For more than three decades, Thomas Kendricks, better known as DJ Slugo, has been DJing, producing, and celebrating ghetto house, a sound he helped pioneer. Slugo grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes and began building his reputation in his neighborhood; in the 1990s, he became part of a network of underground house producers connected through the Dance Mania label, run by record-store owner Ray Barney. In 1995, Slugo began putting out music through his own label, Subterranean Playhouse, through which he’d also release a handful of DVDs in the 2000s documenting the local juke and ghetto-house scenes of the day. Slugo recently launched two vinyl series, Ghetto House Music and Dance Mania Legends, and he just issued the first 12-inch in the latter—a compilation also called Dance Mania Legends that features Slugo, DJ Thadz, and DJ Phats. On Sunday, November 19, Gramaphone Records hosts a free in-store show celebrating that compilation, where each DJ will spin for an hour between 2 and 5 PM.
As told to Leor Galil
I was always around music, from my mom and my grandmother and all them. My cousin Geno was one of the DJs from the neighborhood. I saw how popular they were in the neighborhood from doing music, and I was like, “If you can get that popular from spinning records, then I want a piece of that.” I had him teach me. I ended up looking at all the equipment they had, saved up my money, bought everything they had, and became my own DJ.
I started really trying to get into it—learn the ins and outs of it—at about 11, 12. And then 14, 15 was my first time somebody actually paid me to do a few hours at a gig. Once I seen that you can actually make money from it, I was like, “You can get paid from that?” That was it for me. It turned into a business. I started looking at peoples’ minimum wage, and I used to always say, “If I can make at least what people make weekly, if I can make that weekly DJing, this will be my nine-to-five.”
I used to complain about how slow some of the music was—like, 130 and 125 [bpm] was kinda too slow. The neighborhoods was changing—like, our surroundings was changing. I was like, “Man, this music is too slow for us. They can’t dance to it.” One of the producer guys was like, “If you don’t like the music, then make your own.”
I ended up being fascinated with the Roland R-70 [drum machine]. And that’s what I used to make “Where the Rats” and “Wouldn’t You Like to Be a Hoe [Too].” That was my machine. Those were my first two major pieces. When I did “Where the Rats,” I didn’t have a sampler. People still don’t believe that to this day. I did “Where the Rats” with a mixer—they had the A, B, C, D bank pads on it, and you had two, three seconds on each bank pad. I was in there, clicking the buttons, [chanting] “Woo, where they at?” [and] “Uh-oh!” and changing the sequences on the R-70 at the same time. If you listen to “Where the Rats” close enough, you’ll hear it. It’s almost like a live setting. That and “DJs on the Low.” We did that live—all of us sitting in a room with the mike in between us.
Streaming snippets from a DJ Slugo 12-inch on Dance Mania, originally released in 1996
I already had a following in the buildings where I grew up, and then I ended up meeting [DJ] Deeon. Deeon was like, “You should let Ray hear this stuff.” I’m like, “Who’s Ray?” He’s like, “Ray Barney, Dance Mania Records.” “OK, who’s that?” He was like, “I’m gonna just take you up there—he’s gonna look out for you and give you a $1,000 advance because I’m bringing you up there.”
I wasn’t really believing nothing of it. Ray was like, “Yeah, I’ma write you a check for $1,000—I just need you to give me the records in this format.” And I was like, “Oh, wait a minute, you for real.” If you look on my first album [Livin’ That Ghetto Life], it says “DJ Deeon presents.” I put that on there because Deeon was the one who walked me in the door.
Ray Barney is solely responsible, on the musical side, for everybody who came off of Dance Mania. If you wasn’t on Dance Mania, if you didn’t get the chance to get a record out on Dance Mania, people really didn’t take you serious—you wasn’t on that epic label. It ended up becoming iconic because he was taking all the hood guys who did production and he was putting the music in front of people that we couldn’t get to. He actually changed all our lives, every last one of us. We’re legendary and all that because of Dance Mania and Ray taking a chance on us.
[Nineteen] ninety-five was my first release with Ray. I had just got out of a four-year stretch in County. Imagine that—I got out, started doing records with Ray, and didn’t look back. I ended up getting in trouble again in 2000. But that first five years with Ray, it just changed everything. Even with the mixtapes—he would pay for our mixtapes and say, “I’ll distribute it everywhere else. Y’all can have Chicago.” It made me epic in Chicago. The colored mixtapes was like crazy. People was like, “I want the green one!” “I want the blue one!” Ray changed my entire life.
Ray made me leave hanging up under the buildings. I started focusing strictly on music. I wanted to be in the studio. Basically, I wanted them checks. Every time I released a mixtape, that’s a check. Every time I released an album, that’s a check. I was like, “This my way out the hood.”
I always wanted to be my own entity. I read [Don Passman’s book] All You Need to Know About the Music Business, and when I started learning the music business and all that, [I thought,] “I need to have my own company. I need to actually be bringing out my records under my own label. I need to break away from the Dance Mania thing.” So I started Subterranean Playhouse.
