



Southside Chronicles 3: Monday June 2 2008
The Maxwell Street Afters
PHOTOS:
TOP: 57th Street Quaker House: Sophia Community Sunday night dinner. Housemates Arjuna rapper HB Sol) and Iccha with me; student activist Hannah, a dinner guest, tells Donn Wedd and daughters Julie and baby Sophia about her adventures with U.Chicago town, gown & hood
LEFT: Playing for Little Scotty (singer in pink) on the plywood Maxwell Street bandstand, 2000.
RIGHT: Felicia Porter, Ramblin Rose and me with the statue-ized apple selling guy at Ladies Blues Brunch on the new, homogenized Maxwell Street.
Maybe I’ve told you before about Chicago’s historic Maxwell Street, the neighborhood on the Near West Side where the street market drew thousands of people every Sunday from about 1910 to around 2000 when the city and UIC and some developers got together and tore it down. The fight to stop the demolition drew a lot of protestors, including me on my first of many trips to Chicago. There were 48-hour blues marathons on Frank “Sonny” Scott’s homemade plywood bandstand, near Jim’s famous hotdog and Polish sausage shop. Back in June 2000, I took my first rinky-dink keyboard, plugged it into an amp someone had fashioned from old stereo speakers, and played a few tunes with another bluesman named Scott—Little Scotty, who was at various times a pimp, a civil rights speaker, and a street seller of buttons of Martin Luther King, Pride in America, and Malcolm X. One by one as the Maxwell Street stores were demolished, people played music in the rubble til the bulldozers came and tore down the bandstand.
The loss of historic architecture was bad enough; most of the stores dated back before the Chicago fire in 1871, and only a few facades were saved. The upending of the market and the street corner music was even worse. Maxwell Street is sacred ground--the birthplace of Chicago blues. When African-Americans migrated by the thousands from the South in the 1940s and 1950s, Maxwell Street, being very close to where the Illinois Central train station was, ended up being the first stop for people to buy supplies. It had the flavor of an international market. Italians and Mexicans came to buy and sell; Jews owned many of the stores, giving the place the nickname of Jewtown. Our plywood bandstand was decorated with signs that said "Blacks + Jews = Blues, " no doubt inspired by Professor Steve Balkin of Roosevelt University, a devotee of Maxwell Street and the Jewish working class. Known by the musicians as “the Fess,” Steve and his wife were my first hosts in Chicago during the Maxwell Street protests.
African Americans had brought the music to the street corners—blues and gospel. Musicians would earn money playing at Maxwell Street, meet each other and get together to play gigs around town. Back in the 1960s and 70s, Larry’s stepdad, Eddie Taylor Sr. played on Maxwell Street and would take Larry along. My late blues godmother Johnnie Mae Dunson Smith was known as the Queen of Maxwell Street. She sang protest songs from her wheelchair when the stores were torn down.
.In the late 1990s, the city moved the outdoor market, now mostly run by Latino vendors, several blocks over to Canal Street and is supposed to move it to a permanent location at Desplaines Street. None of these places has the atmosphere of the original Maxwell Street, but it’s still a big fine flea market with good bargains and very tempting ethnic foods.
During the last four years, Maxwell Street itself was rebuilt, complete with University dorms and high-priced condos, and a cheerful, brick, gentrified shopping block with a few old facades. There are statues of apple vendors and ladies with shopping bags, even one of a blues musician. My housemate Arjuna, better known as the political rapper HB Sol, had not been to Maxwell Street for 15 years, and found it quite disconcerting. For him it was another example of people getting pushed out of their own ‘hood—something that could happen down here on the South Side too, as the U. of Chicago is making rumblings about expansion. Last week at the Sophia Community dinner here at 57th Street Quaker House, Arjuna invited a guest, Hannah, who is a UC student and neighborhood activist. She told us that this university, just like UIC, tries to maintain a separation from the neighborhood, to the point of paranoid warnings to students not to step outside the square-mile Hyde Park confines of the campus.
