goodfootcrop “All good things must come to an end,” Dennis Owens says, explaining why his dance club, Good Foot will be ending in September after 13 years. “It’s time.”

The funk and soul club—which has a couple of first-Fridays-at-Que-Sera remaining— became a Long Beach institution almost at the moment Owens and best friend, Rodi DelGadillo, cut their rock roots and started DJing. Since 1998, Good Foot has been sharing danceable deep cuts and funky hits with endlessly diverse crowds every month in a setting that only our city could provide.

Owens and DelGadillo grew up on these streets, going to late-’80s punk shows at Fenders Ballroom and watching early ska acts on stage at Grand Central Station before playing in a series of local bands together. After their last band, power-poppy Action League, split up in 1998, the duo decided that they were burned out on rock music. They turned their interests towards the music being spun at area clubs they were attending (such as La Conga at the Foothill and Garden Grove’s Golden State Soul Society).

At the time, Owens had been collecting records for more than a decade, but his interest in vinyl only increased as he became introduced to a new swath of lost funk, soul and Latin rhythms. The biggest influence on Owens’ shift from performing in bands to DJing, however, was Science, a drum-n-bass club in Santa Monica. There, he watched people lose themselves on the dance floor, flailing about as if possessed by the music.

“It set the standard of what I wanted to do with Good Foot,” he says. “They didn’t care how they looked—they were totally into it. That’s what music should do.”

But 13 years later, a lot has changed.

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