A book review: "Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry"

It's a great title, Flickering Empire, evoking not only celluloid running through a projector but a flame, capturing the evanescent nature of Chicago's early film industry.  It burned for a brief, bright moment, then was snuffed out. (Not to say there's not a fine film industry in Chicago today, but that's another story: this book tells the story of how the center of the film industry came to shift, once and forever, from Chicago to Hollywood.) The subject of this fascinating book is what historian Susan Doll, who also wrote the book's foreword, reckons is "Chicago's best-kept secret": the city's history as "the original Hollywood." As the subtitle indicates, the book promises to explicate how Chicago "invented" the U.S. film industry. Penned cleanly and with dry wit by two Chicago locals, film teacher/filmmaker Michael Glover Smith and historian/tour guide Adam Selzer, the book successfully prosecutes its case for Chicago's "pioneering roles in the production, distribution, and exhibition of motion pictures in the United States." In one swoop it intertwines two of yours truly's main interests: Chicago history and film history.

 

In fact it was at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago that Thomas Edison had hoped to give movies their great roll-out. However, he couldn't get "his" invention, the "Kinetoscope," an individual peep-show machine, on-line in time for the fair. It seems his right-hand man (and the Kinetoscope's real inventor) W.K.L. Dickson, had suffered a mental breakdown under the whip of taskmaster Edison. (Dickson would soon defect to form what became the Biograph Company.) Thus, Glover Smith and Selzer disabuse us of a scene in Erik Larson's Devil in the White City where the murderer Holmes watches a movie on the Kinetoscope. This was apparently one of the novelistic flourishes that brought Larson's Chicago classic to life. Glover Smith and Selzer speculate that the scene was likely inspired by Edison's pre-Exposition publicity posters, which did in fact promise the machines would be there.

  

Nonetheless, the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago still played a major role in movie history. It featured what the authors reckon "probably deserves to be called the first commercial movie theater in the world": Eadweard Muybridge's Zoopraxigraphical Hall. Muybridge, utilizing his invention, the Zoopraxiscope, "a sort of primitive movie projector," did in fact make images appear to move on a screen. (Prior devices like the Kinetoscope had only allowed for individual peeping). Unfortunately, as the authors wryly note, Muybridge's imagination was limited to using the Zoopraxiscope to illustrate principles of animal locomotion, and the Hall was "a total flop" with fairgoers: "Given the choice between watching Little Egypt dance the hootchie coo and seeing Professor Muybridge present a lecture on animal locomotion, nearly everyone went with Little Egypt." A much bigger hit elsewhere at the fair was Otto Anschutz' "Tachyscope," a device similar to the Zoopraxiscope.

 

Many of the men who would go on to found the Chicago film industry were first turned on to the possibilities of film at the Columbian Exposition. One man mightily inspired by seeing the Tachyscope was a young George Spoor, who would go on to team with an inventor from Waukegan named Edward Amet to pioneer the film exhibition business in the 1890s and, in 1907, to found, with partner Gilbert M. Anderson, what will always be Chicago's most famous contribution to film history: the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company. (Spoor was the "S" in "Essanay," Anderson the "A".) 

Co-founder Anderson was a multi-millionaire cowboy, better known by his stage name "Broncho Billy," "cinema's first true cowboy star." Broncho Billy's fame was soon eclipsed by Tom Mix, the biggest discovery of Colonel William Selig, Essanay's chief Chicago rival. There's a fun photograph in the book of Mix, one of the few movie cowboys with real cowboy experience, entertaining children with a lasso during a performance at Soldier Field. (The book is well illustrated throughout, with a fine collection of images from the Chicago History Museum and other archives.) Anderson would live a good long life anyway, staging many comebacks before dying in 1971 at the age of 90.

 

Even the film pioneers who weren't at the World's Fair in person had links to it. This brings us back to Colonel Selig, the man who some historians, including his biographer Andrew Erish (as cited by Glover Smith and Selzer), have called "the man who invented Hollywood." Selig founded the first-ever Chicago motion-picture studio (and one of the first in the world) when he set up what would eventually come to be called the Selig Polyscope Company in 1897 in Chicago's 'brothel-strewn 'tenderloin district'" down on East 8th in between State and Wabash.  

 

The authors note that Selig used the money he made from Selig Polyscope to buy one of the original automobiles: these "horseless carriages" had been rolled out at the 1893 World's Fair. "The Colonel would use the carriage as a prop for chimpanzees in his popular animal pictures." In another link to the Columbian Exposition, Selig "would also use the replicas of Christopher Columbus's ships that had been built for the fair in a 1912 movie, The Coming of Columbus, which was among the first feature-length motion pictures." 

 

By 1894 there were 10 Kinetoscope parlors down on State State in Chicago's Loop, which is where Amet and Spoor first saw the machines. "Chicago was a central destination for many European immigrants who were constantly arriving and contributing disproportionately to the city's population growth. The movies, with their purely visual and universal language, were the best form of cheap entertainment for newly arrived immigrants who did not speak English."

 

Also knocking around in Chicago at the time was another key player in the tale, George Kleine, the "undisputed king of film distribution in the United States."

