With his open friendliness and his mane of curly hair—which earned him the nickname “Medusa”—Dave Shelton was a magnetic presence on Chicago’s nightlife scene in the mid-1970s. DJ Teri Bristol recalls first spotting him at a Lakeview gay club called Broadway Limited. “His hair was past his shoulders—it was in ringlet curls,” she says. “He stuck out to me. It was almost like he was illuminated. I was instantly drawn to him. He was so interesting looking, and I could not stop staring at him.”
You could try to measure Shelton’s influence on underground culture by listing the famous songs Medusa’s DJs broke or the canonized bands that performed there. But his greatest legacy is the generosity he extended, particularly to the young people who flocked to his original Sheffield club. Howard Bailey began working as a doorman at Medusa’s in the late 80s, when he was 16, and he says his time there changed his life. Bailey went on to open Wicker Park record store Beat Parlor in the early 90s and Goose Island nightclub Slick’s Lounge in 2000; he also had a son with a woman he met at Medusa’s. Bailey threw his first party at Medusa’s in the early 90s, and Shelton encouraged him. “He’s my mentor,” Bailey says. “He’s my fairy godmother. He’s my teacher.”
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.
Shelton seemed to find a way to throw his support behind everyone he worked with. Designer Tom Hemingway met Shelton in 1984 while at Medusa’s to help fix up the interior of the women’s bathroom. “It felt a little daunting, and he put me at ease,” Hemingway says. He decided to go for a brothel look—he put in loud, colorful 1970s wallpaper and a hanging chandelier. “Dave didn’t put any reins on me at all,” Hemingway says. “The crazier the idea, the more he loved it.”
“I became one of Dave’s kids when I started working for him,” Marszalek says. “Every kid that went to the club felt like a Medusa’s kid and had some connection to Dave, or to someone that worked there that helped them feel like they belonged. And that was really the greatest thing that Dave ever did, was make anybody that he ever met feel like they belonged to something.”
In the mid-1980s, when Francis needed a place to live, Shelton offered her a room in the Medusa’s building. “We lived there for free. We didn’t have to pay any bills—no utilities,” she says. “If someone didn’t have somewhere to live for a while, they could just stay there in some little room or something.” Medusa’s DJs, including Stephens, Bristol, and Val “Psycho-Bitch” Scheinpflug, lived there periodically, and so did a couple skinheads who worked security. “The people who knew Dave are very, very loyal to him,” Francis says. “The people that lived there and worked for Dave would have done anything for him—anything at all.”
