'Disco King Of Skokie' Documents Niles North Grad, Pioneering DJ

SKOKIE, IL — The "Disco King of Skokie" has retired from producing more than 1,000 events a year and is telling the story of spending three decades in the party business. Carey Weiman, a Niles North graduate in his 60s, now lives in Northbrook and rides a bike daily, spending time on golf and and focusing on his two kids. But from 1977 to 2015, he operated what became one of the top event production companies in the country, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Weiman got his start on the North Shore the late 1970s after getting the idea to build a mobile DJ both after seeing a WGCI-FM staffer with a "Disco Van," which included a table, he put two turntables, a microphone and a 16-channel mixer from the radio station.

"When I saw people dance to what he was doing, I said, 'I can do this, and I can do this better," Weiman says in a documentary premiering next week in Highland Park. That gave him the idea of putting a DJ booth on wheels and transporting it to parties.

"I was able to come up with with a way that I could take those two turntables and a microphone, put on a tuxedo and be accepted at all these parties where DJs had never even thought of going," he said.

Weiman worked in nightclubs during the week, while booking gigs at parties on the weekend. He said he knew DJs would be in demand for graduations, high school functions and bar mitzvah events. He would set up his equipment for dance parties at the Windows restaurant at the top of the North Shore Hilton in Skokie. On the second week of promoting the events, the party got shut down by the fire marshal.

"That's how the rest of my career went, it was always more than what I thought it was going to be," Weiman said. "When I was up there, with a short time, I felt like I was king of Skokie. I wasn't king of Chicago yet, but I was 'Disco King of Skokie.'"

Ken Goldstein, a producer, musician and 1987 Glenbrook North High School graduate, told the Tribune he met Weiman at a cocktail party in 2017. Their relationship developed into a film project, leading Goldstein to direct "The Disco King of Skokie," a 60-minute documentary about Weiman's life. It's set for a premiere event at 7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 16 at Landmark Renaissance Place Cinema in Highland Park. (Tickets available online.)

"He has had a profound impact on the DJ world and I came to understand disco on a more serious level, learn that it really helped heal America after the Vietnam War. We had to make a movie," Goldstein, a former creative assistant for director John Hughes, told the Tribune.

Weiman's employees at Disco Experience, later renamed Dance Experience, were known as "disciples." Several will be on hand for a question and answer session with the director and audience at the film's premiere.

Disco, which created a welcoming environment for many communities rejected by mainstream culture, also provided valuable job skills, as Weiman's empire provided his proteges with valuable business schools and fostered a local electronic music scene which grown exponentially in recent decades.

In a preview of the film, Weiman said the subjects of the classic 1980s films popularizing teen life between Wilmette and Lake Forest – movies like "Risky Business," "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" or "The Breakfast Club" – were essentially the same crowd that showed up to the parties he was producing at the time.

"It's nice to know some of the biggest DJs in the world came from the North Shore where I did all these parties," Weiman recalled in the film.

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