 

In 1895 Amet built a laboratory in Waukegan. The authors call this "the world's first film studio." (Unfortunately it was demolished in 1965). In fact in later years, Spoor and Amet would claim they were experimenting with projecting film in the Chicago suburbs as early as 1894, a full year before the Lumiere brothers' "invention" of the movies. This occurred on December 26, 1895, "the birth of the movies" in many histories. The Lumiere brothers in Paris unveiled their "Cinematographe," an event that is "believed to be the first time 35mm film projection occurred before a paying public."  

 

Back in the states, Selig can take credit for shooting the first narrative film ever made in Chicago. Made in Rogers Park (maybe in 1896, maybe not until 1899), The Tramp and The Dog, now lost, told the story of a tramp just barely making it over a fence before a bulldog got a big hunk of his pants. A massive hit, the film established both "pants humor" and tramp-themed films. Future Essanay star Charles Chaplin would take these forms to transcendent glory.

  

Meanwhile, Edison bought up the patent to a projector invented by others and called it the Vitascope, then patented that, "ostensibly forcing anyone who wanted to show motion pictures projected onto a screen to pay him a royalty...Almost all of the motion-picture production and distribution companies in New York and New Jersey, because of their close proximity to Edison and his patent-enforcing 'Goon Squad,' agreed to pay licensing fees to use and/or sell equipment that resembled any of the devices Edison had patented...That stagnation [in the northeastern U.S. film industry, thanks to Edison's monopolistic practices], in turn, allowed the Chicago companies, by virtue of being farther away from Edison geographically, to gradually build themselves up over the next several years."

 

The very first film review to appear in a Chicago newspaper, published in the July 7, 1896 edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune, reviewed movies presented by "Edison's" Vitascope projection system. (You can almost see those "air quotes" around the possessive case of Edisons's name on behalf of Glover Smith and Selzer.)

 

In 1896, Alexandre Promio came to Chicago to make Chicago Police Parade for the Lumiere brothers. This film still exists. Reviewing it, the authors note wryly that all but three of the Chicago policemen in the parade sport big bushy mustaches.  

 

(The authors note that in that same year Promio "would become a major footnote in motion-picture history by effectively inventing camera movement when he took his Cinematographe to Venice and placed it on board of a gondola.")  

 

Smash hits with audiences of the age were the films Amet/Spoor made about the 1898 Spanish-American War. Denied permission to go to Cuba to film the actual battles, Amet recreated them. Thus, he "single-handedly invented the pseudo-documentary genre."   

  

A fascinating side-note: in 1903 Selig recycled war movie footage made in 1898 and passed it off as footage of the Philippine War, which, as the authors point out, "did not actually break out until a year after the movie was shot. To paraphrase Charles Foster Kane, Selig was providing the actualities and was content to let the United States government provide the war."

  

Almost every page of Flickering Empire contains a fascinating nugget or an amusing anecdote like that, such as the time Selig Polyscope was shooting a bank robbery scene in Oak Park in 1907 and the police turned up and arrested everyone.

 

Then there are nuggets like this, which somehow speaks to something in the very nature of film itself, something about communing with the dead: 

 

"To many believers, the phenomenon of mediums talking to the dead, a spectacle that emerged around the same time as the early motion-picture experiments of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, was the wonder of the modern age. It was while in Dallas that Selig first saw a true wonder of the age: Edison's Kinetoscope." 

 

Edison held the patents and the copyrights. In self-defense, his former employee, now foe, W.K.L. Dickson snatched up the patent to the Latham loop. When Edison and Biograph finally came together they founded the Motion Picture Patents Company (the MPPC) in 1908, consolidating all patents and establishing a licensing system. The MPPC now controlled not only the production of motion pictures (studios had to have a license from Edison to work), but even the stock with which movies were made (Eastman Kodak would sell film only to licensed filmmakers.) 

 

Selig and Edison had been foes, but a legal arrangement worked out with Edison on behalf of Selig by a legal team brought in by Armour and Company established a truce. (Selig had produced what amounted to very early commercials for the meatpackers, who'd recently been scandalized by Upton Sinclair's The Jungle). By 1907 both Selig and Essanay had joined up, and the Edison Trust was in place, ushering in the short-lived "golden age" of film production in Chicago. 

 

"It is hard to overstate how phenomenally popular motion pictures were in 1914," the authors note. This was the golden age of Selig and Essanay. Selig's brightest star, Kathlyn Williams, was as popular as any movie star of her time. Williams was "the Selig Girl," Chicago's answer to "the Biograph Girl," Florence Lawrence, who by 1909 had become what some historians have called "the first screen star." The Adventures of Kathlyn, for its part, was the first American cliffhanger serial. "Moving Picture World wrote of fans waiting in line for hours, even in the notoriously bad Chicago winter weather, to attend the latest Kathlyn serial." 

 

Selig also triumphed with its "landmark newsreel," the Hearst-Selig News Pictorial.   

 

Essanay had its own triumphs: "The most important surviving Chicago-shot Essanay film of [the golden age], and arguably the masterpiece of all of its extant movies, is From the Submerged, a drama released in November 1912 that was written and directed by Theodore Wharton and starred the beautiful Ruth Stonehouse."

