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Enter Andy Kastanas.
DJing professionally since 1980, Kastanas is probably the first ever Charlotte house music DJ with roots going all the way back to the celebrated club Park Elevator. "Park Elevator was really the turning point for me. We got to do a lot of experimental stuff that nobody was doing anywhere else, and people dug it. This was way back in 1987," he says. "There was no format, no genre [for the club]." Alternative dance music was truly alternative to what was out there. On any night you could jump around from a MC Lyte to Eric B. & Rakim to KMFDM to The Cure to The Cult. Ever since the late '80s, when the house movement really hit hard nationally, I was into it, being that my roots were in disco. The hard part was getting Charlotte into it.
"I talked to the owner of the club [Park Elevator] to start a house night," continues Kastanas, who also "moonlights" as a journalist, club owner and restaurateur. "Ten people showed up the first night. I asked the owner to give it a chance. The next week, 15 people came out, the next week we had 25 people show up. It took forever to get that thing going. We stuck with it, and about nine months to a year later, we were 500 to 600 people. And this was on a Thursday night!
"The biggest crowd of supporters at that time was a black, male, gay crowd. They're the ones that supported that genre more than anybody else. They got into it really big. They created the buzz, and then everybody else started peeking in to see what was going on. They were driving in from all over the state. I remember pulling into the club at, like, 9 p.m., and these guys were all in the parking lot, asleep in their cars because they had been driving for the past three hours. They were coming from Raleigh, Charleston, everywhere. They knew that Park Elevator was the only place nearby that you could hear this type of music. So that's pretty much how it all got started here in Charlotte."
Kastanas' efforts to launch house music in Charlotte were soon absorbed and picked up by other DJs, such as the popular local wax spinner Anthony "That Guy Smitty" Smith.
Smitty, a native Charlottean, got his baptism in house nearly 20 years ago. "I got my first taste of house music while I was in the Air Force in the late '80s. Right about that same time, Andy Kastanas, the Godfather of Charlotte DJs, was starting to drop house music at Park Elevator," says Smitty. "I was stationed in Charleston, S.C., so I was able to come home almost every weekend. I'd go to the Park Elevator and hear this really dope, soulful music. Come to find out, it was house music. And I've been hooked ever since."
Although he didn't start playing until the end of the '90s (complete with his first crate of records given to him by Kastanas), Smitty has maintained a residency at various clubs for the last 12 years. And throughout all the changes that Charlotte's dance scene has endured, he has remained true to the soulful sound of house. "The scene started out as house, then breaks got big, and that's all you ever heard in the clubs. If you were a house DJ, you couldn't beg, borrow, or steal a gig. Then breaks died out and people started playing what they called 'European' or 'intelligent' breaks. That went into trance, then 'progressive house' -- which is not house! People go out on these tangents, and they embrace things. And they try to bring in these new things, but it always comes back to the soul. It always comes back to the groove. It always comes back to house."
The Present
These days, Charlotte's house music scene is driven not only by early adopters like Kastanas and Smitty, but also by "newer" faces such as DJ Johnnie Davis, who spins regurlarly at HOM and Loft, and event promoters Jenn Hurst and a cat who likes to go only by the moniker D.T.
Hurst and D.T. are primarily recognized around town as the team responsible for bringing the aforementioned Julius the Mad Thinker to the Q.C. Julius made his debut in the Queen City in 2004 at Eden, after his sister, Hurst, had an epiphany. "When I came [to Charlotte] in 2004, there was a DJ [Kastanas] playing at Lava that was playing music that I could relate to. I remember calling my brother like, 'Oh my God! They're playing real house music down here!'
"So then I thought 'what if my brother played here?' I started talking to the manager [of Eden], telling him how great of a DJ my brother is, and that they should let him play there. I just really wanted him to play for a couple of hours, but the owner gave me the room for the evening! It was just thrown at me to do! I wasn't sure just what to do, but Julius literally guided me through the process, and the event was unbelievable. The amount of support we had, the people that came out ... so many people told me 'I've tried this before, it's not gonna happen.' But it was that negative energy that drove me to make it happen."
