WORK THAT PEABODY Cole and Grusane loved boogie before the boom.

Photo: Charles Young

On a typical weekday, just a few folks wander into Mr. Peabody Records (11832 S Western Ave) in the Morgan Park/Beverly area of the South Side—a lady looking for a Chinese restaurant (closed), a guy on a bike looking for rap CDs (the shop doesn’t carry many, but its website, mrpeabodyrecords.com, does), and of course, the pizza guy with a sausage special from Fox’s Beverly Pub. From the looks of it, Mr. Peabody isn’t doing bang-up business. But looks can be deceiving.

Mr. Peabody is perhaps the best place in the Midwest to get boogie and disco records—especially rare, original pressings and independent releases. Europe has been in the thrall of a disco and boogie boom, New York has caught it, and it’s bubbling up among history-minded West Coast jocks, too. Chicago is late to catch on to the charms of these vintage underground sounds—and the records are getting scarce. “Now you’ve got guys here looking for that stuff we’ve been shipping,” says Mr. Peabody’s Mark Grusane. “And a lot of that stuff is extinct when we used to have 50 or 60 copies.”

The shop wouldn’t exist without the foreign market or the passion of its proprietors, Grusane and Mike Cole, who are DJs and collectors themselves. The guys met in 1994 at the nearby Beverly Records where they bonded over obscure disco and ’80s titles. They began going to vinyl shows and record hunting together. They tried to turn on B-side-loving DJs and collectors to their discoveries, but the New York and overseas markets called. About ten years ago, the pair started selling online, and they opened their specialty record shop in February 2004.

“When the game got competitive and the dealers started holding a lot of stuff, we opened up the porthole,” Grusane says. But Mr. Peabody still does the vast majority of its business online. Records on long-gone labels like Golden Flamingo, Shy-beck, Black Giant Records and Stage Productions fetch $300 or more online. Like any good vinyl emporium, the shop stocks hundreds of $1 records, but its rep is as a high-end underground boutique.

Most of the hype is about the back room Peabody keeps for extra-rare items so less-than-serious buyers can’t mishandle them. That’s where Theo Parrish, Peanut Butter Wolf, Brooklyn’s Kon & Amir, Kool Herc and local legends of house and hip-hop like to shop. Disco obsessives, such as Dimitri from Paris, have been customers for a decade.

Some of the priciest records are ordered by European record labels putting out rare disco surveys. “A lot of times when we ship stuff out, we see the compilations popping out a few months later. It’s been going on like that with a lot of labels overseas,” Grusane says.

So many Peabody finds have been compiled—often uncredited—that it’s finally getting in on the act. The duo, introduced to the British label BBE through jazzy-house DJ Shannon Harris, inked a deal to do a series of The Real Sound of Chicago compilations to highlight independent Chicago dance music from the late ’70s and early ’80s that’s either never been reissued or released at all, like Lajohn & Sheela’s “Too Far Gone” on Magic Touch. “No one has ever done a strictly Chicago comp that’s prehouse—[that tells the story] of what was going on in Chicago before house kicked in,” Grusane says. The first volume of the BBE collection drops this summer.

Overseas interest means the Peabody DJs, who play Chicago sporadically, will be spinning more often. They visit London’s Plastic People this month and kick off a residency here at Crimson Lounge.

They’re hoping to repair Chicago DJs’ difficult rep. “We’re not too tough to get along with,” Grusane says. “But as far as Chicago people go, everyone has their mystique. We’ve always been about the music. If people keep it music with us, we keep it music.”

Click here for some picks of key boogie cuts.

Mr. Peabody DJs spin Butter Boogie at Crimson Lounge the first Thursday of every month beginning Thursday 5.