  

Which brings us to our town's claim to cinematic fame that not even doubters can dispute: we are the city where Charles Chaplin's career was born, when Essanay signed him in 1914. The fact is, though, that while he liked hanging out at the Green Mill, Chaplin was miserable in Chicago almost immediately. He made one film here, His New Job, then promptly decamped for Essanay's Western studio in Niles, California. As the authors note, "Chaplin's entire Chicago residency lasted 23 days." We glean interesting details about Chaplin from his brief sojourn in Chicago that flesh out our view of one of cinema's greatest artists, such as that he was a truly cheap bastard, and that he went to see Birth of a Nation, which "forever codified the 'language' of movies," at least once a week. 

 

The authors are careful to ensure that Edison comes out of their book as a mixed bag. For all its repressive practices, the Edison Trust "regulated and stabilized the nascent film industry and provided the model for the Hollywood 'studio system' by merging its production and distribution companies." Also on the "plus" side of the ledger: Edison Studios produced 1896's The Kiss, a massive hit, as well as 1903's The Great Train Robbery, starring Gilbert M. Anderson, the future "Broncho Billy" and co-founder of Essanay, and directed by Edwin S. Porter, whom historian Lewis Jacobs credits with having invented film editing, "the basis of motion picture artistry." 

  

Edison's gravest mistake may have been not to understand that movies were to be, as the authors put it, "a business driven by creativity and talent." If anything, a man like Edward Amet emerges as the true inventor/visionary of the era.  

  

Flickering Empire provides a twin service in that it provides at once a more detailed history of Chicago film history than has ever been attempted, while at the same time providing a concise history of the birth of the movies. While general readers may tire of the details of the business machinations and legal wranglings in Flickering Empire--even as a student of film history, my eyes glaze over a bit at that side of things--the authors delineate developments in the film business of the late 19th/early 20th century, particularly in distribution, in a clear, linear way, unraveling a tangled tale, so you understand how the founding of, say, 'film exchanges,' led to the next step. (Klein's distribution of real French films from Pathé Frères in the United States, as opposed to Edison's duped versions, enraged Edison and might have spurred on his founding of the MPPC). The early Chicago film figures were entrepeneurs as well as inventors and scientists, so this is necessarily a business story as well. 

 

At the same time they give us a concise version of the birth of film. It's a story that film buffs will have encountered in sometimes unwieldly detail in other books. I'm thinking especially of Lewis Jacobs' The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History, as well as the first three volumes of the University of California Press' mammoth History of American Cinema series (Charles Musser's The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, Eileen Bowser's The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915 and Richard Koszarski's An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928).

    

The book brings half-forgotten comedians and directors back to life. We meet Hobart Bosworth (The Count of Monte Cristo, 1908): he was the "Dean of Hollywood." Beverly Bayne was the "Queen of the Movies," and Francis X. Bushman was the "King of the Movies." They would go on to marry: the "first superstar screen couple."

 

Ben Turpin and Wallace Beery were Essanay comedians. Turpin, a former janitor, was the star of An Awful Skate, directed by Anderson, who simply strapped a pair of skates on Turpin and pushed him down a crowded downtown Chicago street, where he proceeded to wreak havoc and crash into pedestrians. (Turpin wasn't acting: he really couldn't skate.) The film was a massive hit, and after leaving Essanay Turpin would go on to achieve superstardom in 1917. 

 

These people are alive, so long as we read. 

 

Along with the little-remembered figures, we also encounter legends such as Gloria Swanson. Discovered by George Spoor, she left Essanay by 1915 and was ready to abandon the movie business altogether to travel the world. She was intending to just pass through Hollywood on her way abroad, but she stopped to say hello to old friend Wallace Beery and he showed her around. She became entranced by the "absurd" "freaks," the colorful characters in the brand-new movie town. (She and Beery were unhappily married for a few years, 1916-19). She got snapped up by Keystone, and by 1925 Gloria Swanson was a huge, huge star. Modern audiences remember her most for her unforgettable comeback performance as a former silent screen star, in 1950's Sunset Boulevard.

 

I love encountering the palimpsest of the past just under the surface of everyday life. Glover Smith went out and snapped photos for this book of both the "Diamond S" logo carved into the door over the sole remaining Selig Polyscope building in Chicago, abandoned only recently, and the exterior of the original Essanay Studios over at 1300 N. Wells, where the word "Essanay" is still proudly emblazoned on the flagstone over the door. I was chuffed to read that at the height of the Selig studio's expansion in 1908, Selig had several blocks over by Irving Park Road and Western, which is only a short jump from our home. "These new facilities included outdoor stages, artificial hills, a giant man-made lagoon, 'jungle trees' and an interior studio with a glass roof." Today Essanay Studio is part of St. Augustine College, and restoration efforts are underway. The old interior Essanay stage where Chaplin made "His New Job" is still there: today it is the Charlie Chaplin Auditorium.

