mother’s spot following his return from Japan, I can see why tallying his massive collection is beyond a single human’s ability.) Things began humbly enough, with a young Bahar hitting up neighborhood acquaintances for wax. “[I] would just ask, ‘You doing anything with those?’ And they would give me their records, especially people’s parents with stuff they didn’t play anymore,” he remembers.“I would get great ones I needed, like First Choice ‘Dr. Love,’ and Loleatta Holloway ‘Hit and Run.’ And a lot of Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder that was being played at parties. So I was getting these collections, and, as they grow, you really get addicted.” As he began traveling for gigs in the ’90s, he found his biggest scores would come on the East Coast. “Records I was paying a hundred for in Chicago were like fifty cents in New York, like the Skatt Brothers’‘Walk Tonight.’ I’m like,‘This can’t be right,’” he says. “I also noticed in NewYork that they were partying hard.I’d see Larry Levan and Tee Scott—but [they] were calling the music ‘club.’ They’d say,‘You want the old club or new club?’ In Chicago, I was playing disco, but everybody said I played ‘deep house, that real deep stuff.’ We were also listening to new wave like the B-52s, Gary Numan, and Devo, but they were even calling that ‘house.’” Bahar would find his flock with the DJ collective Soul in the Hole, which he founded in the ’80s with Russell “Russoul” Dixon, originally under the name Goldmine Productions.The crew would crystallize with the addition of Richard “Richie Rich”Waddington, Trenton Odeneal, and Lee Collins.“Collins was already a real major
When one of Bahar’s cousins and his crew brought him to see Ron Hardy at a party, Bahar had a further epiphany.“I was a Frankie head, but when I saw what Hardy was doing, I fell in love [with it]. He was rocking beat tracks, playing records backwards—it was insane!”After slipping Hardy his demo, the two became fast friends. Bahar started playing out himself around 1987. By 1990, he’d set up shop at the future home of the short-lived club, Reactor, then an underground spot called Kings and Queens. “Mike ‘Hitman’ Wilson and Jesse Saunders opened up [that] spot with Fred Riley, over on 1115 W. Lake Street,” he says. “When we first got there, it wasn’t safe—you could see through the stairs.They eventually got it together and built a DJ booth, turning it into Reactor.” Bahar kept it moving, next to a bar known as J&R’s on Seventy- Ninth Street. “We called it Chicken Wings,” he remembers. “This older, bigger DJ, Sam Rico, used to cook chicken wings in the back and played records. I was in there playing out of his music, and ended up getting a gig. He’s like,‘You have to buy your own records, you can’t keep using mine,’ so then I would bring my own stuff— and he could focus on the chicken!” It was at this point that Bahar’s fervor for collecting records grew from a hobby into a lifestyle.Today, he’s said by some to have one of the largest private record collections in the world—or at the very least in Chicago.“The majority of my stuff is in my mom’s basement in Pill Hill,” he says.“A friend started counting it all once, and gave up at around 13,000 records.” (After meeting up with Bahar at his
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