Richard Pegue eyes the dance floor, quickly calculating how many dancers are up, down, or heading for the bar. It’s Friday night at Taste Entertainment, a south-side nightclub, and the joint is jumping, with nearly three dozen men and women slipping and sliding to James Brown’s “Funky Good Time.”
But once he had that tape recorder, he found himself drawn into the radio world. He stayed up late to catch his favorite DJs. He kept track of the hits, charting the top ten in a notebook at the side of his bed. And he taped what he heard, building a collection of hits, oldies–virtually everything.
By the time he enrolled at Hirsch High School he had a reputation among his peers. “Oh, Richard was cool–he was very cool,” says Richard Steele, one of Pegue’s best high school buddies and a fellow DJ at WGCI. “He had it all figured out. If you had a group you’d get the female attention. So we had a group, a doo-wop group–the Belvederes. As strict and as straitlaced as that school was in those days–and it was very strict–they gave us the run of the building. They allowed us to walk through the halls singing Christmas carols in doo-wop fashion. It was a time.”
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He spent those days rushing back and forth from the grocery to the record store to his dance gigs and over to Columbia College, where he was taking courses in radio broadcasting. He began to branch out, playing bigger south-side dance venues, high schools, and city parks as part of a revue headed by Herb Kent, the top R & B DJ of the day. Alpert introduced him to Leonard Chess, who with his brother Philip owned Chess Records and WVON. By 1968 Pegue was WVON’s music director. He was 25 years old.
There were about two dozen record companies in town, including Vee Jay (a black-owned concern that at one point had the Four Seasons and the Beatles under contract) and Chess, whose lineup included Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, and Bo Diddley. South Michigan Avenue between 11th and 25th streets was Record Row, a string of studios and distributors for dozens of labels. “Chess was funny,” says Pegue. “They owned WVON and Chess Records, which put them in the rather unique position of producing records and then deciding which ones get on the air, which I suppose is what some people might call a conflict of interest. Though it didn’t seem to bother Leonard Chess, God rest his soul.”
When he wasn’t in the recording studio he was on the air as backup DJ, subbing for someone or hosting an overnight weekend show that was the forerunner of his current show. As he had stayed up to hear Rodney Jones, Al Benson, and other DJ idols of his day, kids now stayed up to hear him. “I remember hearing him on the overnight show 30-something years ago and he was playing doo-wop songs out of the 50s, and I’m thinking, ‘Who is this guy?’” says Barry Bruner, a bass player for various R & B dance bands and also an art teacher at Whitney Young High School. “He’s telling who’s singing background and which group they used to play in and who wrote the song and who produced the record and what studio they recorded it in, and he says it all straight up, real matter-of-fact, like he’s not showing off, like everyone knows all this stuff. You hear guys like that on jazz stations, but not so much on R & B.”
“I don’t know if it’s this divided in other cities. I know in New York it’s more of a cross-cultural thing, with whites and Hispanics listening to R & B. But here in Chicago there are no neutral places. Here in Chicago the black and white is all so ingrained. You live in Bridgeport or wherever, and your father told you blacks did this and that’s just the way it is, because well, if your father said it then it must be so.”
