Most of Ryan Raddon’s classmates at Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook spent their Friday nights at football games and keggers. Raddon’s clique took off for the city, staying up much of the night at dance clubs, such as Medusa’s, where Chicago house-music pioneer Frankie Knuckles held parties once a week.
“It was completely a group of outsiders … a small group of five or six kids that were kind of the misfits who found each other,” says Raddon, who today is Kaskade, an electronic-dance-music DJ with earnings of $18 million, according to Forbes. “It was a different mindset, and we all felt like we’d found something that was on the underground, that not everyone was doing.
“My parents were completely cool with it. They were totally like, ‘as long as I get home by 1 (a.m.).’ I missed that a lot,” he continues. “They saw it as a pretty innocent thing: ‘At least they’re going into the city and dancing instead of high, face down in a gutter.'”
Kaskade, 44, has been present for much of the evolution of modern dance music. While Raddon was in high school in the mid-’80s, Knuckles was in the process of transforming disco into something heavier and more experimental; punk rockers were part of this scene, in Chicago and other big cities, and began to push it into an even harder direction. “These things were all kind of connected to each other — early Wax Trax! Records, with Ministry … and early industrial music,” he recalls, in a 20-minute phone interview from his Los Angeles home. “It was all kind of part of the same team.”
As Raddon grew up, so did the music. He learned how to DJ by practicing in his dorm room at Brigham Young University in Utah. After a Mormon mission in Japan, he wound up in New York City, working a Japanese-speaking job for a tour company called Teiko-Kanko: “Typically I was in one of these 17-passenger vans with the microphone attached and I’m driving at the same time,” he recently told the Daily Beast. He provided the music for his first party at Club Manhattan in 1995, and moved to San Francisco.
During this period, dance music was evolving from warehouses and club parties into larger and more elaborate raves. It would soon morph into a short-lived type of commercial music known as electronica, then take off in Europe in a much larger way. In the last decade it emerged in the U.S. as electronic dance music or EDM, and festivals such as the Electric Daisy Carnival have pulled in crowds of as many as 400,000 people.
Along with Calvin Harris, Tiesto and David Guetta, Kaskade has emerged as one of the most reliable superstar DJs of this genre. Unlike his contemporaries, though, Kaskade is not the type to collaborate with an established star like Rihanna or Madonna. He makes house music in his own style — 2013’s “Atmosphere” was heavily orchestrated, full of piano and strings and swirling effects, while the new “Automatic” has a more simplistic rock sound, with guests such as R&B singer Estelle and singer-songwriter Sasha Sloan.
“A song like ‘We Don’t Stop’ or ‘Papercuts,’ that’s more indie-based — that’s a sound I’ve always been interested in personally,” he says. “That’s a sound that’s not been very popular in the dance world, a blend of rock and pop.”
Over nine albums, Kaskade’s process has generally been to write his songs quickly, then work on the recordings in a brief period while he’s off the road. He focused on “Automatic,” by contrast, for 12 to 14 months. “I feel like you can kind of hear that in the record: ‘At that moment, I was more inspired by this,’ ” he says. “The sounds in the club move so quickly — whatever is cool one week, the next it’s not. The album reflects that.”
Anticipating his upcoming return to Navy Pier — “I can never have too many shows in Chicago” — Kaskade spends much of the interview reminiscing. While in high school, he drove into the city every weekend and helped his brothers clean his father’s office on Ohio Street. His dentist was in the city, he says with a laugh, and “my parents weren’t scared of the city.” He never expected what would happen some 24 years later.
In 2009, he headlined the Electric Daisy Carnival in Los Angeles, and he pinpoints the exact moment when his style of house music was suddenly no longer for a clique of misfits. “I was on the main stage, and I could just see the people filing into the stadium — the old Coliseum, this beautiful venue — and the sun was setting,” he recalls. “I had the sunset time slot. The first 20 minutes, the sky’s purple and orange, and I can see 45,000 to 50,000 people in the venue, and I’m literally watching 25,000 more filter in to see my set.
“It was kind of one of those life-changing moments,” he adds. “I don’t think I’ve ever been the same after that set.”
Steve Knopper is a freelancer.
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When: 6 p.m. Saturday
Where: Navy Pier, 600 E. Grand Ave.
Tickets: $43; 312-833-9331 or www.navypier.com