Vanishing Chicago: Audio Artifacts

The slow evolution--some would say disintegration--of Chicago's character isn't restricted to physical appearance, naming conventions or cost of living. The musical tone of the city--from the sounds wafting out of clubs and bars to the voices and songs riding the airwaves--is also markedly different. Nothing new: Music scenes changes just like everything else, and that's the way it's supposed to be.

However, it's still cool to run across a CD that captures the sound of a particular era or scene--or, in the case of the CDs below, three different scenes all happening within the same era within the same vast, diverse box o' music that was and is The Windy City:

The Sundowners: Chicago Country Legends. In the late 1980s, I was working second shift at a small company that specialized in 35mm slide presentations. (These were the days just before PowerPoint became the presentation tool of choice, quickly making slides obsolete; the company shut down around 1994.) One night, the whole shift went out for a going-away celebration to a place called the Bar R R, housed in the same building as the Woods Theater. The Bar R R was a dive--dark, smoky, loud, rough. Pretty much like every other dive in the Loop. The only thing that differentiated the Bar RR was the house band: A three-piece country/western combo known as the Sundowners.

They played that night. And when they did, everybody pretty much shut up and paid attention.

Country Music Legends is a collection of live recordings of the Sundowners playing at the Bar R R over the course of nearly three decades (1960-1988), and it perfectly captures the flavor of a typical Sundowners performance. The songs are a mix of country sand folk standards ("Cimmaron," "Clementine," "Tom Dooley"), reinterpreted pop songs (a swing version of the Beatles' "Something") and less familiar fare (like the heartbreaking "Sidewalks of Chicago," in which the narrator's family thinks he's hit the big time when, in reality, he's destitute: "If I buy the bread, I can't afford the wine"). All the while, you can hear the sounds of the Bar R R in the background--beer bottles clinking, tables shifting, semi-stoned patrons murmuring to one another (or, just as likely, to themselves).

You can't go to the Bar R R anymore--the building was demolished in 1990 and the Goodman Theatre now stands on the site. But if you load in this CD, light up a Marlboro and close your eyes, you can easily picture yourself there.

WLS AM Volume One: The Lost Sixties. On most evenings in the spacious but rundown apartment on Leavitt Street, you could hear the tinny whine of the transistor radio spitting out whatever passed for pop then while the tall, skinny boy scrubbed dishes in the chipped porcelain sink, taking care not to leave the plastic bowls and cups on the space heater for too long, lest they warp, melt and drip between the slats.

The station to which that radio was invariably tuned? WLS-AM--the call letters stand for "World's Largest Store," since the station was started by Sears in 1924--which boomed Top 40 hits out across much of North America from 1960 until it switched to an all-talk format in 1989.

The Lost Sixties CD, which was issued to benefit Orchard Village, a nonprofit organization devoted to helping people with developmental disabilities, attempts to simulate a representative '60s WLS broadcast by interspersing hits of the time (the Hollywood Argyles' "Alley Oop," Del Shannon's "Runaway," the Vogues' "Five O'Clock World," etc.) with promos for the various disc jockeys (Dick Biondi, Clark Weber, Art Roberts, etc.). While the CD doesn't quite recreate the sound--WLS played about as many commercials in a typical hour as they did songs--but the combination of the personality promos and music provides a nice flashback to the heyday of Chicago radio, when "The Big 89" wasn't just throwing out music into the nighttime air of America, but the distinct sonic personality of Chicago as well.

(And just in case you're wondering...no, I don't know whther or not there ever was a "Vol. 2.")

Brotherman. What do you do with the soundtrack album to a movie that was never finished (and may not have even been started)? If you're songwriter Carl Wolfolk and Darrow Kennedy, lead singer for the virtually unknown Chicago soul group The Final Solution, you cart the master tapes around with you for 30 years until record company Numero Group tracks you down, cleans the songs up and gives the album the proper release it always deserved.

And thank god they did--this is some of the most amazing soul/funk ever, made even more so because Wolfolk was working from an incomplete script and could only write general tunes (an opening theme, a couple love songs, background for action sequences, etc.) without any idea of what the final product would look like. In a way, that generic approach works to the album's advantage--without specific plot details cluttering the brainscape, the listener is free to make up his/her own movie on an imaginary drive-in screen. It would have been a tragedy if Brotherman had remained lost in the back of a dusty closet.

Sometimes, though, that which is lost becomes that which is found--or, at the very least, preserved in some way so that future ears can get a sonic taste of what once was in a sprawling city by a brooding lake.