But as Arjuna saw, there it was. A sanitized Maxwell Street. Like my Hampshire County WV buddy Francis Chilcoat’s own song goes, “Welcome to After. A-F-T-E-R!” It’s about a broken relationship, but it could be about a war. You get the feeling things are not the way they were, or were supposed to be. You have to cope with it. For thousands of years people have been conquered and lost their relatives and their homes. The world has seen a lot of Afters. Bullies beating up on people and nature, just making a mess. Genocide of Native Americans and slavery of Africans. The Holocaust. Rwanda. Cambodia. Bosnia. The Three Gorges Dam in China. Iraq. New Orleans. Mountaintop removal. Random shootings of innocent people. The blockbusting of urban neighborhoods in the 1960s, at the expense both of fleeing whites and overcharged, incoming blacks. Grief does not end. Resentments linger. Maxwell Street should not have been demolished. It was. In this life, one cannot fix Afters.
Some of the white middle class protestors have coped with the Maxwell Street afters by creating a foundation, with the intent to preserve the history. Maxwell Street Foundation has been responsible for books, a photo portfolio and several exhibits. They’ve collected artifacts from the street like the classic sign in a second story window which read, “We Cheat You Fair.” The slogan always seemed to represent Maxwell Street, where the only color that mattered was the color green and the price of anything was whatever the buyer and seller agreed on.
I serve on the advisory board of the Maxwell Street Foundation, which for the first time has a booth in the Chicago Blues Festival this week.
My job is to help preserve the music. I don’t mean recordings of music. I mean real live music with real live musicians, getting paid. (The industry promotion of live rather than dead blues musicians is a subject Larry brought up on the musician’s panel at last week’s Blues and Spirit symposium—a subject everyone promptly shoved back under the rug, but cannot stay there forever.)
Even in a town as huge and culturally with-it as Chicago, there are continual obstacles to live music. For example, the band playing outdoors at the Canal Street market has been hassled by the city to get a license. (They only play for tips as it is, and have always been allowed to entertain at the market.) As one of my housemates, Iccha, Arjuna’s wife, puts it, “The city wants to get part of every little bit of money you make. And every bit of money they might think you could make.” Then, last month, two weeks after I got here, city council threatened to pass an ordinance requiring an expensive promoter’s license for every small club or onetime charity benefit show. It would pretty much shut down the live music and theater that attract people to live in Chicago despite the $100 parking tickets. Five thousand musicians, actors and fans emailed in protest. I went to the city council and found out that the ordinance was buried in a committee, hopefully never to emerge. People are still wondering who had come up with such a horrible idea. http://savechicagoculture.org
Luckily, in the midst of all this nonappreciation of music, there is a restaurant/bar, Juniors Sports Lounge, in the middle of Maxwell Street that realized the new “improved” Maxwell Street was now competing with every yuppie shopping district and needed to offer something distinct. Something unique to the area, now that the poor black residents and the Jewish stores had been driven out. Something during a time before the sports come on TV, like a Sunday brunch with blues.
So Junior’s Lounge asked Maxwell Street Foundation to find some musicians, and I got the job. It was not hard. Underemployed musicians are roaming the streets and clubs here, as elsewhere, with empty pockets hanging out. The trick was that for only $150-250 we could not pay a full band, so we needed acoustic duo acts like those we have in West Virginia, without drums and loud electric guitars. In Chicago, though, acoustic blues music was countrified stuff that became outdated in the 1950s as soon as electric guitars came in. After some searching, I booked an interesting acoustic brunch series in 2007 with Fruteland Jackson (yep, that’s his real name and he’s one of the best blues educators in the country), Elmore James Jr., Larry Taylor and his guitar playing brother Eddie. This year during April, Fruteland www.fruteland.com played a duo with another award-winning blues teacher, Fernando Jones, who started the nation’s first college blues ensemble at Columbia College.
For the May and June blues brunches on Maxwell Street, I decided to try a women’s acoustic show. I called up Ramblin’ Rose, one of the singers who has been visiting the Maxwell Street market, and a young trombone player, Felicia Porter, who splits her time between Greece and Chicago, and hauled my keyboard, amp and mic down to Junior’s Lounge. (Since I am organizing shows for Junior’s Lounge co-sponsored by Maxwell Street Foundation, I guess that qualifies me as a promoter; under that ridiculous proposed ordinance I would have had to pay a $500 fee, which is about what I earned for my part of the five Ladies Blues Brunches we have put on.) Joining us this week on bass has been Cecile Savage, originally from France, who began playing in Chicago over 25 years ago with Larry’s generation of blues men and women.
