Dave 'Medusa' Shelton died three years ago today. Take a look at our tribute to this Chicago club scene trailblazer below. 👇 | ✍️ imleor
, Old Town gay dive Carol’s Speakeasy. After the Warehouse opened in 1976, Pittsley and Shelton made their way there too.
Pittsley says 161 West stayed open maybe six or eight months. After it closed, Shelton happened to walk past a four-story building on Sheffield near School with a handwritten “For Rent” sign on the door. “There was nothing fancy about it,” Pittsley says. “The bathrooms were about as primitive as you get, and they were in pretty bad shape because the building had been there since the 1920s.” Shelton took the place and turned the first three floors into Medusa’s.
Medusa’s operated as a juice bar—it couldn’t sell alcohol, but it could stay open after bars were legally required to close. Shelton had always intended it to be an after-hours club, and at least at first, a Medusa’s party could run well into the next day. “We had to play until the last person stopped dancing,” Bristol says. “Sometimes that could go until ten in the morning.”
Medusa’s regularly featured performance art, and Hemingway collaborated with those performers too. He once created a theme based on the kitschy 1988 horror comedy, and its performance-art component involved an oversize papier-mache clown head so large that it wasn’t yet completely dry when the performer had to put it on. “What we didn’t know was that cockroaches had gotten into the papier-mache,” Hemingway says.
He didn’t meet Shelton for his first four months, because Shelton was hanging out in Hawaii, a favorite destination of his. When Shelton first walked up to the door during one of Bailey’s shifts, the teen was suspicious. “My first words to him were, ‘Sir, I don’t think this is age appropriate for you,'” Bailey says.
Shelton’s generosity also extended beyond his club family. Among the many people Shelton supported was Sean Duffy of punk production company Last Rites, who began booking shows at Medusa’s in 1987. “There were a couple of shows where I took a beating, and he would give me a huge break—I think maybe one time he even dropped the whole room rental,” Duffy says. “Nobody in the city back then would have done that. They would have made me owe it forever.
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