometimes submitted demo tapes for her. “It was never about being a woman for Teri or I, but unfortunately the men in the business made it about that,” Scheinpflug explains. “They would look us right in the eye and tell us right to our face, ‘You can’t do this, you’re a girl!’”
Bristol’s friends remember her for her warmth and humor as well as for her ease and skill in the DJ booth. “Some nights, even with two or three thousand people in the club all bouncing off the walls, Teri would be standing behind the decks with a cigarette in her left hand, and she’d have the record all cued up in her right hand, and she’d be all nonchalant bobbing her head,” Scheinpflug recalls.
“Some DJs do tricks, some DJs program well, some DJs mix clean,” LaPorte says. “Teri could do it all.”