Being as it was a very short term gig, we did not rehearse. There are standard blues tunes everybody knows, and you just try to adapt to the singers and musicians as you go along. You know the basic chords, rhythms and patterns, and you improvise. That’s what makes blues so much fun. Ramblin’ Rose is very good at exchanging remarks with people in the audience, and putting them in songs—especially with the Denise LaSalle favorite “I’m a Dirty Old Woman.” People liked my song “We’ll Still Have Memphis” which gave Felicia a chance to croon on the trombone. Cecile sung a lovely original tune called “Spring Fever” that was a little like “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” My 57th Street housemate Iccha, who is studying jazz singing, cheered us up with “Simple Life.” Another woman guest singer pulled off “God Bless the Child.” Rose took out her flute and played the jazz standard “Killer Joe” with Cecile and Felicia.
Arjuna (HB Sol) even tried his hand at rapping with the live band. Wendy, another bass player, stopped by and spun out a funky groove for his rhymes. Instead of having a set mechanical beat, HB had the chance to tell the musicians to speed up or slow down. Some rappers are like showoff guitar players, trying to get in the maximum number of words (like Gilbert & Sullivan) or notes per measure. But Arjuna told us, “Slow it down. I want to make sure to get the words in.” HB’s serious raps are found at his website: www.myspace.com/hbsolmusic On his new album “Monumental.” He hits the mark with his satire on “Free Love” and its consequences. Beware, there is some profanity, but there’s a purpose and a moral(!) to it.
By the time the Ladies Blues Brunch was over, the ladies and guests had played blues, jazz, pop and hiphop. It all naturally evolved from the river of American music created by African-Americans—the river described by last week’s symposium keynote speaker Dr. Portia Maultsby, ethnomusicology professor from Indiana University. Classifying music in genres is convenient for marketing, while frustrating for musicians. At least on Sunday, at Juniors Lounge, it wasn’t our responsibility to:
Classify or ossify
Stupefy or crucify
Dignify or biggitify
We just made our fingers fly
We just made our voices cry
Didn’t stop to wonder why
We just tried to keep the beat
Flowing down on Maxwell Street!
Aren’t these hiphop rhymes fun? Maybe we can survive the Afters.
If you’re in Chicago, we have one more Sunday Ladies Blues Brunch coming up: June 8, from noon to 2 p.m, Junior’s Lounge, 724 W. Maxwell St. You can get there on the Blue Line L at UIC. A big THANK YOU to Junior’s management and
Maxwell Street Foundation for co-sponsoring our blues brunches.
And don’t forget…I’ll be playing Friday June 6 with the Larry Taylor Blues and Soul Band, www.larrytaylorbluesnsoul.com at 2 pm in the West Side Revue on the Crossroads Stage of the Chicago Blues Festival in Grant Park. Am I scared? Yeah. In fact I gotta get off this computer and work on my music! This is the big leagues. Larry’s three act West Side revue, featuring the Harrington brothers Vernon and Joe, plus guitarist Willie Davis who is on our CD, plus horn blowers BJ Emery and Mike Finnerty, begins at noon and ends at 5:30. The first act at noon features Joe B’s Shotgun band with West Side singers Al Harris, Willie D, Ice Mike, and ZZ Hill Jr. The final act at 4 pm is the Taylor brothers and sisters. On Thursday and Saturday I’ll probably be found at the Maxwell Street Foundation booth, handing out history brochures. C’mon down to the fest!
If you would like to see a classy evening blues show this weekend , Larry’s also at the Checkerboard Lounge as special guest of Killer Ray Allison Thursday June 5 and Friday June 6 at 9:30 pm, 5201 Harper Ct., just around the corner and two blocks from the 53rd Street Metra train station. Sunday night I sat in on keyboards to play the old-fashioned stuff with Killer Ray at a South Side neighborhood club called Good Times. Killer Ray just keeps on playing and makes everyone smile and dance. It was a blast!
As long as there are people, there will be blues to sing. Welcome to After.
Labels: Francis Chilcoat, HB Sol, Little Scotty, Maxwell Street