Who was Ron Hardy before the Music Box?
Ron Hardy started DJing in 1974 at Den One, a Chicago gay club, working two turntables, a mixer and a reel-to-reel deck years before that setup meant anything to anyone outside the room. He spent time DJing in Los Angeles later in the decade before coming back to Chicago, where the club world already ran through Frankie Knuckles, a friend from the New York gay club scene that Warehouse owner Robert Williams had brought to Chicago in 1977 to open the Warehouse.
When Knuckles left the Warehouse at the end of 1982 to start his own room at the Power Plant, Williams didn't hire a soundalike. He called Hardy. Williams renamed the space the Music Box, and in 1984 it moved into a basement at 326 N. Michigan Avenue, a room with no windows, no clock and, most nights, no reason to leave before sunrise.
What made his Music Box sets so much harder than everyone else's?
Hardy played the reel-to-reel like an instrument. He'd take a single record, most often a disco, soul or funk cut, and stretch a section of it out for ten minutes before the actual song ever started, looping and re-splicing tape edits of records like the Walter Gibbons mix of First Choice's "Let No Man Put Asunder," Kikrokos' "Life Is a Jungle" and an Isaac Hayes album cut, "I Can't Turn Around." He ran Taana Gardner's "When You Touch Me" backwards off the reel-to-reel just to hear what the room would do with it. Where Knuckles worked the bassline, Hardy worked the whole EQ, sweeping through frequencies mid-record like a filter, and he pitched turntables up far past where Knuckles ever went. Techno producer Derrick May still remembers hearing Stevie Wonder played at +8. Regulars also remember Hardy dropping a rumbling train sound effect into the mix, letting it barrel toward the crowd before it passed through the room.
Marshall Jefferson brought Hardy a cassette of a track he'd just finished, not expecting it to get played that night. Hardy put it straight into the tape deck. That track was "Move Your Body," and its run at the Music Box helped turn it into a Chicago house anthem.
"Ron Hardy was the greatest DJ who ever lived.", Marshall Jefferson
Why does the Knuckles-versus-Hardy split still matter?
Knuckles carried the Warehouse and then the Power Plant on a smoother, disco-rooted continuum, and that residency is where the genre's name comes from. Hardy took the raw, drum-machine-driven, edit-heavy end of the same music and ran it faster, louder and more aggressively than anyone else in the city, and it's that harder Music Box strain, not the Warehouse's disco polish, that runs straight into the Chicago house records Marshall Jefferson, Farley "Jackmaster" Funk and the rest of the DJ International and Trax Records rosters were cutting by the mid-1980s. Both DJs mattered. Only one of them got called the genre's godfather.
How did it end, and what's left of it?
In 1987, Chicago passed an ordinance forcing after-hours "juice bars" like the Music Box to close at the same time as licensed bars, and the club shut that year. Hardy tried other rooms afterward, but nothing recaptured the Music Box's pull. He was also fighting a heroin addiction through the back half of the decade. He died of an AIDS-related illness on March 2, 1992, in Chicago. He was 33.
His reel-to-reel edits, unreleased in his lifetime, started circulating as unauthorized bootleg 12-inches in 2004. In 2005, Partehardy Records, run by his nephew Bill Hardy, issued authorized versions of edits nobody outside the Music Box had heard in over 20 years. They still get played out today by DJs who cite the room as a reference point.