Ray honored it and said, “Hey, no problem. If you want to break out and do your own thing, just let me distribute it.” So Ray distributed my first three albums for me. Ray was still distributing whatever it was we had, because he had all the connects on the distributors; we didn’t have that. He had a 23-page list of places to distribute the music. He never gave up that list. Even after Dance Mania shut down, he didn’t give that list up.
[Releasing my music through my own label] afforded me to be able to get more up-to-date equipment. I bought a 32-track Mackie board. I was living in Lansing at the time, and my whole entire front room ended up becoming a recording studio. It afforded me to be able to become a real producer, a real musician, all my own equipment. I didn’t care about furniture; it was a futon in there, and everything else was equipment.
I was in Lansing from ’97 to maybe 2000. I caught my case in 2000. I fought my case up until 2002, I think. Then I had to turn myself in. I didn’t get back out till 2005. So jail was my home for the next four years.
When I got out in 2005, I was completely upset with everybody who was doing ghetto house and doing juke, because when I came home, it was dead. A lot of the guys were working nine to five. Hip-hop had took over Chicago, and wasn’t nobody doing ghetto house. I was like, “Why is nobody doing this no more?” All the people who used to dance was now thugs.
It was just crazy for me. I just said, “I’m not giving up on the music that put me where I’m at to this day.” So I became the poster child for it. Like, “I’m gonna put these CDs out. I’m gonna put these mixtapes out.” I went and started videotaping stuff and piecing it all together [for a juke and ghetto house DVD]. I did the soundtrack behind it. I was like, “I’m not gonna let this music die, not the music that built me to the person I am.”
The DVD kind of opened up everything for me. There was a place called Nitro where a lot of the kids went to dance and party. The guy who was throwing the parties, Tony Bitoy, was my buddy. I was like, “Tony, I need this. I need to videotape it. This DVD is gonna revive my career.” He was like, “For you, bro, I’ll do it.” And once people saw that I was able to get into Nitro with a camera, the DVD [Chicago Juke DVD] started doing real well. The whole soundtrack was all my tracks. I used nobody else’s tracks; it was all original to me. The DVD just took off. It established me right back to where I was—even a little further than when I left.
I flipped the colored mixtapes to CDs. But when CDs faded away, I flipped it to USB drives. So what I did was, I took the mixes, flipped the whole mix to just one MP3. Then I took maybe 26 other mixes, put them all on a flash drive, and was selling the flash drive. But my flash drive looks like a mixtape—it’s an actual tape, but it pops out at the bottom as a USB stick.
I always looked at streaming like a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because people outside the United States are able to get your music without having to go through all the [rigmarole] for getting it to them. [But] the pay on it, I don’t understand. I asked that at a seminar not too long ago: “How are you able to break up a penny? The lowest amount of money on planet earth, how are you able to split that up?” I don’t understand that. So streaming sucks to me. How you gonna fraction out a penny and then give that to an artist for their life’s work? That’s crazy. I hate streaming.
When things change, you just gotta figure out how to get in, change with it, and get what you can from it. When they went to streaming, I was like, “Well, if I’ma stream, I’ma stream the best way that I can, try to hold on to it as much as I can.”
This 2023 DJ Slugo collection combines combines new tracks with material from the vaults.
I’m more into physical products, and that’s why I went back to vinyl. I know how it was when the vinyl was out: you had to have your own. So now I’m on a kick where me and a few of my other buddies are just doing 1,000 albums each, and only 1,000 albums, throughout the world—so if you don’t get one of those 1,000, then you just don’t get it. That makes it exclusive.
I’m a kid from the projects, so being able to go places and see other people who don’t even speak the language but understand the music—to see how universal music is—it’s epic. Especially when you’re DJing and you’re playing a song that you made ten or 15 years ago, and they dancin’ or they chantin’ the record. I ain’t never ever in my entire career think it would be what it is now, to be able to go to these different countries on somebody else’s dollar.
I’m having fun with it. It’s fun for me. I actually want to be on a plane as much as physically possible. Anytime they book me, I want to go—ain’t no ifs, no ands, no buts. Let’s work it out, ’cause I wanna get on that plane. I’m taking every gig—I haven’t turned down a gig yet. Especially for countries I’ve never been to. I’m geeked.
I love music. If I could pay all my bills and do music for free, I would do music for free. I would make the tracks and release the tracks for free if all my bills was paid every month. To just come from beating pens and pencils on my desk in grammar school to me actually tapping out these sounds on a drum machine now, and then people actually in love with it—that’s what keeps me excited. When I hear people say, “I love what it is that you’re doing—don’t stop what you’re doing,” that’s what makes me keep going. That’s my happiness to it all. And I always tell my buddies, whenever I stop having fun with it, that’s when I’m gonna quit. But right now, I’m having a ball.