 

As someone interested in the history of censorship, I found an unexpected late turn in Flickering Empire a treat: its history of Chicago censorship. In 1912 Chicago put its censorship board in place, with the post of chief censor going to one Major Metullus Lucullus Cicero Funkhouser, a former Chicago cop and veteran of the Spanish-American War. Within Our Gates by Oscar Micheaux deconstructed the racism of Birth of a Nation; in the wake of the Chicago race riots of 1919, the board banned it. In fact, they censored everything from footage of the 1915 capsizing of the SS Eastland in the Chicago River to an instructional film on how to do the 'hesitation waltz, the turkey trot and the tango." "Funkhouser's meddling repeatedly halted the regular flow of local distribution and exhibition."

   

We get two interesting post-scripts:

 

"One of the best-kept secrets of Chicago's secret film history is that the Second City was in fact first when it came to producing 'race movies.'" Selig Polyscope studio is where Oscar Micheaux, the great pioneering African-American filmmaker, shot his first film, in 1918. Based on his own 1917 novel The Homesteader, the film is lost today, sadly. Micheaux also made Within Our Gates (1918), the earliest surviving feature film made by a black director. Like Griffith, Micheaux's film "cuts back and forth between action occurring in separate locations in order to generate a suspenseful climax." As the authors note, "The Oscar Micheaux story deserves to be much more widely known, and his films deserve to be more widely seen."

 

The second postscript has to do with the Chicago origins of a titan: Orson Welles was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago when he made The Hearts of Age in Woodstock, a Chicago suburb. Though in later years Welles would claim his student film was meant as a parody of the avant-garde, the authors raise the possibility that it might have been an earnest attempt to work in that genre, with only defensive hindsight on the mature Welles' part. It's fascinating either way. "Like the early sketches of a master painter, the film in many ways points the way towards the greatness that was to come." I had seen this truly weird film before without fully registering that it was a Chicago production. As I recall, Criterion included it as an extra on its edition of 'F' for Fake (thus bringing together Welles' very first film with his last).

 

Of course it all fell apart. We're talking about Chicago, after all! As the Edison Trust felt the blows from independent producers and exchanges, and was simultaneously buffeted by lawsuits, the Chicago film industry began to decline. In part this was due to Edison's recalcitrance and myopia: for one thing, he refused to produce or release feature-length films. By 1920 Chicago was a "veritable cinematic ghost town." 

 

Ironically, the former independents the MPPC had tried to squeeze out--mavericks like William Fox, Carl Laemmle and Adolph Zucker--went on to establish the new Hollywood order. In 1906 Laemmle opened up one of the new storefront theaters called Nickelodeons in Chicago; thus, his Universal Picture empire had its roots in our great city. 

 

You could claim, I suppose, that the real story of the movies begins where this book leaves off. Certainly most prior film histories have proceeded as if this were the case. After Flickering Empire, though, it won't be as easy for historians to be so dismissive of Chicago's major role in film history. Glover and Smith's book amasses enough evidence and accumulates enough detail to make the case that, as the authors say, "so much came together in Chicago." 

 

*As a fun footnote, a film this book calls one of the "most significant Chicago-shot Essanay films of its era," Arthur Berthelet's 1916 Sherlock Holmes starring William Gillette (who had already spent a decade touring as Holmes with the theatrical production he co-wrote with Arthur Conan Doyle himself in 1899), is showing this month at the 51st Annual Chicago International Film Festival after being lost for almost a century! The authors write that it was "the first feature-length Sherlock Holmes movie as well as the first film in which the famed detective was portrayed wearing his soon-to-be-iconic deerstalker cap." As the Fest's program notes, the film "miraculously emerged last year from a French cinema archive." 

Notes on watching "Treme" and "When the Levees Broke" with my baby

Karolyn and I seldom catch TV shows when they first go out, preferring to go at our own pace and in our own time.  We catch up eventually, though.  Watching the series "Treme" was a special viewing experience for us.  We will miss following our New Orleans friends (LaDonna and Delmond and Toni, Albert and Antoine and Annie, etc.,) around as they rebuild and heal and begin again in the years following Katrina.  There is a palpable sense that these lives go on even now that the cameras are off.  Only today, I thought of Terry (David Morse), an honest cop, a good man.  Important to remember a good man too, in these times when we rail, and quite rightly, against police brutality.  And to remember how Terry was hounded out for challenging the department's culture of brutality and corruption.

The show deserves a salute for being itself an act of preservation and curatorship of New Orleans heritage. It's a show about rebirth, created, written and produced by people rooting that rebirth on: David Simon and Eric Overmyer.

"Treme" beamed New Orleans culture all over the country (the music, the food), so we could learn about it in Chicago. That's how we learned about Kermit Ruffins and his code of partyin', about Mardi Gras Indians and Big Chief, and so much more. When we started visiting New Orleans together, the show enriched our visits; in turn, our visits enriched our experience of the show. We'd be sitting there on the couch watching the show after returning from New Orleans and a scene would appear set at Lil' Dizzy's or Vaughan's or Cafe Du Monde or the Praline Connection and we'd exclaim, Hey! we were just there!

We went to the gigs and started meeting musicians who'd played themselves on the show, like Kermit and Glen David Andrews.

The show's heart and soul was in the "Treme" neighborhood, the country's oldest African-American neighborhood, where those hit hardest by Katrina lived. It celebrated Treme's street culture.

