It’s been almost 25 years since I first met Andrew Kitchen, but when we recently got together for not-drinks (“Sorry,” he apologized, “I only drink martinis and daiquiris”), the perpetually aspiring media mogul looked exactly the same as he had in the mid-90s. A long-running joke about Dick Clark—who kicked off the TV dance craze in 1957 when the Philadelphia show he hosted, Bandstand, went national and became American Bandstand—imagined that he never aged. But sitting before me was one of Clark’s pop-cultural successors, the host of hundreds of episodes of Attack of the Boogie from 1983 till 2014, and he really did seem to defy time: he had a smiling baby face, the exuberance of a teenager, and a full head of the same glossy curls he’d worn for decades.

Andrew Kitchen record-release party Kitchen hosts and Kool Hersh DJs. RSVP, mask, and temperature check required.Wed 9/9, 7-10 PM, the Promontory (upper patio), 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. West, 21+, free

Before one can properly submit to the attack of Kitchen’s boogie, one needs to study the combat histories of Chicago dance shows of yore. The Gettysburg of these boogie battlegrounds was the WCIU studio, originally located in a tiny room on the top floor of the Chicago Board of Trade Building. Founded in early 1964, the station has since morphed into the anchor of the MeTV empire (making Svengoolie and Andy Griffith great again), but channel 26 first found modest success in the 60s by narrowcasting to different ethnic groups, providing a spot on the UHF dial where viewers who spoke Polish, Italian, and Spanish could hear their own languages (and even watch bloody bullfights, in action-packed contrast to the bulls and bears of the station’s hours-long afternoon stock market reports from the Board of Trade floor).

Starting in 1996, while I was working with my then wife, Jacqueline Stewart, and Kelly Kuvo of the Scissor Girls to produce our own CAN TV dance show, Chic-a-Go-Go, I also volunteered to work cameras on three very different dance shows that I really admired, developing friendly albeit superficial relationships with their producers. Our program, an homage to Kiddie A-Go-Go, became the most celebrated, likely because having cult musicians lip-sync gave us quirky indie cred, leading to national attention. The realest was Elma and Company, which featured hyperlocal artists and a capacity crowd of teen dancers and built a genuinely rabid fan following among actual high schoolers, just like the classic dance shows. The highest-quality outing was the short-lived Soul in the Hole, a noble tribute to Chicago’s powerful underground dance culture that had outstanding production values, dynamic camerawork, and thrilling talent (the mesmerizing dancing of poet, singer, and artist Avery R. Young is permanently seared into my hippocampus). And finally, there was the most historical of the three, Andrew Kitchen’s Attack of the Boogie.

Kitchen made friends with the Chicago Soul Train dancers, and he considered the channel 26 crew superior to the LA set because they had memorable names. “We had a guy named Pinball Wizard,” he remembers. “There was Arthritis, and his cousins Rheumatism and Bursitis, and their dancing was like they had arthritis and rheumatism. There was a girl named Cupcake, two twins named Sugar and Spice, and a guy named the Masquerader—he was the most popular, he always wore a mask. And I was the Dancin’ Magician.”

  • The second Attack of the Boogie pilot, shot in 1984. The source videotape is somewhat the worse for wear.

In 1989 Kitchen entered the Green Street CAN TV studio, and with homemade signs, party-store decorations, an amateur crew, and 20 years of TV dance-show know-how, he launched a cable-access classic. Kitchen thinks he may have made as many as 800 episodes of Attack of the Boogie between then and 2014. He broadcast the show weekly on channel 19 (minus a suspension for overcrowding the studio), and for many years he produced a second version running simultaneously on the low-rent commercial station WJYS, channel 62 (the exact finances elude him, but he recalls that he and the station sold sponsorships to cover his airtime and production costs, and he made a few hundred per episode on top of that), so that estimate might even be right.

Kitchen participated in the local Soul Train reunion hosted on Chic-a-Go-Go in 2009 and guested on the Chic-a-Go-Go podcast in 2014, but our paths haven’t crossed often in the last decade. The Star Creature Universal Vibrations vinyl compilation Attack of the Chicago Boogie, which drops Friday, September 9, gave me an excuse to look him up. Label cofounder Tim Zawada and his colleague Hersh “Kool Hersh” Singh (both of the Boogie Munsters DJ crew) are vinyl archaeologists, obsessed with what record collectors classify as “boogie”: synth-driven dance music from the late 70s and early 80s, post-classic disco and pre-house.