The South Loop was a much more likely location for an underground music and arts space in 1999, when Griffin Rodriguez first moved in. McCormick Place West didn’t loom over the block, and the neighborhood wasn’t enveloped in the scaffolding of what seems like dozens of concurrent construction projects. Back then the loft known today as the Shape Shoppe, 4,000 square feet in a former warehouse, was headquarters to the local Truckstop label and housed a couple recording studios—one run by the Truckstop guys and the other by saintly soundman Elliot Dicks. Rodriguez’s old band Bablicon accompanied a screening of Metropolis at Truckstop in ’98, and by the following year he was living there.
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After the Truckstop crew moved out in 2004, the remaining residents started opening it up for more public events, and though unlicensed it became a significant venue for Chicago’s underground music scene. The Shape Shoppe (Rodriguez says the name evolved from a friend’s story about a suburban shave shop) hosted acts covering a major swath of the nonmainstream musical spectrum, from experimental jazz combos to the art-damaged freak ravers of Baltimore’s Wham City scene. In fact it was the space’s association with Wham City and its poster boy Dan Deacon that ultimately led to its demise as a venue. Last March, in a fit of enthusiasm and bad judgment, Pitchfork published the details of an otherwise secret-ish Deacon show there, alerting a couple hundred more fans than the space could hold. The neighbors—mostly artists in adjacent loft spaces but also residents of new condo developments—already had their patience worn thin by a busy week of shows at the then nearby Nihilist space, and right after Mahjongg got the show started the cops showed up. After that the Shape Shoppe closed its doors to the public.
Go past the large, airy living room/kitchen combo—the last remaining vestiges of the space’s former loftiness—and you enter a warren of rooms packed with instruments and recording gear, much of which Rodriguez, a producer and engineer, purchased from Truckstop. Some rooms function as practice spaces and others as bedrooms, but with all the gear it can be hard to tell them apart. “Before I was dating my wife,” says Rodriguez, who got married last fall, “I could probably be here for a week at a time.”
By the end of the spring OYB will release a limited Man Man 7″ followed in the summer by Miami Ice and the U.S. version of an album by the art-funk outfit Chandeliers—in which Kalis plays bass and keys—that’s currently only available in the UK. In the fall there’ll be something with Zach Condon, ringleader of the indie-Gypsy collective Beirut, then a record by Tennessee rapper Count Bass D. “The whole thing here has always been musically diverse,” explains Rodriguez, “and I want the label to reflect that.”
Fri 5/23, 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, 773-227-4433 or 866-468-3401, $10, 21+.