The show deserves a salute as well for keeping its characters complex and human.  Its people are sometimes weak but never really "bad," not even the councilman who finds himself wordlessly accepting bribes. As was true in Simon's and Overmyer's "The Wire," no one is ever merely an instance of a type. The excellent casting deserves a nod. Each character found his or her double in just the right actor.

The show's realism meant there were no false plot machinations (though plot was not the point, it's worth stating that the show's handling of multiple plotlines was deft).  To critics who didn't love lingering on the music and moments, as we did, I suppose they would say there was no powerful story engine.  For us, the story engine was all there in the rich Altmanesque tapestry, interwoven with real people and places, chefs and musicians, restaurants and clubs (Dr. John, John Boutte, Irma Thomas, Trombone Shorty, etc., etc.).

Every character gets a rich characterization.

Just one example sticks in my memory. I think of the encounter between Davis (Steve Zahn) and Nelson (Jon Seda). Davis is the groovy, slightly dysfunctional, stick-it-to-the-Man activist. He's a DJ, A walking encyclopedia of music, steeped in NOLA history, albeit a slightly fanciful version. He wants to preserve and protect NOLA's culture.

Nelson is the slick real-estate developer, a go-getter with an unsinkable personality. A carpetbagger, he comes into town from Texas after Katrina to siphon up some of the pork from all those rebuilding contracts flying around. Opportunistic, but likable for all that. His thing is get-'er-done efficiency. That said, he genuinely digs the local music, is genuinely interested in the people, curious about what makes them tick. He enjoys hanging out in the community, wants to learn. In final scenes he worries that he's never really made anything, anything except money. Both Nelson and Davis are are doing what they feel is right by their lights.

They first encounter each other as onlookers at a community hearing around plans for a new jazz center. Davis is there to support the community, Nelson as the "eyes-and-ears" for his developer boss. They strike up a chat; each is startled to find himself speaking with someone who sees the world so differently. The chat carries on over beers at local bars as Davis takes Nelson on a tour of the real New Orleans. It is fascinating to see the two of them kick around ideas and actually listen to each other. Each gives the other something to consider that maybe he hadn't thought of.

Not to belabor the point too much because the show doesn't, but it struck me that while the show's heart is with Davis, it does not dehumanize Nelson, the "suit." It seems to say that, going forward, NOLA is going to need the spirit of both of these guys. It is going to need all of the characters in this rich tapestry.

Then there is that final shot of the entire series. I won't give away it away; I will say that I think it finds the perfect image for funky, one-of-a-kind New Orleans. It's an image that says, here in this town we may not fix what's broken, not exactly. But we will make it into something beautiful, in its own strange way.

*                                 *                                                  * 

As a follow-up we also re-watched Spike Lee's heartbreaking, transcendent documentary on New Orleans and Katrina, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts."  It's no less a rich mosaic of humans. Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, a real New Orleans resident caught up in Katrina, is so vivid and funny and outraged that you can see why Simon thought she'd be great in "Treme" and would go on to cast her as Desiree.  Sometimes Spike Lee cuts between her and the great Wendell Pierce, who would go on to play her rascally, good-hearted, 'bone-playing husband on "Treme," and it's fun because we know that they will go on to play the tempestuous but loving couple, Antoine and Desiree.

"When the Levees Broke" can make you angry to see how carelessly a corporate-run society treats its people. What happens to a society when you have oil industry people running this show? How little regard we have for the poor who pay the price for decisions made in high places to cut corners for private gain.  How coarse is our ignorance of our country's true wealth: its music, its culture, its people. And yet we see good people too, people who behaved bravely in crisis and helped others. And we see resilience.

There are times when "When the Levees Broke" can restore your faith in humanity. Yet I think finally what it asks of us is just that we watch.  Watch, in the sense of bearing witness.  The tone finally is more elegiac, haunted, than angry. Not least because of Terrence Blanchard's haunting music.

Jazz, Blues and Beyond: A Chicago Music Tour

On a recent Saturday morning Karolyn and I hopped aboard the Chicago Detours “Jazz, Blues & Beyond Bus Tour,” a birthday present from her to me.  I’ve found on my trips to Europe that walking in the footsteps of the artists somehow enhances how you experience the art.  Wandering through the pubs and lanes of London where Shakespeare trod, say, you get a sense of his stomping grounds, of space and distances.  What was abstract becomes physical.  So to do this in my own town, Chicago, with, say, Muddy Waters instead of Bill Shakespeare, was a kick.        

We’d gathered on a Saturday morning at the great downtown record shop, the Jazz Record Mart.  As we pulled away from the curb our tour guide, Amanda Scotese, posited Chicago as a place of (productive) tension, a place where people came together (and not) over music.  In that sense, an alternate title for her tour could have been the “Jazz versus Blues tour.”  She set up a dialectic that was really just a fun framework for thinking about jazz and blues in terms of oppositions: north versus south, head versus heart, mood versus story, etc. 

Our bus featured video screens like on an airplane, so she could play us footage of the jazz and blues musicians she was setting in opposition.  What contrasts could we hear in, say, Mahalia Jackson versus Scott Joplin, spirituals versus ragtime? People volunteered some good stuff: soulful versus jaunty, rural versus urban, on the beat versus syncopated.  She gave us Charlie Parker versus Muddy Waters, leading to Tortoise and the White Stripes, respectively.  

