LAKEVIEW — It’s not unusual to see a gaggle of youths hanging out on a sidewalk in the areas around Wrigleyville — so if you walked by the cool kids loitering in front of Bookclub, Lakeview’s coolest hidden venue, you might not even notice they were going to a show.
That’s not by accident: Tucked away on the second floor of a commercial building, the performance space is “DM for address” only; the only way to attend besides someone bringing you to a show is to DM Bookclub on their Instagram account.
Founded by rapper TYGKO (Kevante Weakley) and Loyola alum Cam Stacey, the place often fills up on weekends, with acts from as close by as DePaul and as far away as Germany.
Because of the DIY vibe and origins, there are some particular rules the Bookclub organizers abide by.
“There’s a salon right next door to us that doesn’t close until 7, so we can’t soundcheck until then,” Stacey said. “And each show has a hard ‘noise curfew’ time out of respect for Chicago’s noise ordinance, as well as our neighbors.”
Despite the constraints, Bookclub has been going strong for almost three years. Stacey handles booking, logistics, and audio, while TYGKO handles access at the front of the house and stewards the crowd. The staff has expanded to include three audio engineers and an additional door person. When the venue first opened in June 2021, it was just the two of them, and they learned as they went.
“We figured out quickly that we needed to keep water stocked,” Stacey said.
“What became super important very early on was managing capacity,” Stacey added. “There is such a thing as an unsafe number of people to fit in one confined space.”
Stacey and TYGKO went to high school together in Cleveland, and had been making music together before the pandemic hit. As lockdowns started lifting, they put together a show to celebrate TYGKO’s return to the stage under the auspices of Stacey’s event production company, Reset Presents.
Less than a week before their show at KIP Studios in Logan Square, the location was hit with a cease and desist.
“We were left without a venue four days out from a sold-out, small room show with people flying in,” Stacey said. “We got the cease-and-desist on a Monday, we found [Bookclub] on a Tuesday, toured it on a Wednesday, got up in there and cleaned all the cakes of dirt and dust out a Thursday, had a show on a Friday.”
After accepting a rental agreement for the space, they initially had a slow start finding shows to book, until they announced that they were open to people from the city’s DIY scene.
“When we started Bookclub, it was like we lit a beacon for those artists and they started coming,” TYGKO said. “They had ideas for shows, had ideas for release parties they wanted to do, all sorts of events that we were able to house.”
In the almost three years since that scramble to open, Bookclub has hosted artists of varied genres — punk, hip hop, rock, electronic — as well as comedy shows and other live events. Acts have come in from the U.K., Paris and Germany. Artists have ranged in popularity: Fraxiom, who played the venue’s very first show, is a hyperpop artist with more than 30 million streams on Spotify, while a random weeknight bill might include bands from local universities.
“The two biggest groups, I would say, are the Columbia and SAIC art school kids, and then DePaul has its own DIY rock scene that loves us as well,” Stacey said. “It’s those kids who have these very specific ideas for lineups, just for their scene … they know that we’ll take care of them in such a way that they can feel comfortable taking a risk on their show.”
Bickle, an Atlanta-based musician with more than 25 million listens on Spotify, made the trek to Bookclub in 2023 to play a show with his friends. TYGKO picked them up from the airport and took them for ice cream before the gig.
“It’s a small venue that wasn’t limited by that in how big the show felt,” Bickle said. “I’ve never been in such a small venue that had a sound that large … Definitely, people should know about it. It’s great.”
Despite all of Bookclub’s success – or, in fact, because of it – Stacey and TYGKO have been looking to upgrade to a place that can accommodate more of a crowd.
“We want to be able to offer a bigger room and be more flexible with our programming, so we can go later into the night and even earlier into the day on weekends. We can’t do that with our current space,” Stacey said.
“I’m not selling out, I’m trying to keep this going. I’m taking this above board because I started this on accident, and now it’s bigger than me.”
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