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Description
David “Risqué” Walker, aka The Global Groove Guru, may be best known as the dancing Indian at The Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic, but his house music bona fides run deep, all the way back to 1979 when Wayne Williams and The Chosen Few Disco Corp. began promoting parties at The Loft on 14th and Michigan. Born in Englewood, but raised all over the South Side, including in South Shore and West Pullman neighborhoods, David Walker came up on the danceable funk and soul of Chicago’s version of Soul Train. He remembers going to dance at Mendel before he got a taste of The Loft, but once he found the underground, he never looked back. In 1979 Walker had started his freshman year at Western Illinois University in Macoma, where he and his friend Michael Benson helped promote a Dukes and Duchess chapter for Black students as an alternative to the Greek system. The project turned into a promotional entity, Gentleman’s Unification of Conceptional Individuals, or Gucci, which Walker brought back with him when he returned to Chicago. He also created a party-promoting entity called Rare Sounds and Space with Roy McAlister and the late Howard Williams. At eighteen years old, Walker/Gucci began promoting parties at Sauer’s, a German restaurant in the South Loop with DJs Andre Hatchett and Celeste Alexander. He made history when he brought a young musician-cum-DJ with conservative parents named Steve Hurley to perform there for a DJ battle. Walker’s brief and illustrious career as a risk-taking dance party promoter was cut short when he left Chicago to join the US Marine Corp. in 1982. He spent the next couple years traveling the world before returning to the city in the early 1990s following a stint working as an actor and model in New York, where he also moonlighted as a security guard who produced events at legendary clubs like The Choice, Better Days, and The Tunnel. He would go on to work from 1992 to 1998 at Red Dog, produce parties in The Cabaret Room at KA-BOOM!, and perform with Vic Lavender and Jere McAllister in the group Mr. ALI.
Publication Date
2014
Publisher
Columbia College Chicago
City
Chicago
Keywords
House Music, Chicago, Illinois, Chosen Few Disco Corp., The Loft, Rare Sound and Space, Gentleman’s Unification of Conceptional Individuals (Gicci), Red Dog
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Disciplines
African American Studies | Gender and Sexuality | History | Latina/o Studies | Music | Regional Sociology
Recommended Citation
Salkind, Micah, "Interview with David 'Risque/Global Groove Guru' Walker" (2014). Chicago House Music Oral History Project. 12.
https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/house/12
Comments
This interview is part of the Chicago House Music Oral History Project held at Columbia College Chicago and was captured for Do You Remember House? Chicago's Queer of Color Undergrounds authored by Micah Salkind and published in 2019. The work integrates histories of music, production, DJing, dance, fashion, and slang and addresses movements that led to the development of Chicago's house music.