All the while we were shooting up north, bound for Uptown, a neighborhood I pass through twice a day on the “El”.  On our way Amanda pointed out the building on Argyle that once housed Essanay Studios, where Charlie Chaplin made films. 

As we headed Uptown, Amanda explained that Chicago kept expanding:  you had to drive or take the streetcar to get to Uptown.  It was the “end of the line.”  The Green Mill, which once took up a whole Uptown block, was a roadhouse; “roadhouse” meant you had to drive to get there. 

She showed us a great clip of Gene Krupa with trumpeter Roy Eldridge and singer Anita O’Day doing “Let Me Off Uptown,” a very early integrated duet (circa 1941), playful with sexual innuendo. 

As an aside, we learned that “juke joints” were places that had jukeboxes, and jukeboxes played videos like this one.

We alighted the bus and stood studying the Aragon.  I admire it from my levitating El car every day (and in fact I saw one of Nirvana’s last-ever shows there almost 20 years ago).  Now we gave it a Rick Steves-like going over, admiring its Spanish façade with its swirling columns, the faces peering out of its crisscrossing brickwork, its shields and scalloped shells.  This was an exotic place for rural and working people who traveled great distances to come dancing in the big city.  (Bands were told to play faster so boys and girls wouldn’t dance too close.)   

We strolled over to the corner of Broadway, from which vantage point we had before us the Riviera, the Green Mill and the Uptown Theater.  Amanda asked us to imagine the scene as it would have been at the height of the Jazz Age, say 1926: this was Chicago’s Times Square, a neighborhood of glittering ballrooms and movie palaces.  It was the place to be.  Squinting, you could almost see gangsters stepping out of gleaming cars. 

We clambered back aboard the bus.  It was time to head down to the South Side to Bronzeville, that historic African-American neighborhood. 

As we rounded corners Amanda pointed to the site of Lincoln Gardens on 31st Street, one of the great “Black and Tan Clubs,” which welcomed blacks and whites to mingle, dance and hear music together.  Joe "King" Oliver's Creole Jazz Band kept ‘em dancing here in the early 20’s.  Those were the days when cats like Bix Biederbicke, a young white fella, would take the train to Chicago to sneak into speakeasies to hear some “hot jazz,” jamming with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. 

As an aside, I hadn’t realized how important New Orleans musicians were to jazz innovation in Chicago, all those greats like Mahalia Jackson coming up with the Great Migration.

We passed Olivet Baptist Church, the oldest African-American Baptist church in Chicago and itself a great catalyst of the Great Migration.  Amanda called it a “key to the neighborhood.”

As the bus rumbled down State Street between 31^st and 35^th, Amanda pointed out that this particular strip was once known as “The Stroll,” the vice district.  These were the days when jazz was associated with sleaze.  Today “the Stroll” is the notably unsleazy campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology. 

We came to a stop at an ACE Meyer Hardware Store.  What!? you exclaim.  Had this suddenly become “the Chicago Hardware Shop tour?”  Allow me to explain.  This hardware store was once the Sunset Café, a.k.a. the Grand Terrace Cafe, a very important "Black and Tan club” featuring Louis Armstrong’s big band (another son of New Orleans, of course).  Cab Calloway and Earl "Fatha" Hines came up here under Armstrong before becoming the bandleaders themselves.  In fact Hines would go on to lead the band there for twelve years.  On the way there Amanda had shown us a photograph of the Earl Hines band during this residency, featuring a young Sun Ra, no less! 

 

We went in and headed for the back.  A few at a time we climbed a few wooden steps.  We stepped into a narrow, cluttered office.  Lo!  We were onstage at the Sunset Café!  The original murals are still there, visible around the duct and piles of boxes.  A topless demon lady clawed the skin of a great drum.  Climbing back down to the floor, we stood amidst aisles of hardware supplies imagining the floor filled with tables draped in elegant white tablecloth.     

 

 

Back aboard the bus we passed Pilgrim Baptist Church, designed as a synagogue by no less than Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, built in 1890-1891.  It was the “heart of Bronzeville,” one of the birthplaces of gospel music in the 1930s.  Thomas A. Dorsey, the "Father of Gospel Music", was its music director. 

Next up for our merry bus: the “blues” part of the tour.  That meant we had to talk about the Chicago Defender, the country’s most important black newspaper.  It was the catalyst for the black exodus, the Great Migration, which hit its peak in the 40s and 50s.  It wrote about Chicago as a place of hope for African-Americans, a place where housing and jobs could be had.  “Blues is hopeful music,” as Studs Terkel put it from our screens.  “I may be down now, but I won’t be down forever.”      

We rumbled up South Michigan Avenue, up historic “Motor Row,” past the great display windows which once showed off their proud auto showrooms.  We trundled up Record Row, grinding to a stop at 2120 S. Michigan, that address that rings out in music history.  This was Chess Records (today renamed the Willie Dixon Blues Heaven Foundation).  To some, this is the “birthplace of rock & roll,” Amanda told us, and quite right she was.  Interesting to think about which has the stronger claim as birthplace of rock & roll, Chess or Sun Records in Memphis (which I've also visited).  Hometown pride compels me to proclaim that Chess has as strong a claim as any. 

