There wasn’t a lot of precedent for The Get Down when the event began in the early 2000s. The classic soul and funk spin, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this weekend with four days of events, would eventually become one of Milwaukee’s destination dance parties, but when it launched in 2003 it was a curiosity. Andy Noble recalls that promotion for the very first Get Down at Quarter’s consisted of little more than a Friendster event page and maybe 10 handmade flyers they posted around Riverwest.
“When we started The Get Down we had to literally create the fanbase, because it didn’t exist,” Noble says. “Dance music events were completely based on contemporary music. And that typically meant that during my days in the ’90s it was going to have an electronic bend—hip-hop, trance, house, that kind of stuff. So creating an audience for soul music from scratch was basically the first thing we had to do.”
It was a tricky sell on paper, a DJ night where audiences were almost guaranteed not to recognize a single song. In those early years the DJs spun ’60s funk rarities almost exclusively, usually small- or no-label 45s with aggressive tempos, raw production and an often-psychedelic edge. Some records were so rare only two or three copies were known to exist in the entire world.
But, to The Get Down’s surprise, crowds were into it. Within years they were packing The Riverhorse (the Riverwest corner bar that’s since become High Dive), then The Red Light, the club that used to be above the now-defunct Trocadero. When that club closed they made the leap to Mad Planet, the nearly 300-capacity Riverwest club where they drew some of their biggest crowds ever. They still have a residency there the second Saturday of each month.
They had some help filling the club in those early years. Radio Milwaukee, then just a few years old, used to broadcast portions of their Mad Planet sets on Saturday night, which Noble says helped their reach considerably. And, through sheer coincidence, The Get Down’s style of ’60s and ’70s funk enjoyed a widespread revival in the late ’00s, thanks to acts like Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings and a sudden interest in the genre from music publications like Pitchfork. “It weirdly didn’t have much to do with us, but it was a nice bonus that the mainstream music media started creating a customer for The Get Down,” Noble says.
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Noble notes the irony that the very music The Get Down set out to expose eventually became overexposed. As ’60s and ’70s soul music became the soundtrack to Wendy’s commercials or background music at the grocery store, it lost a little bit of its excitement, Noble admits, which is why these days The Get Down DJs have expanded their purview. Their sets now feature everything from ’50s blues and doo-wop to late ’80s boogie cuts, along with heaps of rare Latin music. “The younger crowds seem to be way more into the extremes, especially the earlier sounds right now,” Noble says. “We’re also playing way more disco and way more ’80s tracks, but they’re still in line with the same M.O. we’ve always had: small, regional records with rough production values.”
These days, Get Down spins aren’t the regular event they once were. Its DJs have moved on to other projects or left the city entirely. Noble himself runs two businesses: His Riverwest shop We Buy Records and the East Side restaurant Strange Town. But for The Get Down’s anniversary weekend, DJs Noble and Nesh Malinovic will be joined by guest DJs from New York, Sweden and Minneapolis for a series of spins across the city.
The weekend kicks off with a low-key listening party Thursday, Oct. 11, at Strange Town at 9 p.m., then continues with a pair of dance parties, one Friday night at Tonic Tavern in Bay View at 10 p.m. and another at Mad Planet Saturday night at 10 p.m. (“That’s the main one,” Noble says.) The weekend will wrap up with a relaxed Sunday afternoon spin at Strange Town from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., in conjunction with that restaurant’s first anniversary.
As part of the celebration, The Get Down DJs have been sharing some of their old CD mixes, which feature some of the rarest tracks in their collection. You can stream those mixes at mixcloud.com/GetDownMKE.