We didn’t go in.  Amanda offered that there’s nothing much to see inside, which is kinda true.  Still, as someone who’s been inside twice, it’s still pretty cool to stand on the same floorboards as Muddy and Jimmy Rogers, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.     

We had to finish up by taking a trip to Maxwell Street, ground zero for the Chicago Blues, once a teeming, communal place where people gathered around music (not unlike Grant Park today, Amanda offered).  Every musician had his or her corner, such as Blind Arvella Gray, who now appeared on our video screens.  Like the Stroll, the old Maxwell Street Market flea market is gone today, of course.  However, we stopped next to a statue commemorating the days when the blues rang out: a bluesman sitting on a box, with his harp by his side. 

We had one more treat in store: a harp lesson from Fruteland Jackson, a veteran bluesman who hopped aboard at Maxwell Street.  Each of us was issued a harmonica, and, wielding an acoustic axe and a harmonica rack, Jackson taught us to play a basic 12-bar pattern.  The trick: for the first bars you suck, and then you blow.  As we rolled back to our starting point, the bus resounded with the sounds of blowing, sucking, “dumping” (exhaling) and flourishing big finishes.  We got to keep the harmonica! 

Did I say one last treat?  There was one more.  When we got back to Jazz Record Mark, its legendary owner Bob Koester, happened to be there.  Mr. Koester was the founder of Delmark records in 1953, the oldest jazz and blues independent record label in America.  The great man stood listening as Amanda summed up. 

I’ve said it before: as long as I’ve lived in Chicago—20 years now--there’re always something new to discover around every corner.  Turns out there’s always something “past” to discover as well. 

Now when I’m on the commute home, I can pretend like I’m on that streetcar up to Uptown.  

Roger Ebert's voice: companion, pointer to vistas on my own journey

Roger Ebert was my teacher. That is, his voice was, and by his voice I mean his writing (and TV as well). When I was a kid, that voice pointed me to what felt like a secret door opening onto whole new continents of film. Sometimes after we watched a film on home video I’d reemerge with one of his books and read aloud his review to my family and we’d consider the picture in that light. Not that I always agreed. But he did that uncanny thing that our favorite critics are somehow able to do: somehow he put into words something I felt but couldn't express.

That voice never really left me. Years and years later, his journal ("The London Perambulator" article, one of my favorites) guided me on my very first walk around London. Funny, his voice almost came to mean more to me after he lost the use of it in the literal sense. On my first first visit to Venice, I kept in the back of my mind the name of his favorite trattoria. One morning I was out exploring and I suddenly looked up and there it was. What’s more, through the window I saw who I thought must surely be the character he’d described so vividly in his journal: Lino, the lively proprietor, busily preparing for the day. Though graying now, I recognized him from Ebert’s description.

I took the liberty of taking a picture. When I returned home I e-mailed Roger the photo, letting him know that I’d stumbled across his favorite trattoria, though I didn’t get to eat there because it was too early. I told him I hoped that this was his old friend Lino, still at it. I didn’t really think I’d hear back. He must get massive amounts of e-mail every day, I thought. Then the response came. He couldn't open the picture and asked me to re-send to his personal e-mail address. I did so, and shortly thereafter came the reply: “Ah, yes! The very place! The beloved man! Now you must go back someday.” There followed an extremely enjoyable e-mail exchange that still feels a bit surreal. Amongst other things, he told me about how beautiful Venice is in the winter, how that was his favorite time to be there.

This only begins to say how much I’ll miss his voice. On Thursday when I first heard the news I sat at my desk and wept.

Jon Langford rocks the Art Institute

  

Karolyn and I burrowed deep into the bowels of the Art Institute to attend a lecture by one of Chicago's great rockers and all-around creative guys, Jon Langford.  He appeared in a subterranean auditorium as part of the Institute's “Artists Connect” series, billed as “where local artists talk about how their work connects with artists of the past.”  Langford’s connection is with Goya, whose devilish eye held a twisted mirror to society that showed its true soul.  In a society still run by fear, Langford noted, Goya couldn’t be more relevant.   

I have a personal experience with Goya myself.  In 2012 I explored the Prado, something I've wanted to do for 20 years, and saw three flights of his stuff, from the pastel cartoons of leaping lords and ladies that he made as a young court painter, to his “black paintings,” when he had a freak-out and smeared the walls of his house with his nightmares.  (He "had a freak-out."  Way to put it in social and historical context, Pfeiffer!) 

Of course, since it was Langford, he appeared with guitar in hand.  He turned the talk into a concert, jamming out on songs like “The Country is Young,” “Sputnik 57” and “To The Last Dead Cowboy.”  The music passed my litmus test for proper music, by which I mean to say it could have been played by the guys sitting around that circle in the Elvis Presley ’68 comeback.  (Okay, that’s one of my litmus tests for proper music.)  His lyrics, of course, are quite another matter indeed.  Those could have only come from the surrealistic imagination of Jon Langford.  Langford always plays with a fiery rock ‘n’ roll attack, even if he’s playing acoustic, even if he’s singing country or folk songs.  

He'd made a slide show to go with his talk, toggling back and forth between Goya’s images and his. Many of his works are illustrations of song lyrics.  Motifs include skulls, cowboys, cowgirls, and country music greats, sometimes blindfolded or X-ed out as though in a Stalinist wipe-out.  There were slides from his life as well, and the lecture became a personal story about the rather twisty road that brought Jon to country music. 

He was a boy from Wales born in the late 50s.  In the 70s he was excited about punk rock and art school.  During his art school days in Leeds, he co-founded the Mekons, the seminal second-wave punk band.  They dealt in small ‘p’ politics, he said: the everyday things that were around them.  He brought up a slide of the Three Johns, one of his innumerable side projects, looking like art-school pranksters togged out in djellabas, or like the jawas from "Star Wars" (an admitted big influence). 

He told the story of how the Mekons got into country music back when no one in their circle was into it.  (It'd be interesting to know if Elvis Costello's "Almost Blue" was an influence.  I think that record was way ahead of its time in turning people on to the beauty and strength of country songs). 

He talked about moving to Chicago and hanging with the Sundowners, the legendary Chicago honky-tonkers.  Later he went looking for the roots of American music, a pilgrimage many of us take.  (Karolyn and I are about to take a similar journey into the roots (routes?) of American music, to Memphis, Nashville and New Orleans.)  He talked about discovering Tootsies Orchid Lounge in Nashville, a “beautiful graveyard” with walls covered in amber, shellacked playbills of C&W stars.    

He pasted the people who run the American country music business as “Stalinists,” and he meant something quite specific: the way they consigned the country greats he loves to non-person status and shot them down the memory hole.  He pointed out that Nashville radio isn’t playing much Hank Williams or Bob Wills and Texas swing these days.  He is fascinated by the moment when an artist becomes an employee: that is, the moment when the pen hovers about the contract.  In the music business, people are food for machine. 

(Much to his bemusement, some industry people came to one of his shows and liked the images enough to commission him to do a record cover.  Everyone has his price, Langford admitted to audience laughter, and that day mine was $6,000.)

He performed “Hank Williams Must Die”:  It seems Hank Williams actually mentioned Stalin by name in a song and Stalin heard the song, apparently enraging the dictator.  The song is Stalin's imagined response.

Even though he made no mention of it, all of this put me in mind of the Mekons' urgent song “Amnesia,” which fascinates me.  History and memory is what it’s all about.  (“I forgot to forget to remember.”)  As the song begins, “it was a dark and stormy night" and we’re on a storm-tossed slave ship “taking rock & roll to America,” that is, bringing Africans to America, where they invent the music that then goes back across the Atlantic to turn on English kids.  It’s about two different British Invasions: the musical one in the 1960s that brought the Beatles, the Stones, the Animals to these shores, and which reawakened America to its own musical roots.  Also the one in 1812 where the Brits burned down the White House. 

It all swirls around until it finally explodes, riding in on a strumming dulcimer straight out of “Battle of Evermore,” a hurricane that is the harvest of all the forces the song’s unleashed so far.  There’s a rousing battle cry of “truth, justice, and Led Zeppelin!” but you don’t know whether it’s rallying you to join the rock & roll battle or the political battle, or both, or to what end.

There's a lot more in it (Mardi Gras Indians, segregation, the Shining Path, the drug trade), but that’s a few things I hear in this roiling maelstrom of race and  America and England, and cross-Atlantic trade and cultural give-and-take. 

So.  Back to the talk.  It was dense with references, musical and artistic.  He mentioned Otto Dix, the German painter and printmaker, and how Goya influenced his own ruthless depictions of war.

Langford was particularly shaken by Goya’s “Caprices” (Los Caprichos), the sheave of etchings that lacerated 18^th-century Spain.  Goya published it in 1799 but withdrew it due to fears of the Spanish Inquisition.  Likewise, Langford was hard hit by the "Disasters of War," Goya's etchings about the Peninsular War (1808-1814) that found Spain at war with France, pulled into the maelstrom of Napolean’s post-French Revolution conquests.  He showed us “This is what you were born for,” plate twelve from Disasters of War, showing a man puking over a pile of bodies.  (Goya kept it real.)   

Langford was knocked out by “The Dummy,” which he called one of the great images of humanity being tossed about.  

There’s something very moving, very hopeful and unbowed, about Jon Langford.  For one thing, he's still a believer in the socialist project, and though it wasn't a topic of his talk, he's as acidic about those who betrayed true socialism as he is about those who betrayed "true" country music.  (I think of "This Funeral is For The Wrong Corpse," the Mekons song about how the reports of socialism's death were wildly exaggerated: "How can something be dead when it hasn't really happened?") 

And he loves his adopted home, the United States of America, with a fierce, embattled love.  He ended with “Lost in America,” a song that always moved me.  We can still turn things around.  Let's keep the flame burning, and let's fight those who would snuff it out.  Langford made it sound as if the project of keeping America's flame burning and keeping our music's flame burning is one and the same.  Which of course it is.  As Goya showed him, the best art is about what’s going on immediately around you.